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I meant to update a few days ago, but um, yeah, that didn't work out so well as you can probably see. It was an eventful week however, so I have an excuse.
On Wednesday I flew to Atlanta to interview with Chick-fil-A's corporate IT department. It was a really fun trip, got to stay in a nice hotel, and the offices are absolutly gorgeous. The people who work there are awesome, and it'd be a great place to intern over the summer if I get it. I think it went really well, and I find out in January then what I'll be doing this summer. Remember, Eat Mor Chikin!
UF Men's Basketball is #1 in the nation! This is only the second time it's happened in school history, with the first time being last year. As a HUGE basketball fan "very excited" doesn't even begin to cover it. We have a great team this year, and I think we'll go far and do really really well. Our first test as a #1 team is tomorrow night with Maryland, which I'll be at, so GO GATORS!
The semester is winding down as well, our last day of classes is tomorrow and then I finals all this week and next week. So what do good college students do? Make up any and every possible way to put off studying as long as possible. Which since my lovely parents bought me "Air Supply: The Christmas Album" for St. Nicholas day, I was in a Christmasy mood, and so I decided to make paper snowflakes. I mean it was fun in 1st grade right? So after a little searching I found some instructions and some patterns and I was set. The result:
Snow... in Florida!
The overexposed flash makes it seem almost like real snow if you look at it crosseyed
I have way too much time on my hands
Care packages from Mom are the best thing EVER
Three classes down, two to go. So far all my finals have gone well, but my two hardest one's are coming up. One on Monday (Stat) and one on Thursday (Solid State). I think I'll do ok on both of them, but I'll have to do a lot of review/studying for them. In the meantime I've moved on to making virtual paper snowflakes. And standing in line for 6 hours in the rain to go to a basketball game. Which even though we lost to Maryland by 1 in overtime, it was one of the loudest games I've gone to yet, it was absolutely amazing.
Coloured ice cubes. Coloured is much cooler
than colored.
Some new photographs have shown that there are
reindeer on the sun. If true, that is one incredibly huge
reindeer.
Yet another test has gone by the wayside. Now it's just Solid State Devices on Thursday night, and I'm finished. In the meantime it's a whirlwind of activity of seeing friends before the semester breaks, and trying to get in studying. Plus I bought the first season of The West Wing on DVD. Best show on TV, and now I can watch it whenever I want: Life is gooooood
So I'm sure everyone's heard by now that Saddam has finally been captured. And then the obligatory talk about what it means for Bush's re-election and Dean's hopes. Which in a theoretically perfect world wouldn't matter since Bush had nothing to do with finding him, and he wasn't in any kind of power position, nor ever could be. But it is a nice morale boost, and at least they finally did catch him. My favorite reaction to the news was on a message board discussing how the trial would work. "It'll be easy to convict him with all the WMD evidence that we found over in Iraq. Oh wait...."
So for whatever reason 6 people on my floor decided to try the "Drink a Gallon of Milk in One Hour and Not Puke" challenge.
And yep, every single one of them failed, some in trully spectacular fashion. If you're not familiar with the bet, it's physically impossible to drink a gallon of milk in one hour and keep it down for at least another hour after that. But people for whatever reason refuse to believe it, and well, the results were to be expected. It wasn't a pretty sight to say the least. See, this is what finals do to people!
Our basketball team might not be doing so hot (lost two in a row last week after being ranked #1) but our volleyball team is
continuing on it's way to a National
Championship. We've swept every team so far, and so UF is now in the national semifinals, which play on Thursday. Football may get the most attention, but our other sports teams are spectacular. I think they can definitely do it, they're amazing to watch and maybe we'll get to face USC in the national finals, and redeem our only loss this season. Go Gators!
The UF volleyball team played for the national championship today, but unfortunatly lost to University of Southern California 3-1 in some really close games. I went to quite a few volleyball games this year, and I was there for the Elite Eight match last week. A great season overall however, as they did set a record for the most consecutive games won.
I'm back in Tampa for winter break, which means hanging out with lots of friends who I don't get to see nearly often enough, and messing around on the computer (Linux kernel 2.6.0
was released last week). It also means seeing tons of movies that I never get to see up at college since it's such a hassle (including the wonderful Love Actually which I saw tonight) and home cooked burritos from Mom. How I do love those burritos.
Would you believe it if the oft-un-updated mp3 list was updated? Oh believe it! 11.3 GB of music goodness.
My laptop has finally been ordered! It was originally supposed to be a high school graduation gift that kept being pushed back further back and back. At first it was because I didn't really need a new laptop right when I got to college, and then it became a waiting game for the stuff I wanted to finally come out. Everything came together though, and so I ordered a very nice
Dell Inspiron 8600 all decked out for programming, wireless web, and of course gaming. The full specs are up on the
specs page but the short of it is that it has a Pentium M (Centrino) 1.7 GHz (comparable to a 3 GHz Pentium 4), 1 GB of RAM, a 15" UXGA screen, a 60 GB harddrive, DVD burner, and the key component I've been waiting about 6 months for: a 128 MB ATI Radeon 9600 videocard, which blows everything else away. I'm also buying the RAM separately as 1 GB of RAM costs $550 from the Dell website, or you can buy it for $250 straight from the manufacturer. You just have to install it yourself which is easy to do. The only bad thing about buying a laptop (any laptop) is due to my Florida residency, you can't buy any kind of accident protection due to some stupid Florida law. So I'm going to have to make sure nothing happens to it. It should come in around January 8th, so I'll be spending that day wiping the harddrive to install Linux and reinstall XP so I don't have to have all those crappy programs that most manufacturer's put on their computers (No I don't want 6 months of AOL, geez)
How come it doesn't feel like it's 4 days till Christmas? Hmm, oh yeah, I still need to buy some presents for some people.
Oops. I need to bake Christmas cookies or something. Yes, nothing says Christmas like baking snowman and Christmas tree sugar cookies. Yumscious
You know I'm out of school when the archives get updated. January 2003 and February 2003 are modernized.
I just lost the last 8 months worth of email. Eight months. Everything. This is one of those times where I really really really hate computers.
The story behind this is that I reinstalled Linux today. Something had broken a while back, but I didn't have time at school to really mess with it, so I just waited for the Christmas break. So I decide to start fresh, and I make a backup of my user directory. Everything seems to have been burned fine, and I go ahead and format it all. The install runs beautifully, and for the first time in a long time everything seemed to work right out of the box (except for some known issues wiht my soundcard, but I had already figured those out). I copy over some of the other files, like my website files, and everything goes smoothly. Then it comes time to copy over my email files. I have about 280 megs of email accumulated over the past 3 years or so, and I noticed when I was copying them I kept getting "Stale NFS file handle" and "Input/output error" on a lot of the files. So it finally finishes, and I notice that most of the mbox files, the files that all the email data are stored on, are empty or else just contain the first few lines of the file. I then try reading the data off the cdrom, and it only reads so much before it crashes. Windows can't even open the files. So my last backup is dated August 14, 2003, and I figure, well it's better than nothing. But no, I check that, and it is also corrupted. So my last good backup is dated May 5, 2003. Almost 8 months old.
Everything else copies over fine, so there's just something in that email folder that was corrupted that transfered over the cdrom that caused all this headache. The only good news is that I don't *think* there was anything incredibly important (as in my life is over if I didn't have it important) in all that email, but there was an awful lot of stuff that would be very convinent/nice to have. Such as the laptop confirmation email I recieved yesterday. Or the email telling me when I can register for basketball since I've forgotten. Or the email my friend had just sent me with his cell phone number on it.
I also finally saw Return of the King tonight. Yeah yeah yeah, I know I'm a bad nerd for taking so long, but I just hadn't had the chance. Muy good movie, I recommend it.
Merry Christmas!!
Hopefully Santa was good to you this morning, and you remembered to leave grass for the reindeer. He was certaintly good to me this year, as I got a couple of really cool things. As can be seen by our Christmas tree, there was much fun to be had. My list of presents include:
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition
A tie (?!)
2 Desktop 365 Calanders
Gift Certificate to Best Buy
A stuffed penguin (I like penguins a lot)
and a Gator poncho
And the best one of all, a new cell phone. I'd been wanting one for a while just for the convinence factor, since I hardly ever use a phone for just talking. I much prefer IM for that, as I just don't feel that comfortable talking on phones. But there have been many times where it'd been nice to be able to just call someone or get calls from wherever I was instead of having to go all the way back to my dorm. So my entire family got a shared plan, and we're all connected with free long distance, no roaming, and free nights/weekends. The phone itself is a Motorola V66 which is a pretty cool small flip phone. I'm pretty excited about it, I just hope I don't become one of "those people" who annoy 99% of the other population with their phones. I plan on having it off most of the time, as I personally like being able to get away on my own. Though the free long distance will come in really handy sometimes.
Behold the Airzooka. I've heard nothing but great things about this "toy" so I'm very tempted to go try to hunt one down. The premise sounds so simple, but it's supposed to be insanely fun in action. The possibilities of dorm warfare are endless...
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