3.31.2007
11:35pm
What to do with an old Pentium 233 computer... in my case the answer is not "throw it away." I'm a bit nostalgic for it since it was the first "new" computer I ever assembled, so it's been hanging around for the past 9 years. For the last 6 months or so it has just been in the closet but a week ago I pulled it out because we needed another computer with a serial communications port. My current desktop and laptop do not have any such old-fashioned serial port which is a shame. When I was at Astro Too (electronics surplus) last week, I picked up a brand new Asus CD-ROM for $10 to put in there and it's going to be my new CD-ripping machine. I discovered this piece of software that has been around for quite a while called Exact Audio Copy, which is essentially the most precise ripping software that exists anywhere. The Asus drive I got is supposedly one of the best drives for disc ripping as well, so they make a good combination. Hopefully if I re-rip my CDs I won't get the occasional pops and sync errors that affect some of the ALAC tracks I have right now. I'm not sure whether iTunes is to blame for that or the Lite-On DVD-ROM that is in my main desktop.
Last night Ron and Courtney came over to hang out with Rolando, Diana, and I and to play some cards / do some drinking. Rolando shared some expensive tequila that he bought and Courtney was the only one who wasn't drinking because she had to drive back home this morning. Around 2:30am they decided it would be very fun if we stopped by Relay for Life on campus and did a lap around the gym. We met Oliver, Jason, and Sputnik there and managed to stay out of trouble.
3.30.2007
9:30pm
Interesting look into the car selling business. Got linked there from this article about avoiding the 4-square scam at dealerships.
About time to watch Glengarry Glen Ross again...
3.29.2007
10:07pm
Google Maps to the rescue! Check out step 20 and have yourself a laugh.
3.28.2007
11:35pm
Dr. Grossman was pleased with our senior project demo today so we are in the clear now until the showcase. Such a relief, although we still have a decent amount of work left. Ron came back to the house after the presentation to help us clean up a bit. Rolando made some salmon for dinner and we watched Borat, which was great. They cut out some good stuff but the DVD had the deleted scenes too.
There has been some drama on the web recently about a company called ZioSystems that sells computer gear. Don't buy anything from them. Visit www.mymarketingeffortswilldominateyourface.com for the scoop. By the way that domain name comes from a quotation from the company "CEO" if you can even call him that. GideonTech titled their article "how an online business self destructed" and it's very appropriate.
Here's another article from today that has a very appropriate title, this time from ars.
1:10am
Well the senior design project is finally coming together. We present to Dr. Grossman again tomorrow (well later today technically) and I think he's going to be happy with the progress we made since last Wednesday. If not for the defective chlorine sensor we would be 100% functional, at least from a hardware standpoint. In the process we've destroyed one PIC programmer, one LCD screen, four PIC18F4520 microprocessors, a computer power supply, and a few voltage regulators. I almost killed another ATX power supply today while "modifying" it for use with the project. Picked it up at CompUSA for $22 so it wouldn't have been a huge deal if I had, but still. I went out shopping with Matt and we got some more connectors from RadioShack, some sulfuric acid from PetSmart, some Lexan and brackets from Home Depot, and misc stuff from Wal-Mart. From now until the showcase on April 13th we have to get our presentation materials ready, get the web site updated, move the components from the current sloppy breadboard work into a more consolidated package in the see-thru box, and tweak any of the code that needs modification. The water pump that Rolando bought is pretty loud to use at the showcase, so we might try some acoustic dampening around it to reduce the annoyance factor. It's pushing through around 6 GPM and we only have 5 gallons of water in the aquarium so the turnover is very quick.
3.26.2007
5:12pm
Luvaglio announces a $1M laptop. The most impressive tech feature is the 128GB of solid-state storage, but most of the cost comes from the rare diamond power button / security identifier. Possibly vaporware, but since they only have a tiny target market does anyone really care?
I finally got to see 300 last night with Nate and company. Good movie. Watching the Family Guy ep from last night right now, plenty of innuendo and sacriledge.
1:46am
Another one of Tolkein's unfinished books is going to be published soon, since it has finally been finished up by Tolkein Jr. I'll have to check it out.
3.25.2007
12:28pm
Old car ad on autoblog.com:
Well, Esso/Exxon had the Tiger in your tank ads back in the 60's, so Pontiac decided they would put a tiger somewhere else in their GTO. A year later it makes another appearance. Some owners took it a little further.
3.22.2007
11:44pm
Talk about one awful week for me, Rolando, Matt, and Ron. We had major delays with the senior design project, very little sleep a couple nights from working on said design project, and today the shit hit the fan in Communications Systems. It's not even worth going into all the details on that last one but suffice to say all the students are in a precarious position. Dr. Pearce said the administration did not respond when he asked to be relieved of his duties for the rest of this semester. It's not a big surprise, I doubt any of the regular faculty members want to try to teach the contemptible material that makes up the communications curriculum. What's ironic is that neither our professor or the majority of the students want to be there in that class. I would guess less than ten students would be taking it if it wasn't part of the EE flowchart. As it stands right now I have my 95% from the midterm but the remaining 70% weight of the course is yet undecided.
We did have a bit of good news tonight after we got the correct type of op-amp to use with the pH sensor for the design project. We are now getting the expected response and should be able to interface it with the microprocessor before our next demo on Wednesday. We also have to get the flow rate meter working completely and finish the software code and get everything mounted this weekend. So much for working on anything else. Things are going well at HSX so at least that is a nice break from the school work. Our building finally got upgraded to the new Cisco VoIP phones yesterday.
Going to watch the LOST episode from last night now and get some rest before a full day of work tomorrow. ABC revamped their streaming video player and it's very nice now; when are the other networks going to follow suite...
3.19.2007
1:03am
The Simpsons spoof Lord of the Rings, and quite well if I may say so.
3.16.2007
8:03pm
Anderson, Alaska is giving away 1.3 acre homesteads. I heard about it on FatWallet, of all places. When you see the size of this "town" below, you will see why they are trying to attact more people to the area. I think they should have tried offering bigger chunks of land.
Tesla Motors is opening five dealerships this year, and one will be in Florida! That would be awesome to go see the car up close.
12:53am
LOST just gets weirder all the time. They are keeping me tuned in every week, although now via the web streaming instead of on TV.
My suspendeddisbelief.net domain made it to the front page of Google if you search type in suspended disbelief as the keywords. Pretty neat considering there's not any content there.
Disney's The Frog Princess (2009) announced. Finally the return of 2D is confirmed (woohoo) but unfortunately they are going to use Randy Newman again for the songs. It will feature the first black princess, another step forward IMHO.
12:12am
Well we got back our Communications exams this week. Grade before curve: 60/100. Grade after curve: 95/100. Current overall grade: 96/100. Our professor is not very happy with the class. However, we found out from the people who took the class last semester that they had to re-take the first exam three times. Dr. Pearce decided to just do the curve and push on instead of trying to fix all the stuff we didn't learn right.
3.14.2007
7:42pm
Happy pie day! 3.14. Unfortunately I've been sick all day with a cold. I worked from home a while instead of physically going in to work so that bit was all right.
I put up some pictures that Ron took in Key West. Also wrote up a summary of the trip that's kinda long.
3.13.2007
8:43am
I put up some photos from Key West. More to come when I get Ron's pics and Gwen's pics.
3.12.2007
12:10am
Family Guy parodies Ferris Bueller again. The original parody.
3.11.2007
9:51pm
I'm back from Key West. More to come later, right now I'm not in the mood to type much. Watching some free nature and science program on the China news channel since we just cancelled the Dish Networks package. Right now we have 12 non-PPV stations in the guide list and I think only 4 of those have real content on them.
3.8.2007
8:41pm
Officially the geekiest rap song [nsfw: language] I've ever heard. Weird Al has nothing on this guy. You better know your UNIX commands or it won't make any sense at all.
Speaking of UNIX, Nate did some investigating about what operating system to run on our new TWiki server and we are going with Ubuntu Server edition. Apparently it performs very well and has even better support than Red Hat Core. Ubuntu has become the de facto choice for desktop Linux so it will be interesting to see how the server version compares.
Tomorrow starts the Key West weekend trip. I believe we are going to leave around noon and thus miss most of the bad traffic times around Miami. My car is fixed up with the new tire as of today so I'm happy about that. Tonight I'm trying to get everything ready: syncing the iPod, charging the digital cam, changing the fish tank water, etc.
I meant to go see Wild Hogs at the theater this week but that didn't quite work out. Guess I'll catch it after the trip. Tonight I've still got the March 6th episode of House to watch.
3.7.2007
9:31pm
Well, I survived my birthday. It was fun. Ron took some pictures when we were at Chili's. No, those empty glasses were not all mine. Six and a half of them were though... Rolando and Matt were also in attendance. It wasn't over after dinner though, Rolando (my designated driver) took me over to a friend's apartment and we played some more drinking games. Ron drove his car as well so he conveniently excused himself from any additional alcohol.
This morning I had a bit of a hangover but was good to go by noon. I went to work for a while and I'm going in tomorrow as well. Most of the new stuff is set up now but there's still one more rack to finish.
While uploading the pics with Picasa I noticed that Google increased the amount of storage space from 250MB to 1GB. Nice. Dave started a new blog to chronicle his journey in law school. He's still working on the acceptance stage for most of the schools he applied to.
3.5.2007
11:41pm
Changes abrew at Disney feature animation... Lasseter, you better not let us down. Via Brian, another Disney nut (and I mean that in a good way). In other news, Apple upgraded iTunes again with new features. A notable one is that full-screen Cover Flow (album flipping) is available. An interview with Matt of Wordpress fame. That whole blogging thing. Funny billboards. Oprah's ugly secret. All in a day's reading on digg.
I found out today while having my oil changed that one of my 3300-mile-old tires has a nail in it. It was too close to the sidewall to repair so now I've got to order another one from Tire Rack and have the bad one replaced. Fortunately it hasn't been leaking any air so I should be ok driving on it until the new one arrives. It wouldn't be prudent to try any highway travel though, so my car won't be one of the ones going to Key West unless the replacement arrives by Friday. Courtney already said she's driving so that means one of the other people will have to volunteer. Unless Rolando decides to go, in which case we can pile into his Dad's GMC SUV that he's borrowing for the week.
Tonight after I got home from the oil change I found the other guys working on the senior design project. We headed off to Home Depot to get some plumbing supplies for the sensor assembly. We still have to get the actual water pump but Rolando said he's going to take care of that. We only have the next few days to try to get all the sensors working, because after spring break there is another check-up session with Dr. Grossman and he wants to see some major progress.
My 21st birthday is tomorrow. I got a birthday card and an email from Aunt Brenda and Uncle Andy today, which was an unexpected but welcome surprise. They told me they bought me a present but I have to go pick it up at the store. Unfortunately they only gave me the street address and there is a whole shopping plaza at that location. I'm placing my bets that the package I'm supposed to pick up is at the liquor store.
The card I got from Brittany said to have fun partying but remember that friends have cameras. I know all about that, I was the "friend with camera" a number of times in the past. White guys can't dance.
Just passed midnight... all the online forum happy birthday emails are coming in now. Automated ones of course... I'm special but so is everybody else listed for today's 12:01am cron job.
3.4.2007
10:26pm
This is an example of why I like Family Guy so much... every once in a while they put in a real gem. That Youtube clip shows the episode footage with the original Gene Kelly footage in the corner (the actual TV episode didn't have the overlay). They even changed Stewie's voice to match the older audio.
7:24pm
The sexy new Mazda2 design, coming to the US in 2008. I still like the Fit interior and gauge cluster better, but that Mazda exterior is nice.
3.1.2007
10:10pm
In Office 2007 you are allowed to use older menu shortcuts from Office 2000/XP/2003. However, Microsoft decided it would discourage users from attempting to use the old ways because you have to do it blindly. There is, however, a handy popup that alerts you to the fact that you are indeed using a deprecated navigation method and it lists the keys you have pressed in sequence. Don't remember what the options were on the ALT, I, P submenu? Tough luck. Better open your copy of Word 2003 on another machine and check.
I personally liked using the menu shortcuts before. ALT, F, U was a common one for page setup along with ALT, I, P, F for insert picture from file, ALT, I, S for insert symbol, etc. The ALT, F, U option doesn't work anymore because they redid the file menu altogether.