At this point, the only things that remain unpacked are Chronos, his power adapter, the clothes I am going to wear tomorrow, my toiletries, my coat (with pocketed gloves and earmuffs), and my shoes.

The quick packing at 1 am was a nice change of pace from sitting on my butt all week. I’m still not sure if my body is ready for a regular schedule again, even though that’s exactly what I need. I’ve basically been running on Hawaii time for most of break, which shifts my alone time from the 8am to Noon block while my parental units are at work to the Midnight to 4am block. Either way, I don’t really see the sun. Come to think of it, we do still have a sun, right?

I did get some stuff done this week. I finally tallied the SWILMovie votes (only 6 weeks overdue!), and wrote some SWILNewsii (only 8-12 weeks overdue!). I went through 10 chapters of a Quenya textbook, and I’m really starting to get the hang of it. Soon I’ll be able to write elvish poetry! Anwavë, quetanyë ar tecanyë i vanya lambë Eldaron!

On a random note, I’ve noticed lately that I tend to type the wrong homonym. In the previous paragraph, for example, I wrote “right” instead of “write”. It’s been happening more and more often. I’m wondering if my brain is malfunctioning or something. Maybe I’m hearing the sentences in my head when composing, instead of seeing them? At any rate, I think we should all just adopt IPA, and learn all of the weird characters. Then you could at least pronounce any language written in it. If you had a little phrase book, you could probably even be understood by natives! Will it be okay for me to assume that practically everyone in Vienna will speak English, and therefore I can be a stupid American and not bother learning a word of German? I apologize for the random linguistic rambling. I should really just get to sleep, so I can wake up for church in the morning.

The huge, huge, huge project I worked on this week was an update to the family tree. First, I moved my existing database of about 470 names from Family Tree Maker, an out-of-date OS 9 program that used a non-standard and proprietary database format, to GRAMPS, an open-source GNOME program that uses a nice standard XML database. While I was working on that, my dad mentioned that he had gotten some new documents from my grandma. I have now added a bunch of data out to the third cousins for the Schuett and Bahnfleth families, who were the parents of my paternal grandmother, and my grandparents. This has upped my entire family tree to almost 1300 names. I have birthdates for about 900 of those, and I think that there are only 30 incomplete names. I have actually done very little research myself; mostly, I’ve just compiled data from a lot of different sources.

As I continue the project, I want to add something none of my other genealogically-inclined relatives (there are at least 3 of them) have: media objects. GRAMPS supports images and sounds, and I am fairly sure that I can get images on all of my living relatives out to the second cousin level. Such information is nice, and perfectly suited to the Web. I have my family tree published online, although there are still some small errors I need to fix: The Family Tree. There’s no graphical view, just a name index and links that connect an individual to their parents, spouses, and children. You can navigate the whole tree that way, however. If you click on my head on the right, that will take you to my node, the home node of the tree. The whole site gives you a preview of the look & feel for my as-yet-unfinished new website, Nurd Central.

I did see some movies amid the worthlessness of the last week, and we did some shopping. Cold Mountain is good, but not great. It tried too hard to be a mix of romance and action, and didn’t succeed really well at either of them. In other words, it’s a good date movie. The Cooler is very good, with a decent script and some amazing acting from William H. Macy and Alec Baldwin. Baldwin is a great old-school gangster, and Macy plays his classic nice-guy-down-on-his-luck character, just like the one from Fargo, Magnolia, and others. I will quickly mention that both movies have unnecessary sex in them. I will continue to contend that you can show people’s love for each other without any sex. In Cold Mountain, Kidman and Law didn’t even hook up until after almost 2 hours of demonstrating how much they love each other! Call me a prudish Lutheran, but you never need sex in a movie to tell a story. Violence, on the other hand, is both really sweet and totally awesome. Not sure which is worse for children to see; probably the latter.

Anywho, I really need to go to sleep, otherwise I will be dead for travel on Sunday and Monday. I’ll be in DC all week playing with the robots at NIST.

And here I thought this was going to be my worst semester at Swat, grade-wise. Taking three engineering lab courses can instill that kind of paranoia. I was most concerned with E72, Electronic Circuit Applications, which I felt kind of lost in throughout the semester. I tied my worst grade, with E72 coming out the same as E6, my first real (and probably scariest) engin course.

As for E15 and E27, I think I did as well as I did because of Bruce. He’s a great prof, and the subject matter is really in tune with what I want to do. It probably helped to have worked with him over the summer, thus having an idea of how he works.

Emery and I definitely complemented each other well on E15 and E27; I helped him with Digitial Logic, he helped me with all of that analog crap that he loves so well. I’m sure I largely have him to thank for my better-than-expected grade in E72.

E27, Computer Vision, has me really looking forward to Advanced Vision, E127, this coming semester. I’m hoping we do some more 3-D stuff, or stereo vision, or something. Can anyone say “Mars rover”?

Oh yeah, and surprise, surprise, I passed Spanish Literature. Whoopee. I think I could have passed without turning in the final project :o\. If I ever get the idea in my head to take another literature course, someone needs to knock some sense into me with a large piece of archaic computer equipment.

No offense to all of you humanities people out there, but I just can’t stomach Literature with a capital L for very long, even though I love to read. I think it basically comes down to my preference for event-based stories as opposed to people-based stories. I don’t know the technical terms for that, but based on the books I’ve enjoyed and the ones I haven’t been able to stand (curse you, Faulkner!!!), it has something to do with the storytelling style. There’s got to be some good Spanish sci-fi out there, right? Right?

“God Put A Smile Upon Your Face” from A Rush Of Blood To The Head by Coldplay

Two quick phone calls later, and my ID problem is fixed. It turns out that the clerk I talked to this summer issued my new ID as a “duplicate” instead of a “renewal” – in other words, it had the expiration date of my old ID.

The first phone call got me the number to whatever we call the DMV here, where they could actually call up my record. For the second phone call, I went through a menu, entered my ID number, and got connected to someone right away. I guess they’re not doing much on a Friday afternoon. The funniest part of the menu system was that options had instructions like “Please say yes uur nuu naow” in the best Minnesotan accent you can imagine :o).

At any rate, they’re going to send me a new ID to my Swat address for no charge. It’ll arrive in about two weeks, so it should be there when I get back from Washington, D.C. The Hennepin County bureaucracy is digging itself out of the hole of its own creation.

“One Like You” from Hit Parade by Audio Adrenaline

The obituary for a girl from my high school was in the paper today. I had actually heard on Monday, from my dad who still works at Breck. She just passed away from some sort of sudden medical condition. She had turned 20 the week before.

I did not know Beth very well (she was a year under me), but from my experiences with her in theater I know that she will be sorely missed by everyone who knew her, especially her closest friends and family. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose my sister at her age, for example.

General musings, really. I’ve never had anyone close to me die, although I know it will happen with my grandparents soon enough, and could possibly happen with anyone of my immediate family or friends. Every time someone I sort of know dies (a friend’s mom, someone I sort of knew at school), it does make me briefly consider the possibility that I might not wake up tomorrow. I’m just glad I don’t obsess over death or the risk of death like some people, otherwise I think I’d live a fairly bleak life.

Pray for Beth’s family.

“Refuse Resist” from Inquisition Symphony by Apocalyptica

I can’t believe JC beat me to this. Well, at least I got a better result than him :oP.

You are an Akira-class Battlecruiser, every ship
should be like this. You are very versatile
and can be trusted to perform any task with
excellence. Powerful, agile, and graceful.
You, my friend have it going on.

Which Class of Federation Starship are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

And yes, I too am “frightened by yams”. Disgusting little tubers.

Today I slept from 5 am to 3 pm. That means that the sun will be setting roughly 2 hours after I get up. I’m sure that this will completely mess up my equilibrium, and I will be effectively jet-lagged the rest of the day.

I did have fun things to do last night: I watched a Nova special about the preparation and launch of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, I surfed online a lot, I read several chapters in The Lord of the Rings, I played some Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (they finally fixed one of the main puzzles so that it’s mac-compatible), and I ripped a number of CDs from the family collection that I was missing. I am now one CD short of the 2000 song mark :o).

I do have a few productive things I need to do before the business day runs out. I need to call Hennepin County about fixing my state ID, and I need to order some CDs online for my mom. The latter is easy, and as for the former, I am hoping I can convince them not to charge me a fee, since the mistake was completely on their end.

Before leaving MN for Swat this past semester, I ordered my over-21 state ID, to be delivered on my 21st birthday, October 25th, 2003. My under-21 ID was set to expire on my 21st birthday, so I needed to order the ID before leaving. I got the ID in the mail at Swat the week before my birthday, and started using it shortly thereafter for the purpose of buying alcoholic beverages. As it happens, I’ve been carded a lot less than I expected, but since I am legal, I don’t particularly care (even though I could probably pass for 15, especially with my retainer). At any rate, I used my ID uneventfully throughout the semester, including several TSA checks at airports. On a flight with my family from Chicago back to Minneapolis, the NWA ticket agent asked if I had an unexpired ID; naturally I was confused, since my ID had only been issued 2 months previously. I needed to get the full TSA search (with wanding and bomb sniffing), which wasn’t a huge added delay because there wasn’t a line in their cordoned off area.

I inspected my ID, and found that it’s expiration date was 10-25-03. Now let’s think about this briefly. This is an over-21 ID, and therefore not valid until my 21st birthday. My 21st birthday was 10-25-03. This means that the ID was not valid until 10-25-03. Yes, readers, my ID expired the very same day it was issued. I love bureaucracy.

I double and triple-checked with the clerk when I got my ID that it was okay to order my ID before 21. I can only conclude that they copied the expiration date from my under-21 ID. I really don’t want to have to spend a lot of time fixing this. ::sigh::

As you can see, I’m posting to my actual livejournal, as opposed to the feed. The reason I set up the feed was solely to use iBlog with my .Mac account. iBlog was one of the “free” pieces of software, so in other words, using it would partially justify paying for .Mac for this year. The other reason was to keep a copy of my journal entries on my hard drive.

What I completely didn’t think about before starting this convoluted setup was that there might be LJ clients for OS X. Right now I’m using XJournal, which uses the Safari engine to display stuff, and interfaces with Address Book cards. My only complaint thus far is that it doesn’t appear to be able to display my merged friends page; it only does one friend at a time. It also grabs my current music from iTunes automatically.

As for the me being stupid part, it seems like this is probably a better way for me to do this, since it interfaces directly with my LiveJournal. I will have to go and backdate a bunch of my K5 entries, just so they’re out there.

In summary: this is a lot more direct than uploading to my .Mac account and having the feed on LiveJournal. It also puts my comments in the same place as my journal. My apologies to for wasting her synchronization points.

I think I may switch to using this Xjournal, even after all of the effort I put in with the iBlog templates. Any recommendations either way?

If you’re in the community, you’ll know that I now have an RSS feed from my .Mac account (Thanks, !). I’m using iBlog and my paid .Mac account to (hopefully) do smaller and more regular posts. If you have the syndication points, you should subscribe to my feed. I’m a cheap free user, so I can’t even subscribe to myself…

I’ve already got two updates up there. Let me know if any of the generated HTML on my end is screwy – I’ve tried my best to make iBlog XHTML 1.1 compliant.

Chances are, I won’t be posting much in this account anymore (not that there was much to begin with). I may put silly LJ surveys here, simply because those would be hard to integrate with iBlog. W hen I get the chance, all of my kuro5hin.org posts will get moved over to my iblog, so you can look back at all those posts before I joined LJ, if you’re at all interested. I will still use this account to read and comment in your journals.

In the last week, there have been two thoroughly excellent SWIL-organized gaming sessions. This makes me happy, because I enjoyed them, because other people enjoyed them, and because both attracted new people. New people are good, because it provides variety in terms of interaction, and because it shows more people that SWIL does fun, cool things. Obviously, we do those fun things whether or not people know about them or think that they’re cool, but it’s nice to know that not everyone has listened to some of the stereotypes.

Full Story (1284 words in story)

This entry has two purposes:

1. To update you on what I’ve been doing for the last month. I’ll give you a hint: it involves being insanely busy with lots of work, and having my free time focused elsewhere.
2. My paid subscription to K5, which I’ve pretty much wasted this semester, will run out in 19 days. At the point, I think I will move my web journal somewhere else. Explanation for that follows.

November was a busy, busy month, but it was all worth it. Life is good. This semester went by very, very quickly (today was the last day of classes), and that means that I am inching closer and closer to graduation and the real world. AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

Full Story (770 words in story)