3.31.2006
8:05pm

Kudos Pioneer, kudos... they actually found a helpful use for the marketing email addresses collected from everyone that registers their product:

As you’re changing the time on your appliances this weekend don’t forget to update the time on your Pioneer car stereo! In case you've forgotten how to do this, take a look at the handy “how to” guide on our Website, which shows you how to change the clock so you won’t arrive late to any of your destinations!

We're headed out to see Ice Age: The Meltdown tonight. Should it live up to or succeed the original, I will be happy.

3.30.2006
12:39am

Since it's now techinically the 30th, happy birthday to my roommate Dan who turned 21.

Flash map of Iraq casualties, via Digg.

The new South Park episode tonight was about Hybrid cars and the "smug" emitted by their owners who think they are better than everyone else. Interesting approach for the liberal show, but then again they make fun of everybody. Kyle's family moves to San Francisco to be with intellectual people who like to smell their own farts. No, really.

Nate and I found out today, along with the rest of the Harris integration department, that our boss Scott Hodler will be leaving April 7th to go to Tennessee. It's likely that he will continue to work remotely from there for a while until Harris gets a full-time person hired and trained on all of the things that Scott does. Nate and I are only part-timers and we probably know one-third of what Scott knows so there is going to be a rough transition period, especially if the remote thing doesn't work out. He's been dropping small hints about it for a while but I never realized he was seriously going to leave this soon.

3.26.2006
6:58pm

I went to the Botanical Garden Air Potato roundup yesterday that was hosted by Dr. Patterson to help them remove the invasive species. The vines grow clockwise around trees and have these tubers that grow with their seeds inside. When they get to a large enough size they look a lot like potatoes hence the name. I lasted for two hours so I got to spend a little time outdoors which is a really rare occurrence for me. They had prizes for the largest air potato and the air potato that most closely resembled a Florida Tech professor. Adam and Christine were there as well along with a group of other volunteers.

After the cleanup thing yesterday I found out Dan was going to a LAN party hosted by one of his Geek Squad co-workers from Best Buy. I tagged along and so we had fun playing Half Life, Counter-Strike, Rogue Spear, and Unreal Tournament until 1am. Note that the games are all 4-6 years old; that was intentional since some of the other gamers were using older computer systems that couldn't support some of the newer multiplayer games. Ah, the good old days when only the server PC needed a copy of the game CD. Oops I didn't mean to say that--long live copy protection... yeah.

King Kong is also coming out this week on DVD; unfortunately it doesn't have DTS sound but they're probably saving that for the Peter Jackson Extended Edition DVD planned for November of this year. I read Jeff's review on AVS Forum and he said the video and sound quality was excellent so they obviously did a good job fitting the 3 hour movie onto one disc. I'm going to have some other Student Ambassadors over for a social-event movie night for King Kong and possibly another one when the Chronicles of Narnia DVD comes out the following week.

Today I got a couple algae eater fish, one for the betta tank and one for the large aquarium. I’ve been having some trouble with brown algae growing on the silk plant leaves and rock decorations. I also picked up a few more ghost shrimp because those guys are very fun to watch and only 33 cents apiece. I decided that guppies don’t like our water here so there are no longer any of them in the aquarium... I will just have to pick a different species if I want more fish.

Sunday night is Family (Guy) night. 9pm EST.

3.22.2006
11:21pm

Shipment of Windows Vista has officially slipped to Q1 2007.

I turned down an interview with Microsoft this week for an intern position. The latest news going around about Microsoft was basically the last nail in the coffin: I'm not going anywhere near that company. They actually offer interviews to quite a few Florida Tech students each semester, mainly from the Computer Science and Software Engineering departments, so it's not all that prestigious. I've talked with Tim before about their interview process and it's heavily focused on coding ability--not exactly my forte. He writes software and web pages for fun and still didn't like their process.

The new South Park episode tonight was great. It started off with a "flashback" to a fake previous episode, pretending that Chef was leaving to join an Adventurer's club to see the world and find the answers to some of life's biggest questions. Then Chef returns from his trip and everyone is overjoyed to see him--until they discover something weird about him. It only took a few seconds to realize that Matt and Trey were blatantly using sound bytes from previous episodes to be the voice of Chef (since the actor quit... see a couple posts lower). Then the "Super Adventurer's Club" turns out to be more allegory for scientology and they talk about how the club members travel around the world to molest children in different countries... now that Chef's back he keeps saying that he wants to have sex with the South Park kids. To make a long story short, the episode concludes with Chef being impaled on a spike, mauled by a mountain lion and grizzly bear, and finally reincarnated as "Darth Chef" with the full black suit and oxygen mask a la Star Wars. The show thereby can use a new voice actor for Chef without anybody noticing the difference (although with all the media coverage lately, I'm sure all fans of the show will know it's somebody new). I'm not sure what they have planned for the new Darth Chef... but I bet it will be amusing.

12:03am

Bodies, Rest, and Motion: a slow, unusual, weird movie the likes of which I haven't seen since Adaptation with Nicholas Cage. I knew to set my expectations pretty low given the rating on IMDb, and considering I got the DVD for free I'm not complaining. I got to see Tim Roth in a different kind of role and it wasn't too bad to watch just one time.

3.21.2006
5:09pm

Sitting in the most boring class in my college career... Computer Communications. I thought this class was going to be interesting since it ties in network protocols, physical communication media, layers, models, etc. However, the textbook isn't very interesting and Tamas teaches almost directly from the book so you can imagine how the lecture goes.

Tomorrow is the first new South Park episode of Season 10. They decided to call it "The Return of Chef!" to mock Isaac Hayes (the voice actor for Chef) for leaving the show due to his ties with Scientology. In case you missed the episode last season, Matt and Trey made fun of Scientologists in general and specifically insulted Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and R. Kelly. I personally can't wait to see the new show and it's sure to piss people off as always.

3.20.2006
10:19pm

Acronym of the Month... WHUXGA = Wide Hex Ultra Extended Graphics Array.

It would take 16 of my current 1920x1200 Dell laptop LCD to construct a WHUXGA display. Now that's insane.

3.19.2006
3:43pm

My favorite part of The Green Mile...

John, I have to ask you something very important now.

I know what you gonna say; you don't have to say it.

No, I do. I do. I have to say it. John, Tell me what you want me to do. You want me to take you out of here? Just let you run away? See how far you could get?

Why would you do such a foolish thing?

On the day of my judgement, when I stand before God and He asks me why did I did I kill one of His true miracles... what am I going to say? That it was my job?

You tell God the Father it was a kindness you done. I know you're hurting and worrying. I can feel it on you. But you ought to quit on it now. I want it to be over and done with. I do. I'm tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having me a buddy to be with, to tell me where we's going to, coming from, or why. Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world, every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand?

Yes, John, I think I can.

3.18.2006
4:14pm

I saw V is for Vendetta with some friends on Thursday (US showtimes started at 10:01pm Thursday as opposed to the regular midnight opening). I read a few reviews online before seeing the film and one called it "a thinking man's popcorn movie" which I think is an accurate description. It has enough action scenes to appease those who don't want to think about the movie's message but at the same time it appeals to the intellectual types as well. I haven't read the graphic novels on which the movie is based, but I did read that the adaptation by the Wachowski brothers was fairly true to the original tone. By the time the movie is over you will be cheering for the "terrorist," in this case the man called V who is trying to overthrow the oppressive British government. Natalie Portman did a good job with her character as well, and I'm sure given her political stance she was excited about the opportunity to act in a movie that promotes democracy and limits the power of government. V himself was played by Hugo Weaving who you may recognize as Agent Smith from the Matrix Trilogy or Elrond in the LOTR movies. Worth seeing.

And a powerful line from the movie: "People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people."

3.12.2006
10:16pm

Spring break is over :(

What did I accomplish: conference trip, 19 hours of work, 16 new fish, 4 movies, 2 books, 2 pizzas, 1 magazine, 1 oil change, 0 homework.
I'm not very proud of that last number. Every spring break I plan to use the time constructively to get ahead in schoolwork; I never do.

3.10.2006
11:05pm

Amusing blog post with Chinese mistranslations on a restaurant menu. Prepare to laugh quite a bit.

I picked up a set of Koss KSC75 clip-on-ear headphones today from Radio Shack. Yes, I know what you're thinking: why the #$%@ would you buy anything made by Koss if you have any common sense. Well, turns out these little guys are a real gem when it comes to audio quality and they come at a shockingly low price: $19.99 normally, $14.99 on sale this week. I threw some CDs and MP3s at them along with a DVD movie and I'm in disbelief. I plan to grab another set before the sale ends just to keep as a backup. They honestly sound better than the $150 retail Bose Triport headphones that I had for a while (sold those when I found out what a mistake Bose is). Not quite as comfortable with the clip style, but also more portable which is the tradeoff.

3.5.2006
9:03pm

Well I had an interesting weekend. ASAP conference for Student Ambassadors from Thursday - Saturday. Thursday night we arrived at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando for check-in. Alana drove 6 of us in her friend's van and we met up with Bec and Amy who drove separately from Kennedy Space Center. We had a quick dinner at Denny's then went to a welcome session followed by some lip-sync performances and swing dance lessons. Friday was packed with events, starting with another welcome session with ice breaker which led into some seminars, a guest speaker on Racism in America, followed by some more seminars. Our group from Florida Tech split up so that we could cover as many seminars as possible. Friday night we were given free time to explore the town, so we made another official Ambassadors trip to Margaritaville at Citywalk and walked around to some of the shops there at Universal. They told the waiter that we were celebrating my 20th birthday so we got some free dessert out of the deal. After that we went through the McDonald's drive-thru to ask directions to the nearest Wal-Mart, then went to buy some "spirit supplies" for the next day of the conference. We came away from Wal-Mart with hair dye, face paint, a whiteboard with markers, and noisemakers. Philip dyed his hair black and red to match the Florida Tech school colors, and the rest of us just did face paint Saturday morning with black and red as you can see below. We met up with Diane on Saturday morning so she got to attend some of the sessions with us before returning to Melbourne. On Saturday we had another free-time break from noon until 7pm so we hit up Buffalo Wild Wings, Payless Shoes (I forgot to bring dress shoes to the conference) and some Pirate Cove mini-golf (36 holes). There were several other schools from the conference at the mini-golf place so that was a lot of fun. I was having allergy issues so my eyes were watery and my nose runny but I tried to make the best of it. We fed the ducks and slowly made our way back to the hotel where we took a nap before the semi-formal banquet. They announced the winners of several awards, voted for the new district III ASAP representative, and of course served dinner. We left around 9:30 and drove back home in Bec's car, as Alana had left earlier in the day with a few other ambassadors who didn't want to stay for the banquet.

Photo gallery coming eventually.

Today I finally got my fish for the 30-gallon tank in my room. I bought 6 neon tetras, 4 fancy male guppies, 3 plattys, and 3 catfish. I will probably get some ghost shrimp as well for cleaning crew, although the catfish do seem to be doing a good job of that for now.

3.2.2006
1:11pm

Welcome to Florida.

And a nice, big reminder that I'm not 21 until next March.