10.31.2005
1:06am

I'm cheating and posting this under Oct 31 instead of Nov 1. I don't feel like making a new HTML page right now. Happy early Christmas to all the computer geeks out there (remember OCT31=DEC25). Happy Halloween to all the non-geeks ;)

Tomorrow there is a horrible, awful, sure-to-be-painful test in Signals and Systems. Still, not as painful as the torture some of the characters of the recent Saw II had to endure. I went with Dan, Cory, Chris, and Drew to see it this past Saturday. We had originally planned for Friday but it sold out more than 30 minutes early. It was everything we expected, very gruesome and suspenseful. It held my attention better than the original Saw since it had more action and a slightly better plot. The ending from the original Saw was impossible to beat, but the sequel had a pretty decent one too.

Star Wars: Episode III comes out tomorrow. At least there's one good thing about this week.

10.27.2005
10:38pm

I watched The Wizard of Oz tonight for the first time in who knows how many years. The special edition DVD was just released this past Tuesday as well as a boxed set for the extreme Oz fans. I was very impressed with the restored video quality considering the age of the film (1939). The audio was also remarkably free of crackles and pops thanks to new digital techniques. The DVD had a small segment about the restoration process, explaining how they scan the original reel digitally at 4000 line resolution (which amounts to 50MB of data per frame, by the way). Then they do some magical dirt removal and color merging to get a seamless digital presentation of the movie. All that extra resolution goes to waste on our current DVDs but in the future they will be ready for high-def DVDs and digital cinema projection (Sony currently sells a 4K projector for around $60,000).

10.25.2005
2:03pm

Well as others from Melbourne have said, the hurricane was pretty anti-climatic on this side of the state. We got a lot of rain and some category-1 winds, but most buildings didn't lose power and many businesses were open yesterday after the storm had passed. The west coast got it much worse, with category-3 winds and massive power outages. Of course that is all relative to the destruction and chaos near Cancun where the storm hit with more power than Florida ever saw.

I'm in Multifarious Systems right now about to learn PHP. Well, more like get a tiny glimpse of PHP since this is a survey class that doesn't go into much detail about any particular technology. I miss the excitement that Brian Jenks brought to our class last week when he did a guest lecture about ASP.NET.

10.24.2005
2:12am

Wow, I think this is a record for most amount of time between blog posts.

Hurricane Wilma is headed across the state of Florida and we should be feeling the effects here by noon today. It was chugging along at 18 MPH as of the 11pm NOAA forecast so it should pass by fairly quickly. Harris is closed today so I won't be going into work and my Signals and Systems test on Tuesday was postponed a whole week. Woohoo! We had a get-together tonight at Ron and Jason's place to watch the Stewie Movie and Sahara.

Jason turned 21 this past Friday so we had dinner at Chili's and went to a couple parties at Southgate afterwards. It was pretty fun, although there were quite a few people that I hadn't met before so it was somewhat awkward.

As far as academics go, last week we had a major Electronics test on which I hopefully scored at least moderately well. Dr. Earles has very high standards but the test wasn't as awfully difficult as it could have been. My understanding of MOSFETs is still sub-par but I should pick up a little more detail as we move forward in the class. The upcoming Signals test worries me more because nobody understands what is going on, so we don't have each other for mutual support. The professor rushes through material with no quizzes to check our understanding, and the GSA is not good at communicating information either. Our hope lies in a test curve.

10.12.2005
12:59am

Please do not remove passengers from aircraft

I don't stop by Something Awful very often, but when I do there's always something entertaining or disgusting to read and enjoy.

10.9.2005
12:05pm

Pretty boring weekend, just staying at home. I've been reading some more of Fabric of the Cosmos since I left it untouched for about 2 months. Rolo has gone home for fall break (and his 21st birthday) and some other people are out of town as well due to the break. Dan and I had to entertain ourselves last night playing some CounterStrike, at least until his computer started acting all glitchy.

Today I've got some Signals and Systems homework to start. That should be about as much fun as jumping off a bridge.

Someday I might convert my web pages to XML, using what I've learned so far in Multifarious Systems. But that's not going to happen this week; maybe over Christmas break. I'd still like to figure out if I can utilize SQL on the my.fit.edu server.

10.5.2005
6:05pm

Happy Birthday to my roommate Rolando today. He turned 21 and is very pleased about that.

Today we had our second difficult Murshid test, this time for Microcomputer Systems 1. On Tuesday we had the Digital State Machines test. The one today definitely went better than DSM, I actually left early because I finished all of the questions. Total time spent studying was probably 6 hours and it was almost entirely memorization. Normally that wouldn't be too awful but when you've got several similar communications standards on the same test it's kinda easy to get them confused. RS232C, RS422, RS423, RS449, EIA-488-1978, IEEE1394, and USB. A few diagrams for a D/A converter and a microprocessor A/D converter thrown in as well.

Oh yeah, fall break officially starts today so I don't have class again until next Thursday! Unfortunately it's not going to be all fun and games because I have a few homework assignments and an Electronics project to work on over the next few days.

10.2.2005
2:31am

Happy Birthday to my sister, Brittany. She turned 17 today! Only 10 more months and she'll be heading off to college somewhere. Dad said they might be making a trip down to Florida around Thanksgiving to see me and tour Florida Tech.

The recent lack of updates is testiment to how busy I've been the past week (and this weekend). I had a few major assignments due last week on top of 7 hours of time commitment to Student Ambassadors; 5 hours sleep was the norm unfortunately. The upcoming week isn't looking much better, with two tests, three homework assignments, and new member preparations for SA. Today I took a break from homework to do some housework since it needed cleaning. We had Matt and some other guys over last night for poker and Halo which was fun as usual. Tonight Rolo and I watched Robots which was funny all over again as it's been six months since the theatrical release. Kudos to Fox animation for including DTS audio; the video bitrate was a little low but the picture still looked fantastic. I forgot that I wasn't watching a Pixar animated film. Speaking of which, Pixar's newest movie "Cars" isn't hitting theaters until June of next year.

The Disney CEO transfer from Michael Eisner to Robert Iger happened just recently. Iger's big focus is going to be CGI films and he's trying to rebuild the relationship with Pixar that Eisner screwed up. It sounds like he doesn't have as short of a temper so hopefully they will get along fine.