10.31.2006
7:07pm
It's Halloween! Having said that, today is nothing out of the ordinary for me. After work at Harris and the usual boring Logic class, I plugged away at the Virtual Instruments project in lab today for 3 hours and made some progress but not as much as I had hoped. After that I helped Trevi deliver some of the Halloween Treat pumpkins for Miles of Smiles. We've been getting quite a few orders coming in since we did a mass mailing to all of the freshman students' parents. The downside is that it is requiring more of a time commitment from the Ambassadors, but I think it is a worthy program to have.
Right now I'm eating some of my Mom's excellent banana bread and listening to the new Bat Out of Hell III album by Meat Loaf. Only on track #4 right now and I'm already liking it a lot. Earlier I was listening to Curtain Call by Eminem and surprised Rolando who didn't think I ever listened to rap music. Today I also picked up Mission: Impossible III which we are going to watch later in the week. Since I already submitted my OS concepts project today, I might watch my favorite Halloween movie, Donnie Darko, tonight after House.
10.29.2006
4:37pm
Yesterday Matt wanted to go out to dinner to celebrate his full-time job offer from GE, so we got a group of 6 people together and went to TGI Friday's. Courtney was in town visiting Ron so she came with us as well. After dinner, we headed over to Cinema World and watched Saw III. It was gruesome and bloody just like the other Saw movies, and it had an interesting twist at the end. I had to agree with the critics that this should be the last Saw installment. If they came out with a fourth one I would not be interested in seeing it. That's not saying anything bad about the third one, as I enjoyed it, but the general feel of this one was that they were wrapping things up and explaining the remaining mysteries from the first two movies. Box Office Mojo says that Saw III had a production budget of $12M and they have already taken in about three times that as of today.
Today when I was at Wal-Mart there was a couple in front of me in the checkout line. The woman had on an Athena Technologies t-shirt and I got a kick out of that. I almost asked where I could buy one.
10.27.2006
9:26pm
Well, much to my surprise today I found out that I have been getting Harris profit-sharing benefits without even knowing it! A statement showed up from Fidelity Investments telling me about the current balance of my 401k account (not a lot but something is better than nothing). It was a good kind of surprise though, not the kind where you have to pay money. At this point I'm not sure what will happen with that arrangement when the MCD division breaks off from Harris and becomes Harris-Stratex Networks, but from what I've heard the future benefits will be kept as close as possible to the current ones.
I downloaded Internet Explorer 7 the other day from Microsoft and installed it on my two computers. It looks nice and seems to run faster than version 6. However, it doesn't want to render my frames properly in the Blog section. Today I downloaded FireFox 2.0, also just released, and it is working fine. So now I just ask myself why I felt like I needed to get IE7.
Nintendo Wii or Apple Wii? You decide. Clever joke in the subject line nonetheless. Also, YouTube starts going down the tube. Every day I hear about some new copyright complaints that result in videos being taken offline. Comedy Central is just the latest one. Too bad, I was hoping YouTube could fly under the radar a little longer but that doesn't seem to be the case.
10.26.2006
10:03pm
7:30pm
In my random wanderings on the Internet this evening I came across a mention of Freei networks, which was an ISP I used back in high school when I lived in Wilmington. They were in business for a while, and then all of a sudden I remember my account no longer working and I had to switch back to NetZero for free Internet service. Freei was awesome because you could connect to their modem banks without actually using their software, which meant the banner ads were basically an optional component. The average user wasn't going to take advantage of that vulnerability, but anybody who knew how to manually set up a dial-up connection could circumvent the ads. I had read something at the time about Freei going bankrupt and selling its assets to NetZero, but I didn't realize the extent of the financial distaster that they had gotten themselves into. They spent $89 million in VC funds and didn't have much revenue at all. I'm a little impressed with NetZero for hanging on so long, since the ad-based revenue model seems to be very difficult to properly manage; they have dropped their maximum free connection to 10 hours per month which is really low bt it's still something.
In non-ancient news, Sony's profits continue to drop by large amounts due to that pesky battery recall program. Worth watching is this video of a scanner playing some music using just the motor mechanism. If I had known more about hardware interfacing back in my days of QBASIC I probably would have done something geeky like that. Of course assuming that BASIC even has the ability to do stuff like that, which I doubt.
Today in Virtual Instrument Lab we were assigned a mid-term project that is due on November 9th, two weeks from now. Last year he gave the same project to his class as a final exam of sorts, and they had four weeks to complete it. It's no easy task either, which left us confused as to why we only get half the time that they got when it is the same course. Moreso than that, it is worrisome to think about how difficult our final project is going to be if the trend continues. Well, enough complaining.
10.24.2006
7:52pm
It was incredibly nice outside today. Cool temperatures all day long and a brisk breeze that felt refreshing in the sun. Rolando was also enjoying the change of temperature and has all the windows open in the living room. I've got a test tomorrow in Dr. Hadji's class that I'm studying for tonight. We also had the OS concepts project due tomorrow, but I finished up the last bit of that earlier today and submitted it online.
Diggdot.us had a problem when I tried to access it tonight:
500 Internal error
Server got itself in trouble
Cool home theater cable site (their descriptions are hilarious): AViC Cable.
10.22.2006
9:16pm
I think Wachovia likes cheetahs too:
It went zooming across their banner ad that I happened to see when I was browsing 411.com looking for local tire dealers. I checked the tread on mine today and I could see the top of Lincoln's head so it's time to buy new ones. Now that I think about it, maybe 411.com was implying something with the car + cheetah association? Kudos to them if that's the case.
Update: I found a great website, tirerack.com and did some research on the tires that are available for my car. The only ones that I could buy through Wal-Mart directly were some poorly-rated Uniroyal ones, and nobody else in town (including Sam's Club) carries the small 13" rim tires that my car requires. So, I ordered 4 new highly-rated tires from tirerack.com and the price was about $50 less than the Wal-Mart tires. By the time I add in the cost of mounting/balancing/disposal, it should come to about the same cost but I will have the better tires. They had some ranging from $29 - $71 (in the 13" size) and you can see specs, ratings, and user reviews for each tire.
12:24pm
How pizza is delivered in Alaska. Via Ryan.
12:25am
The original ICQ: The DialTone of the Internet [archive.org]. I never even heard about ICQ until 10th grade; by then my allegiance to AIM had already been solidified. They are currently owned by Time Warner, and compare the modern-day site with the original site and I think I like the June 1997 version better.
10.21.2006
11:04pm
Three updates in one day... it must be the weekend. This is a minor one though. Click the "Suspended Disbelief" title on the main page of my web site to see the logo I finished a couple weeks ago. It was way too big to use as the regular title, and it didn't shrink well to a small resolution.
8:22pm
Old newsgroup spam... haha I used to have a Tamagotchi.
What is Tamagotchi ?
Tamagotchi is virtual reality creature. It was first discovered in
Japan Late 1996.
Where is Tamagotchi come from ?
Tamagotchis hatch from tiny eggs after traveling millions of
lightyears through cyberspace.
How to keep Tamagotchi ?
With proper care and feeding, the Tamagotchi quickly grow into
lovely virtual pets in a wide variety or shapes and personalities.
How to get it ?
Enormously popular in Japan, Tamagotchis have been adopted by
children, teens, and adults of both sexes. Now you can get it on
line for NT$1450(=USD$53). Just print the order-form below and fill out
your visa card number, and quantity. Send the form to us by fax
886-7-3380918. You will get your Tamagotch in one week!
1:36pm
More images posted on the Picasa web album. I found out they don't support video upload yet. Even so, today I'm working on converting some of my large-size Quicktime camera captures into the more manageable size M4V format. iTunes includes the conversion functionality already, all I have to do is add the clips to my library, right-click them, and select Convert for iPod. Then I just delete the clips from the library and retain the smaller file (but still with the same resolution and frame rate as the original).
Last night was fun: I went to Wendy's with some of the Student Ambassadors and then we came over to the house to watch Over the Hedge. It would have been nice if more people had been able to come, but it was a Friday night after all so I'm sure others had plans.
Now I have to go write a pair of C++ programs for another OS Concepts project. Fortunately they look to be very straightforward so it's just a matter of cranking out the code.
10.19.2006
11:48pm
Interesting factoid: when a cheetah runs at full speed, its paws make contact with the ground less than 50% of the time; they leave the ground both at the contract and extend phase of the stride due to the unique abilities of their spinal cord. 0-45mph in about 2 seconds, 0-60mph in 3.5 seconds. I just watched Duma again, which has got to be the best cheetah movie ever made. It has Peter Gabriel music during the credits :)
8:53pm
I got a couple new tank buddies today: one small Chinese algea eater and two gold mystery snails. The algae in my 30gal tank is starting to get plentiful so I needed another hungry fish to eat it. One of the mystery snails went in the betta tank to battle a smaller algae problem. I don't think they deserve the "mystery" namesake, as there isn't much about them that is mysterious. They just move around and eat stuff.
According to the Over the Hedge DVD, and IMDb.com, there is a 3rd Shrek movie coming out in 2007. It appears that all of the voice stars are back which is a good sign.
10.18.2006
9:22pm
Getting my weekly dose of LOST (Hurley and Locke are back, and the polar bear!). South Park is next. Then some reading and finally bed time. I just saw a Nissan commercial featuring Marc Horowitz, who made a short film called 7 Days in a Sentra.
I added an icon to my web site today so that I could easily identify it among my Firefox bookmarks. Nothing fancy, just a basic bitmap with 's' and 'd'. It won't show up correctly in Internet Explorer most of the time, but Firefox has no issues. I wonder if the newly released IE7 fixes that issue. Due to the way Florida Tech sets up student webspace, I have to manually tag every page I want to have an icon, so right now only the main index page has the icon association.
6:47pm
School bans kids from playing tag. I'm glad I grew up before every little aspect of kids' lives were regulated.
10.17.2006
10:30pm
So far I haven't been home before 9pm this week. Today I had a good reason though: a Harris GCSD information session at the Florida Tech campus, then a comedian at Gleason Center (sponsored by Campus Activities Board).
Two thumbs up for the comedian, Tim Young. He had some great material, a good mixture of clean and raunchy stuff but nothing too overbearing. He involved a few people in the audience that drew attention to themselves, ragging on them or tying them into some jokes. He's got a great idea for solving the planet's energy crisis, but you have to hear about it first hand because it's much funnier that way. Oh and he made fun of Republicans and Dubya which is definitely OK with me :)
10.16.2006
3:15pm
I have two dilemmas (I had to think about whether the singular and plural form were the same or not). The first is that I have almost completely filled up my FIT web space, and the second is that eventually I will have to host my files elsewhere after I graduate. I found a solution to the first problem with the new Google Picasa Web Albums feature that they included in the newest version of their free software. I can move all my pictures to Picasa (up to 250MB free) and remove them from the FIT server which will give me a lot more space back. The process for uploading images is incredibly easy, all you have to do is select the album you want to upload to the public server, click the Web Album button, and select what size/quality you want the destination pictures to be. Another plus is that Picasa's online photo viewer is 10 times better than the free HTML layout galleries that you can generate if you host your own site. I've only put one gallery over there so far, but all of them--that I chose to upload--will be available at http://picasaweb.google.com/jgillow eventually. I still have to figure out how to compress my oversized Quicktime movies down from hundreds of megabytes to a couple megabytes; DivX or H.264 will probably be necessary.
So now photo sharing is so easy that even my parents could do it :)
10.15.2006
4:22pm
Someone posted some old Florida Tech orientation video footage on Youtube. The music, clothing, and hairstyles are definitely very 80's.
11:10am
Yawn... just woke up after getting some much-needed sleep. I didn't get much rest Friday night, since I was getting stuff ready for the Student Ambassadors' homecoming float for the parade that happened yesterday. The school theme was "Rock the World" and our specific theme for the group was "Celebrities that Rock." We only had four people on the float this year, which wasn't too great, but we had fun with it anyway. I got a caveman costume and some props from the local party store so that I could be Fred Flintstone (you know, from Bedrock). Joe and Kendall dressed up as an actual king/queen which was cool because I don't think any other groups did that. The fourth person was inside the Pete the Panther costume (but I'm not supposed to disclose who it was... protect the innocent). I set up the sound system on the float again this year so we had some good "rock" tunes that fit with the theme. After the parade I worked on tearing down the float and getting everything cleaned up.
I wanted to see Man of the Year, which came out Friday, so I went with Nate and a couple other people to see it at Oaks. It was a good political satire movie, but some sections of it did drag out longer than they should have. Robin Williams gets some good jokes in occasionally, but that isn't the main focus of the movie. On the way home, I went by a CVS pharmacy and their sign out front said "hh:mm" instead of "12:10", somebody must have forgotten to change the backup battery.
10.13.2006
12:04am
I just got done watching Click with the roommates, the latest in a line of emotional-yet-funny flicks starring Adam Sandler (and the delightfully eccentric Christopher Walken in this one). Despite the straightforward plot, there were some interesting twists and quick-fire witty remarks when called for. Sony proved that you can have a decent movie where a dog humping a stuffed animal is a motif. They just overpower the toilet humor with family values and lessons learned. And yes, it does jerk a few tears near the end.
Earlier today I attended the homecoming week talent show, sponsored by the Caribbean Students Association at Florida Tech. There were ten features in total: some of them dance numbers, some solo music, and some group music. It figures that just about the time the songs from TLM were getting un-stuck in my mind that the Players in Harmony had to go sing an acapella version of "Kiss the Girl." Joe and Kendall, the homecoming king and queen from Student Ambassadors, got 2nd place in the 1-minute belly dancing contest that all of the kings and queens had to participate in. There was some cool break-dancing, plenty of booty shaking, a dirty Stephen Lynch song [NSFW] by "Two Guys and a Guitar," and a hilarious comment regarding sexual orientation from TJ among other things. But the talent show isn't just about obscene stuff, there were a couple piano solos, a solo Indian dance, and "Two Guys..." did an acoustic version of "Baby One More Time" with the proper lyrics. It's all for a good cause too, since CSA was collecting suggested donations from students and guests which usually goes to help the elementary school down the street.
10.11.2006
11:20pm
I wasn't aware that Wikipedia has Featured Pictures, but they do and some of them are really of astonishing quality. I thought this one was pretty cool: stretching tiger.
8:56pm
A Collective Soul song, "Better Now," made its way into a Kellog's Special K commercial! Sweet. Although it's really old news, tonight is the first time I heard it.
10.10.2006
9:25pm
Listening - Oakenfold
<geek> Today at work I got to play with a Dell Latitude laptop. Nothing unusual, right? Well this was a Pentium 100MHz laptop with an 826MB hard drive, 24MB of RAM, and a DSTN color screen (I don't miss those at all--ugh). Blast from the past, circa 1999, still had Windows 95 installed. Most suprising of all is the fact that the Lithium-ion battery charged up and worked properly, even though nobody has touched the system in 5 years. One of the guys at Harris discovered it hiding in his garage and brought it in so we could use it as a serial terminal; the only thing wrong with it was the system clock said September 2003, probably due to a dead CMOS battery. </geek>
10.09.2006
2:49pm
So, Saturday night I went to see Jackass 2 with Dan, Buff, and Drew. They all really wanted to see it, I kinda sorta had a small interest in it, so they convinced me to go. It actually was a pretty decent movie in the typical Jackass shock-fest manner. There was lots of laughing, a decent bit of cringing, some looking away from the screen, and a general sense of disgust with some of the skits, but that's exactly what the movie set out to achieve. They did a pretty good job of alternating between the "I can't believe what they are doing to themselves" skits and the "what the !@$%, that was hilarious" skits. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that anybody go see that movie, but if you must go just be prepared for some shocking stuff.
And since long 4-day weekends are designed for watching lots of movies, last night I watched The Little Mermaid and The Mask of Zorro. It has been so long since I saw TLM that it was like watching it for the first time; of course I did remember some of the songs, probably from watching the video tape a large number of times as a kid.
On the computer gaming front, I successfully completed Hitman: Blood Money this weekend after 3 days of playing it. It was a different style of game than I am used to, and definitely a welcome change. You have flexibility when it comes to completing your tasks in each mission, although the most challenging and most rewarding is the Silent Assassin approach where you must use disguises and discreet movement to kill only your intended targets and without tipping anybody off. There were a couple levels where I just took a pistol or automatic machine gun and killed everybody, but that's the lazy way and it isn't very rewarding. What impressed me the most was the visual quality of the game, which topped Valve's Source engine with its realism. Light shaders and reflections were superb. I was able to run at max settings and 1680x1050 resolution, thanks to my now-overclocked eVGA 7900gs which is running at 600/820, a 33% increase in core speed and 24% increase in DDR3 memory speed without even breaking the 70C mark. It has been quite the impressive bargain.
10.06.2006
5:39pm
Awesome, I got a 93/100 on my first Electromagnetic Waves test. I only missed one part of one problem, but most people missed the same part so I didn't feel bad about it. I was also supposed to get back my logic test yesterday, but the LabView seminar caused me to miss class so I'll have to wait until next Thursday to find out that grade. We have Monday and Tuesday off from school, and I moved my Monday hours at Harris to Tuesday so I get a three-day weekend.
OS Concepts was interesting today. I could say a lot of bad things about my professor but it won't really help the situation at all. Let's just say that in class today he told us the specific things he wanted for the project that was due last week. Yeah. He commented on how some of our programming code was "unorthodox" and not what he wanted, but he never specified what methods to use, just to make sure that they performed the right action. Also, he's giving some people a chance to rework parts of their project but not allowing other people to update/fix their project. We have a test coming up right after fall break that covers nine chapters of material from the textbook.
Fortunately the rest of classes are going fine. I need to stay focused on logic since it's so easy to blow that class off as irrelevant, but I do need to get an acceptable grade in there. My fish are all still alive too which is a good thing. I can't say the same for Ron, since he had some issues with his salt water fish, but he's going to work on restabilizing the water quality and try again with some more tolerant species.
I also got a call today from one of the recruiters that was at the career fair, from a medical software firm up in Boston. The first few lines of discussion were fine: they were hiring a software training person to go around to health clinics and teach doctors how to use their software. Then they dropped the 75% travel requirement and I didn't need to hear any more about that position. I reminded them that I wasn't graduating until the spring, and that if they had another (non-excessive-travel) opening they could give me a call. I'm not scared by the prospect of having to travel for my first full-time job, especially since I'm young and not tied down, but spending 1 week at home and 3 on the road is a little too extreme for my tastes.
Speaking of employers and the career fair and such, I went to the Microsoft presentation on Wednesday night with some other people from Hadji's class. These are usually fun events that showcase some new Microsoft technology while trying to attract future graduates to the software development opportunities within the company. They have lots of pizza and usually ~$500 worth of prizes so there is always a large turnout. Well, this year they dropped the ball by having a completely irrelevant presentation for over an hour. They had a person from the Xbox game coding division give a talk about code optimizations for the Xbox 360. Now, I'm sure some PR-minded person at Microsoft was looking over the titles of potential presentations and the "Xbox 360" heading caught his or her eye. Had they actually read the abstract or flipped through the PowerPoint slides, they would have immediately noticed the complexity of the topic and its inapplicability to a Microsoft recruiting event. Even though I understood some of the topics that were discussed during the presentation, none of them made me excited about Microsoft or programming for the Xbox. The difficult parts that I didn't grasp were probably understood by the Computer Science senior-level students, but there were plenty of freshman and sophomores in the audience who have probably never heard of kernel mode system calls or paging techniques. I will say that the presenter was very enthusiastic about his presentation, and pushed on without delay even though only one or two people had any response at all during the talk. The rest of us had glazed-over eyes and were discretely glancing at our watches, waiting for them to wrap up and announce the prize winners.
10.03.2006
11:59pm
Three good releases today: X-Men 3, Thank You For Smoking, and Disney's re-release of The Little Mermaid. Melissa bought all three so we watched Thank You For Smoking tonight; almost as funny as the first time I saw it. We're doing X-Men 3 tomorrow and probably TLM later in the week/weekend. My replacement video card arrives Thursday, can't wait for that to get here.
Tomorrow is the career fair at Florida Tech so it's going to be a crazy day. Work, then class, then career fair, then more classes, then home. I'm leaving for Orlando early Thursday morning with Ron and Matt to go to the LabView conference; we are required to go as part of our Virtual Instrumentation lab class. My boss, Charlie, at Harris mentioned something last week about switching to a Java programming role, but he didn't know when/if it would actually occur. So if that does go through I can learn about Java.
Also I'm happy to announce that Matt got his new home theater system hooked up and calibrated today, making it the third system I have designed/recommended for friends. All three have featured the SVS PB10 subwoofer, imagine that. One setup with Athena Audition like mine, one with JBL Northride E series, and finally this last one with the budget-conscious Insignia coaxial speakers. I still spend too much time at AVSforum.
This guy is running a blog with the installation of two Thigpen Rotary Subwoofers. Between those and the three "regular" subwoofers, he has spent more on 1-80Hz sound reproducing capability than most people spend on a luxury automobile. And the speakers handling the 80Hz-20kHz are no slouch either... there's also a video up at Youtube with the rotary woofer in action. Bruce Thigpen, owner of Eminent Technology, was on-site for 14 days with an assistant to do the custom installation and tweaking. I guess that's what ~$50,000 will get you. Certainly an interesting saga to follow, and there will be more custom installations in the upcoming weeks I am sure. I just find 1-20Hz bass @ 125-130 dB hard to imagine.
10.01.2006
10:04pm
Tigers are awesome. Lions too. And don’t forget those rare Ligers.
