9.27.2005
3:50pm
Just found out that we will not receive any homework grades for Digital State Machines. We will still turn in assignments and they will still count full percentage toward our final grade, but to our surprise Dr. Deshmuk does not return assignments graded. So basically we will have no idea how well we are doing until we see what grade we make in the class. According to him we should be able to figure out how bad/well we are doing by comparing our work with his class notes and guessing how many points he would take off for certain things. Old-fashioned teachers are the worst kind, and I can honestly say I've never had a teacher that refused to give feedback on course performance... especially in the form of grades.
9.24.2005
11:11am
Last night I saw Flightplan with Rolo, Jason, Melissa, and some of their friends from FIT. I was hoping to see Lord of War but they had already decided on the Jodie Foster movie. The premise is that a woman and her child are flying from Germany to New York after the death of her husband, and shortly after takeoff the daughter goes missing and nobody remembers seeing her at all. Jodie's character becomes more and more frantic as she searches more parts of the plane (she was a propulsion engineer for the aircraft design company and just happens to know the entire layout of the jet) but doesn't find her daughter anywhere. Eventually the crew starts to imply that she is delusional and that her daughter was never there on the flight to begin with. The plot, while midly suspenseful, was not very exciting and the movie took way too long to get underway, something not often said of a 90 minute film. Most of the people in the audience will have already flown on an airplane at some point in their life so there was no reason for them to waste so much film time showing mundane flying situations. The one impressive thing about the movie was how they portrayed American prejudice against Arabs since 9/11. Jodie sees a couple of them traveling on the plane and immediately thinks that they were responsible for the kidnapping, and another American on board really wants to get into a fist fight with them even though he has no evidence of wrongdoing. After questioning, the quick-witted man quips that they will have to find another Arab to intimidate.
After the movie we headed over to Steak and Shake for some midnight dinner; the only problem was they had about 80 high school kids eating after a football game and only 4 waitresses. Rolo and I headed over to Chris's after that to see what they were up to; we stayed and watched Goodfellas for a while with him and Dan, Drew, and Cory. A little more exciting than the average Friday night where we just hang around at home. Rolando got a job at Best Buy so he'll be working in the Geek Squad just like Dan.
Classes are still progressing as they should. I had my first Multifarious Systems test this past week and scored a 98 so I'm content with that. We had about half the class make decent scores and the other half wasn't paying attention and got not-so-decent scores. Kepuska hasn't given us the details of our team project yet but once he does I think Rolo, Ron, Matt, Chris and I will be cooking up something impressive. If we aren't allowed to have that many people Matt and Chris will probably work together.
9.19.2005
6:12pm
That was one of the funniest Family Guy episodes I've ever seen. Certainly not the best of the best but there was a great combination of subtle jokes and big raucous laughter-generating jokes. I couldn’t stop laughing during the "song" with Peter and Michael Moore. I missed watching it last night because I went with Rolo, Dan, Gwen, and Bruce to see The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It wasn’t quite what I expected, a movie with as many elements of drama as of horror. It’s not centered around the ritual of the exorcism but rather a criminal trial of the priest who performed it.
I fired up CounterStrike Source last night to play online with Dan for a little while. Fortunately my Inspiron 6000 runs it like a champ, definitely better than the desktop. 128MB PCI-Express and 2GB of DDR-2 makes for some nice gaming, except I rarely use it for that. I’m trying to avoid the lure of MMORPGs since they have recurring monthly fees and they seem to suck the life out of everybody I know that plays them... which is about 3 people. Poor Chris and Cory, they wouldn’t know what to do without Everquest 2.
9.18.2005
12:23am
Somewhat sarcastic psycho-babble brain dump ahead... you've been warned.
It's been a weird Saturday... not that anything of any interest happened, but because it felt like something was going to happen. I had this sense of temporal suspension that occurs every once in a while--one of those sensations where your mind has no clear sense of direction and waits in anticipation of something to shake it from its paralysis. In the back of my mind there's this nagging question about where my life is headed and whether I'm doing the right things and making the right decisions. It's somewhat spiritual and not at the same time, an exercise in soul-searching that never seems to lead anywhere. On the surface things are going well and I'm progressing as any teenage college student should, but as I'm getting older it's seemingly harder to qualify my place--humanity's place in the grand scheme of things. Scientific discoveries are constantly altering the history of our existence and are gravitating toward the complete understanding of the physical world... but to what end? When we finally figure out what happened at time zero, when we figure out what dark matter really is, when we count all the black holes and stars in the universe, what then? Ah but then there's cold fusion and plutonium time travel to keep us busy. Maybe if we're lucky we can figure out wormholes and how to travel at the speed of light and send some ambassadors with Coca-Cola and Microsoft Windows to the nearest alien civilization to negotiate the establishment of the first interstellar Wal-Mart and Starbucks. If our friends are generous maybe they'll clue us in to an Earth-like planet with a fresh stockpile of fossil fuels and biomass so we can continue our old tricks. You have to wonder if humanity will ever resume the process of evolution or whether we're destined to fill the planet to capacity while burning away millions of times more energy than is provided by the sun. No amount of nuclear fuel or hydrogen or solar collectors is going to compete with the exponential growth in energy demands. We may be recycling and using energy smart appliances and driving hybrid electric cars but we're still screwed in the long run. As Daniel Quinn would say, we've driven our flying machine of blind hope off the cliff and no amount of pedaling is going to make the thing gain altitude--all we can do is watch the ground rise up to meet us, although a more fitting metaphor might be watching the water rise to drown us. The recent tragedy in the gulf coast, as others have said, serves as a reminder that no matter how much our technology evolves we are still subject to the laws of nature and biophysiological constraints. Even if the effects of global warming don't get us, if a rogue asteroid or cosmic ray burst from a supernova comes our way there's not much we can do except be consoled that it didn't all end in a nuclear holocaust and the cockroaches still get the last laugh. So do we throw our hands up in the air and give in to inevitability, of course not. There's still the ray of hope, the glimmer of light, the divine intervention. My generation may be those poised to make the biggest impact and that's why we continue unabated. If there's one thing I've learned it's that we are creatures of opportunity--and no amount of prophesizing or theorizing will stop that instictual drive. The problem is getting the masses to be proactive instead of reactive since it goes against what we've been shown to exemplify. It's bigger than pollution and overcrowding and conservation and AIDS because it will affect every single person in some way. I'm as guilty of desensitization as the next person but at some point we've got to stop and listen to the noise no matter how irritating and foreboding it may be. We're all pawns in the game of chess and we spend so much time worrying about who's the better color, who's got the most pieces, who's the most enlightened, and who controls more squares on the board that we don't think about whether we should be playing checkers instead.
9.13.2005
11:20pm
Buzzword this fall: 1080p
Electronics manufacturers are competing like mad to attain the lead position in the rush to deploy 1080p HDTVs. Companies like Samsung, Mitsubishi, JVC, Sony, Sharp, and Hitachi have already got first-gen products although supply is limited at the moment. My dad's actually waiting on delivery of the Samsung 1080p DLP RPTV set he ordered a couple weeks ago because they didn't have it in-stock at the time.
The bigger problem of course is getting content delivery with high resolutions and low compression artifacts. DirecTV has already hit their brick wall in terms of bandwidth and cannot deliver any more HDTV channels without dropping the quality of existing channels. Dish has an edge since they acquired the VOOM satellite, but even so they don't have much opportunity to grow without redoing major infrastructure. DirecTV is launching their MPEG-4 equipment soon which will open up a huge amount of bandwidth for numerous HDTV channels but it's still in testing phase and will be deployed slowly across the country.
The other word that's going to pop up come early next year is HDCP. All the people with older CRT HDTVs and some cheaper RPTV/LCD sets are not going to be able to enjoy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD content without upgraded to a set that supports HDCP over DVI or HDMI. Fortunately the HDTV sets that are currently being sold in major retailers all have HDCP capability so that should help limit the number of pissed-off people.
Dan's working full-time at Best Buy in the Geek Squad so I've still got a connection there to keep me up to date. Rolando's going to apply for a job there as well since he wants something part-time. I stopped in a couple days ago and talked briefly with Allison, Kevin, and Mike. They've been holding 1st place for home theater sales in their district which is really awesome and also means that lots of people in Melbourne are buying new TVs and audio systems.
Oh yeah, something about classes and such: everything's going ok so far. Dr. Deshmuk was sick today so we didn't have microcomputer systems or digital state machines. Javier said he hasn't been doing too well lately so hopefully he gets better and we won't fall too far behind.
9.8.2005
2:10pm
Went and saw The Transporter 2 last night with Chris, Dan, and Rolando. It was an entertaining flick with lots of good action sequences but the plot was thin as expected. In other movie news, Toy Story was re-released Tuesday for its 10 year anniversary. Toy Story 2 will be coming out December 26th so those of us who missed out on the original DVDs can get these new special editions. According to the reviews I read, they improved the picture quality with a new high definition transfer, and they also added DTS-ES audio which is a first for a Pixar release.
Classes are proceeding as expected. I'm not getting a huge number of assignments yet but then again things are still gearing up. Dr. Earles didn't make us wait very long before giving class quizzes--we already had two this week.
9.3.2005
11:43am
nForce is pretty cool...
A little signal noise during silence that is audible on sealed headphones but otherwise isn't a problem. It's not exactly a THX-Certified Audigy2 but it's no slouch either. One of the unusual features of nForce is Dolby Digital Live encoding for pass-through to a receiver. Unfortunately I no longer use a surround receiver attached to my PC so I haven't had a chance to try that out. The best part is that it came with my motherboard and I didn't have to pay anything extra for it :). I sold my SoundBlaster Extigy to the WFIT radio station for their Windows 2003 Server.
9.1.2005
9:08am
Nothing better to do before class at 9:30 so I'll update my blog. Things are back to normal with work at Harris and a full-blown class schedule including labs. Course line-up for this semester is:
Toughest of the bunch I would guess is going to be Electronics 1, just because our teacher is a reputed perfectionist and she will probably make the going difficult. It also has the thickest textbook. Multifarious Systems 1 will probably be the most entertaining class since we get to work with cool stuff for web programming. Rolando already converted his Xbox into a Gentoo linux web server so we can host some pages on the domain name he purchased. It's not up and running yet but when it is I'll post a link.
Hopefully the people trapped during hurricane Katrina are moved to safety ASAP and the relief crews are able to start draining the flooded parts of Louisiana and Alabama. I'm still amazed at the amount of damage a Cat4 was able to cause. The Red Cross is accepting monetary donations at their web site.