Posts from — November 2003

New bulletins from the fronts:

I bought SImCity 4 yesterday, and I’ve been playing it quite a bit over the last couple of days. To my surprise, it’s an excellent game (I figured they’d start churning out crappy products after EA had the franchise for a while.. I guess it’s just a distrust of large companies). Anyway, it’s generally quite polished, allows you to view your cities in ways never before possible, and makes formerly complicated stuff much more simple. I’ve always loved the SimCity games, and this one is better than all the others. I remember why we dubbed this game one of the “afternoon eaters” (along with Star Wars:Rebellion and Roller Coaster Tycoon).

I got to play frisbee with 10 friends today. It was cold and a bit snowy, and the ground was muddy and wet, but the game was a lot of fun. Sometimes I wish I had cleats… the few people who have them can always turn better than I can in the mud, regardless of skill. Part of me feels that getting cleats would violate my casual view of the game a bit, so I shy away from them. I’m hoping we’ll be able to play indoors over the winter, it’ll just depend on availability and economics. It would be really fun though.

I saw most of Terminator 3 today, and I think it’s not too bad as an action movie. Loads of destruction can’t be too bad…

I may be getting a cell phone tomorrow, as much as cell phone ownership goes against every fiber of my being (you may find me watching Friends and Dragon Ball Z soon). Hopefully I won’t become “that guy”… I’m not too worried about it though.

Tomorrow afternoon it’s back to school and back to work, freed from these allergies that I get every time I come home. It’s been good to be home, but it’s time to get back to school and take care of business… 1 presentation, 2 projects, 1 paper, 2 reports, 2 finals, etc

I’ve started a new project: kRSS. kRSS is an RSS aggregator for KDE (unix desktop environment). I’m writing it in Qt with KDE’s class library. It’s inspired by the program ‘Straw’ for GNOME, which is quite good.

I’ve learned a lot about Qt programming in the last few days, and I think I like it. Lots of work remains in the project, especially with offline storage as well as some unique features that I’d like to put in. Screenshots can be found here and here. It would be really cool if this were included with KDE some day, as I don’t know of any RSS aggregators for KDE.

It was good to see everyone at thanksgiving today. As always, I ran the Manchester Road Race in the morning: 4.7 miles. I ran with my dad, brother, cousin, and Chris Horan. I ended up losing all of them in the first mile and got boxed in until mile 3, which was really frustrating. The first few miles took over 28 minutes and I was relatively mad at the people around me since they were so slow (and started in the faster section). After that, I started moving fast to try to catch up with Chris and my brother, but I wasn’t able to. I paid for my ending sprint and lack of training by throwing up after the race, but I sure deserved it! I finished in 42:28, which is fine with me. It was a great day for a run.

Well, I think I got to bed around 6am last year before the eco flame… I should make 4:30 this year, so things are getting better. Unfortunately it’s been caused by work both times. Logically I shouldn’t go tomorrow since I still have a pending assignment, but I’ll try to hold things together. I just can’t say no to any events or obligations.. one day it’ll kill me.

I’ve added a few more “friends” to my journal, as I’m starting to enjoy the prospect of RSS. RSS allows syndication and aggregation of online content using XML. I view this as a paradigm shift from ‘surfing’, as RSS allows you to get content from subscribed sites all in a consistent format, as opposed to having to check dozens of sites with different layouts just to find recent content. This is great for blogs, news, update/changelogs, and comics, all of which are available via RSS. If I’m interested in a site that updates once a month, I’m not going to check it regularly, but if I get it via RSS, I can get the content immediately without going out of my way. Neat stuff that I’m beginning to appreciate.

This is Lehigh/Lafayette week, and for some reason I’ve had a ton of work, and will continue to until just before thanksgiving. Not to mention a band final to study for! I finished a robotics project for today (that being yesterday), now I have a paper and a test on thursday, so I need to stay fairly focused.

Wow, it’s definitely past my bed time.

Everyone seems a little uptight recently, I think we all need to relax and sip cherry coke. Cut the drama.

After countless hours of work, I’m almost done with my two campaigns for band. I’m running for Publicity Manager as well as Manager for the band. Both my letters came out pretty good, though my publicity letter wasn’t as funny as last year. It did have more actual content than last year, though, since I have some idea of what’s going on now. My manager letter came out pretty good, I hit on almost everything I wanted to in about 2.5 pages. Writing personal messages in all of them took a ton of time, I was up until 4:20 am and finished about 10 minutes before band.

I’m glad it’s done, but now I need to catch up on all the other stuff I put on hold…

I’m very proud that I was able to be a part of this. Playing fights songs at a funeral sounds really tacky (and was really awkward at first), but the following letter to our manager gives the whole story:

Pete, I wish I had time when I saw the group to give you a more personal
thanks.  The past two days have been somewhat of a blur.  My 85 year old
father was a true-blue, Lehigh man.  The last years of his life he was
in tremendous pain and discomfort but always, always, watched and
cheered for the Engineers (not Mountain Hawks!).  If you remember, I
live in Washington, DC and attended the Lehigh-Georgetown game.  In the
fourth quarter, I approached the traveling band and asked for the
"Lehigh will shine tonight" fight song.  I held my cell phone as he
listened on the other line and I could hear him singing along.  His
caregiver said he smiled all day!

He passed away last Sunday and I could think of no better way to pay
tribute and bid farewell, than to have his beloved '97 play a tune for
him.  Thinking this was a complete 'Hail Mary' pass, I began phoning the
typical abyss of a university recording system until I reached you.
Even then, I thought it unlikely to happen.  You can imagine when after
giving my Dad's eulogy, walking out of the church and seeing you and the
group, in full regalia.  Amazing!

The congregation was full of Lehigh grads and know of my Dad's devotion
to Lehigh.  Needless to say Pete, hearing the tunes, then songs of
Lehigh, which I grew up with and always enjoy...there was not a dry eye
in the group.

Pete, you are obviously a great young man with many, many good times
ahead, professionally and personally.  You will learn that moments like
the one you orchestrated are unforgettable and priceless.  I will not
soon forget, nor will my family and friends forget the favor.  You, like
it or not, have a new friend for life.  If there is anything I can do
for you, your family and any of the band members who appeared at Our
Lady of Perpetual Help, please call on me.

My Dad is in heaven with a big smile on his face and still humming the
tunes.  So is every other Lehigh grad who has passed on. 

With great appreciation...

Petch Gibbons

Well, after a week of work, I finished my big graphics program. It works really well, though I don’t doubt that I submitted it with bugs, Regardless, I was quite surprised that I finished the thing with hours to spare.. it was probably one of the most difficult assignments I’ve done at Lehigh.

I’m going to Colgate tomorrow for the football game, we leave at 7:15, but I need to get to Zoellner by 6:45 to pick up the van. It’s about a 4 hour drive, and I’ll be splitting the driving with Dan Lin. I won’t be getting more than 4 hours of sleep tonight, which is not very good. I can’t get to sleep before 3 anymore. I think I’ve managed to create a pretty effective nap schedule that mixes well with all my classes, meeting, and work, and lets me get my homework done. Despite this, the system breaks down at times like this.

Colgate is going to be very cold (high in the 30′s, I hear), and will be the biggest and hardest meaningful game of the year. They have the longest winning streak in division 1 football. It will make the season if we win, though, and would potentially get us into the playoffs.

I hope I’m not getting sick. Though I stay up late all these nights, I do end up getting a fair amount of “rest time” which equates to some proportion of sleep, so I’m usually feeling pretty healthy. It’s been a long week though.

Next week looks to be just as busy. I need to write, assemble, and distribute two different candidacy letters (for publicity and manager) by Thursday… it’s always a lot of effort. I have a very vague and potentially tricky robotics assignment also due Thursday. Additionally, I need to contact all the Lehigh/Lafayette marchers (people joining us for just that game) early next week and handle all the RSVP’s during the week, which will take up a lot of time. I think we’ll be getting 97 people to march, which will be quite good.

OK, maybe I’ll try to get some sleep now.

I watched “When Harry Met Sally” tonight, and it was much better than I had expected. Someone had recommended it to me, I don’t remember who. Acting and dialogue were top notch.

Unfortunately, it distracted me from my graphics project, which I am making some progress with, but I fear it’s not enough. I hope to have the clipping portion of the program done by tomorrow night (clipping prevents the program from drawing objects that are outside of the current view.. harder than it sounds).

Gonna be a long day…

RSS and XML have finally paid off for me: cross-site blog syndication. Basically, this means that I can read people’s xanga journals from my livejournal friends page. The sites communicate using RSS, a standard xml-based language for content syndication. Soo… you can check out my friends list and you can see who I added (more to come?).

Caveats include:
* initial feeds all mark date as today, so they pushed back all the actual lj friends for now (this will go away soon)
* easyjournal.com (amy’s blog) doesn’t have an rss feed. Boo!!

OK, time to do some dishes, write an email, fix the server, do some programming, then maybe go to bed.