Tomorrow I spend 6 hours in a car going to Pittsburgh.

Saturday I spend 6 hours in a car coming back from Pittsburgh.

Somewhere in the middle is a conference of all of the Tau Beta Pi chapters in Pennsylvania. There will be talk of engineering, bowling, and drinking. I think that’s pretty much all there is to it. This honor society stuff is pretty easy :o).

I do plan to get a lot of useful work done in the car; I have a linguistics homework to catch up on. I’ll be getting quite friendly with Breton, the Celtic language of Brittany. Good times. There may also be some programming and/or web development, depending on how long my batteries last.

I think I’ve done too much work for the SCCS lately. I’m kind of brain fried now when I sit in front of my computer. That’s unusual for me. Very unusual. Ah well. I’m sure I’ll recover quickly enough ;o).

Hmm. It’s later than I though; my menubar clock froze about half an hour ago, along with all of my other menubar widgets. Mysterious.

A glance at the logs in Console implies that it has something to do with a crash of diskarbitrationd, which died a short time before my clock stopped. Interesting. No time to investigate this tonight; I must sleep.

Also, in case you haven’t seen this yet, you must play with this messed up toy-puzzle-game thing: http://www.interq.or.jp/silver/eye/grow/grow.swf. Requires Flash.

“Opera Singer” from Comfort Eagle by Cake

I know I haven’t been updating lately. I’ve been spending a lot of my free time working for the SCCS. I know a number of you who read my journal are users, and I can tell you, we’re doing good stuff. You just have to be patient with us :o).

Here’s some of the random stuff I’ve done for the SCCS over the last few months:

• Cleaned up the media lounge. You’d be surprised how much random garbage was lying around.
• Got the LOS Task Request System working again (With the help of LOS’ creator, of course)
• Rewrote some of the task requests to fit our setup on the new server
• Rewrote the backup scripts to use our new higher-capacity tapes, with support for a multi-tape backup of everything
• Upgraded Peregrine, our G4, to Panther (Mac OS 10.3)
• Wrote a ton of documentation for staff, so we can know what we did during all of this setup
• Installed three new 36 GB drives for our /home and /Web RAID array into their drive carriers

I’ve been spending a lot of time updating the staffwiki. It’s fun. I’m pretty much obsessed with wikis now. Updating WikiPages is also a great way to procrastinate from doing work. Kind of like what I’m doing right now.

We’ve got some big stuff coming up for the SCCS: We’re going to be reopening the Media Lounge on Monday. Not all of the clients are set up yet, but we’ve got 5 working Sun Ultra 10s from the CS department, one of which is a dual-monitor setup. We’ve also got Peregrine, our G4, and we’ve got a dual 1.8 GHz G5 on its way. That will probably arrive next week, but not in time for the opening. We’re going to put a wireless hub down there, also. We will have some downtime in the near future while we upgrade the drives in Roc, which will double the storage space available for web and home directories. That doesn’t mean you can abuse said space; we’ll be implementing soft and hard quotas, too :oP.

Yay!

It’s all finally coming together, after a year of very, very slow migratory motion from Merlin to Roc and Osprey. We’re oddly like birds. Appropriate, no?

“Baby, What A Big Surprise” from The Heart Of Chicago 1967-1998 Volume II by Chicago

The best one I’ve gotten thus far:

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	ultranurd
Your haiku:	and that means that i would guess that a similar history is true
Username:
Created by Grahame

“The Stake” from Greatest Hits 1974-78 by Steve Miller Band

You don’t understand what this means to me. I lost my watch 4 weeks ago… I had pretty much accepted that it was gone forever. I had even started getting used to checking the time on my cell phone… and then, joy of joys, my watch came back to me!!

Could this week get any better? I hope so!

I should probably explain… you see, I have a tendency to attach an inordinate emotional value to cheap, easily replaceable objects. Try to take my eraser or pencil sometime, and you’ll probably see what I mean.

I have my watch, yay! It may be a worn out Target Timex, but it’s mine, and I hate change. I did not relish finding a new watch…

How I lost it: I forgot to take it off before going to sleep about 4 weeks ago, so I took it off and threw it out of my bunk, figuring I’d find it in the morning. Unfortunately there was no sign of it on or in anything on my floor, even though I could swear I had seen and heard it hit ground near my desk. Fritz and Emery made fun of me.

How I found it: I started my laundry. It was at the very bottom of my laundry bag. I still don’t know how it got there, but it must have fallen into my open and empty bag when I threw it off of my bed.

To be honest, I don’t care, since I have my watch back! :o)

“Hunter” from Ducks in a Row by Swarthmore Mixed Company

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a day that goes really well, the whole way through! These are the days that make me thankful and happy to be alive. I would also like to point out that this post is completely angst-free, unlike some people I know… :oP Actually, today was just the culmination of a great weekend. I’ll get to today in a moment.

Emery and I “borrowed” Fritz’ poor, abandoned Gamecube and hooked it up to the projector to play exceedingly large Super Smash Brothers Melee. Play was concentrated on Friday night, but was spread over the weekend. Emery doesn’t have the conviction necessary to play video games constantly, like I do. Wimp.

There was a gaming session Saturday afternoon/evening in Jake’s room (read: double-that-could-be-a-triple-but-is-now-a-ricockulously-massive-single). He’s big on the Oriental Adventures setting, particularly the Japanese-style land of Rokugan. It’s probably because he’s been studying Japanese for a while. We’re playing nobles and military officers in a major fortress city, on the eve of a huge attack. Should be interesting. By the way, thanks to Raoul for selling me his Oriental Adventures book last year.

Emery and I had a great 3-hour conversation with Jenny, one of the frosh on our hall, on Saturday night. Her quadmates were all out partying or on dates, so we losers decided to have a lovely little chat. It’s nice to have the time to just sit down and talk about stuff, without thinking about work and what-not. We covered everything from dreams to linguistics to high school. I also had some good green tea with mango.

On Sunday, I led SPC discussion. I also ended up leading singing; I’m basically the third-string singer, but when Sara and Tammy are both doing the opera, we’re left with me. Most people think I have a decent singing voice, but I’m fairly weak on technique, like finding a pitch, part independence, sight reading, that sort of thing. It’s still nice to know I can still sing, however. The discussion went very well. I had touched upon the idea of a major division in the church at Pizza & Parable on Thursday, and I wanted to explore that further. We talked about church unity, and examples of polarizing issues (e.g. homosexuality) within the church, generally along the liberal-conservative axis. We talked about the Bible’s misapplied role as an absolute Book of Answers, and what it means to have the Truth. We also briefly touched upon the different denominations in which people were raised. It’s nice to have a real spiritual discussion, even with a small group of people.

Class on Monday was generally uneventful. Somewhat interesting, but nothing to jump and shout about.

Fritz () and I gave a CS Lunch Talk about our experiences working with the robots last summer, focusing in particular on what we learned at the IJCAI conference in Acapulco and the experiment at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD. We talked mostly about the interface, and the various modules we use on the robot. A lot of the focus was on what problems we had, and what we learned from them, and in turn, what future work we’re going to do with the robots to improve the interface. Our presentation was well received; there weren’t many students there, but the CS faculty seemed to like it. I managed to drag Emery in, and Dan and Ben, two people from our Advanced Computer Vision course also attended.

Fritz and I spent the rest of the afternoon working in the SCCS Media Lounge, up to and including staff meeting. I got some more things up and working on Peregrine (our G4), specifically the Fink package manager. I tweaked some of the LOS scripts, so that’s almost ready to go (really, we just need to put a link on the main web page). I put up a big To Do list on the whiteboard, of which at least 4 items were completed today. Fritz did more work on Fully-Automatic Install (FAI), and Erik finished testing the voting scripts, which are now active for the purposes of electing an SCCS Policy Board. If you have an account, go vote! Branen bought us a Dirt Devil mini vacuum cleaner, so we can make people clean up the messes they leave in the Video Pit. We’ve also ordered brand-spanking-new hard drives for Roc, so we can have plenty of space for all of that crap our users put in their home directories and webspace ;o). Things are finally looking up, and all the media lounge needs is some hot Facilities wiring action!

The day was capped by a wonderful dinner. Joanna () is house-sitting this week for some Swat alums who do folk dance. She invited a number of people over for a belated 21st-birthday dinner party, with wonderful food. She and Katie spent most of the day cooking. I really liked the weird garlic cheese bread appetizer, and I can safely say that the chocolate chip pecan pie was the first pecan pie I loved. Must’ve been the chocolate ;o). I’m becoming both a tea and coffee person of late, so I had a couple of cups of vanilla tea.

The highlight of the party was the nearly 5 straight hours of thoroughly excellent conversation. If nothing else, it proved to us that, when removed from Swarthmore, we can have lots of intelligent adult conversation, about many different topics. I really hope that tonight’s experience was an accurate reflection of what adult life is like…

We really did talk about a lot. The main subjects were linguistics ( and I arguing about various Latin-based pluralizations as they appear in modern English), computers (mostly Fritz, Ben, and I whining about the lack of decent FPGA software), and most interestingly, childhood reading tastes. We all got into science fiction and/or fantasy at an early age, but we definitely represented a general trend of reading a lot as children. As a group, our parents read to us a lot, but rarely forced any reading or education on us. I would guess that a similar history is true for most Swatties.

All in all, an absolutely wonderful day. I am really not looking forward to doing my laundry tomorrow…

Summary: Nice House. Good tea. (Bonus points to people who get the reference.)

I completely forgot to post this earlier in the week when it actually would have been relevant. Here’s a quick list of this year’s Super Bowl commercials, and what I though about them.

I’ve broken them into two categories: Actually Funny and Tried To Be Funny. Any commercials that don’t even try to entertain me are inherently Stupid, by the logic that if you’re going to spend that much money for a commercial spot, you should at least try to make it entertaining. These Stupid commercials aren’t on my list. Overall, I laughed a lot more than in the past three years, since all of the wacky .com ads came out at the Super Bowl.

Hamsters (or was it gerbils?). Shot out of cannons. Hilarity, I say!

First, my favorite commercial from each half, with a brief reason why:

First Half: Bud Light – Dog Bite
What can I say? The snob with the I-just-got-bit-in-the-balls look on his face is timeless humor.

Second Half: Nextel – NASCAR Lineman
Cool concept. Well filmed, for a commercial. Interesting combination of popular sports. Actually funny use of those damn Nextel walkie-talkies. The defenders being dragged along by the car. The victory spinout in the end zone was my favorite part :o).

Now, the lists. Note that I’m not bothering to look up the actual commercial titles, so I’m just naming them descriptively. Commercials are listed in order of appearance. Comments are linked to below the lists.

Tried To Be Funny

• Tostitos – “Football Wife”
• Dodge – “Monkey on your Back”
• Pepsi – “Bears”
• Budweiser – “Shouting Wife” [1]
• Sierra Mist – “Kilt”
• Bud Light – “Flaming Horse Farts!!”
• Pepsi – “Fat Waitress”
• Chevrolet – “Wash your Mouth out with Soap”
• Sierra Mist – “Jumping”

Actually Funny

• McDonald’s – “Dryer Sheet”
• Domino’s – “Muppets & Jessica Simpson”
• Ford – “Funny Disclaimer” [2]
• Bud Light – “Dog Bite” :o)
• Fedex – “Office Alien”
• Bud Light – “Bikini Wax”
• H&R Block – “Willie Nelson Doll” [3]
• Budweiser – “Donkey”
• Mitsubishi – “Accident Avoidance”
• Charmin – “Toilet Paper Bear”
• Visa – “Snow Beach Volleyball”
• Lays – “Grandparents”
• NFL Network – “Tomorrow” [4]
• Bud Light – “Flirtatious Monkey”
• Staples – “Supply Room Mafia” [5]
• Budweiser – “Lipstick”
• Mastercard – “Simpson’s Priceless”
• Nextel – “NASCAR Lineman” :o)
• Truth – “Shards o’ Glass Freeze Pops” [6]
• 7-up – “Basketball Hoop”
• Pepsi – “Jimi Hendrix”

[1] I don’t like commercials that do the nagging wife/lazy husband stereotype. I don’t know how accurate it actually is, but it’s just a mildly offensive skewing of what marriage is like.
[2] The commercial isn’t funny in and of itself; it’s just a regular car commercial. However, it does come with this funny disclaimer in small print at the bottom of the screen: “Clearly a professional driver on a closed course. Duh.”
[3] Oh, the irony. A coup by the ad company for hiring Willie Nelson as a tax accounting spokesman. Definitely a runner-up favorite ad.
[4] Good concept. Some of them can actually sing… and some of them definitely can’t.
[5] My other runner up. Who is that actor that comes in at the end? He’s in a bunch of mob movies.
[6] Funny anti-smoking ad. Shards o’ Glass Website

“More Than A Feeling” from Boston – Greatest Hits by Boston

US States:

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

The World:

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Hopefully I’ll be able to add Austria in April…

“Walk Of Life” from Money For Nothing by Dire Straits

A brief anecdote from tonight’s pub night alternative at Geoff’s:

Fritz threatened to throw me in Geoff’s closet for being silly and a bit annoying. I obliged and went in the closet myself. Geoff complained because his clothes were in there. Once I got in and the doors were closed, someone blocked the door.

I had memorized Geoff’s extension before coming over, in case I needed to use the callbox to get into Pittenger. I called his phone on my cell phone, which was on my belt. He was initially confused, but then I said “Hi Geoff, this is Nick. I’m in your closet”. Everyone laughed.

It appears I’m really good at being the entertainment. It probably helps that I get drunk a lot more quickly than anyone else, because I’m a total lightweight. There are two advantages to this: first, I get drunk quickly, without a significant expenditure on alcohol, and second, I get undrunk quickly, which means I’m already sobering up so I can sleep without worrying about being ill or even hungover in the morning.

I win. :o)

“Medley – Aquarius / Let The Sunshine In” from Forrest Gump by The Fifth Dimension

Right now I’m going over an Introduction to Python for CS63, Artificial Intelligence.

I don’t know why this hasn’t hit me before, but once you learn one high-level computer language, it becomes significantly easier to learn new ones. I suppose that this has something to do with the formality of such languages. They’re all rooted in mathematics and boolean logic, so those concepts can’t vary too much across languages. Concepts like loops, conditionals, functions, and the like are pretty much universal. It really becomes a matter of learning the various keywords and special characters that each language uses.

As far as selecting a programming language for a project, you just need to know the advantages and disadvantages of each, how easy they are to apply in a given situation, etc. Obviously, I’ll use JavaScript if I need to do something online, although I avoid it on principle. I’ve seen the evil it can spawn, and I want no part of it ;o). As far as computer programs are concerned, I’ll probably use C by default. If I’m going to be doing any text processing, or running commands on the system, I’ll go with perl, since it has such a robust regexp implementation. If I really really need a good object system, I might use Java. I doubt that I would use Scheme or Python for anything outside of CS classwork, but that may change. Scheme has too many parentheses for my liking, and Python is sensitive to whitespace, which is just plain wrong.

Anyway, I think that’s enough procrastinating for now. I promise I’ll post at some point about my first week in Gaithersburg, MD outside of DC. For the moment, I’ll say that missing a week of classes, even the first one, is never a good idea. I’m all caught up now, and it wasn’t too bad, but I felt a bit lost in AI having missed a class and a lab period. E25 was all review, and my other two courses stuck with intro stuff.

I’m signing off now. Really.

“And The Tide Rushes In” from Question Of Balance by The Moody Blues

I just got back from 4 days in Washington D.C. participating in a Human-Machine Interface experiment using Swarthmore’s Urban Search & Rescue robots. More on that later.

As it happens, we didn’t have Internet access while we were down there, so I now have a metric ton of e-mail to wade through. Here’s a quick break down:

• Inbox: 42 messages
• Reserved Students: 30 messages
• Prof. Maxwell: 3 messages
• Computer Science department: 3 messages
• SCCS (Swarthmore College Computer Society) Staff: 64 messages
• SCDC (Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons): 4 messages
• SLUG (Swarthmore Linux Users Group): 83 messages
• SWIL (Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature) Chat: 190 messages
• SWIL Debate: 100 messages
• SWIL Fun: 13 messages
• SWIL Geek Chat: 3 messages
• SWIL Presidents: 3 messages
• SWIL Webmaster: 17 messages
• My parental units: 2 messages

That’s a grand total of 558 e-mails, in only a 4 day period. Admittedly, I haven’t sorted out the spam yet; the new style of spam, with large blocks of random text, is very good at defeating Apple Mail’s Bayesian filters. In fact, not a single one of those messages got marked as Junk; I wonder how many of them actually are junk. ::sigh:: Stupid spammers!

Anyway, I’d better get to work reading all of this. I also have a SWAPAzine to write before SWIL Inauguration starts. Tonight at midnight I pass the mantle of the co-presidency.

So tired. So very, very tired…

“Politik” from A Rush Of Blood To The Head by Coldplay