Posts from — December 2003

Time to write about a topic other than me ranting about Christmas.

Christmas time was fun… it was good to visit with the family. This year tended to consist of smaller gatherings than usual, which was nice in a way, but I missed seeing a lot of people (especially those who I only seen on Christmas). At least the names are easier to remember

I got a whole lot of nice clothes, which I of course haven’t gone through yet. I got a Canon PowerShot A80, a 4.0 Megapixel digital camera. It’s really nice and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I also got a book on photography so I’ve been learning a lot of new terms and techniques lately. The digital cam is nice because I can experiment with setting with instant feedback and low cost. I blew through 4 AA batteries in two days, so I went out and got some rechargeables after that. I also got an excellent book on C++ programming, and I’ve learned a lot of little but useful things from that. I recommend it to anyone interested in really understanding what they’re doing in C++. It manages to be entertaining and funny without insulting my intelligence, too, which is a plus.

I’ve been too busy to work on exscribe much, but it’s been moving along slowly. We’ve moved the source onto CVS and I added some capabilities to the templates.

My laptop isn’t working at the moment. There is some sort of power problem that someone will come out to fix on Friday. I hope it goes well…

I’m feeling rather sick now. I always get allergies when I come home, and they were really bad all day at work. I was constantly blowing my nose, and the allergy symptoms can be really exhausting during a work day. It got so bad in the afternoon that I couldn’t get any work done, so I went to CVS and got some Benadryl. Of course, that turned me into a zombie, but the symptoms did subside. I have a slight fever and headache right now, but hopefully I should be ok for tomorrow since I have some fairly important work to get done before the very long weekend.

It’s odd that I get sick at home so much. I eat worse and sleep less at school, and I don’t remember missing any activities due to sickness or being sick for a significant amount of time over the semester. I sure didn’t deserve it, but I won’t ask any questions.

Now I need to finish editing my resume and send it out to a couple of employers. We’ll see where that leads…

Another followup…

Robert Scoble writes: “But, there are those who believe Christmas is a religious holiday. Hint, it no longer is. Get over it. A Christmas tree is allowable on government property. A nativity scene is not. There is a difference.”

Although I can’t say that I’m in 100% agreement, this article is well written and makes some good points regarding the “Holidays” issue. Disagreement is welcome, responses encouraged.

Merry Christmas Eve (/not/ ‘holiday’ eve)!

It’s been a while, so here goes…

Tim and I released version 0.1 of exscribe. We have a website for it now which is very… lacking. But we’ve already had nearly 100 hits to the website, which is rather exciting. Lots of work is being done for the next version, improving the templates and Tim has done a lot of work to make posts editable (and you can ‘view changes’ like in word!). I’m hoping 0.2 will be ready in a week or two.

Grades came out this week. Overall, I can’t complain…

Computer Graphics: B+ I was really hoping for an A- in this one, and I was thinking I would have got it if he curved a bit: the class avg was 77. Oh well. Not sure how I did so poorly on the test, I thought I breezed through it.

Computers, The Internet and Society: A- Could have been an A if I hadn’t skipped that essay

Automata and Formal Grammars: B- Could have been so much worse considering my pre-final tests were 70% and 55%. I got a 93% on the final and rescued my grade.

Robotics – A- Not too surprising, I did ok in the class but wasn’t breaking the curves or anything. My monte carlo localization homework didn’t quite work, but I got points because I demonstrated that I knew how it should work (and the motivations behind the algorithm).

Speaking of robotics, I talked with John (my robotics prof) and he said I could get workstudy in his lab to do programming, and if I programmed well enough I could work there over the summer. This would be great since it would allow me to live at school (more on this in a bit) and see what it might be like to do research (grad school?) . I’m still going to apply to other places in case this doesn’t work out, but it’s a good start.

I’ll be living at 333 Vine St. next year. That’s a little past Deja Brew and Goosey Gander, for those who would know. It’s a really nice house with plenty of space, it’s in good condition and I know one of the guys who lives there now.

I saw “A Christmas Carol” at the Hartford Stage Company in downtown Hartford on Sunday night with my family. It was a lot of fun.. the guy who played scrooge was excellent, and added a lot to the part. I still haven’t seen the one with Patrick Stewart, though, so who knows…

TANGENT!
I’m not sure if it’s getting worse or I’m just noticing it more, but it seems that “Christmas” is more of an expletive this year than in past years. I get upset about it sometimes because it’s such a thinly veiled formality. Making a blanket statement of “Happy Holidays” to a large group of people is ok, but things that used to be “Christmas” are now “Holiday”. Examples (all real): “Santa’s here for the Holidays!”, “Holiday Shipping – guaranteed by December 24th!”, “Get in the Holiday Spirit”.

Give me a break. Nothing against people of other religions, but Santa is here for Christmas. Hanukkah starts before Dec 24, and Kwanzaa starts on the 26th, so the delivery deadline of Dec 24 is obviously geared toward Christmas. If you look at the history and purpose behind the big three holidays (I’ll discuss new year’s later), they all have completely different purposes and “spirits”. Nobody ever got fired for choosing the word “Holiday”, though, so that’s how it works…

New Year’s is probably the most overrated holiday of the year. I don’t see what we’re celebrating… the fact that we cheated death for another 365 days? Why do we cheer for a falling ball on television? Even if you were in the same place as the ball, it wouldn’t make any sense, but YOU’RE NOT EVEN THERE!

OK, at this point I’m just getting bitter and irrational so I’m going to stop writing. I know New Year’s is supposed to be about celebrating what we have and self-reflection, but it’s a silly way to do it imo.

http://www3.lehigh.edu/News/news_story.asp?iNewsID=499&strBack=%2Fabout%2Fnews%2Easp

My sleep schedule is so messed up… I haven’t been to sleep before 6am in days. I’ve been getting a reasonable amount of sleep, and I haven’t felt very tired or sick or anything, so guess it’s ok. I’m just worried that I won’t be able to get on a work schedule for friday when I go back. I seriously considered skipping a night’s sleep to force myself onto an earlier schedule but I decided not to do that because of the stress it would put on my body (everyone around me is sick, I don’t want to risk it).
Oh well.

Part of the reason I’ve been up so late is because I’ve been working on Exscribe, and I’m really excited about it. I think it’s quite good, and I’ve really enjoyed working on it. Tim and I have put many hours in to it, and I’m hoping we can make this software available for free to the world.

Since my last post, I improved the theme for the site, Tim finished the site administration page, we fixed a bunch of navigation bugs, I redid the template system with much more advanced features (conditional statements and loops), Tim made a calendar, and I put more accurate control on who can post.

Plenty of work left to do, but we’re having a great time with it and getting really good results.

I’ve written in here a few times about my interest in blogging. Though I like livejournal, I wanted to have another blog for more “serious” blogging about technology topics, separating it from personal stuff. I wanted a system for commenting on my posts as well as RSS feeds and an attractive interface. It also needed to be free to use and I wanted to host it on my own. I did make a legitimate effort to find such software or service but I couldn’t quite find something to fit my needs. So, as expected, I wrote my own.

I’ve put a ton of hours into this.. staying up until 7:30 last “night” and probably 6:00 “tonight”… Tim’s also been helping with the administration interface (which I find to be the least glamorous part of the project). I made a really cool system for creating templates for the pages. Basically, each page on the site has a template. All the html code is stored in that template, with certain special words that are replaced by variables when the user goes to the page. It also selects parts of the document to be repeated for each post, for example. I’ll be writing a lot more about templates once I feel that the specifications won’t change that much.

Anyway, most of the features are there at this point. Threaded commenting, multiple user support, template support, sitewide configuration, a full database backend (postgresql), and an attractive template has been created. You can see the site at the Exscribe Blog. I wrote something about the project status and feature plan, please add comments if you have ideas!

I’d like for this to be something that other people can use in the near future. I think it’s that good. Try it out and tell me what you think.

So much stuff since my last post, so I’m sure I’ll miss plenty..

I had my interview for band manager last week. It went pretty well… a couple tough questions and a lot of good ones. I’ll find out the results at the band banquet on January 23rd…

Classes are over now, which is quite a relief. I have no shortage of work, unfortunately, and plenty of alluring distractions. The tests aren’t as bad as the very-time-consuming projects that I have. I wrote my graphics program in less than an hour and a half, but then I had to spend at least 12 hours debugging it (didn’t even find all the bugs!). Robotics project and graphics test are next in the queue.

Saturday night consisted of women’s and men’s basketball (vs. St. Joe’s and Harvard, respectively). The games were ok. At halftime they have a contest where you shoot a layup for a certain prize, a foul shot for another, a three pointer for another, then after 30 seconds (no matter what) you get to try a half court shot for another prize. Andrew said he’d give me $5 if I went in the contest, and another $5 if I “tried to dunk” the layup. Of course, I took him up on it, and you can watch the hilarious results here. My shoes were still wet from the snow outside so I took quite a tumble after launching the half court shot. All for the glory, though.

I got back from the game with a headache and a slight limp, so I didn’t feel like going anywhere that night. We ended up having a LAN party in our common room until 3:30 am… 9 people with computers playing Enemy Territory… it was a good break. In fact, I think it was the first real game I’d played at school this semester. It is free and works in linux, which is also a big plus.

I’ve had a chance to visit with a lot of people before finals, but I think this robotics project (due the 11th) will take so much time that I need to be careful not to socialize too much. After that I have a lot of time until my next exam, so I’ll be able to get to a lot of things that I’ve been putting off (I say that every week, it seems).

I started another blog. I decided that it would be neat to try out other software and sites, since I’m so fascinated with this medium. I’m using blogger to build my new tech blog. A few entries on there so far, but I’m going to need to change services, get a new program, or something, since it doesn’t offer an RSS feed (which amazes me). Any suggestions? I need something that offers RSS feeds, is easy to update, and offers permalinks/archives. Comment systems and stuff are a plus.

In no order…

* Play SimCity 4
* Work in kRSS
* Read more RSS/Atom specifications
* Work on my robotics project
* Write letters to alumni
* Work on my resume
* Watch a movie
* Sleep
* Have a movie night
* Be social
* Work on tvguy
* Cook a dessert
* Talk to someone from back home
* Listen to someone talk
* Listen to a type of music to which I’m not accustomed
* Cut my nails
* Read a book
* Read a newspaper
* Do some Christmas shopping
* Clean around the apartment
* Scan historical pictures for band
* Write livejournal entries like this

EOF

So much to do this week, but this caught my eye today. I’m very interested… it’d be a very hard job to get but the challenge is part of the reason I want it. I think Fog Creek would come in only second to google as far as places I’d love to work if I could. Reasons are here and here, but I’m also still a big fan of Google’s policies (especially the stuff on the side of the page). Oh well, enough dreaming, back to work.