|
||||
|
$ clear $ su - Password: # cat /var/log/nolandda |
|
|||
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
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
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
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
Eat it creationists. The full text of the court decision can be found here.
16:47:28 Saturday January 15 2005
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
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.
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
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
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.
Page last modified :
Number of viewings :