Posts from — March 2004

one of the pictures from Tyler's house, as promised. More can be found on his site, but that’s a good one.

To finish the last post…

Our chapter of KKY went to Bloomsburg Saturday afternoon to spend some time with their chapter. I had a good time hanging out with them, though I was disappointed some of them chose to use the time for softball practice instead of something more inclusive (like mud kickball). Overall, it was good though, and I’m glad many people made the trip. On the way back I rode with Pete, Kate, Tyler and Emily. We missed one of the turns and ended up in the Poconos, near Tyler’s house. So… we ended up going to visit his family for a while (what ended up being a couple of hours). It felt great to do something random and really get away from everything school-related. Pictures were taken, but I haven’t been able to get a hold of them yet.

Finally… a good day, low in stress but active. I’m splitting this into two posts, this one deals just with marching band.

Today was Music Engineering day, which is when accepted students interested in both music and engineering are invited to the school, informed that they are accepted, and play with the bands, take tours, etc. This event is relatively new, and I think it’s our most important for band recruitment. Over half the band is engineers, and all of the band has some interest in music. We can’t have the marching band play at this event because they’re involved in so much else and there’s no time, but we do take some time during lunch to tell people about what we do and get contact info. We got 28 people on the list. I think this is a good start, considering we haven’t even been to candidates’ days yet. 4 percussionists are signed up so far. I’m not sure what these numbers mean for actual attendance at band camp, but it’s definitely a good sign.

I’m happy with the exec board so far, everyone seems to care about things and I think we’re working better as a group than last year (just chemistry, I think, I didn’t do anything special).

I read through the band finals from last season tonight (just the first two pages, the survey). Lots of good ideas in there, some completely contradicting each other, which is expected. But some things came up again and again so I wrote up a sheet for execs to work through at the next meeting. Hopefully we’ll be able to improve upon the good and fix the bad. I’d like to take some time this spring to talk to some people who had good input on the survey. There’s no shortage of opinions floating around.

One thing I’ve been tossing around in my head is having a “band midterm” that’s just a survey that takes place about 1/3 of the way into the season. The purpose of this would be to give feedback to execs and the board as a whole on how they’re doing, and how they can improve for the remainder of the season. By the time the band final comes, it’s too late for us to fix anything. Communication needs to go both ways.

Well, I made it to 21, against all the odds (or most of them). I’m not really doing much tonight because I’m going to be away at Shippensburg for KKY. I’ll be fairly busy the rest of the week, but I’m confident that I won’t be stressed by it, for some reason. Lots of events, but not a huge amount of work associated with them. The bar trip is scheduled for my 21+1week birthday next wednesday (by scheduled I mean pete and i just made it up). Hopefully there will be kickball, too. That would be good, I miss kickball.

For the record, according to Emily B, Vicki did hold a surprise party for me at midnight, but I missed it because I was playing Enemy Territory. Refreshments were served. So now we’re even.

Stepping back a bit, student conductor elections for marching band were on Monday. Doug Howie won, I think he’ll do a good job. I’m glad the election process is over, now we can really get to work with a full board.

Been a while since an update, but I haven’t really done much worth writing about. Plenty of stuff going on in the next couple of weeks, I hope it all goes smoothly. I had a good time this weekend, I got to hang out with a bunch of people and avoid doing work for long periods of time (which will cause me to be up very very late tonight writing assembly code). It’s worth it though.

I’m doing pretty well in all my classes… every test I’ve got back has been about a letter grade higher than expected. I’ll be a good semester if I can keep it up. It’s somewhat surprising considering how bad my study habits have been lately. Whatever works.

My birthday is in a couple of days.. no plans set in stone yet, too much work to do in the meantime.

I’m writing this on the bus on the way back to Lehigh, so here’s a bit of a recap of the last couple of days.

The trip was planned rather hastily since we just found out on Sunday that we’d be in the play-in game. The game was Lehigh vs. Florida A&M and it took place in Dayton Ohio. Part of the band left on Monday afternoon, the rest of us left Tuesday morning for the 7:00 game. The plan was to leave from Newark and go directly to Dayton and take a bus of some sort to the stadium. Because of the snow (where did that come from?), we soon found out that our flight was cancelled. After several calls and some investigation, we got tickets on a flight to Columbus and arranged to have a bus take us to Dayton (generally over an hour drive). Craig and a guy from athletics were not on the roster to attend for some reason, and their tickets could not be secured, so they had to stay back and try to figure things out. Unfortunately they didn’t figure things out in time and they didn’t make the flight (I’m not sure what happened to them). The flight got delayed until 3:30 or so. Dan and Pete were hungry and decided to go to a food court because the flight was delayed (this is second hand info so I could be wrong here). The flight was then moved back up to 3:15 and they loaded up the plane (we all got on in a hurry). Unfortunately, Dan and Pete weren’t around to find out that the flight had been moved up, and we all pretty much got on the plane as quickly as possible. We didn’t realize they were missing until the door had been closed, and they ended up being stranded. They took a cab back to Lehigh. Two more down. That’s somewhere around an 80% survival rate for the trip.

Anyway, we had to sit on the runway for a long time, and I got to watch the plane be de-iced for the first time. We lifted off at about ten after 4, the flight took about 1:20. We ran through the airport, making plenty of references to Home Alone, hoping that we’d be able to make the game in a reasonable amount of time. After waiting for our luggage (some of which was Pete’s and Dan’s), we got on the bus. We told the bus driver that we needed to get there quickly, and he drove above 80 the whole time, from what I’m told. We made it very quickly and arrived at the game during one of the first TV timeouts (we were on ESPN).

The band was very lacking at this point.. with dan missing we had no snare drum, which made a bunch of things difficult. The stadium had 7800 people, which was fun, but most of them weren’t affiliated with either team, so the crowd was rather apathetic. We were told that we had to sit when we weren’t playing, and had to limit what we said, which made things less fun. The team started out really cold and never really warmed up, it was a bad game. Lehigh really could have won, but they never got any momentum or focus. I’d complain about the refs if we had played better, but it didn’t really matter.

So we lost. We returned to the hotel where the team and cheerleaders were staying. The rooms were really nice, we had 2 double beds for two people. We eventually got to sleep and met downstairs at 7:30 am to go back to LU. The ride back went much more smoothly, we didn’t lose anyone. We went from Columbus to Philly this time, now we’re busing back to Lehigh.

So that’s it… it was disappointing to see such a bad game, but I enjoyed the trip. Much more fun than classes! I think this was the first time I’ve been on an airplane since I went to Europe, but I could be wrong. Maybe I went to Pittsburgh after that.

Patriot League championship was today… Lehigh vs. American U. We were on ESPN2! We won the game only by a couple of points… it was a lot of fun. This means we’re patriot league champions (beating out all the usual suspects this year), and we have to play-in to make it to the NCAA tournament. We’re taking a plane to Ohio to play Florida A&M.. we’ll leave Tuesday, returning wednesday morning. If we win, we’ll play Kentucky at the end of the week (in Ohio again). Ought to be a good week…

Meanwhile, in the world of people and things, I’ve managed to keep relatively busy over break. I’ve been working continuously on the Avon Little League site… it doesn’t sound like a big project, but it’s actually a pretty big system (at one point I had 22 different types of users defined… it’s gone down now). I’ll discuss it more in depth when it’s done (hopefully it’ll be stable on Saturday).

On Wednesday, I drove to the offices of the Frozen and Refrigerated Food Association of New England in Arlington MA to do some programming for my Uncle (finishing some old stuff, actually). I left this morning at about 9 in order to make it back for my 11:50 dentist appt in hartford. I feel like I got as much as I could in my time there, and I had a chance to visit with the family (which is especially nice because I probably won’t see them for Easter). Wednesday night I went with Uncle Harold, his friend Bernie, Kevin, and Frank to dinner in Boston (at a really nice Italian restaurant) and then to the Celtics/Lakers game. The game was really good, and I enjoyed visiting with them. Shaquille O’Neal, the actor you probably remember from movies such as ‘Kazaam!’ and ‘Blue Chips’ apparently moonlights as a basketball player… how fun! He’s the biggest person I’ve ever seen… I can’t even comprehend it.

The more I use KDE 3.2, the more happy I am with it. Beside all the neat things in KWin (the window manager), I discovered JuK, KDE’s iTunes-esque music player. I haven’t used iTunes, but I’m imagining these features generally aren’t original. JuK lets me deal with music as a collection of media, not just a playlist. I used to have 5 copies of xmms (linux equivalent of winamp) open so that I could hop between genres with ease, but now I think JuK is designed to make that sort of thing easy. I finally got around to trying the Konqueror web browser, and it is also much improved. They finally cleaned up those toolbars… I don’t think it’s too early for me to say that I haven’t ever enjoyed using a desktop environment more than this (that includes windows, linux, macs, etc)… it just fits like I glove. I usually don’t gush about stuff this much… but this is either really good or I’m really tired or something.

The new release of KDE, KDE 3.2 made it into apt a couple of days ago, so I’ve been running it for the last day or so. There isn’t one killer feature in it, but so far I’m really impressed. The KDE group has really done a great job refining a lot of things that were missing or rough in the earlier iterations of the 3.x series. The little things really add up and form the most important change to the system, but there are some larger changes, too.

First of all, the applications as a whole (and kde system startup) are noticeably faster, especially on my laptop. It makes my desktop feel more responsive. Another big change is a new window manager and window decoration named “Plastik”. It’s “lighter weight” than the previous default, “Kermik” which was a bit gaudy. Plastik subtly borrows from the Windows XP theme without making me feel like it was designed for retarded koalas. I think I’m going to be sticking with this one for a while.

What else is new? There’s a bunch of things in kcontrol (sorta like windows’ control panel). Overall, the UI of the different screens have been improved, but the kcontrol interface in general is still tricky to the uninitiated. Definitely improved, though. Stuff like mouse cursor themes, switching resolutions, and font installation are made easy in kcontrol 3.2. The theme/style confusion has also been eliminated. Much better. Xinerama (multiple monitors, like I have) support is better, but I can’t comment on exactly how because I only used it briefly and I’m now on my laptop.

I could be off base with this, but the fonts look beautiful in 3.2. Maybe it’s just me or an unrelated package that I just upgraded… I’ll look in to it after break.

Other developments…. ksnapshot, one of my favorite programs ever, has a small change where it now allows you to take a screenshot by dragging a box around an area of the desktop… that’s awesome (okay, I’m easily excited). I like that program because it tries to accomplish only one task and does it very very well (go UNIX!).

Kate (a graphical text editor) is also improved, and it’s now my editor of choice for coding in PHP and Python. I think I’ll stick with emacs for C++ and vim for everything else. I really need to improve my vim and emacs skills… I’m really bad considering how often I use them.