Posts from — May 2004

I’m not sure that I understand Memorial Day. I think that it’s important to honor people who gave their lives for this country, but I think so much of it doesn’t really make sense. What would I want if I were a veteran? Would I want to walk in a parade? Would I want anything? A ceremony? Barbecues and days off?

I should watch Saving Private Ryan again at some point… that movie put veterans’ stories in new perspective for me. I can’t imagine myself participating in such a thing, but who knows, maybe I would be able to if I were in that time, in that situation. Maybe it’s just ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

I can’t tell if the world is getting more complicated or if we just tend to simplify history (in the medium and long term). Still no idea who I’ll vote for in November… I hope I start liking someone soon.

I’ve started reading Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog tonight after seeing a link from Dave Winer. It’s about journalism and current issues with the press in mind. This sort of thing is increasingly important to me as elections grow closer. Who is giving me my information?

I’ll subscribe to it when I get back to school.

Home for the weekend. It’s been a good stay and a nice change of pace. I’ve been able to spend time with friends and family, and it’s been worth the trip. Unfortunately it’s the last time I’ll see a lot of them for a while since most aren’t staying in Avon for the summer, either. My friends at home are different from the ones at school, but it’s in a way that I can’t quantify or begin to explain. It’s not better or worse, just different.

In other news, I’m bringing my brother’s old game cube back to school with me. I don’t really play console games much, but I bought Super Monkey Ball so that we’d have some thing I like to play. Can’t wait to move in on Thursday.

Lots of people will have moved out by the time I get to Lehigh.

If you’re a band alum or you’re in the band, come play with the Alumni Band on Sunday June 6 at the reunion. It’s a good time… they’re old. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll get you more info.

Got to see a bunch of people before they moved out at a barbecue at 226 today. Karen and I left after a little while and watched moderately and not very funny comedians on tv at 628. The funniest line I got out of it was “I see people driving SUVs with American flags on the side… that’s like a whore wearing a rosary.”

I found a good interview with Ben Goodger (Firefox chief developer). 0.9 sounds good, I’m glad to hear they’re fixing some of the more annoying problems (extension management, mail integration). I should code something for mozilla, but I’m not sure what. Ideas?

I’m now subscribed to Ben’s blog.

I went with Mike and Chris to the new house today. We met with keith (resident) and phil (homeless mexican computer engineer) about living in the house, paying the bills, etc. They were really helpful. We chose rooms, I ended up with my second choice, the front room on the second floor. It’s awesome. Plenty of space for living. We’re all really excited about moving in now. We have 2 bathrooms… plus a shower in the basement. We also have a dishwasher, which is really nice.

Can’t wait to move in.

I added a syndicated feed to , Steve Rittler’s tech blog, if anyone else wants to read it through LJ. He’s writing about Microsoft TechEd right now, finding some interesting stuff.

I looked through a lot of the boxes in my room tonight (looking for things), and found a lot of junk. So I decided to write about some of it.

I did have a lot to do tonight, but I got a lot done, so it was a good break.

I just burned a cd of music to bring to work for when I’m coding alone in the mornings. K3B is one of the best-designed programs I’ve used in a while. It’s easy to use if you just want to get the job done, and it allows intelligent access to all the options if you want to burn something in a specific manner. It’s much more userfriendly than, say, X-CD-Roast, which is probably harder to use than using the command line programs directly.
Example:

http://www.xcdroast.org/xcdr098/sshot5.html

Given that screen, what do you do next? Probably the worst user interface I’ve seen.

Thunderstorm just started… cool.