April 2003

March 2003 -- 2003 -- May 2003

April 2, 2003


Happy Day after April Fools Day Day

April Fools around the web.....
ThinkGeek "New Products"
The Printer and Shredder in one!
The Anti-Linux shirt and more...
Microsoft Buys Linux
Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes
Squirrels Sieze School
New "evil" bit to be introduced for Internet security. Set to '0' if has no evil intent. '1' if is evil

The CNN Frontpage gone horribly horribly wrong.

And I suppose that's all for the moment. At least I updated for once :)

April 3, 2003


Today Bill Clinton came to talk at UF, which was pretty interesting. The line to get in to see him streached for a good half a mile, and I'd guesstimate 8,000 people were out there waiting for the doors to open. It cost $80,000 to get him to speak here (which admittedly was cheaper than getting former President Bush last year, and Clinton seemed to be A LOT more popular to see), and while I don't know if it was worth that much, it was a great speech. He talked about being a codependent society and how we all need to get a long because that's the only real option we have. He also talked some about North Korea, which to me is a lot larger threat than Iraq ever was. Speaking of which, where are these WMD manufacturing sites? We're into Baghdad and still no word.....

Quantum computers may still be a few years off, but already scientists are starting to think about how one would program a quantum computer. Very cool stuff, and it's going to be very very interesting in a few decades when quantum computers become economical and viable to make.

I forgot to mention it, but Mozilla 1.3 was released the other day. As usual, built in pop up blocker, tabbing, and it's open source!

April 13, 2003


Heh, 10 days. Yeah.... I've been slacking. I don't even have a good excuse this time. For the first time this year I actually have free time, but what do I do with it? Play videogames and mindlessly surf the internet. The semester is winding down, so now all that's left is pretty much finals.

It's been a really fun weekend though! Friday night I went to my first ballet, which was INCREDIBLE. I loved it, great music and awesome dancing. Then went to go see Star Sixty-Nine and Big Sky at Gator Rocks, which were both quite good. Then lots and lots of donuts and caught the last half of a movie, so it was a fun night.

Then Saturday was the DDR club's picnic at Lake Walburg, which is the lake that UF owns. We had a HUGE watergun/water balloon fight, and lots of food. And lets just say that when DDR music gets played, you don't need a machine to start dancing.... Then went and had some Japanese food (which wasn't bad, considering I"m not a fan) and saw a DVD of a bunch of Smashing Pumpkin's music video's, saw Donnie Darko once again (which makes more sense everytime I see it) and then played a bunch of videogames for the rest of the night. I'm gonna miss college.

Who knew chemistry could be so funny? Someone sure had a sense of humor.

Remember Real Ultimate Power? Well ninja's aren't the only one's who have it, so do Electrical Engineers :) As it says, "EEs are the ultimate paradox. On the one hand they know about complex variables, but on the other hand, they can't talk to girls." And Matlab code.... mmmmmmmmmm

Well Bagdad hasn't been "controlled" for even a week, and already Bush is trying to invade Syria over chemical weapon charges. I think we should find the chemical weapons on Iraq first before we start taking over other countries as well. This is just getting ridiculous.

Well that's it for now, hopefully it own't be another week and a half before I update again....

April 16, 2003


At the bequest of several people, here's an update.

The Reitz (student union building) got in DDR Extreme yesterday afternoon, and it r0x0rs my socks. So many awesome new songs, and it has the mark of a truly great DDR mix: Butterfly :)

Only one more week left of the semseter before finals. It's gone by so fast.... way too fast....

April 20, 2003


Today is the 4th anniversary of the Columbine tradegy. In a somewhat interesting note, I also saw Bowling for Columbine, the Micheal Moore film about Columbine and gun violence in America, for the first time today. I didn't even relieze that I was seeing it on the same day that it happened until about an hour before I left to see it. Anyways, the movie is really quite good, and definitly worth seeing. It's a collection of interviews and cutscenes asking why there is so much gun violence in America as compared to other countries (something like 34 gun deathes in Japan, compared to over 11,000 in the US) and what can be done and tries to explain our gun culture. He definitly has a bias which has to be taken into account, plus his guerilla interview tactics are a bit unfair, but he makes lots of good points and raises some very tough questions.

It also asks what causes people to resort to violence, what drives kids over the edge. Which leads to something I've done for the previous two years, which is to once again bring attention to the living nightmare that middle and high school are to a lot of kids. As the first in a series of 10 articles originally posted on Slashdot, Voices from the Hellmouth describes the life after Columbine for many kids still in high school at the time. The other 9 articles can be found in the link above from last year's update on this day, and they're all definitely suggested reading. But as Matt Stone pointed out in the movie, there is life after secondary school, and the sooner kids relieze this the better. It's just unfortunate that it takes a major tradegy like Columbine to open the eyes of a lot of adults to how school *really* is for many kids.

But in happier news...

At long last my 8-bit computer for my digital design class is finished! It was about a 2 and a half week long project, that went fairly smoothly for the most part except for the very end. But eventually I got all the bugs and kinks worked out, and so now I have a simple computer with about 15 instructions, an 8-bit datapath, and 1k of memory. It was a lot of fun to do though, and I really enjoy the class, plus the board is just too cool looking. I'll have to upload a picture whenever I get them developed next (which could be a while since I now have two camera's to get through....)

Risk is a very fun game. Playing it until 2 am on a Friday night is awfully nerdy, but that's the fun of living in college :)

My closet looks really empty now. My parents came up today to take home the fridge and some extra stuff, and now it seems like there's a huge gaping hole in my closet. Maybe I should fill it with a potted plant. Yes yes, a potted plant, like a fern.

April 25, 2003


The 4th semester of classes ended on Wednesday, and once again it was an incredibly fast semester. Unfortunatly for the first time I have finals in all my classes, but none of them are going to be too bad (I hope).

What's better than seeing the Matrix sequels in a theatre?Perhaps seeing the Matrix sequels on an IMAX screen.::drools::

The World Wide Web turned 10 years old a few days ago. Hard to believe such an amazing life-changing technology has only been around for a decade, but before Mosaic was released, the internet mainly consisted of BBS's, USEnet, and email. Now everyone and their mother has a website, and any company without one is considered suspicious. Wonder what the next decade will bring... (you need three periods there, cause two just looks like a typo and 4 is just getting excessive)

I have to say, the New York Times is a really really good newspaper. My dorm gives the weekday editions away for free in the lobby, so I've began picking them up to read, otherwise it'd be a $1. It takes a while though since all the articles are so long, so I don't normally get to read everything, but I'm definitly impressed with it.

And finally, songs about Pokemon. I actually know the "Clay" guy online, and he ended up winning the popular vote, netting $650 worth of cash and gifts. Not bad for a half hour's work and some stamps.

April 26, 2003


So I ask myself, how come a fetus is a person in the murder of a pregnant woman but yet not a person in an aborition. Does this make sense to ANYONE?

DNA turned 50 a few days ago, which is amazing if you think about it. We've only known the structure of life as we know it for 50 years, and already we've learned so much. It's just the tip of the iceberg, and no telling what other discoveries will come from it in the future.

I bought the Futurama Season 1 DVD on Wednesday, and I love it. It's definitly one of the funniest shows on TV, and being able to hear commentary and seeing it without commercials is great. I also saw Chicago on Thursday, which was really reall ygood. I just couldn't get over Richard Gere singing though, it just seemed way too "wierd".

In case you haven't seen it, here's the infamous but very cool Honda ad.

April 30, 2003


It's finals week! I've had two so far, both of them harder than I expected, but I think I did good enough on them... two more tomorrow and then I'm through. In the meantime it's much more fun to calculate just exactly the minimum score I need to get an A on the final, rather than actually studying for the final. And once you get that minimum score, then figuring just exactly how many questions you can miss, or partly miss to get that score. So I need a 70 on my comp org (thank you extra credit) and a 79 on my digital design exam to keep my A. Procrastination is a wonderful wonderful thing.

Random flash fun

This is cool, find out how your favorite sci-fi starships compare against each other and against real life objects. That mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is awfully big.

Some people take DDR a tad too seriously. I have never dressed up as a DDR character, though I dunno, with the right persuasion...

March 2003 -- 2003 -- May 2003