Firehed’s Blog

Or so says UPS. I still prefer FedEx, but I’m really just too cheap to pony up the extra dough. At least UPS through Newegg seems reliable (since they started having complains pouring in after the initial switch, they got their act together), and have managed to overnight parts with 3day service before. Busy week coming though… a guest speaker is going to hijack my wheelthrowing class (messy but extremely fun), yet *another* FME meething on Tuesday, holding a Focus Group on Wednesday if all goes well, then early to bed on Thursday for an 8am exam on Friday. Dammit. If only I had a car on campus… but that’s another matter.

I can’t *really* complain though. Only something like four hours of class a day, and only four days a week. Kicks the hiney of CVU any day of the week. Well, except in price. Timewise, I think it still compares favorably to my every-other-day-off S1 senior schedule, at least on average. Still, I’d take four days a week starting at 9:45 or later to 2-3 7-hour days starting at 8:15, not counting driving time (maybe if I drove like my roommate, it’d be less than the time between walking to the buildings, but he’s insane in that department).

And maybe a fun little coding project coming up soon, on top of Aquacart. Well, not so much little. I just hope Rails is easy to learn with zero free time (I do all my blogging and whatnot either in class or at 2am, so that doesn’t count). Hell, I’ve done some coding in economics before, might as well go all the way and self-teach myself yet another language. Noise-muffling earphones (not really noise-cancelling, as they’re really more like earplugs with some nice drivers built in) are on the way, so I can properly ignore the mundane world of GDP.

Yeah, rocked the tripps on the first quiz on the year, after rocking the 0 attention span during class. Better than I’d expected with all the odd squiggly diagrams on the thing. And yes, I both took the pic and blogged it again in class.

What a laughably great game.  Admittedly, I hate the flying levels (because the vehicle controls are completely counterintuitive, at least on the PC), but it’s surprisingly awesome to play.  And it runs remarkably well on the integrated graphics of these Thinkpad T60s.  Can’t say the same for CS:S, which wouldn’t even install (though I’m inclined to blame the un-disableable Symantec), not like I have the free hard drive space to do so anyways.  Yep, 60GB drive, I filled it within a week.  Mind you, 60GB isn’t that big and half of it is my music library (how I got so much is somewhat beyond me), but I do love being able to seed to 3:1, even if my download speeds aren’t especially wonderful (I think I pissed off the IT department from that seeding).

Such a wonderful place to catch up on lost Zzzzs. Especially after not falling asleep till almost 5am (for no good reason, either, just lying awake bored for hours), and having to get up at 8:30. Managed to put in three snoozes and two 10-minute naps before class, and I tweaked a couple scripts in my shopping cart.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, but he just said it himself - “this chapter isn’t the most exciting”.

I really do wonder how he ended up with two projectors and a touchscreen automated room that controls the lighting and projector screens, but still uses a pair of blackboards and chalk. Come on, we’ve used whiteboards for as long as I can remember. Heck, all of the students have dual-core laptops with a fingerprint reader as standard. The tech in these classrooms is nothing short of damned amazing (the touchscreen automation and at least one projector is standard in almost every room, and many have an entire media cabinet that interfaces with the projector), but you think we’d get a writing solution that’s not so dusty.

I just wish the dorms had such luck. They couldn’t even get the wiring all the way in the walls… poorly painted conduit all over the place. Oh well. I could use a UPS or power conditioner though, as the evidently crap wiring really makes my speakers do some odd things at times. At least the lights are on a dimmer.

Believe it or not, there are some of us out there that don’t want to go out every night and get totally fucked up.  I could care less if you want to, but stop trying to convince me that I want to as well, beacuse I don’t.  I’ll respect your beliefs no matter how shitty I think they are, as long as you respect mine.  Unless it’s blind patriotism, which I can never respect (suck it up, you think I’m a terrorist anyways for saying it).

From the days of 5 MB (yeah, five megs) for what I believe was a 7-figure pricetag, to 750GB in a tiny fraction of the space at mere pennies to the gigabyte, the hard drive has come a long way.  I personally maintain over a terabyte - 200,000x the capacity of that first drive, and the cost to me for the drives in my fileserver was under $500.  I’d expect that within two years, I’ll have broken the 5TB mark for my personal storage, and thus a million times where we started.  I’m not quite sure how Moore’s Law (which, in any case, is completely unrelated to hard drive capacity) applies here, but I’d wager the data density is fairly on-par with the doubling every eighteen months trend.  Consider that in that first 5MB drive, with 50 massive platters, each bit was approximately 1/3mm^2 - a certainly small but visible area, were we able to view magnetic fields with the naked eye.
On an unrelated note, apparently my economics professor has a rather odd sense of humor.  His cow-based metaphor for different economic systems had a rather interesting ‘ism’: “Nazism: You have two cows.  State takes both of them and shoots you.”  My how we’ve progressed.  Yes, I’m posting from in class.  No, I’m not paying attention.  Sorry, but it’s just too damn dry.

Oh, how pretty! But, alas, not without problems. From my post at Bit-tech:

RTT, are you using iTunes7 in OS X perchance?

Because my new verdict is that it’s completely fubar in Windows (and Apple discussion forums indicate I’m nowhere near alone). Well, it was great until I actuall tried using my iPod with it. First, it’s not found. Period. So let’s try plugging it into the Mac… long story short, I had to reformat it on the Mac, then reformat it back to Windows on the PC (I’d have loved to leave it Mac, but my PC has all the music on it).

So now I’m hoping to restore things back to iTunes 6. Okay, I happened to have a copy on a thumb drive (thankfully, as I’d just deleted the one on the hard drive about an hour before the pain started). Library got raped, but that’s just a matter of re-importing things. [twiddles thumbs] Okay, that’s done. Turns out that, thanks to the laws of proprietarity, the free cover art you can get now doesn’t actually get tagged into the song as it should, but rather resides in some sub-sub-sub-sub-subdirectory in your iTunes folder in some bizarre format (sure not jpg), presumably stuck onto the songs in the new library file. So all the art I’d gotten (anew, and more notably, replaced with a decent version) is now gone from my music until I can get back onto iTunes7.

Well, it works great on OS X anyways. Looks like I’m waiting for 7.0.1 on Windows. Gah.

Okay, rant done.

Well, supposedly the new search functionality on the iPod is only going to be available on the new ones, or so said the people that did managed to updated to the 1.2 5G firmware. I’m just glad I could care less about that.

Now I’m done.

Ok.. Babson is a great school so far as education goes, but my word are they whores to proprietary formats. I can deal with the Microsoft stuff, seeing that the rest of the world uses it too. Forcing IE for their wireless print driver is a bit much, but thankfully I just got my printer in so I don’t have to worry about that crap. But Real? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. I’m not letting that steaming pile of shite on my system, thank you very much. RealPlayer Alternative in a sandboxxed VM is as close as I’m willing to go, and even that’s farther than I’d like to go. Of the five million different video formats out there, PLEASE try to choose something shittier next time guys - you’ll spend more time trying to find one than I did protecting my system from dealing with it.

And damn, it looks worse than the flash on youtube to boot.

Since I switched to a Mac a few months back (and have loved just about every minute of it), I’ve had to update my organization methods a bit. Well, really just change. As far as files go, Spotlight makes it almost too easy to find stuff, though I haven’t yet found a way for it to index the contents of my php files (thanks Unix and grep!).

So, iCal takes all of three minutes to figure out. Easy enough, but it doesn’t have a great way to deal with assignments. After a small bit of Googling, I stumbled across the aptly named iProcrastinate (at craigotis.com). While it has a couple of mildly irritating UI quirks (regarding text auto-selection, mainly), I really can’t complain as it’s overall very easy to use, and easily fits the student budget at a cost of $0. iCal integration would be great and is planned (for Leopard, apparently, as there will be an iCal API), but overall is an absolute Godsend that’ll make my next four years go along much smoother. This guy is getting a donation.

Now if only gMail wouldn’t be all stupid-like and decide that I don’t want to read email I send to myself on my pop client. No way that I’d want to email my assignments to my Mac or anything, nope.

Only two real gripes about the school so far. One - Microsoft reliance. Like hell am I going to pay for Access in the Real World when I can handle all of my databasing needs much better in MySQL. Two - booze. Just a little too much of the stuff seems to be floating around in the substance-free dorm. But at least I’m not around a population consisting of at least 95% idiots, as I was in high school.

But a couple of posts were eaten. Oh well. PowWeb (my host) was doing a transition for all of their clients to their new servers, but the main site was tossing up comparison errors because of the random new item on the front page, so it took a few months longer than it should have. It’s done with anyways.

On an unrelated note, free food, comedians and concerts rock. As if I needed to explain that to anyone.