12/31/2002
Ah, PJ is trying to stick me with a freshman roommate. What was he planning on doing with this kid before the unexpected vacancy in my room? And what about the two freshman living in a triple on the 2nd floor? Stick him there, not with a junior. Apparently this kid went abroad first semester and if he wasn't able to find someone he'd rather live with then a random junior he's probably some devious misantrhope that I have absolutely no desire to live with. I e-mailed my complaints to PJ but he didn't reply. Let's review the stats: 3 out of the 3 roommates I've had (and didn't know beforehand) no longer attend Colby. Oh well.

12/30/2002

Body:  It's time to go to bed.
Mind:  Nope.
Body:  No, really, we need to go to sleep now.
Mind:  Nah, let's stay up and think about stuff instead.
Body:  Fine, but I'm going to put off your dreams until just before the alarm goes off.

12/29/2002
Sunday. 10:00am. 17+ terabytes. The Lounge. Football. DVDs. Neil. Aqua Teen Hunger Force robot voice. Cheryl.

12/28/2002
Went over to Mike's and met up with Achal, Jonny, Jenny, and Dave. We talked and watched Death Race 2000. So it's a cult film, and waching it with a large group late at night as a I did where you can make fun of it and point out plot holes and talk about the ridiculousness of it while counting down the 78 minute runtime meant 3.5 / 4 star enjoyment. But otherwise, it's thumbs down 1.25 / 4 stars. Mike only paid $3 for it new on DVD, hehe. Cheap Canadian pressing. It's funny how a version with the trailer and an interview costs $15 more and "phased out" the inexpensive one. Did you hear about how the Father of DVD was fired for trying to drive prices down?

12/27/2002
The Hardware Store episode of Modern Marvels on the History Channel = best episode evar!

12/26/2002
I am a patient boy. I wait, I wait, I wait. This morning I had a dream about Meredith, so after 3+ years of being out of touch, I e-mailed her. She replied (twice) in a positive fashion a little later. I love Saara :) "Why do people lie?" Found her on AIM today. Like me, she hasn't collected from her court case. But on the very bright side, just like her plan, she's graduated from NYU and moved to L.A. She's in San Diego with her grandmother for the holiday. Glad to hear that she's doing what she wants in life. Carin and I have made tentative plans for some Route 40 pool hall action on Saturday. Colby Meredith also IMed me. If you thought you couldn't make my day by telling me about your life, you'd be wrong. :) I also chatted with Carolyn & Mike, but then again I always do, because they're just awesome like that. Ouh, time for dinner and the Simpsons!

12/25/2002
It snowed today, rock on! It looks like a good 3" out there, nice big flakes, and the plethora of pine trees in our backyard is looking sehr sexy. I basically ended up wishing I brought home my Dreamcast to give the fishing rod controller and SEGA Marine Fishing a go and playing America's Army. Sleaze came up with a great strategy how to get people out of my spot on the bridge map. Smoke 'em! Can't shoot them because of the Rules Of Engagement, can't whine "Move!" because they won't listen, so what can you do? Pop smoke so they can't see and they'll move right out. It's like fumigating for roaches. I used that and the "rich get richer" squad leader position to boost my honor up to 14, woo-ho! I love yelling "Get the door!" when boneheads open up the defense tower lower level door. The assault players fumbling with that thing is key so that I can stop them. No worries, I also played assault a few rounds and won. It's all about using those 3 smoke gernades you're equipped with.

12/23/2002
Another day, another finished Gundam. This time it's the MS-09F Domtropen. This little guy has more weapons on him then I know what to do with. But I figured out the mystery of the spare parts! Well, some of them. I could have made his knee joints sky blue instead of tan and a chest plate red instead of tan. The instructions were the most Japanese of any set thus far, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't an indication of you can use either or. Maybe you just have to be experienced at such things and know to look ahead and see if similiar parts actually get used or not later on. *shrug* I finally got around to reading those Unitarian Univeralist pamphlets Kathy was so nice to send. If you're looking for a religion, I highly recommend you check them out. I'm happy being a humanist (although I'm jealous of the UU's conferences), but I really appreciate their total and complete lack of and even forceful rejection of "we're right" and holier/mightier than thou dogma. Oh along with the Gundam I also received two new Dreamcast games and the fishing rod controller, oh yeah!

12/22/2002
In a month I'll be 22. Eep. Finished up the gundam, went xmas shopping with Mike. On our way back we saw a big white van get hit by a deer. Yes, a deer hit a van, not a van hit a deer. It came out of the woods in front of us and started to cross the road, but the problem is the aforementioned van coming the other way. It was bounding, as deer tend to do, and just jumped right into the rear corner of the van and got itself spun around by its head/neck. After lying on the road dazed for a bit it got up and headed off into the woods. Silly deer. Headed back to Mike's house and saw a nice film that supposedly takes place in Waterville, Maine and includes the college's astrophysics professor as part of the cast. The flick is called Wet Hot American Summer (2 / 4 stars) except when they go into town it's not Waterville and David Hyde Pierce is not Murray Campbell. Not like there are any other movies that take place in Waterville for me to point out the factual errors, so I have to take advantage of this one. Actually, that was the second movie we watched. After the deer we stopped by the video store and rented Super Troopers (3 / 4 stars). Had a nice talk with Scott when I got home.

12/21/2002
Slept in *stretch* nice and late. Played a nice chunk of America's Army with my brother, and, well, the day's not over yet. There's still plenty of time to end up chickening out on the Ars Technica MD/DC/VA winter meet despite the amount of fun I had at the summer meet. Just when I think I'm getting good at the whole not being shy business. Oh well. Instead, I worked on the Gundam for another hour (it's far too easy for a skill 7, and I'm suspicious of the 1/100 scale because his head is quite tiny) and made a magical makefile that automatically detects intermediate files in the build process and deletes them after linking. I then put this magical makefile to good use and fixed grabber to work with Mike's USB webcam.

12/20/2002
Silly Linux 2.4 PCMCIA i82365 IRQ 12 theft problem solved. The solution is to pass the boot option pci=irqmask=0x0e98 so that the IRQ assigning thing will only be allowed to use 11, 10, 9, 4, and 3. The module will whine about how it can't find and IRQ, but guess what, it doesn't need one anyway! Otherwise I guess it would have taken one of the other ones that is free, but it doesn't take one in 2.2 and works just fine. So yeah, everything is working now, rock on! This is on my Winbook XL, by the way. Props to SuSE. I stated on my "Gundam H-Arms Custom HG OVA Endless Waltz 4" (whatever all that junk means - I'm not into the cartoon or anime in general) model today. It doesn't have a skill level on the box, but it's 1/100 scale so I guess it's skill 7 according to the meter on my other gundam model's box.

12/19/2002
I feel like a bad father. I've kind of neglected to keep my laptop up to date and it's come back to bite me as I try to upgrade to Linux 2.4 on it. The 3rd party PCMCIA packages are being a pain. The kernel really wants to assign the i82365 module to IRQ 12 but duh, that's the PS/2 mouse interrupt and it doesn't share nicely at all. Linux 2.2 assigns it IRQ 3 (yeah, whatever, I don't have two serial ports) and you'd think it'd be easy to slap the module out of going into to IRQ 12 but it isn't. I don't think the module itself has any control over it, even when I pass it irq_list type stuff (me and modinfo -p are *tight* now) it seems to ignore them. IIRC back in the day (we're talking 2.0 here) I e-mailed Donald Becker about how I might force my NE2000 ethernet card to go to irq 10 like it ought to, he said that even if I modify the driver the rest of the kernel decides what IRQ it ultimately ends up on. My BIOS is kind of limiting and won't let me touch stuff too much, either. I'm stuck. Blah. Bedtime. Tomorrow I'll look into arch/i386/kernel/pci-irq.c:pcibios_lookup_irq() Assigned/Found/Hardcoded stuff.

12/18/2002
Chatted with old Speakout buddy Stephen, got my contact lens perscription updated, changed oil in my car, went to to CompUSA and Toys-R-Us to buy goodies with Mike, and hung out at his house. I then proceeded to stay up until 2:30, oh yeah! It's nice not having to get up for class again. :) And ouh ouh, look what I found! Intern, employee, link removed. Lauren and Nicole are hot.

12/17/2002
Back home. Naturally, I've spotted some new construction already (yay urban sprawl). Traffic light at ilchester, not many people down that road, but there is a school. And our development has an elegant new stone entrance sign. Hartford seems to be a well evolved city. Let's face it, public transportation sucks in the US (or else I would have taken a train home), so cities need a major roadway that goes right to the heart of them (this means you, D.C.). They don't call Baltimore charm city for nothing because 395 will dump you right between the stadiums and the inner harbor. 84 through Hartford will do the same, except the road is dark and twisty and the speed limit is too high. I got stuck in rush hour traffic in Jersey for an hour. Eh, I guess they don't call it the parkway for nothing. Buddumpt cha! Hehe, Malaysia. On the drive I saw five backwards cement mixer trucks. Odd. By the way, the RIAA owes you $20. Getting my blog on, yeah! And I think it's awesome how the first restaurant one sees when crossing the Mason-Dixon line into Maryland is a Waffle House. New england idiosyncrasies are too cliquish for my tastes, I prefer the southern ones because they're more hospitable.

12/16/2002
Hey, the network is working again, imagine that. Watched The Godfather: Part II in Olin 1 last night... 0.75 / 4 stars. The DeNiro story was infinitely more interesting than the Pacino story. Only 3 good visuals (rug theft police scare, kiss of death, gun wrapped in towel murder) and 1 good scene (for its hilarity, when Pacino shut the door in his wife's face) in the whole thing. And I was right, roommate transferred to Bentley as expected.

12/15/2002
D - O - N - E

12/14/2002
Boom, German is done. I wish I had another hour or two more to study for it, though. I had to trudge through the pouring rain to Mudd e-mail and update this thing because the Internet in East Quad is down, again. This is largely due to the incompetence of some folks in Colby's ITS department, namely Ray Phillips and Dave Cooley. It's sad to see that nepotism is still alive and well on campus. But on the plus side, I finished reading High Output Management. Cognitive Modeling take-home tomorrow...

12/13/2002
Two down, two to go. German tomorrow. Carolyn just tried to pull me to Truckers, unh-uh, no way. ML final was awesome, had a pre-party with Foosball and then party in class during the presentations and my partner got a little more wrecked than I was expecting. My roommate seems to have moved out today.

12/12/2002
Snow! Yesterday when I was taking my American Bussiness Management final and answering a marketing question I started to ponder and get irritated by all of the advertisements I get bombarded with daily. For example, I know y'all have see a "Beef, it's what's for dinner." and a "Got Milk?" ad. But let me go out on a limb here and say you already know what a cow is. Do the ads actually improve sales or do they just happen to go up based on the phase of the moon like some computer bugs? At least Gabe understands. Had sexy grilled cheeses with Karen and my crew at Bobs. "Hi. My hobbies are government, and people!" But the big story is when I sat with Bio/Math Sarah for dinner, woah!

12/11/2002
Been busy with exams and such but had lunch and dinner with my runnin' crew[/meatwad]. Sometimes I fail to write the fun stuff that happens but thanks to Carolyn I was reminded of a goofy tale which I forgot to write here so I'll tell it now. One time at Foss this year I was standing in line for the food. It was kind of busy, and apparently I wasn't moving along fast enough so the girl behind me pushed her tray into the small of my back to prod me along. Yeah, that's right. And then when I got up to where you can rest your tray and start shoveling food onto it she muscled me with her tray again and pushed my tray down the line.

12/09/2002
*points to the poster on the wall* Turned in the last paper I'll have to write this semester, showed Karina and Torrey the anti-gravity stone, saw the tree planted for Torrey's aunt, and went to the largest art museum in Maine with her. Poked around at some stuff, talked to Carin, and then went to dinner with Meredith & Jocelyn. Seeing how this page floats around and is accessible to the Internet at large, I usually just write about what I do and hope it provides cues for later recall of emotions. Trends, pfft. I feel really good about fiercely battling back my shyness this year and meeting all of these wonderful new people.

12/08/2002
Yesterday I went to a hockey game, worked on my paper until quitting time (9 pm) and headed back to EQ for a little relaxing. Except my older friends were going to cotillion and my younger ones went drinking. So I went wandering the halls of EQ for people with their door open to make with the social. Talked to Lynn about the game and stuff for 45 minutes or so and then headed off again. Thought I'd check out the old room from last year to see how things are going so down I went. But blah, the door was closed! Silly anti-social monkeys. I knocked anyway and was pleasantly suprised to see Torrey there with a junior named Jordan. It's nice to meet people my year. Anyhow, she didn't stick around too long so I just talked to Torrey. It was awesome. I don't think I can say enough wonderful things about her at the moment so it'll suffice to say we stayed up until 2:30 this morning just talking.

12/07/2002
Last night I attended Carols and Lights to see Carolyn play her flute, Miranda trumpet it up, Prager (includes mullet pic!) get her singing on, and Michelle play bells. Fine music which I enjoyed, but I wasn't allowed to clap. Mmmm hum, so I've now been to church five times in my life. I thought the Spanish guitar guy had quite an amazing voice and I got fooled and almost started clapping for him. What a disrespectful act against Christ that would have been *rolls eyes* Since it was suggested to all by the priest that clapping was inappropriate and that we show our appreciation in some other manner, I'd also like to mention that the bells sounded great and the chorale's rendition of a Nigerian song was very lively.

12/06/2002
I think the all-nighter worked. It's 5:30am and I've got 10 pages of okay paper sitting in front of me. Only an hour behind the estimated completion time of 4:30, but the time is accounted for because there was a considerable amount of slacking involved when Clare sprung for pizza! CS professors rock so much house. :)

12/03/2002
So I'm walking back into EQ today after lunch behind some girl. Maybe she lives in EQ, but I don't recall seeing her before. Anyhow, I follow her in and as she's putting putting her card back into her pocket, she dropped something. Well, not exactly. It looked to me like she picked this piece of crumpled paper out of her pocket and with the flick of her wrist deliberately threw it on the ground. It looked like a receipt. Anyhow, I guess I was feeling "polite" so I didn't say "Hey, you dropped something." because it seemed to me that she was overtly littering. I didn't stop and pick it up to recycle it, either. Maybe she would have been aware of my picking it up and felt weird when I just recycled it. I mean yeah, Ken or Marleen would have done it eventually, but I didn't want to be some guy that follows people around and picks up trash for them when they litter. You shouldn't rely on other people picking up your garbage, just police yourself. And feel the guilt from my seeing you litter, ha! Well, except I didn't say anything. Anyhow, I continued up to the 3rd floor (she get off at the 2nd) and then looped down around and picked it up. Yep, a receipt for Walmart. No fun secret messages on it or anything. Then I started up the stairs and caught a glimpse of Mango approaching the door. But then I felt like a monkey for not walking over a few steps and opening the door for her (yes, I know it's winter and I know it's Maine, but it's still cold out) and just kind of bolted up the stairs. Threw the receipt in the recycling bin on the 3rd and headed down the hall to my room. As I was opening my door I glanced down the hall to see Mango opening her door and noticed a white piece of paper fall from her person to the ground. This time I yelled down the hall "Hey, you dropped something." and she looked around and picked it up and replied "good eyes." which just made me laugh at the irony because seeing how my left contact lens decided to not work anymore, I've been wearing my glasses constantly the past few weeks.

12/02/2002
Made a poster. It's just a rough draft. Kontour (formerly KIllustrator) rocks. Ah drat I spelled minimize wrong.

11/30/2002
Wow. Just got back from an amazing 3 hour feast at Karen & Chris' pad. Colby students Neha, Nel, Linda, and Andras. And then there were a bunch of sexy alumni there like Adam, Alicia, and some other people whos names I didn't get. But communications folks, work on the Colby magazine. Great food, too, naturally. :) Before dinner worked on neural net thing, and before that had a nice leisurely lunch with Sara. As an added bonus, Andres and I will be playing ping-pong at 10. Fabulous day.

11/29/2002
3.14159265358979323846264338 (I think 26 digits is enough), huge update. Worked on neural net and went on an e-mailing rampage while it trained. Must... defeat... inbox! I just had a fabulous dinner with Kyle (the dorm president). The conversation flowed while it gently snowed. I'm thinking it's because he's from the west coast. He feels that people out there are sort of stand-off-ish when you first meet them but once they get to know you they won't pretend to forget you. Talked about government, the SGA/SPB, student life in general, lots of stuff. Ah, it was great and I didn't have to bombard him with questions to try and come up with something to talk about. He's a good guy, very amicable and personable.

11/28/2002
Happy Thanksgiving! Got a nice IM greeting from Sharon, finished up the Randy extra credit, watched Colby video #1351, The Killing (3 / 4 stars), still putting off work by updating my journal mid-day... well, I did a teeny-tiny-little bit of work. Mmm yeah, I'm feeling like I'm pretty much dead for my cognitive modeling project, but I've got a good idea for my business management paper. I'm just not in the mood to socialize so I'm skipping out on the Jitney to the Manor house this year. Well, not like I talked much my freshman year, but I'm still not feeling it. So I'm going to go cook up some mac and cheese and watch another Kubrick flick (3.5 / 4), but my door will be open! If you take the initiative to talk to me I'll always talk back, I just might not actively seek you out. This is what being an introvert is all about, folks. I'm talking to my brother online, and he pointed me to the new version of America's Army. We'll have to play together when I get home. It's nice when "serving my country" consists of playing a video game the Army made, hehe. Mom is supposed to call tonight, too.

11/27/2002
So not productive. Carolyn IM distractions, lunch with Karen and Nel, discovered that mame.dk is up again, ping-pong blowout in AMS with Mikey, Chris, and Karen. Did a little Randy reading and came across this little bit...

Clarity && Pleasure -> Joy
Clarity && Pain -> Anger
Confusion && Pleasure -> Suprise
Confusion && Pain -> Fear
Confusion && Pain && High Arousal -> Panic
Confusion && Pain && Low Arousal -> Anxiety
Clarity && Pain && Past -> Regret

11/26/2002
People are afraid. Eventually, I'll learn this. Maybe not when Karen explains this to me, maybe not when I see a great movie about it, but eventually. In the mean time, I'm just going to ignore their poor attitudes and be friendly anyway. :) Too bad for them if they're misanthropes. Anyhow, I got a spiffy running trail map from Karen, intend to use it tomorrow. Talked to Clare, I believe I'll be getting into Bioinformatics. Yay wanting to learn for the sake of learning. Played ping-ping with Alexis. Did $12 worth of laundry. I wish pants knew how to fold. Poked at grabber UI a little.

11/25/2002
This is odd. I don't have anything immediately due. I'm slacking. w00t! I need to greet people with the right time of day. Said "good morning" at around 1pm. Anyhow, had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with some East Quaddies thanks to Kyle (dorm prez) and played ping-pong with Katie. She's from Sandwich. Haha, take that Breadloaf. :) Currently I'm just chillin', aww yeah. But my running crew[/meatwad] already left for break. Aww, sad. On the plus side I "discovered" several new tracks on my copy of Nine Inch Nail's Downward Spiral. See, I don't generally listen to music that loud. And the last 3 or 4 tracks are considerably quiter than the others. So I've never really heard them. Over the weekend there was a video for "Hurt" from a concert sitting on a lab compuer and it had some neat visuals, so I investigate what album the song is on. The one I already own, apparently. So I pop it in and crank it and there it is. How about that. Note: I have some strange imported CDs with missing songs and such so don't get too uppity. Speaking of imported CDs (like the censored one Cheryl got me when she was in Singapore), she e-mailed me back again already! Yay! It's so nice to be in touch with her again, she's good at disappearing. She tells me that she's quite into Counter-Strike and plays it at a cybercafe. Hehe, rock on. I also got an update on Joey from her.

11/23/2002
Slept in until... late. Went to Shaw's to buy instant Mac & Cheese for Thanksgiving breakfast/lunch and discovered a swimming pool in my car. I need to track down that leak. Parked uphill coming back and then watched Roger and Me (3 / 4 stars) with Kyle (yeah!) and proceeded to slack until dinner with Sara and told her what I really like about her - that she's friendly and approachable. I attempted to get work done after dinner, but then I got an e-mail from Cheryl!!! Haha, I missed my Malaysian *huggles* :) I finally settled down to do my American Business Management reading and then afterwards went looking for a suitable chess playing partner. Three rejections later, Kathy to the rescue, again! She's been a very dependable friend since I met Carolyn and her last year. Despite her claims of not being very good we played a very challenging and interesting two hour match which ended up with my king and rook chasing her king around the board until I finally forced her's into a corner.

11/22/2002
2 midterms: done. 1 exam: done. Neural net: training. Rock on. :) Womens ice hockey and Bowling For Columbine tonight. :) Bowling for Columbine = 4 / 4 stars. Ice Hockey beat Trinity 4-1. And, oh yeah, sketchy Heights party count = 1 :) Stayed like 5 minutes, made a loop around the dance floor, left. By the way, all of this was with Kyle. I just don't get to hang out with him enough anymore. Good times. Gotta take advantage of this monkey before he runs off and graduates. Will my inbox ever be empty again? I did it once this year. Maybe I can pull it off again over break?

11/21/2002
Lunch was too funny. I didn't think Becky would show and Peter found and sat with me. But eventually she showed. Anyhow, the America's Army gold CD came in the mail today. w00t! It's nice to have something tangible from my taxes.

11/20/2002

	WEDNESDAY

(I'm still confused from waking up early for the Leonids - just reminding myself what day it is.) The Mr. Sparkle Simpsons episode has a lot to offer.

11/19/2002
Yeah Leonids!

11/18/2002
Wrote Becky a letter inviting her to lunch.

11/17/2002
Woke up to the snow that will probably be sitting there for rest of winter. Comics at breakfast, worked like a monkey, swung by the art museum to see my beloved rodents in a snowstorm replaced by faculty art, dinner, worked like a monkey, read up on Linux 2.5, and went to bed. Kathy rocks, btw.

11/16/2002
Woke up early naturally, was in Mudd working by 7am. Worked until 4:30ish, but had a two hour or so break to go running which was nice.

11/15/2002
Visited a teaching of 151, CS lunch, school work. Then things got fun. I went to see Ron Green lecture on stem cell research with Michelle and had a lovely dinner with her afterwards. Lots of good conversation, the novelty of Foss, some guy spilling his milk. :) Afterwards I went to battle of the bands for just over 2 hours. I like the song selection of the first one, Stoic (from Bowdoin) the best, although their band name reminds me of Jane Eyre. Wasn't she alwasy describing people as "stoic?" Oh and in the downtime between dinner and the battle I made an adventure game of sorts.

11/14/2002
Busy busy busy. But I made time for some culture with Kyle and Meredith.

11/12/2002
Went way past quitting time to 11pm working on stuff. The end is near which means I'm hosed and have very little time to do all the cool stuff I want to do this semester. Marc's Dr. Seuss talk goes down the Monday before Thanksgiving break @ 11. I'm so there. Talked to Clare and him and Kate about grad school today. Hum. I'm thinking about bumping way out west. I also had a nice little chat with Adam (the one, the only, CS one) in the Street today and felt all trendy and hip and cool and such.

11/11/2002
Carolyn's my plant is starting to make a comeback. One of the short stems is in very good shape and it looks like one or maybe two of the longer branches will pull through. Probably 2/3 of the orange stalks will make it, too. In the Simpsons opening sequence last night they jumped the shark. Eh, it's been downhill since season 10 anyway.

11/10/2002
Dout dout dout... had an awesome lunch with Michelle and finished up the Randy reading and now I'm procrastinating studying for German by updating this thing from Mudd. Ha! I was very studious after dinner. But I still made time to play ping-pong with Peter.

11/09/2002
It was lovely outside today so while my laundry was in the dryer I read by the pond for a half hour or so. In short sleeves, too! Gorgeous. But the nice weather created a shortage of clothes hangers so I had to slap on the good old black Speakout.com polo and get my professional look on, yeah! Then I went to Foss with the partial crew and Carolyn's prospective before Carolyn and Brenden left for Rhode Island. Social sink or swim time. Checked the menus and Foss was looking good again so after an unsucessful attempt to persuade Kyle to join me wandered off alone only to fortunately run into Jocelyn, Meredith, and Sara, so I ate with them. But the music was really loud and I couldn't really hear conversation that well so I just started drifting and figured out why grabber wasn't working - because I had to go to 16-bit color for Counter-Strike to work. Duh. Jocelyn had a very interesting tidbit to share with us. When I go out into the Sun sometimes I sneeze. I've mentioned it to people and they say "Eh, it's just your allergies." except I'm not allergic to anything. Turns out it's beacause of this nifty little thing called photic sneeze reflex. Anyhow, after dinner I attempted to do the Randy reading but quickly gave up and watched The Iron Giant (4/4 stars of course and part of my DVD collection) with Kyle. And then I watched most of Ronin with Andres, Katie, Charles, Kris, and Chris before wandering off to play ping-pong with Jocelyn again. We played for over an hour without really noticing until Meredith came down. Couldn't get her to play, so I offered a deal to go running with her sometime if she'd play ping-pong with me. And then I stayed up playing Counter-Strike until 1am. Hehe. That whole 11pm bedtime thing ::out the window::. Meh, quite hours aren't until 1am on weekends anyway. Chris joined in this time and got thorougly trounced. Quality 2 on 2 action, though.

11/08/2002
Saw some crows ruffing up a seagull, got my BNL DVD (Barelaked Nadies) in the mail, CS lunch (quality! Marc has a fantastic claim about Dr. Seuss and programming!), did some work, went up in the attic of East Quad, and I'm just about to jet off to badminton! Word on the street is that Jocelyn plays a mean game of ping-pong and Meredith didn't seem opposed to watching Iron Chef (she's never seen it!) so we'll see how that goes. Yep, ended up playing ping-pong and discovering they're quite dorky (in a good way) and Sara also joined in for the Iron Chef action. Went for a little campus tour walk with Carolyn's prefrosh from Oregon, Gavin before the IC action. And then afterwards I stayed up until 1am playing Counter-Strike with Kris and Andres. Hehe. :)

11/07/2002
Today I had the hat trick going on with breakfast at Bobs, lunch at Dana (went with Meredith and sat with a cordial fellow named Adam), and dinner @ Foss. Did work, watched Monsters, Inc. (2.5 / 4 stars) courtesy of Mango, and went to bed. Zzzzz...

11/05/2002
Voting is sexy. Now let me tell you a tale about my trip to Foss for lunch. First, a little background. I think I've gone to Foss maybe a total of 10 times in 2.5 years. I read the menus and the Turkey Melt sounded delicious and I could go for a little snow walk, so I trudged over. Then I met the card lady that wouldn't scan my card. Why have her sit there if students are on the honor policy anyway? I could be scanning someone else's card for all she knows. Anyhow, I put that aside and went down to get food. There were no forks and they were temporirly out of sandwiches. The soup didn't appeal to me so it's time to find food I can eat with a knife and spoon. French fries! Anyhow, eventually I got the sandwich and it was very tasty, but the checker lady was still irking me.

On the way out I stopped and politely asked why she didn't scan my card. Instead of answering my question she replied, "Why, does it bother you?" to which I replied that it did and when she followed up with "And why is that?" I explained how I didn't think it was in the Colby's best interest to pay someone to sit there and do nothing. This got her all riled up and she started ad homing me and calling me lazy and how she's the office manager downstairs and does a lot of work around here. I explained that I was sorry she felt offended, but perhaps if she would be so kind as to answer my initial question I wouldn't of had to postulate that she was getting paid to sit there and do nothing. Turns out she has carpal tunnel and tendinitis and whatever else and apparently she's the only checker with special permission not to scan the cards. She went on about how some students prefer it because she doesn't spread the germs of 400 hands, which I agreeded was a good thing. Then I reminded her to vote and she said that of course she would after work and I wished her a nice day and left.

And then tonight I went to see Michael Kimmel speak. It was alright, but my geek senses started tingling when he talked about how we're just .com but other countries have .com.fr and such. Guess he had never heard of the .us top level domain. I called (*gasp*) Michelle 5 minutes before it started and she went with me. Oh and Meredith and Jocelyn sat with me at breakfast today.

11/04/2002
Carolyn detected that I'm not being as excited as I should be about the first snow of the season, and she's right. I think I'm being a monkey and letting work overwhelm me again. But it's not that bad. I think it's just the looming long-term stuff. Anyhow, tomorrow I'll get my vote on and that should give me a nice feeling of completeness. Got my camera back and Becky took a few picture of her door. Nifty, huh? She made it out of construction paper. Jay is offically my partner for machine learning & data mining, so that's good. Mmm tasty artificial neural nets. Bayesian learning sounds good, too. I need to do some research; a backpropagation ANN might be farther from modeling human cognition than I've been hoping, so I might switch it around again and do the Bayesian for Randy and ANN for Clare. Today I also rescued Carolyn's plant from certain death. I kept it alive all summer (it's very needy and needs lots of water and attention) and she just goes and gets all distracted and lets it wilt. So now I'm taking care of it.

11/03/2002
Yeah, today was pretty chill. Mango still has my camera, and when Becky came by looking to get a picture of her spiffy door thing I geeked on her and showed her Linux and grabber and told her about pan-and-scan. Hehe. Geeked on. I like my new little phrase.

11/02/2002
I managed to get Half-Life working (save a little sound problems) under WineX and played a few quality games with Andres. Then I went hunting for a ping-pong ball partner and after working my way down to the 1st floor I found Laura and we played. Ping-Pong is turning out to be quite an amazing catalyst for making conversation. I also geeked on Mango and told her about Tux and the Halloween Documents because she used this image to advertise our dorm viewing of The Exorcist without, well, knowing it was Tux's body. Oh, I almost forgot! Kyle's power supply fan died and I was helping him put in Radloff's old one when I heard a rumbling noise outside. As I crawled over to his window and peeked out I saw a motorcycle gang driving on the path next to Miller library. Seriously! It was wild. I think they may have cut all the way down from the road in front of hillside. Crazy stuff.

11/1/2002
Got stuck doing Dale work, played a nice game of ping-pong with Becky, watched Iron Chef with Torrey and Andres and finished up the night with a little Half-Life spectating.

10/31/2002
Boo!

10/30/2002
Today was a good day. Well, I don't really say I've had a bad day, (it's always better than living in the gutter) but today was a good day anyway. Caught up on some work, had time to do a little neural net research, and it was in general rather relaxing. I finished the night off playing a good game of ping-pong with Peter. Props to Karen for the ball :)

10/29/2002
I didn't have chance to turn on my computer last night until 10pm. Big cognitive modeling midterm today... Stammtisch heute Abend Bobs haunted house tonight :) It was awesome. We did it twice because the first time the mummy wasn't wrapped up yet. Random factoid: the British word for jail is "gaol." Tyre instead of tire is reasonable, but gaol?

10/27/2002
Bobs ran out of plates for dinner (yeah, I snagged the last one) and I mused over why no one was telling the guy behind the counter and instead just using the large black plastic bowls, or just standing there wondering "What's the hold up?" I should take a sociology class. Carolyn and Kathy sent me an amazing phone message that said "study monkey" over and over again.

10/26/2002
Watched The Blues Brothers with Jocelyn, Mango, and Meredith. You know that scene when they come in through the window of the ladies room at the ballroom and all the girls scream and run out? My female cohorts all verbalized that the shrieking is actually a rather spurious reaction. Alas, I was tired and didn't ask what their verisimilar reactions would be. But they all get points for speaking up. :) Anyhow, I pondered it a bit. Did Landis tell the extras how to act? If so, why wouldn't they speak up and offer a more plausible reaction?

10/24/2002
Bobs, noon oh six. ~your posse I have a posse :) But I fallen intothe habit of eating at 1 on -T-R- (get with it, posse!) I ate with math Sarah (not to be confused with some other Sara at dinner that thinks Radloff and I look alike. We got that yesterday at kafeestunde. Here's a quick rundown, though. Dark hair, light hair. Brown eyes, blue eyes. Short, tall. Wide, thin. Runs Windows, runs Linux. Okay, that last one wasn't fair because loaf's IBM GXP drive died, but come on, he knew it was coming. Jay gave me a nice little NN lesson and I returned the favor with how a compilier optimizes and assembly. I believe we'll be struggling through neural network backpropagation together.

10/23/2002
Mmmm sexy. Got my DVD player pumpin' 16x9 with the full 2.35 : 1 action going on. Took that with xawtv and I'm not sure how much it hosed the quality, but I definitely need to add a ratio thing to grabber soon. Today was a long and eventful day. Woke up early (couldn't get back to sleep) and had breakfast with Torrey. She was up all night working in Olin 323 on the CS 151 project. Nice :) She stayed the whole time I was eating even though she was done. Went to Wal-Mart with Carolyn to stock up on the Suave Skin Therapy action because I was very low and not being so generous with it and my hands were starting to crack and bleed. But anyhow, afterwards I talked to Scott for about a half hour and he said it's pretty likely that he could offer me a tech job this summer. :) Then went to kaffestunde and chilled before the book seminar. Odd social things include plotting how to suck a dormer into sitting with us and the "checking out" phenomena. Back to sexy Ronin chase scenes before I turn into a pumpkin @ 11.

10/21/2002
There was a girl that passed me by
She gave a smile but I was shy
and I looked down so down.
Yay Ben Folds Five. I have a lot of work to do. Which is what made this giant banana I got from Dana was so special to me today. I ate it walking from EQ back to Mudd after switching inventory. Nice brisk night out, had my nice fuzzy warm hat on, just munching on my banana and walking and not doing work. Quality. It's the little things, it really is.

10/20/2002
"It's so easy to make friends here." -- Overheard from a tall, attractive, and large-breasted female freshman. So naive. I have feeling that CS151 this semester is more difficult and less stricly policed than previous years and as such cheating is rampant.

10/18/2002
You learn something new every day...

template<typename O, typename I>
O conversion_cast(const I& rhs)
{
    stringstream ss;
    O output;

    if (!(ss << rhs) || !(ss >> output)) {
        // "is a number"
        throw invalid_argument("conversion_cast:  type wrong");
    }
    if (!(ss >> std::ws).eof()) {
        // "124 is a number"
        throw invalid_argument("conversion_cast:  extra input");
    }

    return output;
}

10/17/2002
Hello, chicken. This is the egg you came from. No, the egg was not necessarily laid by a chicken. This is me trying to get into blacksmithing. Dr. Hume is out of town but before he left (and vicariously through his wife while he's gone) I have been instructed to sign up, and then he will then authorize me. But, of course, I can't sign up until he authorizes me. Is it 1 yet? I want my Bobs grilled cheese. I picked up High Output Management from the library after having trouble finding it. I always have trouble finding stuff in the libraries, except for the movies. And it's nice out today, so much for my prediction. Had a fabulous lunch with the lovely Becky and went to a talk by Dr. Hinrich Lehmann-Grube, former mayor of Leipzig, titled "12 Years United Germany - A Story of Success and Failure." After dinner did some work on my long term cs projects (the form editor in Netbeans is nice) and afterwards ate Brazilian food and listened to Fernando and his wife play some songs and talk about Brazil. Very nifty. If only learning was always that much fun. Sexy EQ dorm events. The hall staff this year rocks. Karen is going to be my mom this weekend (parents weekend) so looks like I'll be over there for lunch on Saturday.

10/16/2002
I was having a pretty lousy day. Feeling overwhelmed by work, mostly. Had dinner alone to reflect a little, played Airburst and dominated the high score list with 25 *pinky* million points, then got down to business and did the Randy project. Ah. I feel much better. Accomplishment! When I got back Kris and I played Counter-Strike for a bit in his room. Marc wasn't around to give back the C++ book so here's another nifty snippet of C++ code.

template<typename O, typename I>
O conversion_cast(const I& rhs)
{
    stringstream ss;
    ss << rhs;
    O output;
    ss >> output;
    return output;
}


...


int n = conversion_cast<int>(argv[1]);

10/15/2002
Did work, had the door for dinner at Dana held open for me by a cute girl, watched The Royal Tenenbaums (3/4 stars), and cut a build of grabber for the first time in just under a month. Blasted not having free time. Funny how I can say that after having 3 days off with no work at all :) Oh and I almost forgot. Today when I was walking back from lunch at Dana I had the distinct feeling that I wouldn't feel warm outside again. The wind was just cold enough to be annoying and the Sun just a tad too weak. A feeling like if perhaps I lie in a depression the wind will miss me and the Sun would comfortably warm me, but just barely. Ah yes, winter is here. Or at least that's my prediction.

10/14/2002
Slept in until a bit before 9 today and barely made breakfast. But I was quite on time for my meeting with Dr. Hume in the Spa. Yep, I'll be taking blacksmithing for Jan Plan. Rock! It's all about connections and I was dropping names left and right like Carolyn and Karen. Afterwards I visited Karen and she suggested I stop by the conference in Cotter Union. It was the New England Area Physical Plant Department Annual Conference (NEAPPDAC) or some absurdly long acronym like that. I talked to the fellow from SchoolDude.com for about half an hour and asked the hard questions. Then some other fellow whos daughter used to go here noticed I was a student and asked what my major was and blew my cover. Fooey. Important computer marketing concept people: don't make potential customers afraid of lock-in. Did a little HW, chopped wood w/ Peter. Single buck = hard. Ouhhh there's a Barenaked Ladies DVD coming out on November 5th. *puts in pre-order* Awesome. After dinner I put in a quality 2:30 on maintenance.

10/13/2002
The STL is sexy. Consider the following snippet...

	vector<int> foo;
	foo.reserve(10000);
	foo.push_back(0);
	foo.push_back(1);
	cout << "size = " << foo.size() << " capacity = " << foo.capacity() << endl;


	// 1.  temporay unnamed vector init to hold same contents as foo
	// 2.  call swap to exchange the interals of foo with the temporary vector
	// 3.  temp vector goes out of scope, taking old large buffer with it,
	//     and i'm left with the correctly sized foo
	vector<int>(foo).swap(foo);


	cout << "size = " << foo.size() << " capacity = " << foo.capacity() << endl;

10/12/2002
Ran for 28 minutes, missed breakfast, programmed, watched The Green Mile (3/4 Stars - too much implausibility for a serious movie) after Jessica randomly invited me because I had my door open, went to bed. Dinner @ the house of Oh tomorrow w/ Radloff.
Do you know what rocks house? When it's a long weekend and after I jump in bed and the brain won't shut off I can appease it and get up and write down everything I need to. So all that fun stuff above, it's cool and all, but I'd trade it in a second for having a best friend again. I miss my Sarah. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go get my programming on.

10/11/2002
Fall Break. Let the programming and running begin!

10/9/2002
I'm glad I've set aside a nice chunk of sleeping time. Allow me to explain. I go to bed at 11pm, but I don't have any obligations until 10am the next morning every day of the week. This comes in handy when I stay up late thinking about things until 1am, like last night. After working some things out, I set the alarm for 9am and fell asleep. I work up around 8am anyway, but it's cool to know that that extra hour was there if I needed it and I'd still have time to shower and eat breakfast before Deutschstunde. I went to Stammtisch(sp?) last night and it was a blast, aber I was in Eile so I didn't bliben too long. Hehehe. I always think of a blob. Bobs Grilled Cheese tomorrow @ 1:45.

10/8/2002
Cognitive Modeling is very cool and I'm learning a lot, but Randy is a slave driver. Crazy amounts of reading. Carolyn and I played Crazy Taxi last night :) She wasn't convinced of it's crazyness, though.

10/7/2002
What a splendid day. The morning air was cool and crisp, the fall colors are out, a quick rain gave the leaves on the ground little sparkling dots, and there was a magnificent sunset to boot. I also enjoyed the randomly blinking light above the Treworgy fire escape.

10/6/2002
Last night I couldn't shut off my brain and get to sleep; I need a nice toggle switch. And a tail so I can mouse and type at the same time, but that's beside the point. Woke up, breakfast, quick walk by the pond (saw a fairly large fish), off to Olin. Got there around 10:05 and noticed it was kind of dark looking in there. Rounded the corner and while heading down the street caught the eye of a girl sitting down and said, "It's not open yet, right?" and we had a quick little exchange about the sadness of our being there too early. Then I tried going up to the lab to do Randy reading, but it was extra hot in there (I guess the A/C is broken), so I went back down. Get this, I made conversation with the girl, Libby, until the student came to open it up. Take that, chickeness! I've managed to have 4 meals in a row with Miranda, Prager, and Emma. Funny how just when my usual crew goes to Boston for the weekend I happen to have meals at the same time as the old crew. Have I mentioned that I have a really neat idea for a new video game? Well, I do, it's called "Heist", but anyway. Tonight Carolyn will be holding me to that agreement we made to go to the ballroom dancing class on campus, eep! Oh I forgot to mention that at breakfast the elitist Christian table behind me were talking about running. One of them metioned the "This is the stupidest sport ever, why am I do doing this?" aspect. I was wearing my "Why?" shirt :) I can't wait until Fall Break so I can get my running on, yeah! Tonight I'm working on my Cognitive Modeling assignment and lucky me, RoboCop is on AMC. I think I need to do me some studying of Murphy's or ED 209's model. Or something. Somehow it's been edited down to TV-14, should be interesting. Well, the enforcement droid just blew the guy away and it was very gruesome. Bad cognitive model... or AI, rather. Just noticed a goof in RoboCop. When they're rallying up the gang to go hunt down RoboCop, one of the guys bangs on the 6000 SUX's roof, and the rearview mirror falls off.

10/5/2002
I chatted with Mike a bit and finally got around to taking a picture of the gundam I built. It's only at 35% quality, but the sexy part is that everything was done with grabber (snapping, labeling, uploading via scp), boo-yeah! At 7 I went around offering apples to everyone that had their door open. That would be a whole 5 people or so. :( Okay yeah so it's Saturday night, but wouldn't you think that a good number of the people living in a chem free dorm would hang out and do chemfree things? Maybe? As expected, Lillian didn't know my name. Tsk tsk, after all those times I greeted her last year. And HEAT was on FX tonight so I slid in my DVD to do a little quality comparison. Pan-and-scan sucks! Grabber sexly already goes to beyond 480 width so the S-Video input from my DVD player was able to fully (I think) fit the widescreen in. So now I need to add a 800x600 monitor resoltion with black bars to fit the 768x480 love unsquished. It's going to be awesome! :) Bedtime...

10/4/2002
This morning I woke up early to get a little last minute studying in for Deutschstunde and the magic of my black and green outfit became apparent when I was fortunate enough to sit with Meredith from down the hall at breakfast. Take that, game! I couldn't believe besitzen was a regular verb, but I stuck with it and think I did alright on the quiz. A well attended CS lunch followed and 3 hours of Dale work. Had a very brief dinner with Michelle, programmed, read the next two chapters of the dorm book, poked at the Internet, wrote a JNI tutorial, and watched Chen whoop the challenger on Iron Chef. Possibly apple picking (I don't think we'll go if it rains) and dinner @ Karen's house tomorrow. Carolyn and Kathy and Brendan went to some Unitarian Universalists thing near Boston so sadly I've just been poking around alone.

10/3/2002
I didn't do any work today, but that doesn't mean I didn't accomplish anything. I had a lovely grilled cheese at Bobs just like I do every Thursday. Despite the lack of Colby-Jack cheese, it was still quite tasty and I was fortunate enough to find and sit with Becky. I asked her how she was doing when I sat down, and then again shortly after as I was struggling to come up with something to say. But after lunch (and a fair amount of shooting the breeze with Marc), Randy proposed an explanation in Cognitive Modeling class that I liked quite a bit. Everything we observe goes into long term memory, but we're only able to recall things if we know how to, which is greatly facilitated by having multiple paths/connections to it. So I asked a shallow question commonly used as a greeting so it quickly got lost and I asked again. If I were to have asked a more meaningful question, it would have conceivably been easier for me to access because of its uniqueness. Well, not uniqueness in that there are no other connections, but because I would have started relating it as an interesting tidbit. This got me thinking about how it would be neat to have a relationship filled with deeper communication and just totally cutting out the beating around the bush layer. I don't think I could find anyone to play along and honestly answer "So, how are you really feeling." after just meeting them, but it'd be neat. After class I took a nap (really tired, forehead feels like it's packed with meat), somehow managed to have dinner for an hour and half, and was quick-witted enough to smile at the girls down the hall on the way up the stairs. Sadly, they didn't sit with me at breakfast today. I need to build a sign that says "I'm in your dorm and amicable, how many more reasons do you need to sit with someone?" And for those of you that don't understand the rules of the game, if I'm already sitting, I can't get up and move over to sit with them. I'm only allowed to initially sit with them. Presumably they could realize how sexy I am and move over after sitting, but that probably won't happen. See the post below. :) Karen and Brian claim this is all very similar to the cartoon Reboot. Mmm cartoons... if only Colby had Cartoon Network!

10/1/2002
Been working like a monkey on Machine Learning & Data Mining project. Breakfast was noteable. I was sitting with Kyle and two dormers sat at the other end of the 8 person table. But they Kyle had to leave. Got my courage up and asked if I could slide over and join them so I did. Jen and Melissa, from the triple at the end of the hall. Melissa is a Math major so I see her around the 4th floor of Mudd and that went alright. Yay attempt at dorm unity. Gabe (of Penny-Arcade fame) posted his thoughts about Golf games and I felt compelled to write a quick note about my love of Neo Turf Masters to which he replied "I agree, that is a great game :)" ::huggles his year one book:: Oh and today was also Kathy's birthday so we all went to Pad Thai, woot! I've been forgetting that all day, eesh. I had already made plans to dine with Michelle (haven't seen her in a long time and she was in my dream last night) when Carolyn reminds me, d'oh! Anyhow, off to bed.

9/27/2002
Yesterday Carolyn went with me up to Bangor and we hit Toys-R-Us, woah! Downey missed CS lunch, but I saw him after the play.

9/26/2002
There's a rumor going around that Allen Downey will be at the CS lunch tomorrow.

9/25/2002
I keep forgetting the fun things I want to post. Chipmunks are very cool. I had never seen one in person until COOT and now, well, it's sad when I go back to Maryland and there aren't any. Not to say squirrels aren't cool, but chipmunks are just much braver and faster and cuter. Squirrels just have the hypnotic tail. I love how computers make me feel smart. The other day I didn't know how to convert something to log₂ so I hit Google and view source of the Javascript page that comes up and figure it out. Just log10(1024) / log10(2) and you're set. I'm enjoying my 3 new CDs - Frou Frou's Details, Fugazi's 13 Songs, and Dashboard Confessional's Swiss Arm Romance. Dale gave Kate and I new work so hopefully soon I'll be able to bone up on my DVD collection with Tron. Speaking of movies, the videos in Miller are out on shelves and a lot easier to browse so I've slighty updated the list. I've been paried up with another random partner for Machine Learning. Last night Carolyn picked out Private Dicks: Men Exposed (4743) but was too embarrassed to check it out so I did. Then Kathy and Jamie were acting like 14 year olds and off flirting instead of being mature and watching it in the lounge. Okay, so I'm being a littl mean, but come on, I thought it was interesting how all the "euphemisms" for masturbation took the form of [violent verb] [definite article] [noun]. They said they'd watch it, just not in the lounge. Today was the first meeting of our book seminar and I totally geeked out with knowing the value of beauty (1.618). The host was quite prolix and I didn't get much of a chance to say anything. Tonight was also the first night I wasn't done studying by 9pm. Meh. :) I'm glad I stopped to chill, I'll just finish reading tomorrow. Again I Go Unnoticed has a nice peppy beat. Oh, remember that lock I brute forced last May? I used it to lock up some other locks that were lying around the Mudd Lab. =) At lunch today (I went at 11, still bumping around a lot) one of those damn Christians from my dorm didn't sit with me again and instead chose to sit with himself and (presumably) god. I hope his Jesus was smiting him for not trying to spread the word and convert me. Am I just too much of a heathen to be saved? Shouldn't he get extra points for converting me? Flarf. But Miranda sat with me and brought along a nice girl from down the other end of the third floor I had never met before, Laura. She's from Jersey and when I asked "What exit?" she replied with a laught "7A" to which I stated "Mmm, Great Adventure." and there was laughter abound and a confused little Chicagoian wondering how it was really possible to discern where someone in Jersey lives based on their exit.

9/21/2002
Today was the day I saw Dale roller skate. It was glorious. He lit the Augusta roller-rink on fire with his lighting fast dance moves and then destroyed it with repeated waves of smooth moves. Then I came back, had dinner alone, programmed, upped my party count to 2 by visiting Michelle's shindig for a whole 5 minutes, and went to bed. Becky seems to have gone home for the weekend. No guts to go and introduce myself to friendly looking girl down that hall whos eye I keep catching in the dining hall. Blargh. Oh, and last night some drunken idiot pulled over next the the pond and fell asleep with his car still on. So randomly it would rev all the way up to the limiter. Oh and the dorm had cartoons and cereal this morning and I watched some quality Sponge Bob Square pants.

9/20/2002
Endlich, after 3 weeks, I've solved the problem of calling scp from grabber to upload webcam images. *phew* And I got a 92% on my German exam. And because I'm a wet blanket, I stayed home to do that while C&K went to the beach for a dinner picnic. Well, not really. Programming *is* my relaxing time alone thing, and I haven't had a chance to do it much lately.

9/18/2002
Had my first German exam today. I'll let you know how it turned out tomorrow, but I think I did alright. I lost my appetite yesterday at lunch and haven't really gained it back :/ I'm going to get to bed early tonight. Only one week until the book seminar starts, I'm excited.

9/14/2002
Tonight I went to see a juggler by the name of Mark Nizer. He was a good juggler, but his comedy wasn't so hot. Too many mime jokes. One mime joke is okay, a whole routine, not so much. I'm suprised he didn't break out the Polish jokes. I also finally got around to not being shy and went down the hall to visit Becky. See below stories of being a chicken and lunch. She never checked into the fish thing and I think it's gone now. The sleek black fish in the tank across the way and down a bit got WAY big but it's still very sexy. I invited her to join Carolyn, Kathy, Jamie, Brenden, and myself but she opted to write her roomates instead. Her new roommate this year, Aspen, wasn't around. Perhaps I'll build up courage and wander down there this weekend and I can meet her.

9/13/2002
Karen rocks. :) We got slurpees then went to her house and her perpetual boyfriend, Chris, pulled out he pellet gun and I talked it up with my roomates from last year while the chicken cooked. After I playing with a Gundam for a long time (I want to buy one now) and checking out some CDs we ate and talked until around 11ish. Karen and I left Colby 4:30ish, right after I found a good bit of info on the gravity stone. Awesome day.

9/12/2002
Saw Spider-Man, 3.5 / 4 stars. Only $2.

9/7/2002
Today was very interesting. At 8:30 I woke up to the sound of someone knocking (for a long time) then someone using the phone and I could hear them type in the keys and then when they were done the phone down the hall ring. They called again 3 or 4 more times and the phone down the hall rang along with it. Odd. Then I had breakfast and worked w/ Kate for Dale for 3 hours, then had a lame lunch at Dana (salad bar was void of everything except lettuce) and went over to do the Woodsman thing with Peter. That was cool! First I tried to throw logs between two metal poles (I sucked, couldn't heave it all the way), then I built a fire (meh) then I threw an ax (awesome! now I can kill someone with an ax from 20 feet), then I split some wood (I was pretty good at it, but it's not a ompetition), and finally I did an h-chop (standing on log, cutting in half, very cool) which gave me blisters and made me really tired, but I had good lines, so then I quit and came back. Campus BBQ happened a bit later, watched Full Metal Jacket in the lounge, then geeked out and I *think* got the shm soltion to work. I fired up some boob-tybe and was watching the US Open when some girls came up and said "Want to play manhunt?" so I said yes. They rounded up 12 or so people total and we played a round. Then people got bored so we kinda broke up and I went with some to the foam party then we kinda broke up again and I went with even less back to the dorm and it all just kinda fizzled out and here I am. Since it's almost midnight and it's quiet (but hot, blech), I'm off to bed.

9/06/2002
I'm waiting for quiet hours so this whole loudness thing stops and I can get some sleep. Read a good 100 pages in 100 years of solitude today and worked for Dale for 2 hours to boot! The whole shared memory thing didn't work for wrapping scp so take 3 (take 1 was pipes) with message passing tomorrow. I put the Simpsons poster up on the door so hopefully that'll attract a visitor of some sort. Everyone went out drinking tonight so I've just been chilling alone with my door open and no one has really stopped by except for Peter. I showed him grabber and he was impressed and thought it was cool how I actually get to display what I've learned by being a CS major. Oh, I dropped my philosophy minor today, yay! A diverse schedule rocks.

9/03/2002
I'm back at Colby blah blah long drive blah blah cool people blah blah hot women blah blah nice room blah blah. Anyhow, I had a bit of a revelation while brushing my teeth after dinner. It all started when I was walking back from the activities fair by my lonesome and saw an attractive, wealthy, and somewhat petite former EQer walking towards the fair with a rather large jockular(sic) looking fellow. "Of course," I thought to myself, "that's exactly the type of guy I knew she would hook up with." A strong guy that can protect her between long bouts of going out with the guys and doing other such things that annoy her to no end. Anyhow, I backgrounded it and finished admiring the lovely Maine surroudings. After getting back I went to brush my teeth and it hit me that I'm never really outward about what I'm looking for in a partner. Well, not that I'm going to be that eloquent under pressure or anything, but in short, I like someone that's smart and witty (but not annoyingly too witty like bad sitcoms) and can engage me in a descent conversation about something worthy, or just make me laugh about it. But the thing is, I always just mull around quietly in the corner. Like earlier in the day I was joke poking around in Carolyn's room while she was unpacking and helped her hang a tall light. I didn't really proffer any good discussion points or... anything. I just kinda hung out waiting for her to come up with something good to say, just like I always do. So I'm thinking maybe I should form a small list of interesting topics of converation and often throw them around. I can't think of anything good off-hand, but something like "I recently heard 49% of Americans say the 1st Amendment goes too far." or "Prove God." or something of that nature. All you have to do is say one interseting thing to me and I'm all yours. Disclaimer: well, and I have to agree with it or be okay with agreeing to disagree. The stand out example in my memory is standing in a circle of chit-chatty people and looking at a girl in the circle, she was sitting down and kinda off to the side and upon making eye contact with her she said "I'm anti-social and proud of it." Instant identification. I sat right down next to her with a big smile and we proceeded to talk furiously (comparatively). It didn't work out (turns out she wasn't just anti-social but a misanthrope), but in general, that's what I'm talking about. I need to do that more. So far I've just been relying on people to use "vibes" to figure out that I'm a good match but that just ain't working. Maybe I suck because I don't act on it or maybe they suck because they don't or maybe they just don't get it. I dunno. Like there was a guy at the MD/DC/VA Ars meet that looked like my good friend Mike and it was just like *kapow vibe* but he ended up being one of the few people I didn't say anything too. Silly me.

8/29/2002
I don't have hair... dunt dunt dunt dun dunt. I don't have hair dunt dunt dunt dun dunt. :) My new glasses seem to be in order as does my purilens system and my vehicle and I got into the american business managment class I wanted (see 7/20/2002), w00t! Happy day. :)

8/27/2002
Not being able to call exec from a thread sucks. But I get to play with Emily tomorrow while I try to come up with a workaround. :)

8/26/2002
Well, I've finally done it. 20020826 is over 20,000 lines long. But on the down side, the compile time has jumped to a minute and 46 seconds which has become an annoyance when I accidentally clean the project. :) But the separate files build pretty quickly and the link is snappy too so I don't think it'd seem bad for a user. Anyway, after 4 weeks FedEx is still dicking me and hasn't paid me. More on that later, but the plus side is I've left and I've got a whole week to hack on grabber like a monkey before returning to Colby and (hopefully) a social life.

8/22/2002
21 is plenty old. Okay, so I can't rent a car, meh.

8/20/2002
I am pleased with the video pipeline. But I am not satisfied, for I can't get it to run faster than 15fps. A full 30fps victory will be mine. But for now I'm enjoying a steady and reliable 15fps. UPDATE: Well I figured out a way to bump it to 20fps. And just now it's reading 30fps. w00t! But it doesn't seem to be sharing frames like it should be. But still, I think I've got it.

8/19/2002
One method call to rule them all! Guess who stayed up late trying to make things not suck and didn't succeed, yet?

8/18/2002
One of these days I'll get the video pipeline for grabber right...

8/17/2002
Had a lot of fun chilling with Mike watching Simpsons and going to CompUSA. LCD monitors are intriguing...

8/16/2002
FedEx didn't pay me, again. That's twice now... *growl*

8/15/2002
Got a super-nice postcard from Kathy today.

8/13/2002
I've been programming like a fiend lately.

8/11/2002
Servers that don't use SO_REUSEADDR by default = teh lose. But on the plus side, I fixed a known bug in grabber that's over 6 months old (see my entry for 6/27/2002 - that was just an attempt to fix, I've ignored it much longer).

8/10/2002
::sings:: Roommate, roommate, I found out who my roommate is. Adam R. Baddeley. I hope he doesn't suck :) Knowing how to use ph is teh win!

8/6/2002
Today I finished reading The Mythical Man Month and I came across an absolutely absurd comment in it. Chapter 18 is basically a handy quick reference of bullet point proposition set forth in the book, and comments in square brackets were added for the 20th anniversary edition. For example, "The only reasonable candidate for system programming today is PL/I. [No longer true.]" which is an entirely appropriate addition. But here's the ludicrous comment: "A team of two, with one leader, is often the best use of minds. [Note God's plan for marriage.]" Uhm, hello? Why after 20 years (the 2nd edition was published in 1995) did he feel the need to interject such esoteric idealism? Welcome to the 90's, pal. "Man marry woman, make slave." is way gone, no matter what your god tells you.

7/31/2002
I got out of work early today, made some food, and ploped down on the couch for some television. While flipping around I stopped on Headline News to hear about how tuition was going up for state colleges (Texas A&M +8.5%) and saw at the bottom of the screen in the little ticker that some Men vs. Women brain thing was going to be on ABC at 10. I was so there for it. Brief summary: chicks brains' screw them. Females only did slightly better in vocabulary stuff, but they don't know how to draw a bike, they think crying for someone to help them is the best way to solve a problem, and, horrifyingly, they don't know how gravity works! Estrogen imbalance also makes them more susceptible to depression and autoimmune diseases. Rough life. Time to accept it and ditch the chick logic (an oxymoron, they do whatever they feel like based on their emotions at the time and then try to rationalize it later) and not rely on other people to take care of you. It's also interesting to note that the commercials were very woman oriented; birth control, band-aid's, bladder control, and aspirin. Nothing like settling in for a TV special on how your sex sucks, I guess. Silly women.

7/28/2002
The past two days have been very productive in the grabber department. I learned a new trick in Qt's UI designer and was able to remove some invisible frames I was using to control layout. I also generated a missing/lost widget (server monitor) and added that to the source. But just before that, a giant hand swooped down and slapped me in the forehead and went "webcam!" so I cooked up a little webcam do-hickey widget. I'd like to keep it simple (read: small) but I think it's going to need a little more functionality that's not hidden behind the Configure... button. Anyway, it's currently hot as a monkey out even though the Sun went down a long time ago. Damn humidity, no one likes you, go away. But I also did more calking around my leaky sunroof (I got drenched on the way to my FedEx orientation yesterday) so I guess the heat helped it cure mega-fast. I also gave a listen to my entire BNL collection today. I need more! :) *mutters about having to wait until April/May for the next album*

7/25/2002
FedEx finally called back! So tomorrow at 4pm I'll go "interview" for the 5pm-11pm shift and I think get to watch what happens and *hopefully* start on Monday. Yes! In the mean time I've been slacking and playing the fabulous golf game Neo Turf Masters instead of being a productive member of society.

7/24/2002
Added support for grabbing to a PNG in grabber. Lossless codecs suck. :)

7/23/2002
Today my dad wanted my brother and I to help him warez Office 2000. I told him he's just going to have to bend over and take it up the ass from Gates, or install GNU/Linux. I guess a lot of people are just sadistic and enjoy having "the man" (read: Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, MPAA) directly or indirectly control something they've purchased (in this case PC hardware). Perhaps computers are just below that magical price point where people won't take abuse with aplomb. You won't take it from the guy that built your house that you *have* to use his special brand of indoor plants or from Ford that you *have* to use their special brand of inferior tires. Make my DVD have pink lines and my CD not work in a standard Red Book player or be forced to pay a premium on inferior hardware so I can lick my computer screen or pay ludicrous prices for insecure, proprietary, buggy, closed source software, OK! The way I see it is you can either 1) continue to live your life being someone's bitch 2) break the law and be someone's bitch in an 8x10 cell 3) make the man your bitch and drive down his precious over-valued stock until he starts to respect you, the customer.

7/22/2002
Why is it so difficult to make a UPS work with my box? APC sucks. Just like Adaptec and Intel, you're paying more money for an inferior product because you've heard of the name before. Tekram and AMD, baby. Anyway, their weak battery must consist of a few D batteries held together with tin foil and chewing gum; the thing can't support my computer let alone my monitor. It could barely spin the blades on the fan I plugged into it just to see how lame it was. MGE on the other hand is dead sexy and can support my rig. However, their software has decided to stop working since I last checked in and I think I'll have hack at some 3rd party software which does work. And lirc is behing difficult, too. Blah.

7/20/2002
Colby tuition for this year is $37,500 yet I still can't get into the American Business Management class I want as a Junior. Totally weak.

7/19/2002
Went to Mike's and hung out with Brian, Jonny, Dave, Dan, Jenny, and Marie. Never met the two girls before, J is w/ J. Mike's dad was watching Black Hawk Down and it looked quite good. My hands smell all girly from the soap Kerri has in the bathroom. After ripping at grabber like a madman I've come up with a suitable video pipeline for grabber. But ugh, if only the frames came out of the device in RGB order.

7/13/2002
WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is not an emulator, it's the sexiest piece of software on my computer! I've tried and forgotton about WINE twice before. The first time Winamp was blue, but solitare worked alright. The second time Winamp worked, but Red Alert wouldn't install. This time, Half-Life and CS 1.5 installed and ran perfectly. Sometimes it's glitchy getting the OpenGL window to line up right and take keyboard focus, but when it does oh man, SEXY! I think I'm going to have to play all the way through Half-Life again, this time on difficult. Great game. I also tried to install America's Army, but the installer was in some weird executable format wine didn't recognize, so I'll just have my bother zip up the dir installed by it and send it to me. Oh... wait... it needs GameSpy, too. Nevermind, GameSpy is too wretched to even run on my sweet Linux box. Guess I'll just wait for the in-game browser. I also got the offical word that my golf club gig is being pushed back a week. Yay, more programming time!

7/11/2002
The Pragmatic Programmer rocks! It was incredibly nice outside today so during my usual "sit on the front stoop and be outside for a few minutes" trip I decided to grab the book and sit under a tree in the front yard and read for a bit. I never did make it to 7-11 to get a free slurpee. Later I played some America's Army (which rocks the house, I was owning the MILES training) and tried to code in labeling images support into grabber inbetween commercials on The Man Show.

7/10/2002
Today I was lazy and didn't go running. :)

7/09/2002
Went out with Laura for pizza, yay! She brought her new boyfriend, Greg, with her (apparently he wanted to check me out like I was going to have my way with her or something???) but he knew what Linux was so he gets points. :) It was kinda odd because, you know, I don't know him and I wanted to catch up with Laura so it seemed like it was just her and I talking the whole time. I tried to involve him somehow but they split soon after the check came. *shrug* After Bertucci's I went to Borders and bought Peopleware, The Mythical Man-Month, and The Pragmatic Programmer

7/05/2002
The A/C died last night. So I was dying all day. "Kevin no function well A/C without." Then at 6 I went to the orientation for the golf course job. Saw a fox, a bunny, and many birds. It's a nifty course very in nature. When I got back I went running for a slightly painful 30 minutes and had a nice 13 minute cool down walk. My abs are still angry at me from Tuesday but I can seeeeeee themmmm. I also talked to Miranda (first time all summer) and when I ran out of questions I told her that she'd have to come up with something if she wanted to talk anymore :) Eventually she told me about her new car and ran off. I surfed Ars for a bit, and here it is 10:45. I'm going to go make food and wait for the Simpsons to come on @ 11. It's supposed to go down to 60 tonight so the goal is to trap a whole lot of cold air and hope it lasts until Monday when the guy is coming to fix the A/C.

7/04/2002
Stack overflows suck. I wasted a day trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. Up until 2am last night. Blah. "SIGSERV" well, duh, that's when it's my fault. But if you run out of stack space you need to tell me that. Ideally, anyway. I'll have to do some research now. Oh and there was a disappointing lack of quality TV today aside from AMC's Indiana Jones marathon.

7/03/2002
Went to Borders to check out some books. It was 107 out today so I put off my run until 9:30 and I missed Southpark. :( But I had a lovely 25 minute run and 11 cool down walk back to my house.

7/02/2002
Did 100 sit-ups, programmed, watched The Iron Giant and cried because it was so good - 4 / 4 stars.

7/01/2002
Went running, programmed.

6/28/2002
Yeah... that whole refreshing ninja windows thing. It's too much nasty hack bloat code. The events don't seem to carry enough info to explain where they came from and I can't cleanly ignore the events from the global refresh so oh well. I left a TODO and that's that. Blah. Way to waste a solid day of coding time poking at it. Back to motion capture.

6/27/2002
Fixed some bugs in grabber today. Well, one isn't really a bug, it's just a lack of accommodating for other programs that screw up the V4L settings. I mean, who screws up the video picture palette? There's only one friggin page of documentation, read it! I've often seen people fill in the video_mbuf struct only to later ignore it when doing the mmap. Anyway, I also throttled the refreshing. No more dragging windows around and sitting back to enjoy the thing deal with all the repaints. I also made sure to always redraw windows that get dragged over the overlay, even if they're not there anymore when the timer fires. xawtv doesn't do that and sometimes leaves ugly windows lying around. Yay ego boost of grabber doing the right thing. Maybe I'll cook up a fix for xawtv later. Anyhow, maybe tomorrow I'll figure out how I want motion capture to work. Oh and social life wise I talked to Carolyn and Sarah today. Yay!

6/25/2002
Stupid AVI format. I finally got it all worked out after being mislead by some bad documentation. The solution was to just look at the headers (in more depth, I already was) of other .avi files and see what's going on. Blah. So it turns out that Windows doesn't support MJPG decoding. Windows users have to pay for a codec. Ridiculous! How hard would it be for Micros~1 to just use the frigging Independent JPEG Group's free library to decode the frames? Internet Explorer uses it. Heck, even I use it! Blah! But anyway, xanim and aviplay can both play them and I'm targeting grabber at GNU/Linux users first so whatever. Job hunting tomorrow. My last tech lead ran out today. I'm going to FedEx and a golf course. Sleep now.

6/24/2002
Stupid AVI format. So complex. I can get avifile and xanim to mostly recognize my from scratch AVI file. They both seem to want an index even though the spec doesn't require one. Hum. Of course spec and popular practice could be wildy different. Spent a long time on that whole thing today, but I came up with a design of gluing the bits together. Just gotta glue the right ones in the right place. :) Sleep now. Find job tomorrow.

6/23/2002
Ars MD/DC/VA meet was teh win! Pics I took are here and group photo is here. (I'm second from the left) I'll update with details later and a link to pics everyone else took as they get developed and posted and such.

6/20/2002
Fixed a bug in grabber which I introduced yesterday, didn't run, researched the .avi file format, watched a 4h10m movie on AMC, Once Upon a Time in America. Ehhh... I'm going to be really generous and give it 2 / 4 stars I'm kind of a sucker for long slow movies. The plan is to wake up early tomorrow and watch Team USA go up against the Germans in the World Cup. Game starts at 7am. That should give me time to hydrate and go running afterwards.

6/19/2002
Woke up still quite sore from my run on Monday so I've put off running again. Heheh. Instead I spent some quality time with my new love, Generation Gap. It works so well. Along the way I found out that the Qt 3.0 designer will import 2.0 .ui files but not export them. So I had to redo the most complicated dialog. Blargh. But woah, I didn't have to change any code that calls the widgets. Well, until I started refactoring RemoteControl's interface because it was so lame. But didn't have to touch the code calling the options dialog. Mmmmm... my source code is so much sexier now. I'll have to check out how KBattleship does its .ui trick, maybe it's the same, but I looked at it before and it didn't jump out at me. I also tried Vanilla Coke today. It's awful, IMHO. Want to try it yourself? Here's how to make it: take a bottle of coke and pour some vanilla extract into it. That's it. Be sure to put just enough to make it sickening but not too much or else the flavor will last the entire bottle. Cherry Coke still remains my carbonated beverage of choice.

6/18/2002
Worked on filling out forms all day today. Boring. Did some e-mailing to make things interesting. I had trouble getting to bed because my attempt at some "nice relaxing reading" before bedtime got me all hyped up and wild. I found a new pattern. Generation Gap. We're in love. MMmmmmm...

6/17/2002
I woke up at a reasonable hour (I've been trying to sleep 1am->9am) and went running for 35 minutes, woo-ho! Ah. It felt so good. Had that nice feeling that I've accomplished something all day long.

6/11/2002
A very fun and exciting day! At 1 I met the co-founder of the cCC, Kenneth for lunch in Bethesda. He's a awesome guy. We had lunch at a yummy Mexican place and I ordered a lime buritto. Except it was a little too chock-full of lime cream. But not bad overall. Then he gave me a tour of his company's nifty content management system. We breifly discussed the prospect of more hanging out and going to some Chucky Cheese for adults place like Jillians but my meter was running out of time and my geek social skills were rapidly deteriorating so instead I offered to come back in a month or so. He's a true geek. Quality. Not pusillanimous with computers by any means. After dinner I met up with Mike and we watched Simpsons until Achal and Dave came over. Then we went to Barnes & Nobel and they got coffee and I checked out their awful geek book selection. I mean awful. Borders has a whole corner. B&N... one lame half aisle. After we loitered in Mike's driveway talkin' 'bout stuff. Yay well-rounded liberal arts education so I can know what the hell I'm talking about and when to shut my mouth because I don't know enough :) Oh and between lunch & dinner I worked on the Indybox thing.

6/8/2002
I've barely had my computer on the past two days. I guess I got to the point in grabber where almost all of my technological questions have been answered with "Yes, you can do that." and I'm left with a nicely functional piece of software. The only SNAFU is I still can't get it to blit over 10 fps at greater than 320x240 and there's no way to interact with the mixer. Meh, overlay is just fine with me and KMix works wonders. But I want to fix those things and in general add a nice level of polish to the whole thing. Just jumping in and hacking away at code again doesn't seem like the best approach. So I've taken a little time off to read that book on 'nam I got for $0.95 marked down from $17.95 and read about software management online. Fear not, I've been building a list of paper books I'd like to buy. Back to soul searching.

6/6/2002
Visited my Mom's model. Tres big. There was a golf cart but she didn't have the keys so I couldn't tool around in it. :( But she did catch a typo in my resume and I figured out how to make Word wrap using the funny resume template. Yay Shift-Enter. Don't know why I didn't try that earlier. Came back and worked on grabber. Got the channel number overlay working again. Nifty. Carolyn has mono so she won't be visiting. Sad. Tomorrow I'm going to attempt calling Sarah and revel in her not wanting to do anything. I mean, why wouldn't you want to go get slurpees?

6/5/2002
Still searching for a job. I'm going to meet the co-founder of NMUC/cCC on Monday for lunch. w00t! In the meantime I've been hacking at grabber a bunch. Ported to Qt 3, new dialogs, smaller size, etc. Today I took apart the broken WDC drive (look down two posts) and cut a window in the roof of it. It's fun to plug it into my old AT power supply and watch it spin. Time for Simpsons, later.

5/25/2002
Yeah so much for updating this every day now that I'm home for the summer and nothing exciting happens. Tagged a version of grabber. Going to go play Crazy Taxi with my brother now. Carolyn needs to visit.

5/21/2002
Today there was much kung-fu on my box at home. After whooping DHCP into shape, I had to slap my hard drives into order, and then drop the elbow on GRUB. But now everything is nice and working and happy. There's a nice big FUCT label on the Western Digital that died on me over spring break. I'm pondering if I should put in the 6.4gig gimpy DMA braindamaged WDC drive just to put junk data on it that I'd be okay with losing at any time. FYI, I've also had 2 Western Digital 1.6gig drives die on me in the past. Yep, I think WDC sucks. I recommend you buy Maxtor if you want to be a happy camper. My Maxtor IDE and SCSI drives work just fine.

5/17/2002
Sad day, Kathy is leaving us. *sniffle* After browsing my movies list C and I watched A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (Woody Allen flick) and it was kind of weak. It was actually the first Woody movie I've ever seen. I found it to be really slow and quite preposterous... 1 / 4 stars. Earlier in the day I got 16-bit -> mu-law encoding to work after deciding that OSS lies about the presence of a functional built in mu-law encoder. Mmm grabber streaming w/ audio returns and it's sexy! Last night I got brave and watched the Sox game w/ Becky, Kristen, and Sarah down in their room. They were busy studying so there wasn't much chit-chat, but I had a good time anyway.

5/16/2002
My last final today w/ Dale. 2 hours of a whole lot of writing. Wow, my hand was just... dead. But I rocked it. Kevin: 2 Finals: 1. Technically I have my database final left, but since it's a take home I'm already done. Let the slacking commence! I gave in and gave the nice people at 4Front $35 for OSS drivers for my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which uses an apparently poorly openly documented Crystal Semiconductor 4630 chipset. Now I can record audio again, yay!

5/15/2002
Hahah I'm so behind on this. Today I had two finals, including EA150's, but it's okay because last night I "studied" a lot over w/ C&K in C's room. I violated my operating systems final, and did last minute studying in the room before class for EA. Kevin: 1 Finals: 1

5/14/2002
Sexy message on my board after coming back from studying for many hours. "Kevin - someone from penguin computing called; he likes your use of google adwords. His no. is XXX-XXX-XXXX but he'll call back later." I wonder how he got my number... it's not listed publically by Colby and I don't have it up on a webpage anywhere, just my home phone. Hum... I looked at my logs and I have 3 hits from their gateway. Oh, if you haven't heard already, check out the IndyBox story. I'm still getting hits from a cable modem in Indiana, too.

5/13/2002
Had a delicious mandarin orange chicken salad for lunch. Mmm exhibition cooking. Finished up DB final (just have the project left) and downloaded a slew of mame roms. 19xx is a fabulous game. Did a little work on grabber and tagged a broken version. Meh.

5/12/2002
Around 3 or 4 (I forget) some drunk monkeys outside started yelling "Wake up east quad!" for several minutes. Woke up @ 6, took long shower, breakfast @ 8, currently procrastinating on finishing a paper due tomorrow. Another day, another bug in WSB2k2. After hitting a home run the announcer kept repeating "It's a home run." until the next batter was introduced. And while playing the suck assYankees, the O's catcher overthrew an attempt to steal 2nd base and the silly CF wouldn't get the ball, so I had to run him all the way around to home to unfreeze the game. It was the only point they got in the game, a 10-1 blowout.

5/11/2002
Slept until 1, worked on final, watched Simpsons, went to dinner, worked on final, watched Sox game, bed at midnight.

5/10/2002
Nothing like a fabulous spectacle to kick off the weekend. I *gasp* skipped EA150 (first class I've ever skipped at Colby) to watch the seniors get drunk on the library stairs and swim across the pond. Then hung around w/ Carolyn and watched the Simpsons marathon and stuff until I needed some time along so I came back to my room and geeked. Then I hung out w/ Sarah until 2am or so. We were sitting on a bench outside and some drunks came over to open up their bottles on the back of the bench. Becky sat w/ me for lunch which was cool, and then Mike and Matt joined and there was a whole lot of Red Sox talking going on.

5/9/2002
237 is the combination to a lock I found in the Mudd Lab. I brute forced it, but I worked backwards, so it really took me 732 tries to open it. Tonight I went to a party at Tom & Maria's house. When C&K and I got there they were playing flip cup in the driveway. Much different from the family oriented party @ Dale's. Ukrainian rice is yummy. I found another bug in WSB 2k2. I hit a high popup infield and headed for 2nd (since I was going to be out anyway) and then the guy errored on the catch but wouldn't pick the ball up so I just kept running and got an in the park home run.

5/8/2002
Last DB class today. Finished OS project in an hour (I drove). Finished Dogs & Frogs! Lunch w/ C&K and they had little toy foam airplanes out by the lollipops so we had fun with those :) I *really* need to be productive and tag another version of grabber, I mean, it's been over a week. But I haven't gotten that whole XVideo thing working yet so I need to get that done at some point. I've been kind or running around doing a lot of group work lately so perhaps I should Dreamcast it up some.

5/7/2002
I'm having motivational problems today. Silly last week of class. I've been playing a lot of WSB 2k2 on my sexy Dreamcast lately and just about every time I play I find a new bug. Hello, beta testing, anyone? So far I've seen a ball fall short of the wall be called a home run, the game get stuck inbetween pitches, the sound get randomly garbled, the announcer announce the "halfway point of the game" in the 9th inning, a ball hit back to the pitcher be held until I got to 1st base at which point he threw it to 2nd, and playing home run derby at enron field (or whatever it's called) is like rotated 90degrees to the left and you can only hit way foul or to the center. Dinner tonight with HoCo girl, Shannon. It was a blast. She was very full of pep and knew where 103 and 29 and 100 and Long Gate and all were =) Sexy. Then did DB project and Later hung out w/ Carolyn and Kathy (I will now collectively refer to them as C&K and played pool in spa.

5/6/2002
Turns out that Claire is from Towson, but she was really nice and gave me a lead on the the girl from county. I sort of felt like a bad person at lunch. Like, on the way to drop off our trays I stepped over a napkin but she stopped and reached down to pick it up. Then when we were walking outside for a bit she spotted and uprighted a potted plant that had been knocked over. Anyhow, I made dinner plans for Tuesday w/ Shannon (from HC) so I'll have to try and pick up any trash I see lying around :) For dinner I pretended to be a phone-a-thon'er and went to their BBQ w/ Carolyn and Kathy and watched Blow and some awful Columbian drug flick (Kathy has to write a paper comparing the two.) Had EA150 and CS398a outside today, score! It was really nice out, I think I avoided getting burned more. I also took a nice nap after CS398b for 2 hours or so.

5/5/2002
CS party @ Dale's today. Rock on. Bobs was catering so it was just like a potato bar. Sooooo many potatoes. Bleh. Bobs keeps losing points with me. Guess what? I'm meeting someone from Howard County that goes here for lunch tomorrow. Woah! She's been in my buddy list under the miscellaneous group for a long time but yesterday when I was chilling w/ Kathy in the spa and she told me about her trip to Arcadia that day and she mentioned a girl named Claire that lived in Coburn and went with them and it occured to me that it was the same girl so I shot an IM her way and we made plans and aww yeah. I sent her my picture first so that we could locate each other and then she was silent for just over 6 minutes but eventually came back with a picture of herself. *phew* Guess I didn't look too scary. Bonus.

5/4/2002
Today was cool. I woke up at a respectable hour and did the breakfast thing and headed over to the street of Olin to do some work. But the band at Foss arts was quite loud so I had to move inside of Olin. I hurried thru my work and went to see the band =) "Shoot For Noon" and they were pretty good. For most of the time I was the only person listening. Seriously. There were other people there doing like the moon bounce and whatnot that heard them, but I was pretty much the only person sitting there facing the stage and paying attention. Same thing for The Jump Into. Arising sounded terrible (sorry guys!) and Andy even was like "uh... can we get some more vocals?" to the sound guy so I felt justified in my leaving, and they had a crowd anyway. I got a little sunburned (woah!) but I'm considering it a good thing to have actually be outside long enough to accomplish that. Later in the night went w/ Kathy to the spa and we just talked and hung out for quite a while. She asked me about programming and I started going on ... and on ... and on ... so I probably scared her a bit. :) Oh and Kate and I also did Dogs & Frogs. And in WSB 2k2 I made Pedro hit the bench. But the relief pitcher was throwing *insane* wacky curves I just couldn't hit. Anyhow...

5/3/2002
I kind of had a bad day today. Nothing bad happened really... just nothing good. I dunno... just felt sort of confused and disoriented. Meh.

5/2/2002
Woke up and did that shower thing and I was in Olin clicking away just after 9am. Worked for a solid hour or so then I fell into playing a little solitaire. I won. Twice in a row, aww yeah (I played one game last night, too.) After a little more work hunger was attacking so I went and fetched my last paper which had just been graded (B-, bleh) and headed over to food after dropping off my laptop and picking up a rain coat because it was starting to rain. Lunch was fabulous As I went into Bobs, I glanced back and saw Becky. So score, ahead of her. But then in the lobby Kristen was already there. Mmmmm this is going to be tricky. Had to hope Becky would sit down first because I can pretend to know her better and then Kristen could join us and + 1 acquaintance. Card lady started letting people in so I moved up and I might have been slightly maybe rude and half cutting in front of them. They were off to the side checking out the food. I wasn't all pushy, just sort of ended up in front of them and had a nagging feeling that I should of been polite and nodded them to go ahead. Anyhow, headed towards the grilled cheese bar (Jamie wasn't there, oh no!) and Kristen was right next to/behind me in line. I felt like a monkey. Should of like smiled or said "Hey." or something but instead just fidgeted. Put in my order and took off to get drinks. Said hi to Amanda (Jenn's roommate) and back to pick up my sandwhich. Apparently grill lady hadn't taken Kristen's order thing yet so I nabbed mine and some crackers and off to the other side to sit w/ Becky. There she was, alone. Ha! Sat w/ her and soon enough Kristen came over and there was a little introducing and it worked. *phew* You know, I wish I wasn't so shy and didn't have to play little mind games with myself to justify it being OK for me to sit with people I don't know. But, whatever, now it's cool and I could attempt sitting with them if they were just sitting with each other. The only little thing is that they both left at 11:30. No, not 11:20 or 11:25... 11:30. So I guess they had a class @ noon and I was failing to make enough good conversation or be interesting enough to warrant them lurking until noon. Meh. I'll just try to ignore that and hope I'm not pestering them and they'll put out a nice clear "you suck, go away" signal or something if I'm just being too dorkly. And Kristen has blue eyes not brown like I thought from viewing in passing and smiling, and that makes a lot more sense. Apparently she knows lots of languages, too. And Becky gave me the skinny on the O's / Sox series... they won the last 2 and she said she'll check into the tumor fish in the tank on the 2nd floor of Olin, which I doubt, but meh. Anyway, w00t, I've now sat with 2 people I didn't know. *wiggle* Need to find more so as to avoid slipping into being a recluse.

5/1/2002
Over the night I left up some song lyrics and got some concerned IMs over the night. In response I sent this fabulous video of two German kids reacting to the song. It's a wild song - Chop Suey! by System of a Down. :) Anyhow, for dinner I went w/ Miranda and Sarah to dinner @ Dana (the two that IMed me) and it was fabulous. Mmmmm Dana... always so much food. The walk over there was most eventful. Rosie (dorm dog) had gotten lose and was chasing after some kid on a skateboard. Then this kid that looked like he had a rough day stopped us and asked if there was something major going on that he was missing because it looked like a lot of people were going in that direction. I said, "Uhh... bobs is closed for dinner?" and he reiteratated his confusion and continued on his way. He wasn't nuts, as I turned around to answer him in passing I did notice that there were like 3-4 other packs of people heading in the same direction and I think the chapel bells were ringing too. After dinner I was very diligent and worked on my paper for serveral hours. Then came back, watch South Park while chatting w/ Michelle and then went down to the lounge w/ her to watch Insomniac w/ Dave Attel and The Daily Show because she hadn't seen either before. Payback for me watching Gilmore Girls on Tuesday with her and Kate. Yes, I liked it. And I also like the movie "Ten Things I Hate About You." so just finish up your laughing and move right along.

4/30/2002
Lunchtime disaster! So, thinking today would be a repeat of a few Tuesdays ago when I saw Becky's roomate sitting alone around 11:20am and Becky joining her shortly afterwards (thus providing her company and making me bail) I arrived early around 11:10am or so. Actually, I had just finished folding my laundry and was thirsty so I wanted to go early anyway, it was just a bonus that I might make a new acquaintance. So I get my food (I accidently got way too much) and head over to the carpeted side of Bobs and don't see her so I just sit down. After eating a few spoonfuls of yummy roasted orzo turkey soup I see what looks like might be her... just sitting facing the other way. I didn't want to sneak up on her from behind so in an act of brillance I clutched my skim milk and headed back to the drink bar so I could come out the other side and do that whole "Mind if I sit with you? Cool, brb" thing. Like a moron I decided it was necessary to pour out and refill my milk when I was back there. Anyhow, out I come and just as I'm about to try and make eye contact *boom* she's up and walking over to the salad bar. Gack! So I just sit back down and ponder what to do next. I need to reformat this journal thing so that paragraphs work. Right so just as I'm about to come up with a plan a girl sitting with a bunch of cups (yep, cups, she's sitting with a milk crate of them) goes "Kristen! What are you doing here?" and leaves her cups and goes over and sits with her. Beh. So I resume trying to make the excessive amount of food on my plate disappear. A few minutes later cup girl leaves and takes her crate of cups with her. I start to get brave and I had just drank a glass so I could try the routine again. (Yeah, pathetic I can't come up with anything new but it worked the first time so meh.) Then guess who shows up and sits with her? That monkey Rooney! Blaugh! I've never seen him there. But luck is on my side, he only has a sandwich and should be out of there soon. I go back to attacking my mound of sustenance and sending brain waves for him to be on his way. Off to the side I spy Becky getting a wrap made. Then Becky disappears. Then Rooney is on the move out. Then Becky appears and is sitting with Kristen. Drat! Okay. So I could be uber-sexy-brave and go try and sit with them seeing how I've already sat with Becky before... or I could assume they haven't seen each other in a while and have catching up to do and don't want to be disturbed. I went with option 2. So I just sat there zoning out thinking about grabber and making a UML diagram for it and probably looked like a little nutcase because I have this funny habit of freezing up when I'm thinking about something. Sarah will tell you, sometimes she has to poke me when I forget to breath. No worries, eventually I breath, but sometimes I just hold it for a while, longer than I guess she would expect a normal time to be. Anyhow, someone did that awkward sitting at the table next to mine facing me thing so I bolted (almost tripped with my tray on the way out) and ran off to the Davis lab to UML it up. On the walk to Miller I saw Rooney w/ some girl that was holding his arm... sort of like being escorted. I was power walking so I caught up to him at the double doors to the street and he held it for me and I said "Thanks." and he said "Yep." and that was it. *holds up and admires his landscape printed class diagram* Maybe I just need to stop by their room. Sox and O's are playing again tonight (info about said game was on door of guy across from the laundry room) so maybe I could stop by and harass them about that. Bleh.

4/29/2002
I'm good at actually updating this thing. Anyhow, today I finished up full screen support for grabber. It's so sexy now. I soon realized that I would need an accelerator for switching between the inputs, however. But it's still very cool and behaves exactly how I want (locks the mouse so you can't scroll away like xawtv and actually goes full screen unlike kwintv) so I'm very happy with it. On the way to the Simpsons I timed it just right and Kathy and I met at the same time where the paths met. Sexy. And while rounding the corner by the library Becky went by and I smiled and she smiled back and said hi but I was too slow to say anything back. I hope to sit w/ her or her roomate tomorrow at lunch. The O's beat the Sox so I can talk about that and track because she mentioned she's on the team and I did xcc/indoor/outdoor in high school. And today I tried to check my hotmail account and they wanted me to sign up for some .NET passport thing and didn't like my browser so that was the final straw. I went and opened an account @ eudoramail.com since the silly hushmail applet has class format errors. And I made ALSA behave better. Not fixed... but better. Mmm bed.

4/28/2002
Kevin Party Count = 1. Stayed for 45 mins or so watching people play some silly drinking game. Chris was ultra cool about my non-drinking and when he noticed I was just standing around with empty hands like a dweeb motioned for me to come over and told me about a stash of Iced Tea and such in the fridge. Very nice of him. My DB professor and her husband were there, and they were at the concert too. And yeah, it happened past midnight so it goes on this entry. Carolyn and Kathy still aren't back from Montreal! Oh no. I wonder what happened to them. They should be okay, right? On another sad note, I forgot to watch the Simpons! Gah. 8pm just always creeps by. I put an entry in the calendar app that comes with KDE to play a sound and run my tv application 10 minutes before showtime. Not sure why I didn't think to do this earlier... Played around with ALSA (mmmmm, me like... except my sound card's buffer seems to be one size fits all - 1024) and discovered that the hearing in my left ear is better than the hearing in my left ear. Well, at least for the low level volume test sound. Last night I was suspicious about my ability to distinctly hear voices (read: the lyrics) in music. *shrug* It also snowed tonight. Like, several inches.

4/27/2002
Major lesson learned today. If you're linking against Xxf86vm and you get stupid little warnings like "undefined reference to `XF86VidModeSwitchToMode'" you need to switch the order of the command line arguments to g++ so that the list of objects gets passed *first* and list of libraries comes *last* For example...
g++ -Wl -lqt-mt -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXxf86vm bar.o baz.o foo.o quux.o -o monkey is BAD and
g++ bar.o baz.o foo.o quux.o -Wl -lqt-mt -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXxf86vm -o monkey is GOOD.
If you don't do this you'll spend a whole lot of time searching Google and usenet and reading the man pages and when you still don't find anything going to meals or trying to do homework until you look at how another program compiles while linking against the same thing for the 58th time and try to switch it around. Apparently if you pass the linking flags first it thinks "Oh, I don't need this." and just throws it out before even looking at the objects. Blah. But on the plus side while reading the ld man page I learned about the -Wl option. :) Anyhow, I'm probably going to see Arising tonight. Hehe. Chris IMed me and said our DB professor was going to be there. Rock on.

4/26/2002
Hung out with Michelle and tried to make her understand that a long distance relationship with a bad boyfriend is a bad idea. Programmed. Went to bed early.

4/25/2002
Finished up putting grabber's VBI stuff into a widget. It's all slick looking. Went to lunch hoping to see roommate of dorm girl mentioned Tuesday that smiles at me a lot. In a furtive glance I think I saw her sitting with people. Nope, not brave enough to go and introduce myself to a group. Probably busy talking about important things and catching up anyway. Time to meet w/ Dale now. Thinking about the volleyball game Saturday.

4/24/2002
Class, solo lunch, class, found a nifty eraser, senior presentations, dinner, nap, programmed while intermittently talking to Kathy on IM, bed.

4/23/2002
Big news. Today at lunch I wasn't a chicken and introduced myself and sat with a girl from my dorm. It was most enjoyable, but I was quite nervous and my hand wouldn't stop shaking. Back on the geek front, I finally got a user account on the linux cluster... but the admin gave me the username "KS" in capital letters... WTF? Who makes usernames with capital letters? Apparently he even went so far as to verify with someone else that my handwriting of "ks" was indeed "KS". Nomenclature? online form? anyone? I sent an e-mail asking for it to be lowercased. *shrug*

4/22/2002
Had the best OOD class ever (and possibly my best Colby class ever), lunch w/ Carolyn & Kathy, and then took them to see what I thought was a good male prospect. Sadly, the females disagreed. Whatever, he looks like a nice guy that would talk to you, not only care about your body, treat you well, and cuddle. But nooooo, he's not sexy enough. Silly women. Had an awful DB class in the lab, redid(!) the group work, and hacked on grabber a lot. Almost have VBI support added in and working. Fixed a few small bugs along the way in the remote control/channel stuff. Hum... I think I'll add fullscreen support next. Still searching for a summer job.

4/21/2002
Finished my group work for DB. Then got an e-mail from the prof about how we did it wrong. And a previous assignment. Except the assignment webpage has like half a line of instruction and no real critera. On the plus side I returned the car battery I replaced, got an $8 refund, and parked in the best spot in the entire lot. Now I just have to leave the car there until May. :) Later hung out and watched Deuce Bigalow.

4/20/2002
Completed the "Dale Marathon" in record time. Had to add load/save to an XML file for the project. Smoked it uh... before dinner. I felt like a stalker (in a bad way) on the walk to dinner so I sat behind a support column. Then I got mechanical and fixed my car (dead battery), woo-ho. Back to hacking on grabber.

4/19/2002
Missed a social opportunity. 2 strikes. Next time I'll go say "Hi." On the plus side, I only had one class today and I had a fabulous chat with Marc for over an hour and a half. Sadly it was after he stood me up and I had to wait an hour for him to finish with other people, but it was worth the wait I suppose. Later I hung out with Carolyn and Kathy until 2am and that made me feel better, too.

4/18/2002
Had my meeting with Dale (1st fav CS professor) early today @ 11 but got out by 11:30 so I had plenty of time to enjoy Bobs' grilled cheese bar as always. No social opportunites to miss. *phew* Anyhow, later I worked on my EA paper, went to see some jazz music (I didn't get it), fixed up the Makefile for grabber, and called it a night.

4/17/2002
Eventful day. Had lunch with Marc (2nd fav CS professor). People were checking out my "geek." shirt, aww yeah. Carolyn joined us and Marc did a little finessing and now she wants to take a CS class (bioinformatics). Finished up Dogs & Frogs Project 8 (finally!), had dinner with Carolyn and Kathy, and went to see "Le Pacte des Loups" (Brotherhood of the Wolf) down at ye old Railroad Square for free and I'll give the movie 1.5 / 4 stars.

4/16/2002
Today I totally chickened out on a social opportunity. Did you know "kebin" in Malaysian means "chicken" ... only one tiny little letter off from my name. But on the plus side, I'm sporting my new shirt with a sexy giant Linux penguin on the back.

4/15/2002
I've been voraciously reading the story of a crazy guy on bike and I'm up to day 74. I cheated and started reading from when he was in Maryland, but I'm going to go back to the beginning when I finish.

4/14/2002
At dinner I was attacked by a crouton when I tried to stab it with the fork of truth. Well, it was just a normal fork. Maybe that's why it didn't work. It decided to attach itself to my lumberjack shirt until I realized it was still there after returning to my dorm. Excitement.