11.29.2006
11:50pm

Two projects down, one to go. The critical design review presentation today went well in senior design class. Dr. Grossman likes our project anyway so I don't doubt that we will get A's in that class. I just finished the virtual instrument project due tomorrow, and I just have to give a quick presentation on it during class. The remaining project is for OS Concepts, and Matt and I have already started the 5-page report section. I need to wrap up my pages and then we are going to do the actual coding tomorrow night.

I got a nice deal on a 2-CD Elton John set today at FYE. They had mis-priced it at $7.99 but surprisingly (to me at least), they honored the price. A number of the songs I already own (due to the collection of SACDs), but at least half of them are ones I don't have yet. Now if only they'd release Captain and the Kid on SACD...

I tuned in to Tim's radio show on WCRR which was very entertaining. He occasionally does a segment, and tonight the music theme happened to be sex. They played some Marvin Gaye, Bloodhound Gang, Sublime, Vengaboys, 50 Cent, TISM, and some other funny stuff. Of course for me, the idea of streaming lossy music just sucks in general but I make an exception for college-run radio. I used to listen to a lot of Internet radio via Shoutcast streams, but ever since Winamp 2.95 stopped receiving all of the streams I haven't gotten back into it. We still use a techno or reggaeton one for parties though.

Elemental Designs and JL Audio are shaking things up in the home audio world of subwoofers. eD has some very competitively priced models, but they are just getting into powered home subwoofers so nobody knows exactly what to expect in terms of performance. They do have quite a reputation for car audio though. JL Audio is of course also extremely well-known when it comes to car systems, but they have released a couple of formidable subs called Fathom and Gotham. The Fathom already has people raving at AVS, and the Gotham is twice the performance. Even the smallest model costs quite a bit.

11.25.2006
3:08pm

I saw this article about widescreen aspect ratios on Digg: CNET guide to aspect ratios. Short and informative.

11.24.2006
9:25am

The craziness that is Black Friday. Last night I went with Dan and Buff to TGI Fridays for Thanksgiving dinner. They were pretty dead, but most all of the wait staff was working which was kinda weird. Our rather attractive 23-year-old waitress didn't have any other tables so she chatted with us for a while. Buff was scheduled for work this morning at 3am so he was grumbling about that. After dinner we went over to Oaks and saw Happy Feet, which was a great movie with a star voice cast. It does feel a little long for an animated movie, but it wasn't a big issue. The music is probably the best part; they easily used 30+ popular songs from the past and present and remixed multiple songs together for the penguin scenes (singing is a big part of the penguins' life). After the movie Dan and I drove by Best Buy to see how long the line was; there were easily 100 people in line at that point of the night. Chris called me and asked if I still wanted to wait in line in the morning, and I told him how many people were already there. He decided to go camp out with Melissa around 11pm instead of the next morning. Dan and I stopped by CompUSA briefly since they had opened up at 9pm for a 3-hour sale; the line of people waiting to check out wrapped halfway around the store. I decided to go to Buff's place to watch Grandma's Boy (hilarious by the way) and we finally went home around 12:30 in the morning.

I slept for a while until 7am and decided to head over to Best Buy. Chris was still waiting in the checkout line, even though the store had opened at 5am. I think there were at least 2,000 people in the store. Fortunately he did get the DLP TV and a computer system. Best Buy was pretty much wiped out of all the good sale items when I got there, so I left and stopped by Office Depot and Staples. They had much smaller numbers of people in the store and Staples still had some door buster items in stock.

So I think I've finally got the Black Friday thing worked out. Either get in line around 6pm on Thanksgiving night for the popular places or go shortly after the doors open to the less-popular places. Even Target had a few people in line at 12:30 this morning.

11.22.2006
6:17pm

Someone took my favorite TV show and one of my favorite songs and stuck the two together in a video. Then I had to go listen to the original Tears for Fears version. The original version must have had a very low-budget video because it's extremely simple.

I decided to hit up Best Buy on Friday morning with my roommate Chris. He's going to try to score a 56" DLP projection TV for the new house he and Melissa are moving into. I'm trying to get one of the cheap LCD monitors to use at work. I think we're going to head over at 3am and although I'm sure there will be a good number of people already in line (some since the day before), hopefully they will be there for the more desirable items like the $250 laptop computer or the $999 plasma HDTV.

Tonight I'm probably just going to take it easy, but tomorrow I have to get to work on the school projects. Must resist the temptation to play games and watch movies all day.

11.20.2006
10:00pm

Next week is going to be bad... very bad. Wednesday: Critical Design Review presentation for Senior Design class. Thursday: Virtual Instruments Lab final project and presentation due. Friday: Operating System Concepts final program + 8 page report due. It's so bad that we were joking about not having time for Thanksgiving dinner this year. I've actually got it pretty good since I'm not traveling anywhere or having anybody come visit.

On the plus side, there are only 9 days of class left, then final exams. I'm looking forward to the Ambassador's Margaritaville trip on December 2nd, even though I'm still not old enough to actually get a Margarita there. C'est la vie.

I started running regularly. By started I mean tonight was the 2nd time. My fat ass needs to get some exercise.

11.19.2006
7:26pm

It's been a weekend of movies for me, mainly because I've been lacking motiviation to do any sort of real work. Friday night it was Casino Royale with some friends from school, which I thought was a very well-done movie in the Bond series. They actually took the time to have some slower scenes interspersed with the high-intensity action scenes. Today I watched Lady and the Tramp and The Rescuers Down Under, two animated Disney movies that I haven't seen since I was a kid. I was completely astonished with the remastered quality of Lady and the Tramp, which didn't show any signs of being 50 years old. It's also the first movie that Disney animated for the CinemaScope aspect ratio, meaning the original frames are 2.55:1 instead of the common 1.66:1 found on the more recent releases. I also found that Wikipedia has a complete list of all the animated Disney features. I'm missing quite a few of them.

11.16.2006
11:06pm

Wal-Mart revamped their web site. I think they must have fired the last company they had designing for them, because the new layout is 10x better than the last one. Clean and easily navigated. Also when I was writing this sentence, I wondered where "revamped" came from. It must refer to a re-done vamp, right? Well I had no idea what a vamp was so I went to dictionary.com and there it is. The primary meaning is as expected, but a secondary meaning is "a seductive woman who uses her sensuality to exploit men." Interesting.

10:16pm

Thanksgiving break is creeping up on me. The good news is that I don't have any major assignments due before the break. The bad news is that I have a big assignment due after the break. I'm in a good mood this week because I found out I got a 99/100 on the computer architecture test, and a 94/100 on the Logic test. My EM Waves test score was 77/100, but it's actually the highest grade amongst my group of friends. Dr. Lail is letting us re-work the problems this weekend and turn them in Monday for an extra 10 points.

We watched The Da Vinci Code tonight; my second time seeing it but Dan and Rolando hadn't read the book or seen it in theaters.

Tomorrow I'm announcing a contest sponsored by Student Ambassadors for two $500 Barnes and Noble gift cards. We are going to ask students to submit ideas to improve school spirit on campus, and the best two submissions will win a gift card with the intention of using it to buy textbooks (but they can be used at the retail store for other things as well). We will probably do something similar next year as well, especially since the 50th year anniversary stuff will be going on during the 2007-2008 semesters.

11.13.2006
9:17pm

A very weird animated music video called "Holly Dolly" has been popular on YouTube for a while. I don't know what the song is about, but it has a catchy beat and is amusing. It's German language, same as used on the home page.

3:49pm

The Genesis albums are coming to SACD in 2007. 5.1 remastered audio. Sweet.

11.12.2006
7:34pm

Well, the LAN party was a lot of fun. I left yesterday around 5:30pm so that I could go home, shower, and change clothes before the party at Ron's place. I left Ron's place around 12:30 in the morning, came home, and went to bed for a solid 8 hours. It felt good. I ran the Student Ambassador retreat from 11-3 today, which went pretty well but some people who were supposed to be there did not show up, or had to be called in order to wake them up. After that I stopped at Best Buy to see the pre-Thanksgiving stuff going on there, and they are stocking up as best they can just like every year. This year's holiday season should be even bigger for them since Magnolia is now included in the same store.

I discovered a rather entertaining thing today, but for reasons that will be obvious, I'm not going to recommend anybody do it. Today on my way back from the store I pulled out my PDA and was glancing at the Wireless Networks applet when I was at a stoplight. There were about 5 networks detected, and so for the last mile or so of the trip I checked it every few seconds to see what sort of interesting SSID names popped up as I drove by all the houses.

One of my fish is not doing very well today, looks like a swim bladder problem from possible bacteria infection. I did a 50% water change on my aquarium and hopefully he's feeling better by tomorrow. If not, he will probably be upside down and floating. The rest are doing ok, just the one Platy is having issues. If he dies I will have to buy a few more, since I would only have one Platy left and they like to be with their own species. When I was at Ron's yesterday I saw his new saltwater fish. He's only got 4 of them right now, a yellow tang and three small blue fish that I don't recall the name of. We saw his crab attack/fondle (we aren't sure which) the anemone yesterday which was intersting to watch.

11.11.2006
4:31am

No sleep for me tonight... I'm at the FITSSFF LAN party. So far we've played network games with Age of Empires II, F.E.A.R., and Unreal Tournament 2004. Nate showed me a little bit of DOTA, the Warcraft III-based game that he plays all the time on the Internet. I won the F.E.A.R. tournament and got a $10 Best Buy gift card, which is funny since I've only had the game for a week and I'm still not that familiar with the gameplay. Coming up: probably some Counter-Strike, Quake III, more Unreal, possibly Worms Armageddon, etc.

11.09.2006
3:40pm

Big virtual instruments project is finished, submitted, and presented. I'm actually still in class right now, waiting for a few more students to finish their presentations. So far my project definitely had the most functionality (and correspondingly the most complexity). Hopefully I get a very good grade on it, given the large quantity of time I invested. The final project will be assigned next Tuesday, and that one is worth three times as much credit.

11.07.2006
5:40pm

So much work, so little time. Cars came out on DVD today and I'm definintely not going to have time to pick up a copy until Thursday night. The good news is that I finished my two virtual instruments today and now I just have to finish the lab report write-up and do a quick Powerpoint presentation. The bad news is that I have a test in EM Waves tomorrow so I need to spend a good chunk of time tonight studying.

Friday night after work I'm heading over to the FITSSFF LAN party on campus. Nate is coming too so we are going to game it up with the rest of the nerdy people at Florida Tech. I'll be leaving some time on Saturday, how early or late depends on how much fun I'm having I suppose. Having no class on Friday is definitely going to be a welcome break after this week.

11.06.2006
12:30am

I finally got around to installing Windows Vista this weekend. It's a pre-RTM build so not quite final version, yet it is very polished and it's obvious that all of the major elements have been completed. I couldn't get it to install properly on my desktop computer, so I tried the laptop and that one worked ok. It starts up and shuts down fast, but it's obvious that it has heavy demands while running if using the Aero UI. So far I am pretty impressed, but I need to spend some more time with it to figure out whether it's just a "Windows ME"-esque rehash of XP or if it actually stands well on its own as a complete version upgrade. The GUI based install is nice but it doesn't give any troubleshooting information if something goes wrong. In the case of my desktop PC, I actually had to boot into the Recovery Console for XP to fix the master boot record and restore the standard disk boot configuration.

Today I got propositioned for a weekend road trip down to Key West for spring break next year. Ron and Courtney want to go so they've invited some people and are waiting to see who all is interested. This week I'm going to an information session at Florida Tech about a cruise they are sponsoring for students during spring break at a very decent price. It will be a tough decision I'm sure. Either way I am going to do something besides just stay here in Palm Bay.

11.02.2006
6:35pm

South Park last night was pretty great. Cartman freezes himself so that he doesn't have to wait for the Nintendo Wii to be released in stores and accidentally stays frozen too long. "Like waiting for Christmas, times 1000." Apparently people in the future don't play video games though. Mr./Mrs. Garrison teaches evolution in his/her own unique way. We find out Cartman uses Firefox as his web browser.

Today I worked on my Virtual Instruments project for another 4 hours and actually got the thing to work properly. I still need to add some tweaks and clean up the interface, but the core challenge is done. Next week I need to get the hardware interface working but that shouldn't be too difficult. Ron also got his to work, in fact he was the one that solved a problem we were having with the output signal.

I still haven't watched the Mission: Impossible III DVD yet but I'm waiting patiently until I get some free time to do so. The bass looks impressive from some charts I saw posted on AVS.