October 2005

September 2005 -- 2005 -- November 2005

October 5, 2005


Ahhhhh the life of a TA. I'm sitting in lab, bored out of my mind because it's only a "workshop" week where people only show up if they need help on next week's lab. Or in otherwords, a week off. But not for the fearless TA, where I'm sitting here writing this since no one's here. But someone might possibly could come, so here I wait, at least for a while. So I brought my laptop and I've been playing on that, but it's just not the same as hanging out at the apartment.

I also finally got most of my computer problems fixed. I figured how how to get my router to read the DNS servers correctly, figured out how to get internet working in Windows at my apartment, and got a replacement DVD burner from Dell. Now I need to burn some backups, and then I'm going to throw Fedora (currently downloading the DVD now) on the laptop to replace Mandrake since the support is about to expire. And since it's homecoming this week, we have a three day weekend.

Bono's hosting Conan's show tomorrow night. One of my favourite singers with my favorite late night talk show. Thank goodness for Tivo.

Every once in a while, someone has an absolutely genius idea. A multi-cord power cable, how was this not invented ealier?

My girlfriend has gotten me hooked on the Amazing Race (caution, lots and lots of pop-ups) and now I can't stop watching. And apparently it's not even as good as the previous seasons, so I may have to download some old episodes to see what the real fuss is.

October 9, 2005


So far so good with Fedora Core 4. It's been the least hassle free of all my OS upgrades, the only snag coming in that the software updater kept crashing on me for some reason after downloading a few software packages. It's been nice to see how much has improved in the last year or so, with Evolution getting better spam filtering, and the wireless drivers becoming far easier to install. Now if only I could get a decent internet connection in my apartment... you'd think with the amount of money I pay to live here I could get reliable internet, but you'd think wrong. It's always the DNS servers going down for some reason, I can connect well enough using IP's but that's pretty much useless in the world today. Might have worked back in the 70's before domain names even existed, but no so much anymore.

This weekend was homecoming, and Friday was Gator Growl, our yearly homecoming pep-rally which is billed as the largest student run pep-rally in the world. There's always fireworks afterwards, and since I finally had a digital camera I could take some pictures of them:
Fireworks before the smoke gets in the way
Red Fireworks
Near the finale

I forgot about the giant squid story that I was going to post about in the last update. Giant squid!

Apparently the record industry thinks it should be paid if someone searches for Madonna. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. All I want is my $5 CD and I'll be very happy.

October 13, 2005


It's 4 am on a Thursday night, why am I still up? Oh wait, that's right, finishing my Concurrent Reader Exclusive Writer programming project for my distributed operating systems course. Yes, I am that nerdy that once I get started on coding something, I have to finish it. Even if it's not due till midnight tomorrow and I have nothing else going on. And then instead of going to bed, I end up doing one of those infamous over-tired updates where I just ramble on and on about random crap that no one cares about (ie, pretty much like 95% of the internet today) and make even less sense than (oops, almost put then) I normally make.

I still don't get the appeal behind MySpace. Or well I mean I get *why* people like it, but my god is there any site that is more ugly or less user friendly? It looks like internet vomit. Where's Webpages That Suck when you need them? And in a funny story of what a little script hacking can do, one guy figured out how to automatically make people who visited his friends pages his own friend, resulting in over 1 million friend requests in less than 20 hours. This man is my hero. And apparently a lot of other people's too.

Every weekday Student Government does something useful and buys several hundred copies of the New York Times (and USA Today, but who cares about that paper?) for distribution across UF's campus for students to read for free. The interesting thing that I really would like to see a study on is the distribution of readership at each news stand. Some days they're all gone by 10 AM, other days there's still some left even at 3 or 4 PM. The high traffic places run out far earlier than the one's hidden away in corners (which makes sense, don't study those) but I just find it weird that it's almost a crapshoot if there'll be a paper left or not. And it alway seems to be quite full whenever I grab a paper, so maybe the days it runs out it just doesn't have as many stocked? See, this is why I'm really curious. Gah!

Also went to Museum Nights for the first time in a really long time today, so see a guy from the Smithsonian talk about deep sea life and how we pretty much know nothing about it. I love that about science, because it always feels like we know and have figured out pretty much everything by now, but yet there is still SO much we don't know anything about. I'm getting nerdy again, I digress. They also had an exhibit on giant squid, which is very pertinant considering the first live video was released recently (see update a few days ago) so the museum got very lucky on the timing of that one. I also found out it would take 6 of me to equal the length of one giant squid.

I also took advantage of my Tivo and watched some movies today that were on TV over a month ago. One of them was Guess Who's Coming To Dinner which was a landmark film back in 1967 that explored interracial marriage. Really good movie too. Which it still amazes me that it was only but 30 years ago that interracial marriage was still considered controversial. Or well maybe last week, if a poll saying over a quarter of Americans still disapprove is correct. What the heck is wrong with these people? I can't even imagine it making a difference (I've liked whites, hispanics, blacks, asians, jews, indians... I just don't care, why limit my options?), but yet we're still that backward? On the other hand I see gay marriage being the same exact issue, and there are states banning that left and right too. We'll look back on this in a few decades and wonder what the heck we were thinking. Oh you crazy world!

Well enough rambling, it's far too late and I ought (what a fun word!) to get to bed. Midnight madness is Friday so I'll be going to that. Er well not so much Midnight anymore being the NCAA changed the rules so that teams could practice for a few weeks already and can do full practices starting at 7 PM instead of midnight. Talk about a killing the whole spirit of the event, did no one on the NCAA ever go to college? I went to Midnight Madness at the local Division II school as a kid, and have gone to every one at UF so far. I love it, and I can't believe they have to change the rules on us. We're college students, we'll be up anyways!

October 31, 2005


Happy Halloween!

I kept meaning to update, but I've been busy discovering that grad school is awfully hard. I'd taken grad classes before, but having three at once along with TA-ing 11 hours a week quickly adds up. Next semester doesn't look much better in that regard either since it's all 6000 level project classes, but at least it's just 3 classes. And I'm scheduled to teach a lecture all about serial ports on Wednesday to 90 seniors/juniors. The hecticness just never stops.

There's also a raging Halloween party going on upstairs right now, which I'd be quite tempted to crash if I didn't have 8:30 am class tomorrow morning. At the same time however it's like I'm there since my apartment complex, besides having the worst internet reliability I've ever experienced and charging us for leaving out trash we didn't leave out, also doesn't believe in soundproofing walls at all. Most definitely moving out for next Fall.

Now I can listen to the latest addition to my favourite online radio station, Digitially Imported, which is Sky FM. Combine that with something like StreamRipper and voila, dozens of new mp3's every hour. I've been listening to the 80's station mostly, as obviously the best music ever created is from the 80's. They had to make up for the awfulness that is the 70's.

And in case you're using a laptop with Fedora Core 4 and your built in speaker's aren't working (so basically 0 of the people who are reading this), here is how to fix it.

I also went to the Florida-Georgia game this past weekend. Having a girlfriend who lives in Jacksonville sure makes it convinent to go to a game in Jacksonville.


September 2005 -- 2005 -- November 2005