2.28.2007
11:54pm

Conservapedia. The Christian conservative alternative to Wikipedia. Site is down now (due to recent digging), but when it comes back I will be reading articles and laughing with the rest of the liberals. Maybe they will parody it on Family Guy or South Park some day. I think Matt and Trey would really do a good job.

6:40pm

Well I thought I was back to normal today but I'm still not eating much. At least nothing else is wrong. Today I bought my graduation regalia from Florida Tech, a reasonable $30. No ring for me though, definitely not something I have the money for right now.

Tomorrow is the communications test. I'm trying to strategize now, and since it will be open computer I'm leaving the lecture notes in electronic form this time. Supposedly it will be three questions plus a bonus, but the small number of questions does not mean it will be quick. I imagine everyone will be there for the full hour and fifteen minutes.

I downloaded a trial version of Office 2007 and it looks very nice. Substantially better than 2003? Depends on whether or not you like the new ribbon design instead of the conventional menu system. At first glance it seemed like Microsoft "dumbed it down" for amateur users and I still think that was part of the drive behind the redesign.

2.27.2007
1:47pm

Day 3 of being sick. Fortunately I seem to be getting over the stomach bug and my appetite is slowly returning. Sunday night was pretty crazy though, the type of dreams you have during a fever are not pleasant. Last night I slept about 12 hours and that seemed to help a lot.

UPS ticked me off today because they attempted delivery at 11am instead of the usual 4-5:30pm. I'll have to go pick up the package tonight since my schedule for the next two days is busy. Normally I'd be busy on Tuesdays as well but due to the schedule changes for Fab Lab I don't have any classes from 12:30-4:45 on Tuesday.

bittorrent launched its legal movie sharing service yesterday, most of which cost $3-$4 but there are a few free options too. I laughed when I saw the requirements for movie playback: Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6+, and Windows Media Player 10+. I guess they figured the Linux and Mac crowd wouldn't want to pay for movies anyway. Rental content expires after 24 hours.

2.25.2007
7:08pm

Crocodile Hunter meets his match... 5.8 million views and counting. The most funny clip with Steve I've ever seen, may he rest in peace. PINEAPPLE!

I think it's amusing if you go to YouTube and search for "Bob Saget" the first result you get is his clip from The Aristocrats. I think he tells the most disgusting version of the joke on the whole documentary; I saw it a couple days ago and there are tons of comedians that are featured.

I ended up going over to Ron's last night for some, uh... social interaction. Tim, Chris, and Melissa were over as well. None of them had seen The Prestige to I ended up watching it again with them. Not a problem though, it's one of those movies where you want to go back and watch it again after seeing the ending. We all agree that Tesla was quite an impressive scientist, or "the man" if you will. :)

2.24.2007
12:45am

Just finished watching The Prestige, what an amazing movie. At least worth a rental.

2.23.2007
9:00pm

Today was the Digital Showcase at Florida Tech, which I didn't get a chance to attend but I did go to the "Light Tribe" show at 6pm. Light Tribe is a group from Vero Beach (also one in NYC) that uses technology in interesting ways to create art. They showed us something called "liquid paint" which is where they darken the room completely and use a digital camera with constant-open shutter to capture multicolored light from these flashlights that they used. Another cool bit was "video feedback" where they aimed a professional video camera at a television and connected the output of the camera into the TV video input. When they zoomed in some weird mathematical-type patterns emerged and then they could make interesting patterns by waving pieces of string and fingers in front of the lens. They ended with a bit about converting music into light, where certain notes were assigned a particular color. Not only that, but each color had its own position in a unit circle. For the octave increases/decreases, the "height" of the color was changed to give a complete 3D representation. During the final two song performances (which were live), they had a number of colored strobe lights that moved around in patterns with the music, everything controlled by their array of Mac computers. One of their systems was running Windows though, a MIDI/video interaction software that they said was brand new. The software can queue up various video clips when certain keys on a synthesizer are pressed, and they had three projectors hooked up to the computer with each able to display a different clip. The "theme" of the video clips was skydiving footage, since all of them happened to be skydivers. Somehow they don't have a web site, which is bizarre.

I stopped by Best Buy after that show was over since I had a few reward zone dollars. Two things caught my attention as I browsed through the store to see what new gear they had. One was in the computer department: they had several printed signs clarifying that Best Buy could indeed order computers without Windows Vista if so desired. That doesn't exactly send the best message if they had enough people ask about getting XP that they needed to print up a sign. Also when walking by the Magnolia section I saw that they were playing a clip from Animusic (pipe dream) as part of the demo video loop. Kinda odd that I would see that clip on the same day as the digital showcase, since last year one of the featured events at the digital showcase was Animusic 2. Fullsail came over from Winter Park, FL again this year.

2.22.2007
11:50pm

Slate did a story about machinima earlier this week: Nerd Wave Cinema. Their video slide show starts with the obligatory (and hilarious) "The Internet is for Porn" based on World of Warcraft. The music video clip (slide 4) was pretty original and a cool use for The Sims 2. I've played around with the flash game that is featured in slide 7, and it must have taken a very long time for them to set all of that up correctly. Somehow Red vs Blue didn't make it into the slide show, but Slate did mention it in the article.

It's interesting how "video replies" are becoming more common on YouTube. For those who want to comment upon, mock, parody, or praise a particular clip, they can post a video reply and YouTube will link them to the original video. For example, this short (and rather annoying) remix tribute to Lord of the Rings that I discovered the other day has a lot of video replies (some in non-English languages), including a Commodore-64 sound effect version. Not all of them are people just sitting in front of web cams either, some people do animated videos or photo slideshows or similar things. Also I'm hearing more about YouTube screening shows or festivals. People get together to watch some of the more popular videos. How long until we have an Academy Award for best YouTube video?

Speaking of the C64, here is the original commercial which came out 4 years before I was born. 110 bytes per dollar. YouTube is becoming the wikipedia of the video realm, just type in anything you want to see and there is likely something out there. How about a funny anti-drug ad? Yep. Aerial video of New York city? Sure. A bald Britney Spears, of course. How about some disturbing American Idol?

Enough rambling, I have a test tomorrow in Electrooptic Devices. Today we got back our exams from Dr. Earles in Micro fab lab and I got 100 on that which was a surprise. The communications test next week is going to be horrible, and it's even open notes/book/laptop.

2.20.2007
9:53pm

All quiet on the blog lately. Had the first test of the semester in Control Systems, was pretty easy and open note. Tomorrow is the career fair, and I still need to fix some things on my resume tonight before going to bed. Ron had his interview this past weekend with Raytheon in Tampa, and he said it was pretty good. Apparently they didn't ask any technical questions at all which I thought was a bit strange. Today after the Controls test I went over to a Microsoft presentation for some free pizza. They are going to be at the fair tomorrow as usual, so this was a general info session beforehand.

Today at work we received a huge delivery of servers. We thought it was pretty busy the past few weeks with the 16 Optiplex 745 systems arriving and the 5 PowerEdge 1950s. Well today we had 40 brand new (leased) machines sitting in the lab; the boxes took up a lot of space. It was a mixture of PowerEdge 1950/2950 and SunFire V245/X4100/X4200. This is such a big upgrade we are having to reevaluate the power delivery and air conditioning abilities of our current lab space; hopefully everything will operate fine. Nate had his camera phone with him so he got a picture:

Needless to say the next two to four weeks are going to be busy. This time around we didn't get any 4U models, although we were originally hoping our main jumpstart server would be a V445 instead of a V245. After getting a chance to play around with one of the customer V445s that we are working on now, I'm glad we didn't buy one of those. Very noisy fans (it has a jet engine turbo mode) and Sun was stupid about the RAID controller. Only two potential mirrors and no RAID5 ability on a machine with 8 disks. My favorite of the new machines are the 1950s which I mentioned earlier. They run quiet and draw just under 3 amps even with all four cores loaded. I played with the Dell configurator today and found that if you completely fill a 42U rack with eight-core 1950s you could get almost 900 GHz of processing power, 1.3 TB of RAM, and 63 TB of SATA (or 25 TB of SAS) disk in one rack. Talk about high density computing. If Intel releases a quad-core 3.0GHz model CPU that would bump the processor total above 1 Terahertz. You'd probably need about 5 or 6 230V lines to run all that though.

2.15.2007
11:19pm

Home prices in Melbourne/Palm Bay/Titusville are down 17% since last year. Good news for Nate, that house offer he made might get accepted after all.

9:21pm

The 50 greatest Homer Simpson quotations. One of my favorites: "Marge, don't discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel." The Florida gator line is hilarious too.

Today in microfab lab we finally got to do some stuff in the lab. When I say do stuff I mean watch the grad students do stuff. It's understandable though, since we needed to learn the correct processes before messing around with any dangerous equipment. Like the oven that gets up to 1100 degrees Celsius. We had to split up into two groups because there are so many people taking the elective. Half of us learned about wet oxidation and the other half learned about lithography. Dr. Earles was in rare form today; she actually mentioned at the end of lab that we are one of the best behaved and most interested groups she has had in the past few years. So despite the large numbers I think everything will work out ok.

I just hopped on my Harris email and saw a new message from the Harris Stratex Networks director of marketing. His name is Stuart Little. I kid not. The book was published in 1974 so I'm guessing he probably had the name first.

2.13.2007
10:29pm

GE Commercial. Let's go fishing.

Michael Crichton on Patenting Life.

2.12.2007
11:12pm

Cheetahs seem to be very popular in advertising. My latest find (that's one huge server!):

Of course the subtle irony here is that many cheetahs are born with genetic defects due to the limited breeding pool. Fortunately for Intel most people see the big cat and think "speed" and not the other connotations. Today at work we received some new Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers equipped with the 5000-series dual core Xeons. Four total cores at 3.0 GHz each in a 1U rackmount machine, 4GB of RAM with capability for 32GB, and two 146GB 15k RPM SAS drives. They certainly are fast. With the new quad-core CPUs the total cores per unit can be brought up to 8, but we didn't splurge on that.

I just got an email congratulating me on winning the UK lottery. One million pounds sterling... sweet. All I have to do is email some random dude my personal information ;)

2.11.2007
8:28pm

African grey parrot clips I found on Youtube: thinks it's a dog, Marv, the Nextel bird, I'm a tough adorable guy. They all love to click and whistle.

I also checked out some Honda Fit vids on Youtube. Found a great German TV spot. Found a good video review too.

And some other entertaining clips I've found are commercials made by an insurance company called Centraal Beheer in the Netherlands. I previously linked one of their commercials featuring a hungry lion and a suburban family. You don't have to understand the language to understand the videos, the jokes work in all countries. They have all of them here. "Breedband versie bekijken" takes you to the broadband video. The ones I particularly liked were "Acupunctuur", "Auqurk", "Balletje", "Bewaker", "Boodschappen", "Box", "Cementmixer", "Chatwakan", "Egel", "Expeditie", "Leeuw", "Museum", "Overval", "Pianist", "Schilderij", "Schoonmaaksters", "Straatartiest", "Transport", and "Zweefvlieger".

2.09.2007
1:09am

The blog has suffered a bit lately due to my laziness and a busy schedule. This week we had a number of homework assignments due and there was a test in Dr. Earles' class today on semiconductor photolithography, oxidation, and microscopy.

Tonight was interesting though. I went for a walk and got questioned by a Palm Bay police officer for suspicious walking. Yeah, I thought it was bizarre too. He explained though, saying that there have been a rash of thefts, assaults, and rapes recently in Palm Bay and they are investigating any people who are out late at night walking or biking around. I got cotton-swabbed for the first time ever but it wasn't very exciting. I probably wouldn't have been asked to do one if I had my drivers license with me, but I didn't take my wallet. They now have my DNA on file; I better not commit any crimes or they will know right where to find me... :)

On a more serious note, I think Rolando and I will have to be extra careful about making sure everything is locked up. I think it's good that the police are keeping an eye out for people but they can't be everywhere at once.

2.04.2007
12:15pm

Via Brian, "Pachebel Rant."

Yesterday was a lazy day. I woke up at 11 with about 6 hours of sleep (yeah gotta work on that whole going to bed thing) and joined Ron, Courtney, and Tim for lunch at Friendly's. I haven't been to a Friendly's restaurant in probably a decade, but they had some very tasty food so I'm not sure why I was avoiding it. After that I came back home for a while and watched Beerfest with Rolando and Diana. Then I left again to go see Pan's Labyrinth, or more accurately, El Labertino del Fauno. I say more accurately because the movie is based in Spain and all the dialog is in Spanish; fortunately they provided English subtitles which helped out quite a lot. If you place Beerfest on one end of the movie spectrum then Pan's Labyrinth would be somewhere over at the extreme opposite end. After seeing the latter, I know why it got a 96% on Rottentomatoes. It can't be easily categorized under any one genre; it's a rated-R fairy tale.

2.03.2007
2:35am

I felt like going for a walk tonight... so I walked for about an hour and a half and covered 5.5 miles. My legs will probably be sore when I wake up.

2.01.2006
10:29pm

Pine pollen... I thought I escaped my allergy in Melbourne but I have been proven wrong. Last week we had some rain which improved the situation immensely but the runny nose is back tonight.

The 7th Harry Potter book will be released July 21, 2007. Just announced today, and it made it to slashdot which means it must be a slow news day for them. The user comments are great as usual. It has been noted that the book will not release on 7/7/7 as originally thought.

This week I've seen lots of headlines with the word "Vista" in them. Of course that is because Microsoft finally launched the new operating system on Tuesday to the normal retail channels. The reviews are mixed as expected. Apple came up with their own clever commercial about Vista. I like the new multicolored iPod shuffles. Gotta collect 'em all, right? Oh, wait, they only have 1GB of storage.

This past Tuesday we had a guest speaker in Microfabrication Lab. One of Dr. Earles' friends from Intel came to talk to our class. He works on flash memory reliability testing, and told all of us why it should really be called "semi-volatile" memory instead. According to him, most flash memory will lose some of its stored bits after about 5 years if the data doesn't get re-written within that period. If it is stored at high temperatures, the duration before loss will be even shorter. He said that they have come across some cell phones that people have kept for around 5 years that will lose their operating system software because it was stored in flash memory but never "refreshed" via a firmware upgrade or similar method. Also, read/write cycles have a detrimental effect on flash memory and the likelyhood of "bit loss" is greater in sections of the memory that get erased and written to frequently.

As of today, we have gotten the hexadecimal keypad and 2-line LCD display working on our senior design project. The next step is to attempt to get one of the sensors to work through the A/D converter. After that we will worry about upgrading to the full-size LCD screen.