9.30.2006
7:29pm

Today I took a road trip down A1A to Vero Beach; it has been a while since I last took a trip somewhere for fun. Along the way I stopped at the Sebastian Inlet reserve park and spent a couple hours hiking the trails there. It was nice to have some time where I could clear my mind and not have to think about school or work. The most interesting wildlife I saw on the whole excursion were some fish jumping for insects, but it was fun nonetheless and I got some outdoor exercise. I also discovered there was a large campground nearby at Longpoint Park so I checked that out too. Pictures are in the photo gallery section. After I left there I stopped at a beach access place for a little bit to cool off. My next stop was the Best Buy in Vero Beach to pick up something for a friend, then I headed back to Melbourne along US-1.

Tonight I'm going to relax, watch a movie with some friends, and possibly go to bed before 2am. Maybe.

Check out the Top 176 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With "Pants".

9.26.2006
9:54pm

The evil downside to satellite TV... big rainstorms. One passing overhead tonight interrupted about 10 minutes of the newest House episode which made me sad. Of course what's even worse than that is the fact that House, Family Guy, and American Dad will have no new episodes until after the MLB World Series. They resume October 31st which is entirely too far away. On the bright side, Lost and South Park start up next week.

National Geographic's Wildcam Africa is available once again. It says live camera offline right now, but usually they have the live feed.

9.25.2006
5:42pm

Newest RC airplane technology: virtual reality flying. It’s not just displaying the camera image on the glasses, movement of the head directs the aileron and elevator control. Someone had a very good comment about this though: it would be very easy to forget the RC element and accidentally fly the plane out of range.

9.24.2006
11:15pm

Demitri Martin routine for Comedy Central. I wish there was more of his stuff available online. Today I meant to get a lot of stuff done, but I only ended up doing a couple of short reports and I still have to study for my test this week. Fortunately I've got Monday and Tuesday night.

You know you're a geek when: a party that starts with a watermelon and loud hispanic music ends with watching Weird Al videos on the internet and laughing about them as a collective group. Ok so the latter part was mostly my idea and all the "cool" people had already left by that point. There was some Duck Hunt too.

9.22.2006
6:51pm

A new video from Weird Al, called "White and Nerdy", is available on his myspace page (and Google video, and Youtube, and probably some other places too). It was supposed to be officially launched by AOL.com, but it leaked out early and so AOL dropped that from their plan. There are a few other songs available for free on his page as well, like "Don't Download This." Very amusing, especially the new video.

9.21.2006
9:59pm

The Geforce 7900gs drama continues... I sent my card back to woot.com on Tuesday but I saw on their forum today that MSI accused woot of selling stolen cards. Apparently the white-box OEM cards that woot was selling were destined for some company but the tractor-trailer was "interrupted" en-route. Woot probably bought the whole lot off the thief and didn't check the source before reselling them. Also, the MSI site has a photo comparison and the OEM version has a smaller heatsink that doesn't cover the memory chips. That might have been what caused my problems, although overheating was not something I thought would be a problem.

I got the new Elton John CD today, called The Captain and the Kid. I enjoyed it, pretty upbeat just like Captain Fantastic is. Not quite as crazy, but then again Elton and Bernie are a couple decades older now.

9.19.2006
6:39pm

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I had sealants put on my wisdom teeth during my dentist visit. I had a big enough mouth to keep them (joke opportunity here) and they didn't come in crooked which was fortunate. According to the hygienists, it's uncommon for anyone as old as me to get sealants, mainly because almost nobody keeps their wisdom teeth so there's nothing additional to protect from cavities.

We had a rain shower this evening, and when I went back out to my car I saw this cute little frog sitting on the trunk. He (or she... I'm not a frog sex expert) was about the size of a quarter. Macro shot:

I watched The Wild last night with Chris and Melissa, and suffice to say it's one of the more disappointing Disney releases I've seen. It had some humorous moments, to which my small bursts of laughter could testify, but overall the story sucked, the animation mostly sucked, and the soundtrack was having an identity crisis. Two-thirds of the way in, Chris and I agreed that at least some of the people on the project must have been on drugs because there is some weird random stuff in the movie. Worth seeing once, if for nothing else than to make you appreciate Madagascar more. There are also some in-jokes relating to other Disney releases which were nice but nothing impressive.

9.18.2006
6:04pm

Fun but busy weekend. On Friday, Chris came back to town from San Antonio so we met him at the pool hall, talked for a while, then went back to Buff's apartment to do some stuff. On Saturday we were planning to go out for dinner, but that didn't work out so we got some take-out and watched some Jackass episodes. The sequel is coming out in theaters this week but I have no intentions of seeing it, just like I didn't go see the original. Not really my kind of humor. Cory was back in town as well, so I got to catch up with him a little bit. On Sunday I went to the Grape Escape event at the hospital to volunteer with some other Student Ambassadors. It was a wine-tasting & food event/reception to introduce their new wing (very nice design), so there were some hospital employees there along with some contributors and other notable people from the community. We were runners, nothing glamorous, but we had the opportunity to try some of the food dishes they had there. President Catanese from Florida Tech was supposed to be attending as well but we didn't see him there.

This week I've got a couple projects due, SA meeting & interviews, and other stuff that is consuming my time. No breaks until the weekend. My desktop video card screwed up this weekend so I've got to send that back; fortunately I didn't have a problem getting an RMA. Replacement will probably be another 7900GS, but from a different company this time.

9.15.2006
6:08pm

In honor of its 9th place in the 25 Worst Web Sites, here's a link to Hamsterdance.com. Make sure you turn on your speakers. Myspace got the #1 worst site on the web and I cannot argue with that :)

9.13.2006
10:57pm

I'm so tired I'm going to bed an hour early tonight to try to make up for the past couple <6 hour nights. But before I do that, I need to post a link to an amusing IT story that was linked on digg tonight:
Three Letters - a funny IT story

9.12.2006
7:35pm

Today on the way to work I ended up following an Audi named Inni. Good license plate. I also need to wash my car, the windshield is getting a bit dirty. I'm waiting for House to come on at 8pm.

5:44pm

Well, there was no new iPod announced today at the Apple press event, but there are now movie downloads available for some Disney films, and new games for the iPod. The new iTunes 7 is an amazing upgrade to version 6; I really like the new flip-through album view and the iPod status screen. Download it and check it out!

9.10.2006
11:33pm

I'm finally home after a rather exhausting weekend. I tried to post an update in the Binghampton Airport to continue my "sweet, free WiFi" theme but they were blocking all ports except 80 so I couldn't ssh into the my.fit.edu server. Then when I got to Atlanta, the "busiest passenger airport in the United States," they of course offered no free Internet and you had to pay about $6/day to use the network. No thank you. My flight into Orlando was on a 767 that had just come from London, England so there were some extra security sweeps on the plane before we were allowed to board, putting our departure about an hour later than planned. My first flight today was also delayed almost an hour, due to a closed runway in Atlanta that was holding up incoming flights.

Over the weekend I got to visit with my grandparents, and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. There were also a lot of in-laws and extended family and friends there, not all of whom I knew. The ceremony for my Grandma and Grandpa Cortright was nice, with a renewal of vows for their 50th anniversary. There was lots of food and cake and two of my cousins even sang some karaoke songs. Then there were gifts and we all finally left to go back to the house. We had some fireworks and the neighbors called the cops, but fortunately the patrolman who showed up had been invited to the party earlier so he knew what the celebration was all about. He chatted with us for a while and we got to see his new K9 helper. There are some advantages to living in a small town, where you know just about everybody.

I didn't get to stick around since I have to be back at work and school tomorrow, but it was a fun weekend trip. My next vacation probably won't be until Christmas when I go home for a week or two.

9.08.2006
9:00pm

Now I'm at Detroit airport and yes they do have free WiFi as well. My plane was delayed half an hour, otherwise I'd already be in the air again.

5:05pm

I'm sitting in the Northwest Airlines gate 39 terminal at Orlando International Airport, waiting for my flight to start boarding. They are nice enough to provide free WiFi access, so here I am posting an update. I've been working on a Virtual Instruments lab report and listening to some music; might as well not waste the time. In half an hour we should be taking off and who knows, maybe the Detroit terminal has free Internet as well :)

9.07.2006
2:51pm

After some flight rearrangements and confusions, I am still going to NY this weekend but at a different time and routed through a different city. Apparently the airlines think it's ok to bump economy passengers from a 4:30pm flight to an 8am flight with two days notice. Fortunately my Dad worked out the issue with cheaptickets.com and now I'm still going in the evening as planned. Tomorrow after classes I'm going to Orlando International airport and I will be coming back just two days later so that I don't miss any work or classes.

Even though I'm happy for a distraction, things have picked up with my classes this semester and I've got a stack of things to focus on. Pop(void), Push(string), but there's always something in there. The past two days I wrestled with a Linux syscall assignment for my OS Concepts class that required a lot of patience and some cursing. It wasn't the inherent task that was difficult, it was just that we had no clear instructions until the day it was due. Our professor got enough complaints that he went back, did the project himself, and then added a number of "corrections" to the assignment web page that made a lot of problems go away. Then we had a few hours to do the project and turn it in electronically before midnight. The next task is a tiered process tree but that should be a lot easier than the syscall. We are learning some cool stuff in that class, like kernel structure and processor scheduling, but some of it can be dry.

Not sure if I've linked these before but they are very funny. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can... and others.

Also in recent tech news, Apple released some new iMacs, including one with a 24" 1920x1200 screen. Nice. Now all of their machines have dual-core processors, even the diminuitive Mac Mini.

9.04.2006
10:19pm

My labor day: lots of rain, boredom, and a 2 hour power outage. Fortunately there wasn't any school or work to ruin all that fun.

In more somber news, famous crocodile hunter Steve Irwin