Last night I bowled 4 strikes in a row and today on fark I found two links about that hockey game I mentioned earlier.

Playing For Keeps shipped last night and is on its way up to Colby. :)

Got my hair cut. Yeah maybe it's a little short, but I resisted the temptation of the buzz cut!

I think I've finally mastered the world of color space conversions, joy.

Let's see, what's been going on. On the 18th I went to Don Pablo's with Dave, Dan, Jenny, Johnny, and Mike. Fun times. Then on the 20th Mike and I stayed up really late playing Rogue Leader (awesome, but the mission descriptions are too vague) after the Pats game. On Tuesday night it was everyone from the 18th + Kelly? and Jeff & Wendy (they're married now) and we watched Zoolander (2.5 / 4). Sometime before that I was flipping around before bed when I caught the opening scene of Blue Streak. It seemed like worth staying up to see what happened and it was. Not the strongest plot, but it had that "I need to see how this ends" vibe so I'm going to give it a well deserved 3.25 / 4 stars.

If only they'd put more things worth my time on TV. Remember back in the day when they used to show good movies? Yeah, like Playing For Keeps. Holy cow it's on DVD now!!! Woah, woah, woah, I need to go buy it, be right back. Sourcing fee? Don't know what it is but who cares. Good old Borders gift card from Mike working on Amazon.com, yeah yeah. Borders >> Barnes & Noble. Oh when oh when will they release Rad on DVD?

Sweet, after a lot of hassle I think I finally got Amazon to accept the gift card.

In the meantime, I happened to catch the end of the AHL Philadelphia Panthers vs. Binghamton Senators game. We're talking fight club. At the second to last fight they were up to 79-61 penalty minutes. The announcers kept trying to put a positive spin on all of the brawls. Fosters team unity, gets the fans excited, etc. Well, the second part was true at least, I was sitting through the commercial breaks. :)

On Friday we tried to go bowling at Jillians but there was a $5 cover charge! Feh. Went to the Columbia alley instead. But before that while we were still at Arundel Mills we ran into Jill. Woah, haven't seen her since high school and wouldn't have recognized her if she wasn't wearing a nametag. Yeah, I still remember her last name.

Uhp, Die Hard is on so I'm going to see if I can pick up on the German dialog.

Cool, it was only 653 miles (regular is 624). I would have thought going out through Rhode Island and all instead of a nice diagonal slice would save more than 30 miles.

Tonight I went to Ellicott Mills Brewing Company in old (downtown) Ellicott City with Mike and Johnny. I still think beer is icky and need to stick to my girly/fruity drinks. The dude didn't check ID, but I suppose if we were menacing little kids trying to get tore up we wouldn't go to this place late on a Monday night. That's what they're trying to avoid I suppose, the menacing, not the must be exactly 21. Unless it's a college, because then there's always the stupid freshmen factor. It was the first time anyone from back home had seen me drink. Yeah yeah I know I'm going to be 23 in about a month, I'm just off to a late start, which is good, I think.

Got to drive Mike's car back part of the way. A very nice Saab.

I had a great time at Sarah's house. Their cat, Izzy, really wanted to be my friend and jumped on me when we were watching Lilo & Stich (I feel asleep during parts because I was running on only 4 hours of sleep, but it was good) and climbed on me several times during the night to sleep on top of me. Seesh, I'm already relegated to the couch, she could go easy on me. Cats seem all bossy and demanding and not team players or very reciprocal. That's why I like dogs. They play with you and go for walks instead of just going out to play alone and then coming back to eat your food and get in the way and not develop a small vocabulary.

Sarah and I made dinner, brown rice and egg rolls. The egg rolls were amazing. I brought 4 home to feed to my family. Well, and to poke at my mom and say "come on, why can't you cook tasty food like this?" :) And I also have those tasty cookies from Thanksgiving, too. But I forgot to bring home any of the fortune cookies we made to go with dinner, drat!

Well, off to bed.

I am so done.

Off to Sarah's for a bit, then back home.

How about a nice technically useful entry? Yeah, I think I'm due.

You know, sometimes you can only get so far by reading other people's code on the Internet. Sometimes you need to read things like the ISO C++ Standard. Let's look at Section 3.6.1, for example. It's packed with useful juicy tidbits in plain English such as

All implementations shall allow both of the following definitions of main:
    int main() { /* ... */ }
and
    int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { /* ... */ }

So now you don't need to go typing out the whole arguments thing for a simple "Hello, World" and you know it's 100% legit C++ and it's not just the compiler letting you get away with it. Later on in the 5th paragraph there's also:

If control reaches the end of main without encountering a return statement, the effect is that of executing
	return 0;

Cool, eh? One less line to type. I better not see any of that "void main() {}" stuff from now on, seeing how not only is it one more character to type, it's also wrong.

Moving right along to my favorite language, Java. Airwar was being difficult and not always launching correctly on Linux, and never on OS X. I knew it was deadlocking and had even seen some posts on the forums with traces, but didn't know how to go about generating them. Instead of reviewing for my exams, I thought it'd be worthwhile to learn something new, so I looked up up how to do it. But that article isn't the end all be all. On Linux or OS X doing a "kill -3" (or "killall -3 java" in some situations (e.g. it goes full-screen on you and you can't SSH in)) will dump to the console the good stuff. "Found one Java-level deadlock," woo-ho!

And then I finally got around to updating my page on removing Macrovision with some screenshots. Gah, didn't the MPAA see what an atrocity it was going to be and how it could easily be worked around and how it ends up costing them more money? No, of course not, because they're technically ignorant as Steve Jobs and I like to call "them."

And I also found a cool site with pen tricks, and this hilarious article about outsourcing on The Onion.

Played in the snow last night with Sarah and Miranda. Our combined fatness destroyed a snow tube we borrowed from the lounge, but I inflated mine and left it as a replacement. I also had my first phone interview the night before.

I spent some time sprucing up the webpage for our game, Airwar, and making a runnable jar file. Check out the screenshot and give it a go if you have a recent (1.4.2+) version of Java installed.

Guess who has two tickets to BNL on Feb 17th at the Cumberland County Civic Center? Aww yeah. Too bad Ticketmaster had to charge me $107.85 for two $45 tickets. So that's $17.85 in fees which is 19.83 percent. Seems a bit steep, doesn't it?

Anyhow, floor section 5, row D, I can't wait. :)

And our first snowstorm of the season has finally hit and will be dropping 6-8" on us. The only other time it snowed it was only a dusting that melted rapidly. Chances are this stuff will be hanging around until oh... April or so. Yay Maine!

On Tuesday I skipped German table, went to the Colby-Bowdoin hockey game, and then worked until around 7am on Wednesday morning. It's all kind of hazy, but I gave my last speech and won a prize for a previous one and then our demo of the game in class that afternoon went quite well. Afterwards I napped to make up for only having... 4 hours or so of sleep and for dinner Sarah made me mac and cheese and I did my homework for today and went to bed.

It all sounds compressed into a short entry because that's how it feels in my mind. I know a lot happened but it's just fuzzy because I didn't get much sleep and if you know me at all, I like to get my beauty sleep. The soft focus effect caused by the reflection from the flash in the last photo of the night pretty much sums it all up.

I made some progress on the 428 e-mails in my inbox today. And I put in a good 4 hours on our game. Lunch was ridiculously crowded, but it was for a tasty grilled cheese (provolone on Italian bread) and some tater tots. I went to dinner early hoping to avoid the rush, but no on really showed up. I guess everyone split for 20 minutes outside of Boston after lunch.

Let's talk movies, since I've seen 5 in the past two days. Akira, Foxy Brown, and Coming to America are all worth your time and I'll hand out a 3 / 4 stars. That was yesterday. Today I saw Raging Bull, which I'm going to give 2 / 4 stars, even though I dislike black & white film/pictures. What? We have the technology now, use it! And then there's Gumshoe. It sucks. The only reason I'm going to give it 0.5 / 4 stars is because I only had to suffer through 84 minutes of it. Generally I prefer longer movies, but I was happy to glance at the counter on my VCR to see that I only had to sit through a little more and it would be all over. The 3x5 notecard description on the box gives it 3 stars... blah, they're crazy.

Tomorrow I'll be going over to Randy's parent's house for an early Thanksgiving feast around 1pm. I went to Shaw's for food for the night and for once thought maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have them tracking my spending habits with that little member card because it would have saved me $2 a box on the delicious clementines they have now. Ah well.

Off to read more of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Goodnight.

Journal! Woah, it's been a whole month? Ha ha I've got to get back to updating this thing to keep track of my wacky college adventures when I'm an old man. Or maybe just keep my friends that are abroad posted. Sorry, gang.

Anyhow, let's start with last last Saturday, the 15th. Kyle was up to visit because silly BU had trouble getting a president. So we went to the pub and then dancing at the sketchy Heights dance. Except it was awesome because they had a moon bounce! Ohhhhhh yeah. :) And then I had lazy Sunday hanging out with Sarah.

Wait, how could I forget about Halloween? It was awesome because it fell on a Friday night and everyone was out and about all dressed up. I was dressed as a "typical college guy" which was basically me in my very college long-sleeve shirt + a necklace + a clip on earring thingie. Sarah dressed up as my little sexy schoolgirl friend and we had fun going out with her running crew. We actually saw The Skulls (1.5 / 4) now that I think about it.

I'm sure I have more I could write, but that's been most of the major excitement lately. I'll be chilling on campus for Thanksgiving break and over at Randy's parents' house for the actual turkey day.

Off to Theory of Computation class now (it's 7pm) and then to the 2nd CS pub night at 8pm (had one last Monday, too).

What, I have a journal?

I'm headed off to MIT for BOSPRE this weekend. Fall break (last weekend) was awesome. Went to Bangor with Sarah and we got pictures of the Paul Bunion statue, along with shopping, eating, and spending forever in Borders. On Wednesday night it snowed.

Well, I should be on my way.

Happy October! I heard a rumor it snowed for just a little bit this morning. Regardless, it's quite cold out; you'd think I live in Maine or something.

My speech was a whopping 18 minutes long on Monday. Talking head? Yeah, probably, some people looked a little bored, but I was more comfortable up there.

Had fun on Monday with Mahdi and Adam. We pub'ed it up. Looks like I'll hit it again on Thursday with Mahdi and Chris and again on Friday with Sarah.

I've been having an amazing time up here.

I've been having a really good weekend.

It all started Friday morning at 6:30 AM. I woke up early to study for my German test at nine. I don't think I did very well on it, but when one starts out at such a low point, things have to get better.

And they did. :) Had CS lunch, made good progress on my independent study, and I finished the 2nd games programing project before dinner. Had a nice meal with Chris at Foss and then hung out in my room catching up on things (reading Ars and such). And then I headed up to the senior appartments (hehe, had to let underclassmen in) to watch Starship Troopers with Chris, Kris, and Andre. Kris and Andre were actually watching Total Recall on TV when we went up there (same director).

Afterwards we went downstairs to check out a party. Typical Colby party from what I gathered. There was a keg and a wasted girl in the bathroom and a die table in the living room area. So we played a little, this being my second time. I plunked on Kris. :) A quick meeting was held, and my die name was determined. Shaved ₀₁₀₁₀₁ Monkey, awww yeah. Nevermind that by that time I think 3/4 of us were playing with water. :) We were still due for a trip to the pub, also for my second time. I called Sarah but she wasn't home. No matter, she was there when we got there. I munched on some popcorn with Kris and Chris and we talked about life after graduation and women. Good stuff, but it was last call by the time we got there so we didn't stay long.

As we headed out we ran into Sam (up for the weekend to go hiking with Marc) and Marc. There had been a party at Mason's, apparently. But Marc's "yeah, there's the guy... this is the guy right here" routine stalled just long enough for Sarah to catch up with me and Chris and Kris headed off with them to check out the Latin dance after a round of handshakes and I went back to EQ with Sarah. It was a dark and foggy night. So we stayed up wicked late and talked about a lot of things I can't even remember now.

And then Saturday I stumbled out of bed at some point and did my blasted German homework. And then I went to sleep at nine and slept for twelve hours.

Now I'm just procrastinating getting started on my speech. I should get moving on that because I have programming team practice at 3:30 and I'm not going to want to do anything after that. It will be Sunday night, after all.

I just saw a B-17, the Nine O Nine. For only $4 I got to go inside it and see everything except the tail gunner's position. Amazing.

Well, there goes the first full week of class.

Finally got to hang out with Mahdi. Watched some Family Guy with Chris. Went to Yoga and German table. Stayed up late talking to Sarah. Held a Colby Computer Club event (watched Pirates of Silicon Valley. Did my Theory of Computation homework without too much trouble. Had dinner with Katie. Accidentally discovered that the vi movement keys also work in Konqueror. Officially signed up for my honors project. Visited Doug and he was actually home. Those aren't in chronological order, but I stopped working early tonight to relax for a reason. Less thinking. More relaxing. :)

Dining Hall Score Card

     W   L   T
Bobs 5 - 1 - 0
Dana 5 - 1 - 2
Foss 3 - 0 - 2

How about checking out some random images until I return?

I'm back at Colby and I've just been having too much fun to update.

Let's see, I went to the Batting Cages with Marc, Lauren, and Eric. Skipped out on the campus bbq (#1) to eat at Asian Cafe with Sarah and Miranda, saw Gavin Degraw (good) open for Pete Francis (bad), went with Chris to the campus bbq (#2) at the music shell and there was a band there but I didn't get their name, but they were good.

German is German, theory of comp seems okay, public speaking is a challenge but I'll learn a lot, games seems awesome, and my honors project is behaving.

Adam stopped by tonight, woah! He has some class up here Monday nights that lets out at 9. So we'll have to Pub it up next Monday.

So Colby is great, I'm having fun, and don't mind me while I take advantage of my final opportunity to get lost in the bubble. :)

Damn Mike for getting me started on Twin Peaks. Damn Internet for making me want to try Geocaching. Who knew they're be so many around Colby? I don't have $99 to spend on a GPS device. Eh, I think I found one that I can locate without one, though. Should be a good hike I wouldn't have otherwise heard about. We'll see.

Oh and I found a link for the flying trebuchet woman.

A hilarious sounding Windows Media 9 clip was posted. I stayed up late to downloaded and compile MPlayer so that I could watch it. And then I sat through the entire thing.

The following comment in another unrelated thread had me laughing out loud. "Jill, all men have Ars every week for 3-4 hrs a day. When I am on my Ars posts comes from inside my body to outside from an an opening between my legs." Yes, some things just shouldn't be posted on the interweb. Blue, white, blue, white. Oh I wish I was talking about Red vs. Blue. Blue rules, by the way. I also saw a woman on TLC fling herself from a trebuchet earlier today (as in Tuesday). LOL. Oh man... sometimes the world is just too funny. I believe the show is "What Were You Thinking?" and the episode is "When Humans Fly." If you happen to be a reader of mine on the west coast, you can catch the 11pm repeat (because it's still Tuesday for y'all) if you hurry.

Wash your hands. It's the only culturally acceptable course of action.

Watched Dirty Work with Mike last night 2.25 / 4. Read today. Watched more TV while I still have the time to. I've been uh... "recharging my batteries" lately. You know, sleeping 10 hours a night and such. Been reading a bit. E-mailing. Chris comes back Saturday so I guess I'll get to see him Sunday night when I get back. Woah. In less than a week I'll be in Maine again. Rock on. :)

See, what happened is that colby0 switched to new hardware and Comcast suckage meant the DNS didn't upgrade until Tuesday. And then I was busy with dentists and eye doctors and such things.

On Sunday I caught the WRC Rally Finland on SPEED, which is a terrible channel name. Subaru won an intense 2nd/3rd place battle, aww yeah. I'd like to reiterate my desire for a WRX STi, unf unf. Anyhow, it brought back good memories of the MFR2k3. They don't look that fast on TV, but can you imagine going down a dirt road at 165kph (~103mph)? Later in the evening Mike rolled up in his new ride and took me over to Jonny's and we played a little badminton with Dave. I was a bit of a ringer because I didn't mention that I've played with the club several times this year. *whistles*. We gave his new Saab a little workout on New Cut and River roads on the way back. :)

Monday night I watched Old School (3 / 4) with Mike and Achal. And I think somewhere around here I was having trouble with the Internet and general and getting to colby0. Comcast is a lame ISP as it is, but throw in a bunch of infected Windows machines and blah, everything stinks.

So for most of the day Tuesday I sat around going through that 7.5 months of mail that my parents don't forward to me. Information Week is a terrible magazine, despite the fact that I get it for free. On the other hand, Java Developers Journal is fairly good, but it'd be much better if there weren't more pages of ads than information. Seriously, count them yourself, there are more ads than content.

Somewhere in here I got a new trial pair of contacts that didn't work at all. And then the doc just slipped in a different kind and I could see. Same prescription, just a different brand. One was evil, one was great. Apparently this is normal, and explains why the new ones I received over winter break were terrible, despite my HMO saying I was crazy and everything was fine. Hell no, stupid HMO, I get to decide when I can see, not you. So yes, I did break out and go to a different place for my new lenses and I'm quite happy. Just going to take my eyes a while to get used to having them in there again.

On some morning I woke up early because the pain of putting in my bottom retainer (trying to straighten them up just a bit after having my wisdom teeth removed) so I watched Black Rain, which was very disappointing and I became quite distracted by my pile of magazines instead, so 0 / 4 stars.

Anyhow, I also went out to Rockburn park to practice my tennis golf swing a little so I can rock the campus golf when I get back.

Well the Sox beat the Mariners, and the O's are up on the Yankers, so everything in my little Saturday baseball world is working out, although I like the Mariners and hopefully they'll be my home team at some point. :)

I want to go here. I've given it another shot and I really like ArgoUML. Jeff was nice and doubled my web quota so now I actually have enough room. Alright, I'm going to jet, and you ponder how it's a small world after all.

Here's the Internet suckage I was talking about...

64 bytes from 137.146.210.52: icmp_seq=132 ttl=239 time=30.4 ms
64 bytes from 137.146.210.52: icmp_seq=134 ttl=238 time=1342.3 ms
64 bytes from 137.146.210.52: icmp_seq=135 ttl=238 time=355.1 ms
64 bytes from 137.146.210.52: icmp_seq=136 ttl=238 time=32.0 ms

Wait, actually I want to go to bed right now. I'll update this when I wake up.

I need $115 and PayPal to not be sketchy so that I can buy a new toy.

This place is falling apart. There's a giant hunk of paint missing off the wall. The street leading up to the back of Dana is being torn out. The rooms we have to move into are dirty. The stairs in front of Foss/Woodman are wrecked. Dana's elevator is broken, but I guess it doesn't really matter because now it only leads to construction equipment. And our Colby cards don't work anymore. Yes, I'm supposed to move out and into my new room by Friday night. No, I don't see how that's going to happen right now.

Go see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl because it's a 4 / 4 stars movie. On the other hand, Blackboard Jungle is only a 2.5 / 4 star movie.

Marc and I have an appointment to see Ed Yeterian on September 5th at 10:00am. Sadly, Marc didn't get into CEC, so it looks like it'll just be me and Clare.

Oh and by the way, 8th wall.

The CEC 2003 website is impossible to find. But our paper was accepted, so I get to go to Australia in December. w00t. CEC03, here I come. Good thing I got into that public speaking class in the fall. Awesome. Dec 8-12. So sexy.

I went to the 2003 Maine Forest Rally yesterday. It was pretty hype.

Those things go damn fast. I found it hard to track them properly to get a shot where they're not blurry. Some of the club rally cars are wild. People in Honda Civics and trucks and things. An air horn is the only way to cheer someone on, I think.

Sadly, the pictures and even the videos don't convey the smell of the exhaust and the dirt flying up at you as they go by. You just hear this growling engine off in the distance and then all of a sudden there's a car right on top of you. Then before you know it, it's gone again. The top class of cars were spaced two minutes apart I think, and even though the club cars slower, the one minute interval between them keeps you going. All of the cars could go fast, I think the difference between the fast and slow ones was just having the balls to go for it and floor it around a blind corner. My heart was thumping.

I missed the start of Monsoon Wedding updating my journal, so I watched Contact with Marc and Adam instead. Eehhh hard to rate, if the story was just a little different I think I'd like it much more, so how about 2.75 / 4 stars?

Lately I've seen T3, Whale Rider, This Is Spinal Tap, and attempted to sit through My Fair Lady but it was terrible and I just couldn't hack it.

Michelle came up to visit Thursday afternoon, but she had to head back home by Friday. :( But we had a great time and the highlight was going to Reid State Park, one of the day trips listed on that magical summer programs sheet.

I finished Thinks... (3.5 / 4) stars and ENIAC (4 / 4 stars - yeah I guess I prefer non-fiction) and now I'm working on The Soul of a New Machine, per Dale's recommendation.

On Friday night we had the screw-your-roommate-nuts-and-bots-semi-naked Summer Prom. I didn't dance, but I enjoyed Marc's (a.k.a DJ Paranoia) musical selection and people watching so I had a good time. I dunno, when music is really good it makes me want to move around a little, but full on dancing... it just doesn't really often appeal to me.

I don't really understand people getting angry or depressed about things for more than a day. Let's say, for example, that you have a real jerk of a boss at the McDonalds you work at. Alright, he's a total douche for making you clean the bathroom when you were supposed to be doing the register, whatever. So you get mad, go home, sleep it off, and wake up bright and cheery. Know why? Because at the end of the day he may still be your boss, but he's your boss at McDonalds. This guy couldn't even get a job managering at Applebees.

So as Jason used to always say in high school, suck it up and deal.

Yeah I got picked on in elementary and middle school and maybe a little in high school, but whatever, now my degree from a prestigious liberal arts college is within sight and I don't work at a gas station.

Stop being so depressed at the time. If you can't do it yourself, maybe you need to take some medication or go get some therapy. When you break a bone, you get a cast put on. When your have a headache, you drop some asprin. So when you're wasting your life away making the world out to be a terrible place, go take some medication for your brain just like you would any other part of your body that's not functioning properly. Or fix whatever personal issues you have that are making you suck at life, like dumping your loser boyfriend. I'm not denying that terrible things happen in the world or that they shouldn't affect you, but often I think people go a little over the top and don't take a second to think about what they're doing.

Monsoon Wedding is showing tonight in Keys 105, woo-ho.

For the rest of the summer I'm just working on cleaning up Gaphyl, which isn't too terrible. Dale is still going to be my advisor on my honors project, so that's awesome. If only it was bio related I could be working on it now, but it's not so I can't. But it's all just programming and while I was cleaning up the Makefile to make it ultra sexy I learned a few new tricks like the -include directive and $(MAKECMDGOALS). So it's all good and I fixed two outstanding TODOs in a personal project.

The Maine Forest Rally is this weekend, and Chris might be coming up from to hangout and go with me. I've yet to convince the other Chris to visit, but he'll be back soon enough and then we can go surfing.

I feel (as Adam would say) that Marc and Mahdi are my heros.

Chicago was amazing. Best city I've ever been to. I've only been back since 1 AMish Friday morning and I didn't get much sleep because I had to hang out with Kathy yesterday before she left. Yeah, she's gone now *sniffle* but I'm sure she'll have a blast in Argentina. Right, so I was trying to say that I'm still a tad tired so you'll have to sit tight for the amazing Chicago update. I took a ton of pictures, and some of them came out looking very sexy, woo-ho.

And here's the rest of the Chicago update...

At the Saturday workshops I attended the Biological Applications for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (BioGEC), the Undergraduate Student Workshop, and I also stopped by the Evolvable Hardware session for a bit.

On Sunday, I went to the tutorials on Evolvable Hardware, Software Testing via Evolutionary Computation, and Bionics: Building on Biological Evolution.

Monday was the official start of the conference, with John Holland giving giving the talk at the plenary session. Afterwards, I attended the GA Applications 1 tract and saw Reinforcement Learning Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, Pruning Neural Networks with Distribution Estimate Algorithms, and Design of Multithreaded Estimate of Distribution Algorithms. After lunch, I went to the GA Best Paper Nominees 2 session and saw presentations on Visualizing Tree Structures in Genetic Programming, Methods for Evolving Robust Programs, and Genetic Representations for Evolving Families of Designs. The last cluster of the day was RWA Vision & Imaging 2, where Learning Compositive Features for Object Recognition, GenTree: An Interactive Genetic Algorithms System for Designing 3D Polygonal Tree Models, and Improved Image Halftoning Technique Using GAs with Concurrent Inter-block Evaluation.

Tuesday began with Cellular Programming and Symmetric Key Cryptography Systems from the GA Applications 3 session, followed by Emergence of Collective Behavior in Evolving Populations of Flying Agents from the AAAA Best Paper Nominees. The day culminated with the evening poster session. I found the meet and greet aspect to be very important, as I met folks from DePaul University, which I'm now considering for graduate school.

For the final day of the conference, I went to the AAAA Applications, where work on Swarms in Dynamic Enviroments, AntClust: Ant Clustering and Web Usage Mining, and The Effect of Natural Selection on Phlogeny Reconstruction Algorithms was presented.

But of course I still need to fill in the social aspects.

Colby is still amazing in the summer. I'm leaving for GECCO 2003 tomorrow and I'll be back late Thursday night.

Happy July. Ack, there are only 6 weeks or so of work left!

Today after dinner I played a fabulous few holes of Campus Golf with Leigh, Brian, Jess, Mason, and Chris. Many thanks to Chris for the invite and letting me borrow his club.

Speaking of invites, I've been invited to Karen's going away party on Thursday. Awww, sadness. She's been an awesome friend/youth hostel/mom/mentor and I'll really miss her.

But I'll be going to her party with Kathy, yay! Her sister is coming up this weekend. But I got some quality time in with her last night when we went for a walk in the woods to find this new area she had discovered. But it was like a Columbus discovery that I had already been to. :) So I could point out the neat things, like the wood pecker tree and make sure we didn't get lost and such.

Alright, so I suck at updating lately.

On Sunday I went with Kathy on a fun trip to Blueberry Hill to overlook the Belgrade lakes. Very awesome.

Lately I've been keeping up with watching lots of movies, including Reservoir Dogs (2 / 4), Philadelphia (3.5 / 4 - the only movie with Denzel Washington in it that I didn't hate), The Birds (4 / 4), Boyz 'n The Hood (1.5 / 4), and Casablanca (3 / 4 - sorry, it's good, but it's not that great... maybe if you didn't hype it so much).

Work is okay. The Monday paper deadline for CEC 2003 came and went without a paper submission, because Clare got an extension on the grounds of the dog eating her homework. So that's still stressing me out. Not to mention that GECCO is two weeks from yesterday.

On Thursday I hung out on Dana beach with Kathy and we had a nice long converstaion. And saw a naked guy and a few topless guys. Uhm, hello, yeah, you're on the ground floor. I know it's hot, but cover up or close your shade or something.

And then yesterday I had a swell talk with Marc at dinner and another Dana beach conversation. I think we're much more alike than I though before yesterday. But the highlight of Friday was the slip and slide in the hallway. Yeah, that's right. And I would post a picture, but the stupid Colby webserver is broken and giving me 404's for no good reason.

Today Marc and I headed on down to the colby Computer Club to clean out the fridges and the place in general. Mission accomplished. Except we'll need to go back many more times to finish the "place in general" aspect. But I'm proud to say the club now has a nice sexy black shiny fridge. w00! We're also now officially a student chapter of the ACM. Put that on the resume.

But that resume building stuff won't find me a job. Knowing what the hell I'm doing will, so I'm prouder to say that I've been playing around with Subversion 0.24.2 and liking it. I'm sorry, but CVS just sucks. Why must it litter my filesystem with nasty CVS directories? I even poked at the source for a while and made a patch (replete with poor grammar and spelling mistakes. Ick, too bad I don't remember my SourceForge login info because it was new and struggling at the time, so it wasn't really worth using it past me trying it just this once). But then I quickly realized it wasn't worth it and it was way too big of a project to do right on my own. Anyway, Subversion makes nice, little .svn directories that you don't even have to notice or worry about. And their development list is open to everyone! What about the CVS list? Hell no! IIRC, I had to wait over two weeks for someone to grace my e-mail address with approval. *rolls eyes*

Well, as I finish this entry in a hail of 404's, I hope that I have authored valid XHTML and the page will load correctly for you.

Friday was pretty ridiculous. We all got plane tickets from united.com at the same time. Adam's were $320.50, Marc's were $355, and mine were $378.50. Bah! Marc and I got locked out of the price and had to enter all of the information over again from the start. It could have just let us get the price we started at instead of a poor error message or said "Hey, how about paying more?" but no, it was lame. Really lame.

Today was very special, because Michelle came up to visit! We had a nice leisurely lunch at that Riverside Farm Market place (she'd never been and liked it, too) and she gave me her GRE study stuff. Alas, she was mostly up just to grab a transcript and talk to a professor about a recommendation, but hopefully she'll be up for just a visit this summer.

But then I had to get back to working like a monkey like I had been since 8:30 or so. Stupid Phylip. My code just wasn't working out quite right. It was funny because I was trying to keep it bare bones but I could keep adding more Phylip code to Gaphyl and it wouldn't change squat. But after a dinner break and quick rest on the couch, I finally got it to work. I think. Well it was 8:30 anyway and I needed to recharge.

It looks like I just might make it out to GECCO after all. Yeah, I might be thinking about it in a more favorable light now. Just maybe. :)

When I got back, Doug and I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and I'm going to go ahead and give it a 2.75 / 4. Yeah, it wasn't bad. Doug is an interesting character because I only know him because he wandered one door over in EQ earlier in the year from the girls next door when he was visiting them to check out my rig. At least I think that's the only place I know him from. *shrug* But he's cool. On his way out he liked how I had a browser open and pointed at FARK.

I got an "my e-mail address has changed" note from Emily today. Cool. I'll have to see how she's doing. Anyhow, it's 11 so I'm off to bed.

No, wait, I can't let this one go. What a moron. Now I can rest.

Ah, there is much excitement to be journaled. Last night Kathy, Sarah, Marc, Drew (the one working for Karen), and I went out for a little mini-golf action at that place where KMD morphs into Silver Street. It was sprinkling a bit, but we stayed dry and I nabbed a free game (a $4.50 value) on my next trip because I had the best score of our group.

On Thursday I finished up the night by watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and playing the drinking game that accompanies it.

Kathy and I just got back from the wAterville House Of Pancakes (AHOP). I had the W-HOP special, which was just ham, egg, and cheese on a tasty bagel. Buttered and toasted, mmm. :) Under $4, pretty reasonable. The guy sitting at the booth next to us was friendly and asked how we were. That's Maine, very cool.

There was a bit of a time card fiasco on Friday so I didn't make it to the library before it closed to pick up some classic movies for the weekend.

Time to blog. Lessig and RIAA Q&A. Also, "Maverick Judge" Upholds Free Speech in Washington State.

I went to part of the 2003 Norteast Workshop on Gender Issues in the Sciences today. I would have gone to more, but the power went out 3 times last night so my alarm clock didn't wake me up in time for the bulk of it. Most of the attendees were female. The one speaker I did see was Dr. Emily Toth, of LSU. The standard, trite "I shouldn't say seminal I should say..." stuff. The title of her talk was titled "Successful strategies for advancement." I thought that was going to translate roughly into "How to make man money," but it was more about guerilla tactics to get tenure. So make friends with the typically female department secretaries, got it. Meanwhile, she had a copy of her Ms. Mentor book making its way around, so when it got to me I looked up salary. Her advice is that it's easier to grow a penis than for a great feminist salary revolution to occur. Duh. Of course it's easier to sit around and have an organized bitch fest with a bunch of other women. But that's not going to get you anywhere. Try inviting a powerful man. Try not making the second day of the "workshop" exculsive to women.

Dana is now open as of dinner last night. I thoroughly enjoyed walking to dinner in my indoor sandals. Bobs has been better than average over the summer, but it's nice to switch it up a little. Clare took us out to lunch at Big G's yesterday. 3 glasses of skim milk, awww yeah.

Well, although I can't get to the data I need because when the power went out it knocked out a key computer, I'm going to try and get some work done anyway.

So I Sunday I was bummed I checked my e-mail too late to get in on the CTF (Capture The Flag, come on!) action, so I was excited to receive an e-mail today with more warning. And then I got there, and I was the only person that showed up. But I had heard that 12-18 had showed up the previous times. Ah well. Instead I just hung out with Lauren, Elli, Amy, Tim, and Heather, the organizer type people. They made orange juice and then it was 11 so I cleaned the cups and left, because I turn into a pumpkin, didn't you know?

Yes, the movie a night streak has been broken. But last night I saw House of 1,000 Corpses (2 / 4). I thought the first half was quite spiffy, but then it just got kind of silly. You know, suspending disbelief too much. Plenty of spooky imagery, though. And then I hung out with Marc and Külli to watch game 7. Although I was born in Jersey, I found myself rooting for the ducks. It seemed more fun to be rooting for the underdogs to play well and get a tie and overtime. More anticipation, you know?

I finally got that package from Sarah today. Included a happy note, CD, and an updated picture of her! Yay. So now I've got a no bangs one, which is quite cool, because for some silly reason I never got around to taking one before school ended.

Speaking of pictures, I need to get those graduation photos e-mailed out. We looked at Heather's while sippin' on the OJ. Right, bedtime.

I actually did work yesterday and today. But Mudd was locked and I was only a half ninja.

On Saturday I watched The Deer Hunter (1.5 / 4), and this afternoon I watched Field of Dreams. Now, maybe I'm getting sappy in my old age, but I thought it was quite good, so 3 / 4.

Saturday night until bedtime I had a really nice chat with Michelle. And then this morning a few minutes after waking up Sarah called.

My day got a lot better when I went with [Summer] Sarah and Kathy to the Barnes & Nobel in Augusta. On the way down we passed a guy in a pickup truck wearing a helmet and goggles. I didn't notice but they did and though it was a riot so I convinced them to pull over at the rest are just before Augusta and wait for him to pass so we could catch up and go by again. But then Kathy missed the rest area, so she just pulled to the side of the road, and I held up a map book pretending to be lost (on 95, right) and he went by and the Buttermobile was fast enough to catch it before the exit. Hilarious. Yet another time I wish I had my camera on me.

Sooner than later I'd like to walk around campus and get some shots of it in the way I rarely see it, all green and happy.

Just got a note about capture the flag. But alas, I'm already late! Ah well, perhaps next time there will be more notice.

Marc made a sexy summer phone directory.

TGIF? Except I haven't been doing much work and yesterday felt more like a Friday.

On Wednesday Kathy and I watched La Femme Nikita (0.5 / 4 stars), in which I had to suspend too much disbelief, but the AUG was cool. And then last night we watched Mulholland Dr. (2 / 4 stars), which was weird, but artsy, so it was okay. I enjoyed arguging with Kathy about who was hotter, Naomi Watts, or Laura Harring. Photo of them together. I said Naomi, hands down. But Kathy thought I was crazy and Laura was the clear winner. So when the movie was in really weird parts we'd discuss it. :) I think it's funny how her "maniacal dream" is more cohesive than her reality.

Lately I've been enjoying the power and flexibility of the almighty Dreamcast. Marc let me use his burner to make a bootable NES emulator CD. :) I don't know the term, but I think it's key to have modern ways of accessing old stuff. My NES broke down last year and I had to eBay for a new one. And then my Spelunker cartridge broke, but that thing is much harder to find, and, well, it's already been paid for! Anyhow, thanks to NesterDC 7.1, I can play my NES games without lugging around a clunky console and blocky space stealing cartridges. One CD and my DC is all I need.

But I would still like to buy a few more DC games. And I need moeny to do that. Which means I need to work. So I should get back to that now. I've been a big slacker. But it's hard to find motivation to work on ugly code. I started poking at TV Time (which is quite elegant) and then stopped and checked myself about why I was poking at it when if I just go poke at this other code I could make money and maybe get myself to Australia. Sometimes you just need to suck it up and deal.

Oh, almost forgot. Yesterday Marc, Adam, Dave, and I went to the Open Forum with Bro and heckled him about hiring more faculty. He dodged and lied about the student enrollment. But super-cool math department Leo backed us up and subtly pointed out how the current "squeaky wheel gets the grease" method of hiring faculty is asinine and there should be a much more formal analysis process. You know, taking common sense things into account. Like if the number of english majors drops and the number of computer science majors shoots up, perhaps the english department should lose a member (oh no, they'll loose a narrowly focused class on 1/4 of Shakespeare's sonnents!) and the CS department should gain one so we can have a class on a very broad and important topic, like networking, databases, artificial intelligence, or robotics, none of which we currently have a class on. Ridiculous, isn't it?

And then I Karen took me out to a lunch at Riverside Farm Market. She rules. :) But it was a little sad because she gave me the story on her moving to NYC at the end of the month. :( She's been an awesome unoffical host/mentor mother. But I'm glad she's doing what she wants.

Alright, now I'll get to work. No, really. Right after I grab my laundry. Never you mind that I slept in until noon today and it's 3:45 now and soon it'll be time for dinner.

Up late... cha cha cha.

I found a nice capture card program today, TV Time. I stumbled across it while procrastinating on /. and seeing a link to an IRC bot that says when commits are made to several open source projects using CVS. The feature list is very cool, and while browsing the FAQ I was linked, so that just fed my ego and made me like it more, even if it's a competitor with my own little project.

Yesterday I received the code for my summer work, yay!

I can't think of a better way to start of a new month than an update. Well, actually I can, but I've got 20 minutes before The Simpsons starts, so here we are.

I've just been relaxing this weekend. Well, maybe I'm more on the not motivated end of things, but when I'm having such a good time, it's hard to summon the willpower to work. Anyhow, played a little Starcraft with Marc and Mason. It's interesting (from a technical aspect, anyway) because Marc runs Windows, Mason runs Mac OS, and I'm running on Linux (Wine).

My eye isn't swollen anymore, and my cough has mostly gone away, so I've got that working for me. I also e-mailed Chris's sister back. :) I didn't mean to play hard to get (games, bah!) I just keep forgetting with all of the TV and video games and napping and not wanting to clean out my inbox.

Insomniac is on tonight, woo-ho. Yeah, I get all excited about TV because I don't normally have time to watch it. Insomniac plays well with my curiousity about things and places that I wouldn't experience under normal circumstances. Yeah, MTV's Cribs is also quality programming. Come on, admit it, when you visit a medieval castle or cathedral and there are closed doors or you can't go up into the spires, it's just not as much fun. I payed my admission money, let me get my exploring on!

Some of Fark's photoshop threads are hilarious.

I'm really getting my links on tonight, aren't I? I've got this spiffy new Vim guide thanks to Karen so I'm slowly working on becomone a master vimer. As I'm sure I've said before, I hate vim, but I can't deny its ubiquity.

Hum. Running out of things to prattle on about. Guess I'll warm up my TV tuner card. Oh oh, that reminds me, I watched The Magnificent Seven (2112)with Kathy last night, and I was kind of disappointed, so only 2 / 4 stars. But they did have the nifty hand signals. Well, off I go. Ah, summer at Colby. It's lovely, and I highly recommend it.

Woah, I've been having a great time the past week. Colby is awesome in the summer. Here's the quick rundown...

On Friday (the last) Chris gave me "the fever" and we teamed up to give Karen "the fever" so off we went to Bass Park for opening night of the horse races! They're the ones with the buggies on the back. I didn't throw down any $2 bets (first time to a horsetrack) but the band was great, Chris' parents showed up (they're cool), and a TV lady interviewed Chris and I. She said we'd be on either the 11 o'clock that night or the morning one on Saturday. We weren't on that night and weren't about to get up at 6 or whenever to get the morning one, so oh well.

Saturday continued to be part of the awesome Bangor experience. Watched Dude, Where's My Car? (Eh Mann, Wo ist Mein Auto? - 1.5 / 4 stars) and the plot was actually really complicated, considering the title.

Sunday was graduation. And so much more. Picked up my nice $35 carpet, hung out with Chris and Mahdi to watch it, and then did some serious looting rescuing of things the seniors discarded. TV, microwave, fan, multiple fridges, lamps, and a futon are all mine now. Free. Awwww yeah! Going to sell some of it to freshmen for a little cash money, baby. Filled up my truck like 5 times. Really, it was crazy. And I moved in that night. *phew* Long day.

Monday I had to actually unpack and vacuum and clean up. And help move Kathy in and work on getting The Plague because of the totally filthy conditions. Trash all over. Evan's sisters's dirty room. Bleh.

Tuesday, first day of work. Not that I actually received an e-mail from Clare about that or anything. So I just sort of showed up to the 4th of Mudd at 8:30 and e-mailed and to make a long story short at 11 I had gathered everyone up and we went off to a power lunch at Riverside Farm Market. I had the Italian Lite Lunch, very tasty, and it was a nice atmosphere.

Speaking of nice atmosphere, on Wednesday we set up a die table under some carpet out on Dana Beach and got a few chairs out there and I had a very pleasant lunch with Adam, Marc, and Kathy. Ahh. :) It's awesome up here, I'm telling ya. And Sarah called, yay, so we had a nice chat, although her parents really need to get a new phone because she sounded really quiet. A little before she called when Mason and Marc and I were Starcrafting it up, my eye started to swell. In just about a half hour a little bug but I received from out outdoor lunch just below my eye went nuts. Puffy eye, wicked cough, oh yeah, it looked like I had the plague, that's right. But the e-mail from Chris's sister made it all better. Ha ha.

Thursday I didn't do much except play games, including a lot of the totally free and awesome RTCW: Enemy Territory (BitTorrent). Yo, if you haven't had the pleasure yet, BitTorrent is awesome. I was getting a blazingly fast download. As in saturating the pipe fast. Fast. And then the power went out twice. *snarl* So I did the Family Guy thing and Torrey was up to visit the Slemp so I talked to her a little too and even got a hug goodbye, yay!

And here we are. Clare still hasn't sent me the code I need to really get cracking. So at the group meeting I didn't have much to report on. But she made it all better by inviting us out to her place at the Colby-Hume Center on Messalonskee Lake! It's absolutely gorgeous out there. It looks amazingly different in the summer than the bitter cold of January when I was out there pounding the hot iron. Went kayaking for my first time, did a little BBQing, you know, good stuff. Dale was there and we chatted about his book which was fun. I need to finish reading the draft! But I worked really hard this semester, and I found out why my 0.03 GPA increase corresponded to my class rank plummeting 114 places. Because the registrar screwed up calculating it, apparently. It's just some fake run which will settle down and be recalculated when all of the underclassmen grades are in.

Well, that's about it. I'm having a blast. Just watched The Godfather (3 / 4 stars), so much better than part 2. And I should probably be off to sleep soon so I don't get totally out of whack. Oh, I also have a picture of Clare holding up a bottle of wine with a lampshade on her head. Rock on. :)

I went to see The Matrix: Reloaded yesterday and I wasn't a fan. While it's true that the highway scene owned me, and the use of computer technology was very reasonable,

I found myself quite bored for most of the rest of it. And the ending was terrible, just terrible. The music wasn't half as good as in the first, character development was poor, all of the scenes were dimly lit (except the highway scene), I could still tell a lot of the CGI was CGI, and the phrase "I believe" was used far to many times. Seriously, one character or another must have said it 50 times during the movie. How about "I think" or "Well maybe" or "Perhaps?" Anyway. It only set me back $4.50, so that was cool. Yeah, Maine rocks because he expensive theater is only $4.50 for any showtime and the cheap place (which I actually found to be a better watching experience) is normally only $3. Screw renting.

My little sore throat/cold thing I tried to fight on Sunday but won on Monday hasn't gone away yet and it's starting to get quite annoying. Not sure what my adventure for today will be.

Well as of last night I'm safe and sound in Bangor with Karen and Chris. I'm on dial up so it's not much fun to blog, but today I made it out to watch Bulletproof Monk at the $1 on Tuesday movie theather place and it was pretty terrible. But I had fun going around and exploring. And napping and staying up late, yeah! Ah. I have a pretty annoying sore throat and mini-cold going on, but it's so nice being done my junior year. By far the hardest one yet. First semester was just... insane. I hope grades are posted soon. Back to Colby on Sunday. Guess that's it; must socialize.

Thursday I went to the German review session (two really cute girls from the other section were there, woo!), and then pulled Kathy into going with me to get my oil changed because I hate doing things like that. I've actually never been to an oil change place (we just do it in the driveway, but seeing how I'm not going home until mid-August...) so it was nice to have her with me. It wasn't so bad, and there was an interesting race to see if we could get out of there before the machine paving the road went by. :) And then we watched the first Matrix because the sky was overcast and I couldn't see the lunar eclipse. Woah, it's better than I remembered it being. Way better. Such a good movie.

And then yesterday (which sooo didn't feel like a Friday) I did another review session and once again pretty much convinced myself that was a good effort for the day. Actually, I had a nice chat with Karina at breakfast about how I worked hard all year and I just wanted to be done and go home. Finals should be optional, man. And then she pointed out how well yeah, I've worked hard all year, it would be a shame to blow it now. Bah! If the final wasn't worth 25% of my German grade it wouldn't be possible for me to blow it. I could walk away with a nice solid C and be all set for the summer. Bwah.

I ate alone in Foss because I couldn't find anyone to eat with and then just as I sat down I thought "Miranda!" Ah, well. But along the way I asked Jenn and she was busy but I roped her in for food tonight. On the plus side, I had a really nice lunch with Michelle. I realized why I'm so physical sometimes. Anyhow, after dinner and a little studying action, I had a quick chat with Sarah on IM and Chris came over and we watched 3 episodes of Family Guy. And then Kyle's sundown thing happened so I headed down and watched Léon with him. Quality flick, he enjoyed it a lot.

Well, my parallel and distributed final (which was only supposed to be an hour long) went for 2:20 (but some kids took almost 5 hours!) and then I had to leave for my bioinformatics final. We all had presentations so that one lasted 4:15. But it was all good because we had Asian Cafe (Pad Thai is way over rated, altough I tried it (the food) for the first time) which helped to break it all up, of course.

And then afterwards a few people cried out "Who's going to the Pub now!?" and without much convincing I said I was in. So yes, I had my first Pub experience. Virgin strawberry daiquiri ($3!). Oh yeah. Thanks to Chris, Deborah, Michelle, Clare, and Ben I had a good old time. We hung out there for four hours, but the time just flew by.

Awesome day. Even with the two finals. Made $19.50 selling books back, woo!

Huh. Well after banging out 4 pages of quality bioinformatics paper (code listings are awesome!) I went down to visit Kyle and Carolyn and Kathy, but no one was home. However, Alice (yeah, from COOT) was out and lurking about and we got to talking. She's got a job all lined up at the University of Washington and I mentioned how I was thinking about grad school there and she offered me a place to stay if I ever wanted to visit. Cool. Had the disheveled thing working for me I suppose.

Mmm, I've been enjoying Loudness for the first time.

Thursday was our last German class and we ate snacks and watched everyone's videos. Then it was off to lunch with Miranda and Sarah. Later in the day I had my last Programm Languages class and volunteered to be the evaluation guy. While dropping the forms off I stopped by to visit Karen (and Brian, he's cool, too) and snagged Kathy to walk back to the dorm with since she works up on the top of Eustis, too. I attempted to duck the German-Russian volleyball game on the AMS patio on my way to meet up with The Boys, since we were going out to dinner, but was spotted and had to chat for a bit. Then I fooled around with Chris's little beat machine thing until Mahdi came over and off we went. Except when we got to the place (the Railroad Square brick-oven joint) the staff wasn't there yet so we visited the record store across the way and Mahdi bought a live Rammstein CD. So we got our German on anyway. Dinner was cool; nice to hang out with them.

And guess who didn't have class on Friday and stayed up really late? Yeah, Sarah and I. It's nice to have someone again that likes me enough to stay up to ridiculous hours.

Friday I woke up for breakfast at 11 (told you I was up late) with Sarah (when Carolyn and Kathy came in they didn't sit with us - I must fix that!) and then went to watch the usual debauchery with the seniors getting all drunk on the stairs of the library. The abuse went on longer than usual, but eventually they built up the nerve to run down to the pond and throw mud around and two people (one guy, one girl) were even brave enough to swim across. I cheered. I was off to the side a bit and noticed Colby's very own Unix administrator, Jeff. I said "Oh hey, Jeff, how's it going?" and we had a nice chat about how graduation is a sad time because then it's off to the real world. So after 18 months of working he said the hell with that and went to grad school to pick up his PhD in hydrogeology. Yes, all of this while drunk seniors hit each other with blow up dolls and wrestled in the pond and mud a couple dozen feet away. Crazy. :)

Afterwards I went for a walk with Sarah in the arboretum for two and a half hours or so and then split off to have a nice, quiet 5pm dinner in Bobs. Tasty wings night. And I was also quite parched by now and drank lots of nice cold skim milk. I cleaned my plate and even had a piece of apple pie. Read the comics and an article in Software Developer before I was joined by Mike (he was escaping the ruckus of Dana).

To burn off all the food I rounded up Sarah and Miranda to play frisbee behind EQ. And then we say a guy drifting around with an open container and a case of Natty Light. When we were done and returned to the dorm, I took my sneakers off. Yeah, that was enough fun for the day. Although I'm sure Original P was fun, I just didn't have the energy anymore to do stuff, so it was my in dorm sandals for the rest of the night. Which was spent with Sarah again, but this time an hour or so later. When I finally did get back to the room (3:45ish) my roommate still wasn't back. I found out today that he had volunteered to help out with Original P and was helping them to move equipment and stuff until 5am! Way to go, Dan! He's a Colby helping and all-around good guy machine.

And here we are back to today. Woke up at 10, showered, sent out a quick Reid Cup reminder, and headed to breakfast. I was so out of it I didn't notice Kyle and Chris at Dana (even though they were at the bottom of the ramp) and went to sit by myself. But they called me over, yay, and I sat with them. We got all pumped up. Oh yeah, that's right. In the end, Physics dominated, CS took home 2nd (woo!), Chemistry 3rd, and Bio 4th. Physics only had 4 people (although later a Bio jumped ship to give them a 5th) and they showed up late, but they had 2 really good ringers and just schooled us. Bumping hurts. Rather, I don't know how to do it right and my forearms really hurt. Ah, well, whatever. I weaseled out of having to worry about food for the BBQ there, btw. Hehe, yeah yeah.

That was at 11, ended uh... let's say 1... so then it was off to see Arising at 2 on Dana lawn. They were great. It's the best I've ever heard them sound. But it was very cloudy and windy so the crowd wasn't too big. Chris is my rockstar hero. His solo song was good, really, even if he hasn't come up with all of the words yet. He still entertained with good music.

And then that ended and I played Counter-Strike with Andre for an hour or so on a hard de_dust server, but I pulled out a 24-23. Not wanting to brave the cold, Sarah and Miranda and I ordered pizza and watched Comedy Central.

Since then, I've wandered up here to clean up and organize a little (I know when my finals are now! 2 Wed, 1 Sun, 1 Mon), poke at the web, upload the Arising pictures, and, of course, work on updating my journal. Sarah went out to party, and Carolyn is off in... some other state... Kathy is out, Chris is probably with the band, and Mahdi is lost to Lindsay, so here I am.

Good thing I've got a Miranda again. Kinda lost her during the whole avoiding Sarah thing. And of course it's very cool to be friends with Sarah again because she was one of my best friends up here. But anyway, I'm going to go watch Iron Chef with her now and get my microwave popcorn on (mmm, popcorn) and go to bed. Goodnight. :)

Fun dinner with Carolyn. She played with two bananas I had collected while waiting for me to scavenger up more food to sneak out. This is why I think she's so great. Someone else might, I dunno, sit around being bored or get angry with me, but she was cute and fun and played with the bananas and entertained herself, and me. :)

And then I made a fun paper airplane (find the entry for May 2nd, 2003) and went to see the complete works of William Shakespeare abridged (meh). Bedtime.

On Saturday I did work all day (Prolog is cool) and then went to see The Samples play to a huge crowd in Page Commons. People were crowd surfing and everthing. It was packed I tell you! I heard them warm up before the opening band and thought they were pretty good so after the opening band was done I went to find a phone to call Chris and grab something to drink. So I went into the Marsons Commons Room hoping to find a phone because I was up on the balcony level. There was a bunch of catered food in there and I figured it was just some weird Colby event so I snagged a bottle of water. Nope. Turns out it was the ... green room? ... for The Samples. Hehe. Anyhow, they were good except they need a better reason to be cool aside from "Dave Matthews Band used to open for us." and "We smoke a lot of weed; here's a song about it." Losers.

On Sunday I watched the sunset with [my] Sarah for about three hours. :) So after we worked things out (good thing we were both too stubborn to let the cold get the best of) we hung out inside for another two hours. I'm really glad to be friends with her again. It's a little odd how after 4 hours it was business as usual, but it's better than being a hater.

I also read Animal Farm. Good book and a very quick read.

Let's see... Monday. Uh... I studied German all night?

And here I am in Olin 323 TAing and hoping no one asks a question because I have mad German to study for my exam tomorrow. I finally met up with Dan, my bioinformatics partner, and he explained what we're doing so I know what I have to do. *big sigh of relief* Alright, off to German it up.

Ouh, wait, ouh ouh! CS Fest was amazing! Mmmm, Mari food. Brazilian goodness and tons of balloons. And I also found out about an underclassman that actually seems to get this computer science thing, at least IMHO.

Kevin's Hero of the Week is O'Reilly. Yes, Perl/Tk is possibly the worst technical book ever, but any corporation that values humanity's collective knowledge bank is okay by me.

Fowler was great. Three books signed, found out about some neat new software and books, and got my picture taken with him. It's blurry, though.

Before that I had lunch with Jenn (woo! long time no see, it was marvelous) and before that went to another talk by the tomato guy (which was also very good, and actually Jenn's class), and had German. German will be at 9am next year. Murmph.

The games night dorm event was kind of a let down. Risk, or the Friends game, both over the blaring TV with the president yacking about Iraq.

I seem to be slipping into a bad mood, so I'm going to go to bed.

Well, actually, I looked over the logs real quick and there seems to be a fairly good contingent of people with this page bookmarked (even if they only stop by every 2-3 weeks), so you should check out Prevalence Layers (like Prevayler) and CruiseControl, both of which came up during the talk. And if you don't know what version control is and you're a CS major, you should look into it. How were you planning on getting hired after graduation, anyway?

Oh and I keep forgetting, but I could only pass up the Thinks book I wanted to book seminar twice at the bookstore sale a while back. $4.98 marked down from $24.95? I'm there!

Okay, now I'm off to bed.

Somehow cosmic forces aligned to not give me ridiculous amounts of work today. Much fun was had including the CS picnic at Dale's, a lecture on Killer Tomatoes, and the very awesome handbell concert.

Tomorrow our bioinformatics poster goes up. Geeze, I'm like a poster machine now. I feel pretty "ehhh" about this one, though. Actually, I still feel pretty "ehhh" about our project. But making a poster without results just seems silly to me.

Alright, off to bed. I need lots of sleep because tomorrow, the man, the myth, the legend, Martin Fowler is coming to Colby! Can you believe it? Amazing. *sings* I'm gonna get my books signed I'm gonna get my books signed.

The conference was awesome. More later. Pictures are available by asking me for the URL. We wouldn't want that picture of Clare asleep at the John Conway keynote leaking out now would we? :)

Just need to clean up the 109 or so e-mails in my inbox and then go to bed and do my German video project all day tomorrow. So yeah, that kind of later. Uhp, there go 70.

Nothing like updating ye old journal when I have a lot of work I should be doing.

Last night as I was walking back to east quad the air smelled really nice. I know, it sounds funny, but it's never happened before and it was true. It just had a really nice fresh mositness to it. Like eating one of those tasty green melons in the dining hall. Honeydew, that's what they're called. I'm uncultured, what can I say? We never had honeydew melons for breakfast when I was growing up.

But that was after a long "working on the poster" session. It was late. Ah, if only I didn't have school here, Colby would be a really nice place.

On Sunday I had dinner with Michelle. Good times. She even helped me out a little on my bioinformatics project because my partner and I just aren't on the same schedule. Afterwards I did some work, visited Chris to watch the Simpsons, and then watched Pi with Carolyn. Yay Carolyn. It's so rare that we have a chance to hang out alone anymore.

Oh Saturday night I had a nice talk with Scott (of Speakout.com fame). He's really in good shape with his new gig. Bah, plenty of time for me to do that whole earning money thing later. Whatever, man, college is cool!

Today I found out the name of the nice girl I've been seeing around Olin. It's Elli. If only everyone at Colby could be as friendly as she is, Colby, nay, the world would be a much better place. I looked her up in the directory (there was a bit of confusion as to if she said "Alli" or "Elli") and suprise, suprise, she's from Seattle.

Alright, time for German, then I'm meeting up with Karen and Chris and we're going to see Margaret Cho! And then I've got lots of work to do while fitting in a trip to Rhode Island for CCSCNE 2003.

I'm finding myself to be more and more of a misogynist. Everything was fine until my senior year of high school. Then they got all weird. Karen is normal, but man, if I have to wait like what, 8 years?, for these college chicks to be Karen's age and normal again, ack!

Yeah yeah, I could be the dysfunctional one. Maybe when you're upset because your boyfriend is mad at you for cheating on him and the lesson you've learned is that next time you just won't tell him, it's my fault for thinking there's something wrong with you.

Back in high school I didn't have very many male friends, because, well guys sucked. Since then, the numbers have pretty much swapped. Many male friends, very low female friend count. Girls just started doing everything I hated guys for. They're mean, insensitive, stupid, unfriendly, and they can't drive.

Yep, can't drive. Back in high school, the guys were the bad drivers. "Oh, look, I have a car now! Let me burn rubber and drive like an idiot in my mom's civic because I'm all manly and can drive." Now it's "Oh, I'm driving daddy's big SUV so people in tiny cars need to watch out and it has poor visibility so I can't park is straight." Meanwhile, the guys have matured into nice, safe drivers.

Unfriendly. How many guys on the floor stop by to say hi? 3. How many girls? 0.

Stupid. Why do the male computer science majors outnumber the females by 5-6 times? Are they just too stupid to do it? Maybe, although to be fair I think we have a few bonehead guys, too. Or perhaps I'll go with the safe "they lack self-confidence" excuse. Well that's stupid, too. If you're majoring in biochem because computer science was too hard...

I don't have it in me to go into the insensitive part right now, so just know that's how I feel. This one hurts the most.

But on the plus side, I've gotten much better at dealing with these depressing specimens. Today I finally noticed someone's bangs have disappeared, and it also doesn't upset me anymore to watch the beer sluts dance at a sketchy Heights party. I feel really good about that. Like I'm stronger. I can look you right in the eye without feeling a pain in my chest. I wish you wouldn't throw yourself around like that and get some self-respect, but I understand being lonely.

Come talk to me when you're normal, because I'd like to be friends with you.

Hey nameless female journal stalker, you still haven't e-mailed me like you said you would. (See what I'm talking about?)

I had a really nice dinner with Sara on Wednesday. Sadly, it was cut short by the massive crowds at Bobs crammed into only one side. Way to drive people away. Silly dining services. But on the plus side, the oyster cracker package I got today only had 3 crackers in it. Hehe.

I'm on chill mode today. I kind of have a lot of work, but I'm just ignoring it. That'll happen when you wake up early to study more German. Mmm Discovery Channel show on Tokyo's Sky City and History Channel on The Coliseum.

Sent out my second CS lunch notice today. *shrug* Someone has to be leader.

On... mmm... Tuesday? I tried one of the tiny oranges on the tree on the 2nd floor of Mudd in the skyway. It was really sour. Now I understand where the flavor for those atomic warheads comes from. My clementine seedling is doing well.

Had grilled cheese bar with Mahdi this afternoon. Good times.

I had fun filling out my summer housing form. Ask me about it.

Dear Colby Parents,

Colby's Board of Trustees met last weekend and approved the College's 2003-04
budget.  As part of that process, the board set next year's comprehensive fee
at $37,570, which represents a 4.9 percent increase over the current year. This
places Colby near the middle among our peer colleges with regard to both the
level and rate of increase of our fee.

[Jabber about the economy removed]

Sincerely,
William D. Adams
President

But, why do my parents care? I care about a tuition increase, not them. So I replied...

I believe you've addressed the letter incorrectly.  I attend Colby, not
my parents.  In other words, I am the person (consumer) that must choose
to pay Colby's comprehensive fee for 2003-04.

I'm aware that some students' educational expenses are completely covered
by their parents, but in my case, I'm the one going into debt, not my
parents.  Furthermore, my parents aren't "Colby Parents," they're just
"Parents," who happen to have a son that attends Colby this year.

Please, show a little respect for the students.

~Kevin
:)

And then vacation replied "I will be away from campus and unable to respond to email for the period April 16-April 25, 2003. If you wish to contact my office during my absence, please call Jackie Person at 872-3214."

What a shame.

Last night was fun. Hung out with Mahdi and Chris playing some of the ol' SEGA Marine Fishing (Mahdi is a beast, he pulled in a 265lb'er!) and Tetris Plus 2 and Counter-Strike. Then it got later and things sort of dissolved. And then I went and had a very nice talk with Torrey until her bedtime.

Earlier in the day I went to the track meet to see Michelle throw hammer and the ladies in our old room rock the 5K. But I could only stay for part of the 5K because I had to head off to programming team practice. In two hours we completed as many programs as the team that won last year. Oh, and the winning team had 3 hours. :) So I think we're in good shape. Hehe, crazy.

Lots of German, and lots of procrastination today. But I'm getting really good at the Diktat (it's a cognate, work with me people!) so I feel like I'm improving. Off to bed and an early start to cram. I slept in so much today, mmmm, it felt nice. :)

Did you that know I'm working at Colby over the summer? Well, I am.

More good news, one of the four clementine seeds I planted over winter break has decided to sprout. So in twenty or so years I'll have fresh clementines, woo-ho. Patience, grasshopper.

Went to see The Hypochondriac, and that's it. Hum, 10:50. Got nothing going on. *shrug* Guess I'll just go to bed.

On Tuesday I had a half impromptu geek lunch and half Carolyn lunch, yay! :) Guess what I found out at the geek table? Martin Fowler (yes, the Martin Fowler) will be coming to Colby on May 1st. Woah. I have three of his books, Refactoring, UML Distilled, and Analysis Patterns, all of which I hope to get signed and my picture taken with him. Te-he.

On Wednesday... uhm, I found out that Kyle's birthday was the day before. We had the last meeting for our dorm book, Snobbery, and I guess that's it. Wait, no, I'm a fool! Jason destroyed me in Tetris Plus 2. It was bad, 1-5. Every other time we've played 15 or so rounds and somehow always ended up tying. But on the ego boost side, afterwards Andre and I had a great game of Counter-Strike where I was domintaing the top position and getting props.

The people down the hall are weird. They just went in tandem to throw seperate things away and didn't say "Hi." On that note, Wednesday while I was waiting for lunch to happen, I decided there just wasn't any pep left in my right sneaker, and it was time to switch up the twins. Silly bright attention grabbing sneakers.

One of the girls living here next year stopped by. Seemed nice enough.

I did alright on my German oral exam. Well, at least I feel like I did well, but who knows?

I have a least favorite class in a big way. Should I correct the professor in front of everyone or let the miseducation slide? It's a good thing I care more about learning than grades. Here's why. Today, I received the expectations for a project due in less than 24 hours, which was assigned over a week ago. I had just made reasonable assumptions and taken care of business earlier in the week because my time management skills just put working on the project earlier. If I cared about grades, I'd have to go back to this project, which I've already done and learned from, to do a little extra junk to get an A. Or, I could learn something new, like how Java reserves the goto keyword, it's just not implemented, but that you can use labels and named break statements to break out of an inner-inner loop.

I made my decision, and I stand by it.

public class Goto {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

outerFor:
        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
            for (int j = 10; j > 0; j--) {
                System.out.println("i = " + i + " j = " + j);
                if (i == j) break outerFor;
            }
        }
    }
}

I ended up in EQ 332, no problem. Stopped by tonight to check it out; looks very nice.

But before I did that, I worked like a monkey.

And before I did that, I ventured all the way over to Foss because my runnin' crew had sophomore class dinner (next year first semester they're all going abroad, ah!) and had the good fortune of running into Mahdi and Nicolette.

German oral exam on Thursday. Just me and the native German professor for 15 minutes. Yep...

Room draw tonight. I'm the 5th male pick so I think I'll be alright, but one never knows. Silly quotas. *worry worry fidget fidget*

Bar Harbor was great! More on that later. For now you can look at pictures. I tossed in a quick list of the good ones in desc.txt since I didn't make thumbnails.

Thursday we somehow sucked this Michael S. Mahoney guy into talking to our programming languages class. I was too busy being exicted about the trip.

On Saturday I traveled on down to Railroad Square with Jason and a friend of his, Will, and saw City of God (3 / 4 stars), had programming team practice (we're starting to shape up), was forced to socialize in the dirty hippie Mary Low Co-Op, and went to see Posable Action Figure. I wore ear plugs, but not because they were terrible. I like my hearing, and it's just not worth it. I have enough trouble with the quiet talkers and understanding vocals in music as it is.

Today coming on our way out of Dana there was a girl sitting in the uh... lobby where one usually waits to meet people. She looked really sad, though. I tried making eye contact and smiling beacause maybe she's just one of those people (like myself) that apparently looks upset when pensive but I couldn't seem to get my mojo working. Would it have been too odd to just go up with a smile and say hi, introduce myself, and ask if everything was alright?

If you saw a little child in a large warehouse store, you'd probably do it because chances are they're "lost." Alright, it's doubtful she's lost, but being physically lost isn't a big deal (not like you're going to starve to death), it's just the emotional stress. She could have easily been stressing about something, so why is it against the norm to see if a random person could use a little comfort? Just because they're "adult" and are expected to be able to manage these emotional things by now? Feh.

I got the NAS tray at dinner.

Woke up yesterday to no shower curtains. See, April Fools' gives people a poor excuse to be jerks. A good April Fools prank would be to look at the window when you know a friend's car is across the street and say "Hey, they're towing your car!" They'll run over, heart beating, to see their car is fine and no harm done. C.f dorm damage and stinky people in class.

*Pours a 40 (of Cherry Coke ;)) on the curb for Meigs Field*

I had a lot of fun TAing in the Olin lab last night. I guess no one has their project due so it was easy, only one guy had a Java question and he was smart so it wasn't a problem. Also, a cute girl had a problem finding some thing and I quickly fixed that, too. But the real fun was with the monitor wipes. I found some underneath the desk so I figured I'd clean the glass window in desk that looks down into a bin where back in the bad old days you'd put a monitor. It was just hyped up rubbing alcohol and a schammy and, of course, it left crud on the screen. So I printed out the above PA comic and put it in the little clear box with the rest of the wipes. :) I was throughly amused.

Somehow, I don't have a lot of work tonight. Sshhhhh. I think this is only the second night it's happened all year.

I'm off to Bar Harbor (never been there!) to visit two biology labs tomorrow because bioinformatics is a sweet class. Field trip, woo! Back late Friday night.

Good news: I got a C on my German exam.

Bad news: Tomorrow, April Fools', is my least favorite day of the year.

Earlier in the week at Clare's, Mahdi and I had a nifty little revelation. Way back in the day when he was visiting Colby, we met each other. I lived in Pierce my freshman year, and down the hall lived Pedzi and Doug. On this particular night, I was invited down to join them and these prospectives to watch what has without a doubt become one of my favorite movies, Heat. Mahdi was one of the prospectives, although I didn't remember him (nor he I), just that that was the place and movie, which he also rememebered. Nifty, eh?

Here's a good headline, Love dominates all the players at Players.

Everyone is talking about the Big Dig. Too bad I've never been to Boston.

It snowed yesterday and today, woo-ho! Haha all these people just coming back didn't get to see the nice green grass before it got covered up again. It's a really nice snow. Mellow cold, pretty flakes, quiet and relaxing. For me it's like listening to a cat purr or watching a lava lamp.

Ugh, hard time being productive today. I could only hack a little German homework to get ahead for my bioinformatics field trip on Friday. Vacation wasn't all that relaxing with having to worry about invading people's house to have a roof over my head. In other news, I got the NAS tray at Bobs again. I get it fairly often so this is just a little note to mark how often I get it. MMmmm Network Audio System. I rocked my parallel and distributed exam. Well, only 90%, but I only got points off on one part of one question. Harsh, eh?

I wish I were a better story teller. I never feel like I have interesting things to say so I'm usually pretty around new people or someone asks me something. I say this because Karen noticed I was quiet when she had people over and prompted me to say more because she thinks I'm fun. :)

Here's fun for ya. Today the KDE hints & tips at startup actually gave me a good tip! Middle clicking on the maximize button will maximize horizontally and right clicking will maximize vertically. Good for terminal windows.

Back. I had fun. The farthest I went from campus is the north end of [Upper] Ridge Road, which is apparently called Fish Road.

Guess what I got excited about today? The Maine Forest Rally, baby. I really enjoyed getting to hang out in Maine for spring break so I'm sure I'll have just as swell a time staying up here to work.

Back to zoning out.

"These things happen." :) "There's always the unexpected." :)

Having fun at Karen's. But the Internet is dial-up, sadness. I watched Game of Death, and it was as totally different from the footage I'd seen earlier. Bruce fought his way up a restaurant alone instead of with people up a pagoda(sp?). But you could see the bodies in the background and such.

I was productive today and read the next 4 chapters for Snobbery. The AdBusters magazine is cool. Big Wednesday was an okay movie.

Thursday was new taste day. I ate half of a mini-pickle. Would you belive I've never had a pickle before? I thought it was pretty terrible. I'm getting better at hot foods, but those adult bitter foods, like coffee, are still far beyond my taste buds.

It begins.

Yeah, so much for that whole updating every day thing.

Despite Colby's anti-American spring break policy, I've been having a swell time. Clare has be an awesome host and there has been much Mario Party 4, History Channel, and movies to entertain me. And now the Internet, too, since I've discovered the cable modem hookup hiding behind old Colby furniture. Clare has a ton of this PPD yard sale stuff, yet Karen doesn't have any. Speaking of Karen, after Ben and I get down to a last round of GameCube action tomorrow, I'll be transferring to Karen's humble abode for the rest of my vacation.

Mahdi and I took Clare and Ben out to Pad Thai tonight (yeah, I got the pad see ew again). Uhm... yeah, seems like this is where I should write about what happened afterwards, but it was just more Mario Party 4. I slept in until noonish after staying up way late watching the history channel last night... like 3am ish. :) Then today it was a Modern Marevels marathon so of course I wasn't going anywhere. Except when Mahdi came over and I drove him to the Jeep dealer to have his car looked at.

Lately I've watched The Princess and the Warrior (again w/ Kathy and Peter), Jimmy Neutron (awesome!), TRON, Spider-Man (mmm, I think I might have to buy it), Swordfish, and Tomb Raider (terrible movie).

Why do girls try for guys >> older than them? Any older, mature (not mutally inclusive) man will know that some silly woman more than a few years younger has a significantly more narrow life experience and isn't any good, especially if she's begging for someone older thinking that he'll automatically be more mature. The paper put the comics right next to the personals.

I'm living on the wrong coast.

Woke up early, half attempt at studying German (bah, I'm sleeping in tomorrow), class, lunch with Brendan, class, class, fixed up some stuff in grabber (this could be trouble), dinner, German, watched Bush's speech. I don't agree, but it didn't sound totally unreasonable.

And then I was myself and got hated on.

Yeah yeah, hate if you want.  But you know I'm right.

And then I had a good talk with Mahdi. He gets it. Uhp, bedtime!

Did a little work, went to programming team practice we (Marc, Chris, and I) whaled on the freshmen. Dinner, work, and the Simpsons (woah, it was a good episode!) with Chris. Got him all excited about grabber, too. Actually, I did a build. First time in over two months. It felt good. Real good. Mmmmm.

And then I was up late doing the Perl bioinformatics thing I kept forgetting to work on.

Slept in until 11:30, lunch at noon, 3 hours of Dale work, foss for dinner, watched Chinatown (Colby video 338) - 3 / 4 stars, then headed out with Jason to hang out with Doug, a friend of his and a fine fellow. We watched Raising Arizona - 2 / 4 stars - the IMDb trivia is really good), and that was the end of my night. Up until 1am, exciting.

I've actually had a fairly eventful week. Pity I've been too busy to update and yack about it.

Happy pi day. 3/14. Get it? Ha ha. Kathy suggested I eat pie at dinner, so I did. Blueberry. Not my favorite, but the crust was pretty tasty.

I stumbled across this little gem today. Yeah, I think I'm due for another inline graphic...

Chris and I housed our bioinformatics presentation, yeah!

So busy. But Carolyn got me a monkey butler! She even got the key from Mango to install him while I was out working. He's so awesome. I really don't know what else to say. It's a small lamp with a monkey in a tux as the base that she saw at Wal*mart and got for me. Such a swell gift. It's the thought that counts, really, it is.

Ich sah einen guten deutschen Film, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin.

I saw a good German Movie, The Princess and the Warrior.

The big 4 / 4 stars, yeah, that's right. And, bonus, the library has it, video 4773. Don't forget about my ultimate list. The city the film takes place in, Wuppertal, is amazingly beautiful and cool. I want to ride the suspension train. Oh and no worries, the movie has the nice readable yellow subtitles.

Studied lots of vocab for a German quiz. Maybe I did something more exciting, but I can't seem to recall it. So I'll just talk about my plant. It has new growth! Actually, it's had it for quite some time but I keep forgetting to mention it. Yep, new leaves are sprouting from the dead stems I cut off. Niftyness. And lately I've been updating this page with vim, which behaves quite differently on the uname -a = "SunOS diamond 5.8 Generic_108528-18 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60" it runs on than any other box I've run vim on. Deleting doesn't go up to the next line, for example. I have to j-join and g$-go to the end of the screen and i<enter>-to re-newline. But I'm getting good at the whole learning one editor very well thing. Navigation? hjkl, baby.

Had dinner with Mahdi and Liz, because Mahdi is awesome. :)

I have an excellent quote from later in the night. Ask me about it.

In other news, I won the grand prize for the bioinformatics treasure hunt. It's a teen magic 8 ball on a pen. It says things like "don't even" and "shut up."

Caught up on reading Snobbery.

Big Arising concert tonight. I was playing some CS with the guy down the hall and who should call me up but my man Doug! He's come up to see the band, heck yeah. So it's just going to be a party.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I rock at Neo Turf Masters? Well, I do. :) You might even say I can serve up an above par performance.

My silly inbox ballooned to 10x the size I had it to before this week.

I like seeing this on colby0

3:12pm  up 20 day(s), 51 min(s),  11 users
...
kjseptor pts/2         2:44pm                      w
kwburke  pts/17        8:48am  2:24                -tcsh
esfleisc pts/3        12:25pm  1:21      3         -tcsh
ksmann   pts/5        10:15am    27      2         pine
esfleisc pts/20        2:11pm    16                pine
ccongdon pts/33       10:02am     9     34     23  emacs -nw

I sat with hall prez Kyle for lunch. I just sat there. He read.

During the day I basically caught up on stuff. Played a little CS with the guy down the hall and showed him what's up. Nothing big. After dinner Mahdi and I went to see Spirited Anyway, which was pretty crazy yet cool so I'll give it (3 / 4) stars. It was interesting how there were only 6 or so people there considering the film grossed over $200 million before hitting the US shores. Then we went to see Two Siberians (they were awesome) as a warm up for the main event - Arising. The coffeehouse was packed, and it was a great show. Danger's stack of promo CDs was quickly consumed, and he had a rockin' solo.

German exam, I think I did okay. The science alumni panel was awesome. Mike sat with me at dinner and then I went to bed mad early to combat sickness.

More studying for German. Deutsch ist schwer zu lernen. I've actually dipped into the sleep reserve to study, eep.

I wonder if Colby does this. Well, I know they don't, because ITS = incompetent, but it'd be nice if they did.

Worked on p&d project with Chris, and then proceeded to go to dinner with him and Mahdi. So yeah, I totally forgot about that whole book seminar thing I'm doing, but I had way more fun eating with the boys anyway. :)

And then I studied for German. Today's sacrifice = Peter Wood Lecture/Debate re: "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept"

Stammtisch, studied for German. Today's sacrifice = Visiting Writers Series: Elizabeth Strout

03/03/03. Sexy.

Three and a half hours of German homework today. Crazy. Wow, all of the free time and assurance of being intelligent I'd have if I wasn't taking German. Can you imagine? Why is it only 4 credits when Japanese (in which they get the questions to the tests before the test and 100% on every homework) is 6 credits? I want a whole credit for a conversation class, but no, I get + 3% on my oral part of the grade for going to every Stammtisch (German table).

I had a nice chat with Mahdi on AIM after returning from German work in Olin. He's a good guy. But the odd thing is that he believes I'm a really good programmer. Except I don't think I've ever had the chance to demonstrate my talent to him. I think he just assumes. Which brings me to bioinformatics class earlier in the day when a bio guy expressed a sort of anxiety towards approaching computer science people for help. Like we're unapproachable or weird and cliquish. Note that I was wearing my "geek." shirt at the time. :) And that Mahdi and Chris are hatching a plot to also buy one and have all of us wear them on the same day.

Anyhow, Karen has told me many times that people are afraid, and although I wish it weren't so, I think she's right. And Clare's told me that I intimidate other people, and I'm starting to think maybe she's right, too.

A lot more Colby people regularly read this thing than interact with me in person on a regular basis.

Studied for German. Today's sacrifice = lecture "National Security vs. Freedom of Information"

Did 4 hours of Dale work (his book is going to be great!), met with Chris to work on the bioinformatics project (Andy was a no show so now he's going to be our little ho'), dinner, German h/w, and a little Simpsons and Transformers action. Aww yeah.

So apparently the programming contest is co-sponsored by Microsoft. Guess who's going to be wearing a Linux shirt? :)

Did bioinformatics stuff in the morning, slacked a bit, watched Colby dominate Amherst 11-0 in the quarterfinals (women won 5-3 vs. Hamilton), and had dinner at Dana, because now Bobs is closed on the weekend. A moment of silence, please...

Afterwards Kyle and I nabbed Jason and went to the Colby-Bates one act play thing. It was alright. Kyle seemed to not notice that we had organized an improptu walking back to East Quad group and proceeded to check mail and then walk too fast. Hehe. Anyhow, we saw a security guy running and followed him through the street while Jason went towards Small with Sarah and Kristin.

During the semi-together walk K&S mentioned the difficulty of slipping between seven walls. "It can't be done," I said. I've tried it before land didn't make it. Anyhow, Jason and I got back together and I convinced him to come check out the anti-gravity stone with me. And of course while we were out there, we tried slipping through the walls. Jason bravely slid through without getting stuck, so I took off my coat and made my way through, too. That's the key, no coat. As we were walking back we saw a girl getting put onto a stretcher from where the security guy had gone running to. I've e-mailed "tripod" asking for the skinny.

Ahhh, no German today. *stretch* Slept in, CS lunch, and found out about the shower in Keyes from John. Stalled until my only class at 2, and then from 3-5 did the CS333 assignment that's not due until forever. :)

At dinner Katie sat with me and then later Kyle found us. After dinner Kyle and I dominated the 3rd floor of Mudd (spiffy skylight) and went to find the shower. Mission accomplished. :) And then we played mad Kolf and Neo Turf Masters until bedtime.

Why are nerds unpopular? Suburbia. I had a blast apprenticing at Speakout... which has apparently now been sold to SpeechTEK.com. Woah. When did that happen? Apparently in the last month because Google's secondary link is to a 404 page. Wild. Scott tells me that, "Ron mentioned that Barbara had called him to say it was available." It's like the whole dot-com thing neverrrrrr happened. "Big time," says Scott.

Right, so back on track, when I escaped from the Colby bubble I found this nifty new world. It's true that I retreated back to academia, but I feel that only now do I have the right to call it "academia." Why? Because I've experienced enough to seperate the learning from the circus.

"It's so easy to make friends here."
    -- Overheard from a tall, attractive, and large-breasted female freshman.

But as you may recall, I'm not a hater, and I like going to the circus. So the door to my room is open, and I enjoy odd social situations.

Today during the German quiz (which I studied 5 hours for after getting the sexy D- on my exam - the rote memorization part of my brain is not developed) I brushed my eraser bits off the desk and they landed on Ashley's jacket. I couldn't just leave them there, so I started brushing at it. The brushing worked okay, but still left some smaller pieces which I guess where clinging with a little static electricity action. It was hanging off of her chair and what I needed to do was get one hand behind it to stabilize and brush with the other. But I dunno, it just seemed like she'd say "Uhm, what are you doing?" "Oh, just molesting your jacket to remove my eraser bits." So I let it be.

I'm coasting downhill for the rest of the week. No German tomorrow(!) so there's only one bioinformatics tomorrow from 2-3 standing between me and the weekend.

Oh and Bobs grilled cheese bar was awesome today! Cindy has the heat turned up and wheat + colbyjack = tasty.

Worked like a monkey, watched Transformers with Kyle.

Woke up at 7 to study for German. I thought I knew until I saw the test. Ah well. I needed a bit of a break so I didn't do any work today. Well, in the 3:30 hours I was TAing in Olin 323 I managed to read a whopping 20 pages, but that's because Cheryl was helping with the distractions. She claims a lot of sitcom actors have accents, which I denied, and that brought up the subject of engrish.com. Turns out she took a photo of just such a thing while in Japan. "Fresh & Tasty. Just a little change of your walking style may bring you so enchanced effects physically and spiritually to your suprise."

So those 20 pages I have read about snobbery seem to think it's when someone is a wannabe and not a hater. Now I pity snobs even more because they wish they were cool and rag on your for not being cool, but they're not cool either. Sillies.

I submitted a great idea about door stops to Kyle, our SGA representative guy.

Confirmation that one can get the gist of a lot of drama just by being a careful observer.

Worked like a monkey (again).

Inbox down to 4.

Carolyn let me down. First time ever.

Worked like a monkey.

Apparently my JNI tutorial is ridiculously popular.

Blacksmithed w/ Karen (the oxy-acetylene tips are missing, ah!), Asian Cafe w/ Chris & Karen, Yohimbe brothers concert (lame opening band - Molten Soul - started 35 mins late (they were there, just not playing!), Yohimbe tacked on another hour, sleep. I think I was parked there a bit too long. Mmm a tad bit of permanent hearing damage maybe. D'oh. It's funny because (random Kevin fact) I carry around ear plugs in my jacket pocket, but I didn't bring my jacket because I thought it would be crowded and hot and I didn't want to bother dealing with it. *shrug*

"Second, Intel Corp., the dominant maker of processors for PCs, loosened its tight links with Microsoft and started making chips for Linux." Well, according to Business Week, anyway. The i386 (the first chip Linux ran on) was introduced in 1985. "This made it possible for corporations to get all the computing power they wanted at a fraction of the price." Wrong again, that's AMD. "The third ingredient was widespread resentment of Microsoft and fear that the company was on the verge of gaining a stranglehold on corporate customers." Silly English majors.

The weather today has been amazing. We're talking temperatures in the high 40s. Mmmm. Too bad it's supposed to snow and sleet and freezing rain tomorrow. Karen and I are trying to sneak out and go blacksmithing, though.

People keep approacing me with this SGA resolution to oppose the war on Iraq. When did the student government get a seat at Bush's war table?

So I thought today there was going to be this thing with former Colby graduates, including a CS major. The e-mail said "Friday ... 3-5 pm ... Olin 1." So I go down after bioinformatics and it looks like Judy and the other bioey people are in a hurry to get to it also. I go down, and it's empty. Hum. Perhaps it's in one of the other lecture halls. I go to Areay 5, empty. Keyes 105 it is. I open the door and ah, people! So I scurry in and sit down. Nope. By the time I realized I was at the wrong thing I was in a difficult position. The room was packed and he was lecturing and I thought it would have been hella rude to just get up again. So I sat through it. Nothing like wasting an hour of my life to start off the weekend.

Must... defeat... INBOX!

It's 10pm. Since 5pm, all I've done is have dinner with Michelle (for 2:35), talk to Clare, and send e-mail to Jim and Clare. Jim fails to acknowledge that it's not Java 2 if it doesn't have a LinkedList class whereas according to ANSI C, it's still C even if it doesn't know the slightest thing about a linked list.

I've got a story about a girl in a yellow sweater. And Olin has a copy of Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design, score! Yet Another Computer Science Book I'm the First Person to Check Out (YACSBIFPCO). Dout dout, killing time until Stammtisch. I'll be tending to the Olin 323 lab tonight for the first time from 7-10. Rumor is the CS151 assignments will be due on Fridays so it shouldn't be busy in there except on Thursday nights. :)

Lunch with Karen and Chris @ Foss. The Bangkok noodles were quite tasty, and very postmodern. We also discussed blogging, hyper reality, and how Chris' 33rd birthday celebration was last night. They still haven't tried the Bawls.

9-9 vs. Jason in a little Tetris Plus 2 action. *whew* Torrey spectated for a while and drew me the dog, the cat, and the bird.

I've been staying up later and later, so I should be off to bed now.

I finished all of my work up last night after dinner, woo, so today I got to "slack" and do Dale work. He sent another e-mail about if Kate and I would like to check out the drafts of the other chapters, so I figured I should finish up the exercises for Chapter 7. All but three done.

Karen and I are going blacksmithing on Saturday, wharrrr!!! Lunch tomorrow.

Yep, here I am, hiding behind my computer. Not like I keep the door to my room open or anything. I try to be social. I'm terrible at making eye contact with new people, but I'm working on it. Sorry for having feelings. I understand other people have them too, and they're more than welcome to come talk about them with me at any time. But if you're getting bad vibes from someone you don't really know that well, are you going to approach them on the subject? No. So I just write how I feel here instead. If you don't like it, don't come here. What's it to you how I feel anyway?

I picked up 5 free tennis balls that were still lying out on frat row from the winter carnival, score! And I got some cake from Kristin, too. Yeah yeah.

Had a few technical problems with the journal from Tuesday until today.

I spent last night updating my webpage. Added my geek code, updated the gravity stone page, did a little XHTML 1.0aifying, updated my code page, put up a link to my adventure, etc. I didn't find anyone to give my valentine to, oh well. :)

Woke up early to study for German. Had an impromptu breakfast with Andrew and mentioned the "Student research in Genomics" biology colloquium later at 1pm.

Went to CS lunch and an awesome talk by Mark LeBlanc of Wheaton College. He was also at the lunch, and attended our bioinformatics class after the talk, too. Really, it was the best lecture I've ever seen. He was excited and making eye contact and going into the audience to talk and had great visuals and a good amount of humor. Fabulous.

When I got back there was a delightyfully straightforward e-mail re: my "too bad we couldn't work out dinner" note in reply to part one stating that I should just stop by instead of planning ahead. The great irony is that the next e-mail in my box was from Karen. "what up? hope all is swell. let's have lunch someday or dinner or whatever and catch upppp." Karen, the self-proclaimed Luddite.

Carolyn and Brendan are off to Canada so after knocking on the dinner door I rounded up Kathy and Jamie and off to Bobs for wings we went. Andrew came over and thanked me for plugging the talk because he thought it was great, too.

Had lunch with Sara. Made a valentine. It has a blank spot for a name because I'm being optimistic.

"how about dinner sometime, maybe wednesday?"
"sure, don't know about wed yet. i'll let you know when i do"

Apparently that's the polite way to say "no." I don't understand how lying to someone is polite, in fact I'd consider it rude. Thus crew and I went to Foss. Part two.

I lied to Peter today at breakfast. I hate lying. It was an accident, it just sort of slipped out. Later in the night I went and told him the truth and we had a good laugh about it.

I went to the sexy Colby-Bowdoin hockey game tonight. They drew first blood, but then we came back with four unanswered goals. Kyle and I were in the non-drunk Colby section for the first period but there was some grumpy guy that didn't want us to stand (???) so we moved to the drunk section. It's a problem when the Bowdoin kids start chanting "Safety school, safety school!" because the reply is "Geeks geeks geeks," and I can't say that. :) Also note that I didn't even apply to Bowdoin because their CS department failed to impress me.

As we were walking back we passed by the buses the Bowdoin kids had been shuttled in on. I noticed a cute girl making her way down the aisle on one of them, so I made eye contact, smiled, and waved. She gave me the finger.

Bioinformatics reading, German, bioinformatics reading, bioinformatics, parallel & distributed (solid 3h15m block of class!), German homework, played WSB 2k2 w/ Jason, updated neglected journal.

I get a little sad everytime I think about how I only have less than a year and half left here.

Woke up normal time, worked like a monkey, watched Pirates of Silicon Valley (2 / 4 stars - being a geek would help in liking it) with Kyle (I have a genuine VHS copy if you'd like to borrow it), learned how to play Freecell, IMed w/ Meredith.

Who can resist the temptation of a book called "ENIAC" on sale for $6 marked down from $23? Hint: not me.

There I was, sitting in Bobs eating breakfast. I look up from my cereal and turn to the right a bit and saw Fleshy! I abandonded my comic reading and milk drinking in progress and went over to chat for a while. Alas, soon I had to leave to finish up studying for a German quiz, but he assured me he'd be attended geek lunch at noon.

Within the hour I found myself sitting in German flipping through my flashcards for one last time, but I noticed a girl from our section last year and another unfamiliar girl sitting across from me. Nice to have people coming to the sexy 10am class instead of those nogoodnicks in the noon class. When Frau Reidel entered the room speaking in tongue, the girl I didn't recognize quickly became distressed and informed everyone that she was definitely in the wrong class. She was supposed to be in a computer science class, and off she went to find it. I believe I did quite well on the quiz.

After class I went to check mail and, as expected, my package with Pirates of Silicon Valley and the soundtrack to Heat had arrived. There were also $10 long sleeve shirts on sale, a combo that's hard to beat, so I made a quick trip to my room to grab my wallet and went back to purchase one. It was a little cold out, but no way would I put it on and cover up my sexy "geek." tee. I also picked up a ticket for the big Colby-Bowdoin game on Tuesday, why haven't you?!

Soon it was time for CS lunch. Sure enough, after he finished up a conference call (he works for The Devil), Fleshy joined us. Great turn out, and the food was good, too. Bobs is the classic geek lunch venue, but you can't deny Dana having the better lunch menu on a Friday afternoon. I departed at noon:50 or so, because I had to attend my second lunch, at Bobs.

2nd lunch was with the normal crew, plus Liz, a friend Carolyn acquired in Anguilla. Turns out Liz is the girl I was checking out in Olin yesterday while studying for my German quiz. I enacted the rule of I always make passes at girls who wear glasses, natch, but I'm not very good at that sort of thing. My best was probably when I got up and walked past(get it?) her to obtain more milk, which I was still experiencing a slight deficit of from breakfast.

Speaking of milk, she had a little trouble with the chocolate milk she was working on. The first time I met Carolyn it was in Bobs, side one, with the tile floor. Good thing, too, because I knocked over a glass of cranberry juice which spilled nicely on the fortunately easily cleanup-able floor. But hey, here we are still great friends so I'm marking it down as a positive portent. Liz asked if I would be attending the play tonight... of course I would be!

After lunch #2 it was off to Bioinformatics, held in the Olin 3rd floor seminar room. But it was a bit early and the door was locked, so I went into the computer lab next door. Who else could possibly be in there aside from Jim and the CS girl in German class by accident. Turns out she's a senior.

Bioinformatics was cool. I think it'll be a really good experience. Seemed like the CS folk were closer knit than the bio folk. CS rocks. :)

Dinner at Foss was pretty terrible. There wasn't any meat there. Nada. A little bit of clam in the clam chowder, but I'm not sure that counts. Why Foss? Because of the aforementioned play, "Raised in Captivity." Somehow Brendan and I became responsible for reserving no less than eight seats, 2nd row, center. This wasn't a big deal at 7:05 when the house opened. Or even 7:15 maybe (show starts at 7:30). By 7:20, as the house is rapidly filling up when enough tickets had been sold to necessitate opening the balcony, yes, it becomes a problem. Every minute, every second that ticks by, we become larger monkeyclowns. Ridiculous. Especially when the people we're saving seats for are coming from literally right across the street in Mary Low. We folded and gave up some of the seats and there was chaos and I was left in a situation that did anything but lend itself to making conversation. The program thanked the quoteable Wet Hot American Summer, but there weren't any quotes from it in the show. We asked the director and she said it was just an inside cast bonding thing of watching the movie.

Went back to my room, found this lovely memo where Sun admits Java (not the language, but the library and virual machine) sucks. Good for them. I still consider Java my favorite language, but I've been using a lot of C++ lately because well, Java is just too slow, and what I'm working on interacts with GNU/Linux at the system level. Drifting off to sleep I ruminated how the day wasn't all that it could have been, but it was still great by any metric...

Today rocked.

Reading list... empty! *wiggle*

Group project in German. *growl*

Slept in until 10. Eh, last chance to enjoy such luxury so I might as well.

Guess who just showed up on good old FuckedCompany.com? Bluecoat [Lane Columbia, MD 20145]. "BlewCoat - Rumor has it that BlueCoat just laid off a bunch of folks in multiple departments with no warning. 75 Points." Back when I owned two domains, Bluecoat.com was one of them.

Hit up the Trivial Pursuit with crew and Tetris Plus 2 with Jason. Dale work in there at some point.

Open source software rules. If you don't want your computer to suck, you have to use it. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. You'll have to look elsewhere to peddle your operating system patches that destroy a web brower, spyware, and poor technical support, you sadist pig, because I refuse to tolerate it.

And then I fixed Carolyn's ailing computer anyway. It annoyned me when I was getting popups browsing Google. Come on, we all know Google doesn't have pop-ups so it must be some nefarious adware thing. But it's gone now. And now DVDs can play without crashing the box, too. Unless you're very high up on the friend list like lady Carolyn is, or give the good slow head, there's no way I'll fix your lame computer. You CS people that run Windows should be ashamed of yourself and get on the UNIX train post-haste. "But blah blah games." WineX.

Peaceful Lake Peigneur turned into maelstrom. The weather is wicked right now. Freezing rain/sleet/snow. I had a moment with a PPD guy in the street of the library watching the weather report on my way back from Foss. I think he's the Bobs night guy, usually. We talked about the cold and I wished him a nice day as I left and he said, "Yeah you too, take care now. Stay warm." Friendly folk are nice.

Home from nowhere. Good old Main Street in Waterville and [old] Ellicott City. :) But that jive about bringing back the rod for figuring lot size is crazy. I like this "new urbanism" concept, though. Really, how often did I ever play in the front yard of our house? Aside from those two trees for climbing, the backyard is where it was at. But I also think horizontal windows match up well with how our eye perceives more to the side than up and down, but eh, most of it is very good stuff.

Go, Google, go! Law of the Briny Deep.

I got my programming on. But silly kwin doesn't seem to support X's aspect ratio hints so I wasn't too productive. I guess I'll just have to do it like xine does. "It" being fullscreen > 640x480 and supporting 4:3 & 16:9 aspect ratios. It's good to be back with my code. We missed each other. 21,000+ lines now, and compile times are down. Life is good. I have beef, though.

Config::setValue("fullscreen", string(QString::number(fullScreenWidth) + "x" + QString::number(fullScreenHeight)));

Blah! How confusing is that? C++ can be a bit too esoteric sometimes. Or I could be using it wrong. Feel free to point that out if that's the case. Anyhow, sexy Java version:

Config.setValue("fullscreen", fullScreenWidth + "x" + fullScreenHeight);

Yeah, baby. That's what I'm talking about.

Program every day.

Went to breakfast at 8:30am, but apparently only kids on the hockey and swimming team are allowed to eat until 9am. But I asked the checker girl if I could lie to her and say I was on one of the teams and she said yes. :) Might have been my ultra-thin "I Volunteered CVC '02-'03" shirt working its mojo for me.

TV (shuttle...), reading, lunch with Jason, programming, dinner with remains of crew, reading, THPS2/Razor and SF2/Gauntlet/Simpsons.

Which OS are You?

It pays to read the Digest of General Announcements. I picked up a new addition to my Dreamcast library today, Razor Freestyle Scooter. It was only $5, how could I resist?! The plan of buying NHL 2K2 and calling it a collection still remains.

Did laundry, pretended to be Kyle, talked with Laura, lunch & went to the smithy with Erik (but couldn't find my candleholder - made 3 links of a chain and helped the kayak guy), filled out some darn CCSCNE form, chatted with Clare.

Went to dinner at Foss (Foss or bust over break!) with Jason. A nice fellow, indeed. But with the lack of people there I pulled a Mango and we sat with Andrew and three other people that I didn't know so well. But hey, branching out, and we walked and chatted alone to and fro. He's a smart guy. I whooped him on every graffiti level of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, except for Philly where I was only up by 1. Tore him up 14-0 or whatever it is on the half-pipe out in the ocean.

Woke up all sorts of early to meet at The Early Bird in Oakland for breakfast with my fellow Colby-Hume crew. Mmmm mmm good food at a reasonable price, except I wasn't picking up the tab. :) Bacon, egg, and cheese on a bagle, baby. I'd never had a bagle so soft and chewy before. Mmmm, good. And on the way out what would be waiting for Colby (name of one of the blacksmithing kids) and I but a flat tire. Stuck on the spare and missed the group photo back at the barn. Oh and the sunset as I walked to Bobs to meet was lovely. I had a darn camera in my pocket too but yet it slipped my mind to take a photo. But Waterville was shrouded in fog and the only thing visible was George, the friendly smokestack in Winslow. See, if you give it a name, it's not so bad.

The last day of blacksmithing was fairly uneventful until around noon when I finished up my arrow and got to harass Adam, yeah! Photo shoots and such of all of our work, clean up, woodworking kid lots a finger on the table saw, I forgot my candle holder, etc.

Had dinner with running crew, except I snuck off to join Breadloaf and Lanky Spice. Aww, I miss those two monkeys. We fought, talked, it was good. Afterwards Kyle adjourned back to my pad to watch Pulp Fiction, aww yeah.

Erik and I are going to head back tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to pick up my piece and make some nails or work on a chain or something I suppose for a few hours. At least I hope my piece will be there. There was much fondling of it because of its sexyness. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the only piece with a scroll in it out of the bunch.

The pieces will be on display in my room. Ouh! I should hit the art museum tommorow morning. Blah, Jonny is still being idle so no stories of slide to speak of.

Kyle and I got our fight on in the hallway with Andre, Erik, and Jason. It's like our hallway does't suck so much this semester. We've all got our doors open and socialize in the extra wide hallway, very cool. No worries Carolyn and Jenn, I'm still getting off this coast. :)

Dinner with Jenn and her friends (they loath the person I'm disgusted by, woah!). Went back to her room and hung out, looked at pictures of her semester in Australia, and talked. Aww, I miss Jenn. Miko had the quoteable quote of the night at dinner. Adam Zois (of Karen's Thanksgiving shindig fame) didn't show up today, but I learned how to gas weld, sexy. I'm a much better gas welder than arc welder. Finished watching WarGames with Kathy.

Had dinner with Mango. Plus Kris, Kelly, Dana, and Alex. I've got Jocelyn and Jason penciled in (what's with this going home for Jan Plan break business?) for Wed. & Thurs. night, we'll see if they do the same sucking people in trick. Uhp, Jocelyn is out.

Apparently it's easier to "bowl" than ever before. Candlepin, people!

Woah, do these people work at Google? Abundant hotties.

Dout dout... state of the union address. One time Barbara Bush came to visit our elementary school. She has a big head (physically) and we had to give a very long standing ovation. Was it Stalin that got a 45+ minute ovation because people were too afraid to stop clapping? Yeah, it was like that. That's one. He said like 8 words! Anyway...

Do you know how to Arc Weld? I do. :)

*grumble murph groan wronk* had to wake up at 7am to learn how. But you know, that's how these things go.

I was talking to Cheryl about depression and it just kind of made sense to me all of a sudden why I sleep more when I'm kinda blue. I know that eventually cosmic forces will align to bring something really neat and special into my world. But you know what, it isn't happening right now, so I'm going to lie in bed a little while more until it gets around to happening.

True, I miss the dawn patrol at breakfast. And yeah, even if I work on something just a little bit in my free time (humm... can you say "grabber?") eventually it'll grow into something large that someone will notice and possibly lead to greatness. But I've had the door open to my room for plenty of hours, and chances are some new friend I just haven't met yet won't be walking by this early anyway, so I'm going to stay here and relax and rest a bit more.

Jason has some guy rolling head over feet down the hall. And now back again. See, that was worth keeping the door open and staying up for. :) And an e-mail just arrived from Katie, too. Har... :)

Come on, how long is it going to take you to do this

for i in *.jpg ; do convert $i -geometry 320x240 thumb_$i; done

on an operating system without a respectable CLI?

Well, that was unexpected. I went down to collect everyone for dinner visiting Peter were Katherine (the one that lived across the hall in Pierce freshman year that, sadly, I never really got to know too well - my first year here was awful), her friend Anne, Bill, and that woodsman guy with the red hair. You know who I'm talking about. Despite my full winter weather garb & glasses she recognized me and said "Hi, Kevin." I said hello back, but I couldn't remember if she went by Kathy or Katie (I think the former now, but I was drawing a blank at the moment) so I didn't say her name, which might have seemed like I didn't know who she was, but I did! I actually still even remember her last name, just not her first abbreviated name. Then the social awkwardness kicked in and I couldn't even muster asking "How's life after graduation?" The four of them + Peter seemed to have other dinner plans so me and my runnin' crew headed to Dana.

Maybe now you can see what the deal is with my aggressive "branching out" attempts. When's the next time I'm going to be grouped with so many people my own age with time to hang out with them? Never.

One time I got really sick (I rarely get sick in the first place) freshman year and ended up on the bench in front of the library staring off into town. Katie was on her way to Dana and asked if I was okay and I mumbled some sort of an explanation and she offered to bring me back some food from the dining hall. Cereal in a cup. It was delicious, and just about the nicest thing someone has ever done for me.

I just did a little Googling and sent her an e-mail with my life after graduation question. Ha, take that Mr. Tongue Grabbing Cat!

Should the public school system be taken over by the department of corrections? Heck yeah!

I hate Microsoft. Want to know why the Internet sucks tonight? Why the root DNS servers are knocked out? Because of Microsoft's lousy, buggy, and easy-to-write-nasty-propagating-worms-that-denial-of-service-attack software. Just look! UUnet is getting hit hard. And my box at home still gets dozens of Code Red and Nimda hits daily. Argh! For the record, I don't understand why it's illegal to write a virus or worm, as long as you don't "exceed your authorization" to launch it and get it started. Software doesn't come with a warranty. It's your own fault you ran that binary off of alt.sex that promised a dancing lady on your taskbar.

I throughly enjoyed digging through the tangle of links at jwz's gruntle page today. I loved his review of the state of video on Linux. Makali's quote is awesome; Radloff and I had a good laugh. Remember when his webcam was stolen from the DNA Lounge?

Badminton with the boys (won doubles, lost single), hockey with Jocelyn (lost 1-4), and High Fidelity with myself (meh, 1.5 / 4 stars - save time and just read the memorable quotes).

Colby Counseling Services. We can hear you crying through the door from down the hall and on other floors of the building.

Insomniac is a great show. I finished up a neat candle holder today and Keith was quite complementary.

I'm 22 today.

I didn't hit the steel at all today, just worked on designs for my final project.

I went to stammtisch with Kyle but then at 6pm there was a thing. It's not in the events listing (but on Saturday I found a poster), but it was a Japanese performace (the "Enburi Festival Dance") by the residents of Hachinohe City, Japan (our sister city?) and I really enjoyed it. But the thing is, a good percentage of the people there were being ignorant jerkies. So maybe it's not the best time or place to have a performance, but show some respect and shut the hell up anyway; you can talk to your friends later. That aside, it was pretty cool. I liked when they tried to get two audience guys to sumo wrestle and they didn't know the rules at all. Come on, don't you people ever watch Sumo Digest on ESPN? It's possible to get culture from TV, and it's possible to be a poor ambassador in your daily activites.

Another annoying thing is this 2002-2003 Colby College Scholarship Questionnaire I got an e-mail about filling out. Dig this. "Information on this form will be used in the assignment of and reporting on restricted and preferential funds given to the College by alumni and other friends of Colby. The primary criterion for all Colby aid eligibility is calculated need. The amounts you may receive from these funds are included in the 2002-2003 Colby grant already offered you."

One of the questions is "Religious affiliations or membership."

So if there's, for example, a wealthy Buddhist donor, and I say I'm a Buddhist, I get a hunk of cash from him/her. There was a fill in the blank question that asked for "... and other information you'd like to share" so I took the opportunity to write in "I'd like to share that 'preferential funds' based on my religious affiliation are totally inappropriate and it's absurd that the college supports donors using it as a criterion. But if you give me money, I will write a thank you note and come to a banquet anyway."

To help relax a little, I dug up my Quake CD and installed quite possibly the best mod ever, slide. Took a little finessing to get some form of Quake for Linux working, with the official unsupported id binaries being compiled for libc5 back when 3Dfx was the only game in town. QuakeForge actually compiled (twilight/darkplaces didn't) and the no-clipping glitch when looking down a long corridor isn't too bad. *shrug* Not very interesting, but the site claims that the halfpipe level was recently re-discovered. Nah! It's always been in the map pack, just you had to know about it to play it. I figured there would be a level as such back in the day ('98-'99 or so) and "/map halfpipe" did, indeed, work. Imagine that.

In the U.S., Hispanics now outnumber African-Americans, interesting. Super Bowl weekend is the slowest of the year for weddings, awesome.

Or do you people know how to find out about such things on your own by now?

My poster got accepted for CCSCNE 2003, imagine that.

Yeah, me and the bump on a log are like this *crosses fingers*

Had a nice 90 minute dinner with Michelle. That's about it. :)

Watched Requiem for a Dream. Meh. I'll spare trashing it and give it 1 / 4 stars for artistic merit. Another get involved with drugs and your life goes down the drain movie; I saw it coming a mile away. At the beginning it seemed to be more about addiction in general, but nope, just a snooze fest.

Today I also caught Animal House. Meh. First time I've seen it, and uh, it didn't have much to it. 1 / 4 stars. At least now I can say I've seen it. *shrug*

Ah, the exciting world of Kevin. What do I do when I'm sitting at the computer all of the time, you ask? Program, read tech articles, browse the web, communicate with friends (mostly short IMs and e-mail with things like "want to go to dinner now?" and occasionally play video games.

Today I read about Micros~1 shipping Java in 120 days, the [expletive] DMCA being used against the maker of a universal garage door opener, a security article by Diffie (of Diffie-Hellman fame), Mouth Wide Shut (I like most of Joel Spolsky's stuff), and an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of theKompany.com, just to name a few. It's not even noon yet. Can't forget about today's PA. And I've got a nice backlog of non-current-event stuff, too. Unskilled and Unaware of It, Ars's Understanding the Microprocessor series, the complete archive of the Sinfest webcomic, etc. Not to mention that thing... with the words on the paper... a book! yes, that's it, I'm also working on Animal Farm but it's tangible presence somehow makes it have the lowest priority.

Had a nice lunch with Kris @ Dana. We were talking about CS and the guy at the table next to us overheard and started talking with us about it. So we're thinking around 8:30 tonight there's going to be a throwdown. :)

Up until dinner I poked at my computer (see above) and watched ... well ... I'm not quite sure what to call it, but this movie. It's labeled as "Hackers 2: Operation Takedown" but the film seems to refer to itself as simply "Takedown." It got the hacker/cracker distinction correct, but I can't believe Mitnick didn't want to hook up with the girl played by Amanda Peet. Come on, how often does a woman have any interest in technological politics? Sadly, almost never. Anyhow, I really liked how the movie emphasised that 99.9% of the population has no idea just how incredibly insecure their interaction with a computer is, and based on it's public service announcement quality, I feel compelled to give it 3.25 / 4 stars, even though it wasn't that great of a movie. Do you send e-mail? Telnet to colby0? Talk on AIM/ICQ? Hey guess what, people can snag your password in clear-text easy as pie in 2/3 (and get the md5sum for cracking in the other - just like in the movie, except it'll take a lot longer than 36 hours, well actually maybe not because your password is probably lame), and read the contents in all three. While I'm at it, check out U.S.C. § 1030.

I went to the Colby vs. Middlebury hockey game and left during the 2nd period. There was a repugnant Middlebury fan that would vehemently cheer with all of the bloodlust in soul when a Colby player went down and then scream bloody murder "Open your eyes, ref." "Get off the ice, ref." when a Middlebury player got hit. Is it just me or does this remind you of our current situation with Iraq? Just because they're not on the same team doesn't mean it's okay to hurt them. They're human beings, too. When did President Bush decide to invade Iraq? Sept 17, 2001. I don't think starting up the draft again would be a terrible idea. Maybe it would make the warmongers realize that real people will die.

I finished watching The Fast and the Furious, and at the end I felt strangely compelled to sit through the credits for some reason (I usually don't) and sure enough, there was a little clip at the end. Anyhow, I thought the plot was remarkably similiar to Point Break (a great movie), but I enjoyed giggling at the ricers and the production values were pretty good so I'm going to give it a solid 3 / 4 stars.

Then I watched War & Peace Part 2 (part 1 was Tuesday) w/ Kathy. Meh. But afterwards...

I watched The Wizard, a top of the line 4 star movie with Brenden, Peter (a neophyte!), Kyle, and Raddy. "I love the power glove, it's so bad." "Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal, huh?" If you were a) born in the early 80s or b) owned a NES, you need to see this movie. I saw it in the theater but not since then.

Weak. Totally weak. Unlike forge welding, which is hella sexy, much like Lessig accepting responsibility.

I finally brought home a piece from blacksmithing. Come visit and take a peek. "Quit while you're ahead" is a good motto to have in blacksmithing. I had a really nice fork going on, but then after overhearing Keith tell Colby something like "Yeah, it really looks good when you've got that bend in there instead of just coming straight out." I thought I'd go back and "fix" my nice even straight precision fork. Well, now it's got a half ghetto bend and the prongs are crooked.

Moving right along, just because someone's parents have money doesn't mean they will. "So live in the Hamptons and drive a large SUV?" *gets all hot* "What's your major? Oh, cool, I've taken an American Studies class before and I liked it." Ah! L'Amour.

Today I heard some kids bitching about the cost of prescription drugs. You know, like Viagra or whatever Pfizer and Merck make. They didn't believe that the reason the prices are so outrageous is because of the high research costs. Instead, it must be because of all of the advertising. Guess what, companies don't advertise if they know they'll lose money doing it! The advertisements lead to selling more units which as a result they more than recoup the cost of the marketing. Anyhow, the solution is to go and buy some PFE and MRK (or a nice mutual fund and laugh all the way to the bank every time some old man buys Viagra. FYI, here's an easy page to look up executive compensation.

I'll soften my last bold by saying that it's true that in my experience marketing goons have been just that, marketing goons. That's why, as a software engineer, I like the XP solution. geek blog++.

Oh, sad, Carolyn left for Anguilla. But I dusted off my 6 digit UIN and talked to Cheryl on ICQ. Yay! We've just been e-mailing lately. I don't think we've had an active chat in uh... at least a few years. We figured out that we've known each other for 6.5 years, so she's the friend I've known the longest. Cool, huh? Yet I've never met her in person. Someday. :)

Aww man, just as I'm trying to sneak off to bed I wrote Kyle a message on colby0 and he's actually there. :) Haha, old school geek IM.

Okay, bed. I got burnt twice today so I want sleep before I hit more hot iron.

Did you hear about that new Pirate movie?

Yeah. I guess it's going to be rated Arrrrrr.

Dana breakfast = teh lose.

Here are some nifty optical illusions. Illusion 5 is awesome. I checked it, too. They're both #6f6f6f.

I really enjoyed watching Ocean's Eleven, but it has a big lack of replay value so I'm going to have to give it a 3.75 / 4 stars. I did a little more Dale work to end up with five solid hours for the weekend and that seems like plenty.

Back on my own programming front, I gave the Makefile a good tweaking and cut 35,505 bytes from grabber's tarball. Not too shabby.

Relaxed, cleaned up the grabber files and packaging quite a bit, did some exciting Dale work (first proofreading of chapter 7!) and then schooled Andres in Soul Calibur 13 - 10. If you didn't know, I suck at fighters and I'm usually relegated to button mashing so this is quite the victory. Dinner (he calls me leaving for dinner to avoid the crowd conceding and you might, too, if you're a sore loser), watched Wet Hot American Summer (not a porno, despite the title) with my runnin' crew and they enjoyed it much more than they thought they would (basically all I said about it was that it's based in Waterville). Showered, more Dale work for a total of 3h30m and then went and had a nice 45 minute or so chat with Jocelyn. She has a signed copy of Maroon! Okie, off to bed. Goodnight all.

Slept in a bit (no class on Friday), lunch with Jenn, watched Léon (a.k.a. The Professional) with Kathy and I'm going to go ahead and give the movie 4 / 4 stars. I watched the Director's Cut version, by the way. Haven't seen any other version for comparision. Dana dinner (gah! only dining hall open on the weekends!) had a wacky moment. Kathy's told her boss that she worked for last semester that she wouldn't be around for Jan Plan. But then she chickned out on going to Chile and has been avoiding contact because she doesn't want to work there anyway. Anyhow, boss lady came back to the booths with some other people and marked their spot with jackets (*growl*) and then went to grab food. So we all picked up our trays and moved to another booth on the other side and hid Kathy facing the other direction. While we did this 2 other girls on the same side were also up and they gave us very odd looks when they returned. :) Afterwards I showered (blacksmithing schedule...) and headed off to watch Colby soundly defeat Babson 4 - 1 in ice hockey. I saw Randy there with Ben and guess who got one of the pucks that got flipped up over the glass? That's right, Ben! Nifty. Afterwards I had a chilly walk back (it's only 10F out), and proceeded to waste time until bedtime.

This is quite nifty. Compare to the original. I'm also a fan of this cartoon.

Yay playing with CSS. No worries, I'll get the colors right some day.

I had dinner at Bobs tonight because Foss is closed. I'm suprised there weren't more people that live in Foss eating at Bobs, because the salad bar isn't that bad. Bobs just has a bum rap. Anyhow, what was I saying? Oh yes, something about these two guys in Foss. I'm getting a vision. Something involving the first name initials of these two that correspond to the standard abbreviation of a large software monopoly.

Speaking of DVDs (AntiTrust, get it?) the default setting on the Memphis Belle DVD is to have English subtitles. Yes, the movie is in English.

I blacksmithed a leaf today. Yeah yeah, sounds lame, but you try taking a 2" piece of 3/8" square steel and making a leaf. I'll post pictures when I put some sort of finishing preservative dealie on it. So far I've just done the orange heat wire brush de-scale trick.

But like I was saying, if you're a Fosser, you should stop being creepy and come eat at Bobs and say "Hi."

I'm sorry, but the upcoming links in this paragaph won't work while I'm at Colby from outside of Colby. I hung out with Kathy after she got back from phone-a-thon because Carolyn went to see some hippie folk concert lady from Portland, OR at the coffe house. Anyhow, I showed her my pictures of NYC from June of 2001 with Jenn and she pointed out that some of them look really cool. I'm partial to IBM's Peace, Love, and Linux ads on the side of a building and in times square myself. It was my first trip to NYC and I'm glad I got to see the twin towers. Jenn was an excellent host and guide. If you have the chance to mooch off of her, I highly recommend going for it. :)

Today sucks.

Have I linked to the ACLU's "How Free Are We?" quiz already? Eh, I'll do it anyway. And go claim your $20 before March 3rd because apparently not many people have. [/blog]

In blacksmithing I made a curly thingie at the end of a bar (pig tail?) and made a giant staple straight, then back into a staple. Here's a quote I really like that's up in the shop: "We can fix anything except a broken heart or the crack of dawn."

When we were going to Dana I made a funny. But I do kinda use this journal as a long-term memory test in the spirit of chapter 5 of Thoughts on Thought so you'll have to ask me about it.

Blacksmithing was awesome. For our first assignment Keith A. Leavitt told us to cut 30 inches of 1" x .25" steel and mark off 10 inches. Next, stick the 10 inch part in the fire, pull it out, and do whatever we wanted to with it. Flatten it, bend it, melt it, whatever! Just leave the 20" for a project tomorrow. A Whale's Tail, I believe. Not that I know how to make one of those yet, though. We had a tour of the shop, learned about safety (a very good thing, there are many ways to hurt yourself with hot iron), started a fire, had lunch, started up the rest of them, did the assignment (I made a hook kinda thing), cut a piece of circular 3/8" stock for tomorrow, cut off the 10" on a hardie (ha, getting my lingo down!), and cleaned up.

I had the pleasure of getting a ride from a mutal friend of Chris and I by the name of Alex. He flies (eep, it's been over a year since I've gone), plays Counter-Strike, and is friendly. Tough combo to beat.

Beat Metal Slug 3 with Andres and once again found myself being the 3rd floor paper towel savior.

Programmer? UI Designer? Go read about the Generation Gap pattern.

Here's a mantra for you to recite and follow. Bros before hoes; chicks before dicks. It's that simple. Prioritize that which is not ephemeral.

Made it up to Kyle's just as it started to get really dark and the snow started. But he kept playing Magic. Way to bolster the stereotype. I watched the football game with Liz (of '02 fame) while they were doing that. Later that night after everyone left we broke out the Colecovision which had a few line drawing issues, but was useable for playing the Smurf game, hehe. The original plan was to make it all the way up to Karen's, but I think the abbreviated drive ended up working out much better.

Leaving tomorrow. The weather outlook isn't good. Got in 90 minutes of maintenance. Ouh! Behold! I have found the book! Harrrrrrrrr.

Hopefully this layout will help me with the "one paragraph per entry" issue. Fear not, I'm still working on the color scheme. At least it's Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict with Valid CSS to boot.

Anyhow, today I racked up some new DVDs! The classic Night of the Living Dead (one of the few horror flicks I've actually enjoyed), Memphis Belle (helps satiate my fascination with the legendary B-17), WarGames (one word, old school geek flick), Hackers (which should be titled Crackers), and finally the aptly titled AntiTrust (what's with these one word movie titles?) which features GNU/Linux, GNOME (boooo, KDE is where it's at), and source code from bzip2 (yay!) and Jigsaw (sucks!). I've actually used all of that stuff, rock on.

I also got a haircut, imagine that! Mmm, that hot shaving cream neck shave is teh win. Apparently my quizzical look can be confused with me being afraid. When I walked in there were two free haircut ladies and they had a quick discussion about who's turn it was and also gave me a look to see if I had a preference. I was kinda looking at the first one at the time and she said "Well he's afraid of me so I guess you can have him." So yeah, it's not that I'm afraid, it's that I just don't care. :)

Ironically, Mississippi is the first state to place Internet connected computers in every classroom.

Happy New Year! And of course, the 20th anniversary of the Internet! I love how the 'net works. How'd I end up reading about The Monty Hall Problem this morning? Well, I was IRCing and caught a link to this thread (which was billed as "entertaining insanity") and wondered what are Zeno's paradoxes? I Googled and kept reading until the end of the problem of points section, where I followed the link to an unsatisfying explanation, but a great simulation. The *pinky* one meeelion doors analogy finally made me a believer. You can't have a computer program "proof" without source code to show me it isn't biased.