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04:48:08 Sunday January 02 2005
New Years Eve Eve: After work I returned home to find Castor already here. We hung out for a bit until Wanke made it to town. The original plan was to go out to Nick's and play pool with the whole crew. However at some point after Lehmann showed up the pre-party at my place became the party and we never made it out. We played more hands of euchre and spades than is really good for anyone.

New Years Eve: I slept late. At some point I was informed that John's grandfather had died. As a result John's New Years Party was called off, or perhaps I should say that it migrated over here. Around 19:00 I left for A-town. There I attended a party with Amber and several of her friends. It was actually a lot of fun. I originally went because I wanted to hang out with Amber. I haven't seen her much since she took to jumping to a new location every three months. So I was surprised that the folks at the party were so cool and I had a better time than I was expecting. After midnight I hung around until about 4:00 drinking cola and sobering up before making the return trip to Lafayette. When I made it back to my house I found that there was still a party in progress. Scott and Cretia had even appeared while I was away. Needless to say I didn't get to bed for some time.

New Years Day: Spent most of the day sleeping. Once I awoke I declared it "recovery day". I cleaned the house and watched Invader Zim. Terry made it back into town so he, Lehmann, Wanke and I had dinner at Denny's circa midnight.


01:30:48 Tuesday January 04 2005
look at the happy family

Second in the series of things I have been meaning to post, but never got around to.

Some time in November I was chosen as a Neilsen family for one week. This is only funny if you know that I found my TV sitting on the curb with the trash. I don't have cable, satellite, or even an antenna. The TV is plugged into my DVD player or sometimes my Game Cube.

The friendly people at Neilsen paid me 10 USD to fill out a little book. I told the little book that said I didn't watch TV. It was easy. At the end of the book there was a comments section. I wanted to be helpful so I told them that they should bring back My So-Called Life... Well they should.

Also Neilsen has some very strange rules. For instance if you have a TV with a broken tube and you use it to listen to broadcasts your input is wanted. However, if you have a radio which picks up the offset carrier for TV audio your input is not wanted.

As for today, I went out and bought desk stuff for my desk at work. I cleaned and ran errands all day. I cannot point to any single monumental accomplishment, but all in all it was still a very productive day.


17:46:08 Tuesday January 04 2005
I don't normally post interweb links unless they elucidate some aspect of my life or some point I am discussing. However this article is fascinating. They asked scientists, authors, and philosophers a simple question: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The answers are insightful and interesting.

I will add my own answer. I believe that the Ω is greater than one, which is to say that we exist in a closed or oscillatory universe.


01:11:47 Tuesday January 11 2005
zelda

Things have been very busy but simultaneously not too exciting. I am beginning to ease my way into the culture at work. I have had a few actual assignments now and social interactions are coming more easily.

I have been keeping busy in the evenings by doing all the little things that got put off as a grad student. Mostly this involves fixing or replacing things around the house but I also joined the friends of the library and resubscribed to all my favorite magazines.

Now that I have had the Christmas/New Years break I feel more of a clean demarcation between school and work. Because I started work while still in school I never had a moment where I said to myself "I am done with school now". E.B. mentioned that classes started today and it hit me that classes had begun and I wasn't in any of them. What an alien concept.

This weekend was strange. Friday we played Axis & Allies at John's apartment. On Saturday Wanke and I had dinner at Olive Garden just like we used to when the dorm kitchens were closed on Sundays, only this time Lehmann was there. After that there was a great deal of drinking at Eight West. At some point Scott and Cretia showed up. We moved bars when Eight West closed at midnight and eventually Lehmann our genetically designated driver dumped everyone back at Casa de Noland to sleep it off. I spent most of Sunday recuperating from the prodigious amount of gin I had poured into my bran the previous evening.

I suppose you have noticed already that I purchased The Legend of Zelda : Wind Waker. It is an excellent game which is made more excellent by the fact that I found it used for 17 USD. Also to those who don't like the cell shading I can only quote Gabe of Penny Arcade:

I think I've had enough of the "kids games", "adult games" thing. It completely misses the point. Are they afraid that playing a game with colors in it will make them a dork? Well, that boat already sailed. You play videogames? Welcome to Dorksville. You want to know how cool your videogames are? Ask your fucking girlfriend how cool. And if you don't have a girlfriend? That's part of the test.


18:10:14 Friday January 14 2005
apple

It is like some strange holiday for Mac people. Some new Apple products got released and every LiveJournal I read and every IM I receive has something to do with their new overpriced products. (Yes even the new cheap thing is overpriced. Go look at what kind of Dell you can build for 500 USD, and if you time it right you will get a flat panel monitor free with that.)

Now it isn't that Macs are bad machines. Quite the opposite. I like a nice RISC processor as much as the next guy. And they had SCSI long before the x86 architecture did. Despite this superior engineering x86 machines have come a long way in terms of using standard sane components. Though as a computer scientist I cannot help but remember that at some level all universal Turing machines are equivalent.

I even like the style over substance philosophy. Beauty is an important selling point for many people and Apple deserves to charge more for the extra design work that went into their machines. The thing that bothers me most about Apple is that they market themselves as a bastion of free thought fighting against the evil empire. Remember the "Think Different" advertisement campaign where they used famous revolutionaries and intellectuals to market their computers?

It is not a secret that I am a Linux person. I hate the evil empire too. But in this case the enemy of my enemy is my enemy. Obviously all right thinking Linux types are for freedom of information and open standards. With regards to these ideals Apple gets an F. A system with proprietary software AND hardware is not the bastion of free thought. Apple has other litigious and super proprietary tendencies. For instance they sue their own fan sites for "divulging trade secrets", they send cease and desist orders for Linux desktop themes that "look like" Aqua, they charged users of IEEE standard number 1394 for using the term "FireWire", and they flash iPod software to prevent the playing of songs from the RealNetworks music store. Not very friendly.

In short, Apple Computer has good engineering and excellent marketing, but I cannot bring myself to pay their markup when I have reason to believe that they will take that money and go sue an open source project out of existence.


16:44:10 Saturday January 15 2005
image not found

Eat it creationists. The full text of the court decision can be found here.


16:47:28 Saturday January 15 2005
fire

My Ursprungsstadt is on fire yet again. This time they managed to start a magnesium fire. Idiots.


07:46:17 Thursday January 20 2005
Continuing coverage of the Anderson magnesium fire displays just how brilliant the folks in my home town are.


03:07:31 Saturday January 22 2005
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There was a great deal of drinking tonight. It just so happens that there was a toast to "absent friends". I think that it is time that a certain southerner returned to the frozen northlands.

not found


01:51:21 Monday January 24 2005
Thought bucket: Making a FAT32 filesystem from linux

# cfdisk
# mkdosfs -F 32


02:37:15 Monday January 24 2005
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Weekend Update:

Friday: Work went well. I had dinner at Scotty's with Terry, Constantine, Griffin and some of our former students. Afterwards we went to the piano bar and poured large quantities of poison into our brains. My little stick figures on napkins were becoming very popular by the end of the evening. We had some difficulty hunting down a cab to take us home, but we finally got one.

Saturday: I did a whole lot of nothing. I alternated between straightening up the house for ten minutes at a stretch and playing Zelda for an hour at a stretch. The locksmith came out and attempted to get in to my car without success. Later in the evening Showalter called and then Kelsey called so I spent more time on the phone in one evening than I usually do in one month.

Sunday: I began my house cleaning efforts in earnest. I played some more Zelda. I cannot remember the last time that I was so engrossed in a game. Probably not since Eternal Darkness. After living like a shut in for the past week (due to my car's frozen doors) I decided that I needed to get out. Sara with no 'h' and I had dinner at Spageddies. Afterwards some effort was made to find a decent movie, but none were showing. We rented Jersey Girl instead. There were very strange Kevin Smith clips from The Tonight Show on the DVD.


23:04:18 Monday January 31 2005
image not found

Writing in the log has become more difficult since I took a 9 to 5 job. Each day seems largely identical. However the whole point of this log was to keep track of the passage of time so I shall redouble my efforts.

I have been sick recently nothing to worry about, just a head cold. I had it beat, but like an idiot I went out to the Cactus and drank and screamed in a smoke filled room. This illness has hurt my attendance at the gym also...

Oh, checking back through the log it appears that I have yet to mention the gym. I spent a lot of money to join the gym across the street from work. The whole Arxan crew shows up almost every morning at 07:00. This is good because if I flake out then my co-workers will chide me for it at the office.

On Friday I had dinner at Sara with no 'h' and Lorraine (spelling?). I tried to work tech support for Lorraine, but it proved insoluble (probably a hardware problem). We watched Donnie Darko afterward.

Saturday I did a lot of nothing. Sunday my father came up for an Indiana DeMolay meeting. We had dinner before he hit the road.

Today after work I boxed up a color cube which I assembled myself and sent it off to Rich Forkert, my mentor in Fort Wayne. I worked under him at Polaroid. He taught me good software practices and how to program as part of a team and all those unquantifiable skills you can only learn by working with someone who already has them. He was a masters student in Professor Delp's image processing lab once upon a time. As a result whenever we had to fiddle with the gamma levels to do an automatic color correction. He would hold out his fingers to from orthonormal vectors and say something like: "now suppose this is white, my thumb is cyan and my index finger is magenta..." Anyway when I saw the color cube toy on thinkgeek a while back I thought of him immediately. Now that I have some money I thought it would be a nice thank you.

I purchased the next trade paperback of Powers I am totally addicted.


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