matt.wronka.org

Driving along the Charles just before sunset in the Autumn (about 16:00 these days), although chilly, is crazily beautiful.

... it's Green and Red.

Descended from one of #RPI's Electric Monk's oldest features, opinions allows everyone to leave an item (with informative link) in one of two categories, equating roughly to "approve" and "disapprove". Go ahead and add some things.

If anybody would like to tell me where the Monk's online database is these days, I'm curious.

Monday Watching game 4 Huh, it'd be nice if I had something to eat for dinner. Huh, I have fish, I should do something with it.

Tuesday I've got nothing to go with fish. A dry German Riesling would be nice. Hmm, Long Trail Blackbeary Wheat [sic], haven't had that before. A wheat beer should probably go nicely.

Wednesday Watching Ottawa lose After using a bottle to poach the fish, I enjoy some really good salmon, along with some additional drink.

Thursday Huh, there's no hockey on the tele anymore, I've got another filet I could make. Hmm, or there's an apple pie my mother left me. mmm, apple pie.


Saturday "Hey, you want to go to Vermont?" "Sure." (Burlington was a bit too far, and I'd already been there.)

Postscript

"That's interesting, but what happened Friday?" "I don't remember."

"You didn't mention the softball game!" "I didn't want to remember."

Alcohol is very very bad. For children. But once you turn 21 it becomes very very good.

I've finally uploaded the photos through this year, mostly skiing in NH and VT. I even uploaded pictures of my new car which prox had requested. I went out west to Springfield--Mass, not Illinois--for Easter to visit my mother's family. Of all the people demanding pictures of my car, she was probably the last I expected.

I don't particularly understand the fascination with people taking pictures of their car. Let me take a step back before I continue; under some situations I can understand it, such as a vintage car or these monstrosities. A factory-stock car that's just like over 160,000 other sold that year, on the other hand, is just a sign of effeteness.

After Easter brunch, I decided to take U.S. Rt. 20 back instead of I-90. This route had several attractive qualities. My mother sent me off with the instructions of not going to fast, which my grandfather clarified as "don't get a ticket"--this route could not have had more cops than I90 on the way in. The bigger reason was more simple: in twenty-odd years and several trips across the state, I'd neer taken US-20 the entire way.

The first 15 miles where a series of disjoint roads, all part of US-20. After that the road became a much easier to follow meandering road through small, quintessential, New England towns. At one point, along a part of the road, straight, and cutting through repetetive rural countryside, there was a store advertising "$10 Adult Videos: NEW!". As i drove by, my mind stayed momentarily on this small shack on the side of the road--similar DVDs in Tokyo sold for the equivalent of $70, similar DVDs in random shops in NYC go for similar, although usually slightly lower, prices. Obviously, it could be presumed that these DVDs were not thesame as were being sold for $70 in Tokyo.

Relaxing my curiousity for the time being, I continued up the road a bit and came across an idyllic white church set on a hill rising along the side of the road. Just across the two-lane highway was a bar with a jolly and made-up naked sus-waitress advertising on its sign.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

Several times along the road, I would come across ramps for I90, but passed by the boring and monotonous traffic pipeline, shuttling cars from one end of the state to the other. Throughout much of the trip, my mind drifted back to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, and how different one's view of an area changes based on the path one takes. Whether one travels by subway, foot, or cab in the city; or by hiking or train through sparsely inhabited areas provide drastically different experiences. I wish I could finish this with something interesting, but it's late, and I'm watching Monty Python.

Post script
The differences between east and west in Massachusetts is an interesting one, and one which even the most causual outsider passing-through on I90 might divine through observing the large stretches of highway without exits through the middle of the state. Whereas most exits are about six miles apart in the west, and much closer in the east, there is a 28 mile stretch between I-84 (Surbridge) and I-495 (Hopkinton) which contains only three exists closely clustered around Worcester (exit 10, Auburn; 10A, Worcester; and 2.4 miles later Milbury).

Over Easter brunch, I brought-up the drivers out east; sure enough, I realized, of all the time I'd spent in this state, I'd never noticed such bad drivers as I had since I started working near Boston. My family from the west were quick to blame the Boston drivers for the bad reputaiton the state has received, not to mention the rates they needed to pay for insurance. Bostonians, it seems, are the cause of all that is, and has been, wrong in the west as they don't know what's going on past the town lines, it seems.

During the 1990s, the west resented that their tolls along I-90 were being used to fund a massively over-budget project to rework the transportation system in Boston, and which did not provide them with any benefit. The long-running white elephant project popularly known as the Big Dig was already five years in (or twenty-four, or thirty-six depending from what point you start counting) when Boston finally submitted to pressure from the western part of the state, and eliminated tolls for passenger vehicles west of Ludlow.

This dichotomy is nothing new however, and dates back to the earliest days of our country, and one of the most important events historically in its development following its independence. In 1786, a group of debtors and farmers followed the Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays in a rebellion against the more developed east, and specifically Boston, which they felt was causing undue economic harship for the small farmers in the west. Driving along US-20, this division between west and east is still apparent despite over two-hundred years of development. As US-20 starts, there are farms, which lead to small idyllic towns, beauteus lakes and bridges evoking comparison to a Childe painting. Further on, one reaches a junction with I-90 again as the quinessential New England towns disappear in favour of strip malls and car dealerships as one approaches Worcester. By Milbury, the highway has changed from a winding two-or-four lane road split in-half by at most all of two lines into a highway divided by a concrete barrier, with stores, malls, and industrial rental companies non-stop along its borders. Eventually, one comes upon the large office-parks, IBM, the University of Phoenix, and the Natick Mall once turning-off, and onto US-9.

It's time for my annual recap.

There isn't much new, yet at the same time a lot has changed, since the last one; for one thing, I'm writing in a roman script this time.

In March, while the feeling had started much earlier, I thought ernestly about taking a trip back to Spain. My high school was also in the state play-offs. Early one morning, after not sleeping, I decided that I'd go down there and photograph it. This meant stopping by an old roommate's to borrow a telephoto lens, since I didn't really have one. On the way down, I decided to go to Spain. My high school defeated the top seed in the semi-finals, before losing in overtime in the finals. My picture for the victory was top and center, Photos for both were published.



May saw the close of my chapter at Brown. Our topics course in vision made significant progress in providing a usable description to a Virgina police department of a murder suspect, which was undeniably one of the coolest classes I've ever been in. Stella came back to Providence, and together she, Dave, and I went on a walk like old times. Stella left again two days later, and so did I. I spent some time reflecting in my childhood memories before finally leaving for Spain.

While Spain is, in itself, a much longer story than this post, it was a memorable time. Most of it was spent in Sevilla, which is a marvellous city. The stay in Sevilla was punctuated by marvelous company. First Lisa and Sarah, and later their friend Liz. The three of us explored both Europe and Africa in a very memorable weekend shortly before Liz returned to the United States. August brought about much more individual exploration, until a Temple student and her Swiss friend Trish came back from Cádiz on the same train as I did, and we spent the night exchanging stories. The next day, they left for Madrid, and I left for Barcelona via Cordoba. My European journey continued for the next few weeks; unfortunately, even at this point not all of my photos are processed, and I have no disk space for new ones.

October and November saw me back in the United States searching for a job. When that was secured, I left for my first ever visit to South America, wandering around Peru--this too will need to wait for another time. Upon my return, I saw many friends from high school whom I'd not seen in over six years, when one of them performed at the House of Blues in Atlantic City. Following that, I went skiing in VT, and on my way back, rented an apartment, and began preparing for work.

Which brings us to the start of a new year. My birthday present? I bought a new car. Prox has demanded pictures. The thing is amazing. dmcc, both parents, and (belatedly) stella wished me a happy anniversary of my birth via Jabber and/or e-mail. The rest of you, obviously suck.

I felt a pain in my heart. A loss. I'd known her for over a decade. I didn't know life without her, or with anyone else. I closed my eyes and thought back to that November in '94 when we first met. My mind then drifted forward to high school. It started one afternoon when my parents were gone, and we were alone. We started slowly. Sure, they teach you these things in school, and my parents had given me instructions, but this was different: it was just the two of us, alone.

We started slowly, but soon she was getting revved-up, her engines going, and just as I thought it was time to get things going in high-gear--we ran into a problem. It was my fault, really, and I blamed myself. While it was only a momentary stall, I still felt embarrassed as I was just learning, and so the rest of the experience I just hoped to finish as soon as possible.

Despite an awkward start, it was the beginning of something good. She would be mine, and mine alone for the next nine years. We'd go on trips, we'd see new things, we'd race and have fun. Sure there were moments where not everything was rosy. We didn't see each other much my first year of college, but we did spend a lot of time together when I went home on breaks. That summer, I returned home, and got a job locally. Each day that summer, she was waiting for me at the end of a long day of work. The next year, when I returned to college, she came with me.

Nine years. Sure, there were others; short indiscretions. But for nine years, she was mine. The thought of calling anyone else mine was unthinkable. Every night before going to bed, I checked to make sure she was there, to assure myself. I'd ignored the urge to find someone younger or flashier. That's why, when I look over now, where she was only a short time ago, and see someone else, I feel pangs of regret.

But, the things her--how ugly the word sounds--replacement does, are unbelievable! The way she looks with her curves, the way she grips. It was clear this was going to be different. We didn't start slow, it just wouldn't have been right with her; it's not what she wanted at all. The way it feels to be inside her, to feel her pulsating beneath you, the excitement she brings! At the same time, I'm filled with worries. What would I do if something were to happen to her? If she were to get mangled in an accident? Might I go back? Would I want her afterward? We'll see how this goes.

This season, although starting late, was the most time I've spent in New England skiing, and hitting the most mountains.

I skied Wachusett, which is the "local" "mountain", in relatively-nearby-Princeton, Mass. It's a pretty flat, small, mountain. On weekends, it's filled with Boston-metro-area skiers who can't. At nights its skiiable. Two hours before close on weeknights, and it's wonderfully empty. It's not a bad learning mountain, but horribly boaring otherwise.

Loon, in Lincoln, NH, is the only one of the mountains listed here that I've been to before this year. It's the more crowded and built-up version of neighboring Cannon which is what I'd recommend if you're in the area.

Attitash, also in NH, is a nice little place just on the highway. I went with Brainie, who immediately commented on the fact that the lifts were right on the highway (it was reminiscent to the town lift at Park City or similar areas). It was much less crowded than I expected, but by the time I got there, it was also late season and bad conditions.

Sugar Bush, in VT, is the largest place I went to this year. It's grown to take-over some neighboring mountains, and connected them with a long, flat chairlift. The lift was closed when I was there because of wind, but the mountain was somewhat interesting to ski around. It paled in comparison to the cheaper, smaller, and more character-rich ski-only mountain down the street. . .

Mad River Glen. "Ski it if you can" is their motto, and one which was sent up into space at one time with the U.S. astronauts. I've not seen a place like here ever, and it is certainly the best place I've skied in the east so far.

*** Topic for #rpi: Mad River Might Result in My Reassessment of Mediocre Region Skiing
> I take back about 90% of the bad things I said about east coast skiing
<beez> heh
> They apply only to places that aren't Mad River Glen.
<beez> mad river glen's supposed to be fantastic
<beez> did you get a "Mad River Glen: Ski it if you can" sticker?
> no, I didn't, but it is. oh, god, it is.
> single handidly gave me faith in the east coast again
> it's unbelievabke. combarbly, it seems so small
> basically two lifts, two peaks, both lifts right next to each other
> which is neat, because it means that al trails end-up in the same place
> but there's so much skiiable area; basically the whole mountain
> and even if you were to just stay on trails, since they all go to the same place, and there's a blue that basically wraps around the entire montain snaking to the bottom, you can just connect trails like voltron
> I don't think I managed two identical runs all day.
> and Paradise, the locating of which is reminiscent of finding secrets in video games, is unbelievable
> and only called a "trail" in the loosest terms
> basically, get off the lift, turn around, hike up 8ft, take a black for a while, and then cut further into the woods at an unmarked spot
> eventually, you get to a nondescript orange disc nailed to a tree with an arrow and the ironic labelling "trail", which directs you to, basically, a narrow edge to begin your fall
> er, descent
> the "easiest" line involves a minimum of a four-ft-plus drop off of an icy ledge into moguls

Nevir NVR-2046

1. Open the disc tray
2. Press SETUP (or CLEAR)
3. Press 1, 3, 6, 9, 0
4. Close the disc tray

¡Se functiona!

In an interesting twist of fate, about five years ago I purchased a Region-2 version of Blazing Saddles while in Scotland to test DVD players in the U.S. for region-freeness.

My mother gave me a Region-1 version for Christmas, so I gave the Region-2 version to my sister. Since my copy of Slapshot has apparently been replaced by a FreeBSD i386 5.1 CD, this is the only Region-1 DVD I have here.

So the first Region-1 DVD I've played on a Region-2 DVD player is also Blazing Saddles--and it defaulted to playing in Spanish. It's still just as good. Well, almost.

"Cape Cod Cranberry Cheesecake Ice Cream" was in the local supermakeret; I didn't try it.

What have I tried recently:

Kudos. Apparently their web site still has the box from the good-kind. I'm not sure why I can't find them anywhere then.

Grasshoppers, from Keebler. Good mint-flavoured cookies. They're cheaper at Target than Stop and Shop.

Reese's peanutbutter cookies? Something like that; basically oreos with a peanut-butterish middle. They're ok, but not great. The Reese's version of the Girl Scout peanutbutter patties were better (but not as good as the ones made from Real Girl Scouts).

Target's Oreo knock-off. Not bad, possibly better than Oreos; but only avaiable in single-stuffed equivalent. Take a clue from the Japanese--the more cream the better.

Newman's Own Balsamic Vinegar--not worth it.

Archer Farms peanut butter square things are dissapointing. It's peanut brittle covered in the peanut-butter-like stuff they used on the outside of things, like the Skippy granola bars I guess? I can't remember what I had it on last.

Turkey Hill peanut butter ripple: good.

I sat here and read as everyone else posted their turn-of-the-year posts, and hear I am late to the party. Truth be told, arbitrary points in time really aren't my thing, and I normally would write my equivalent in about two months time.

However, give or take a couple weeks, this point in time marks the tenth anniversary of my web presence. Ten years ago I put up a page on Angelfire and Tripod, followed by Geocities. Looking back at my code from that era (all that's left is the Angelfire pages, unfourtantely), the HTML, the CAPITAL tags, and the ^Ms; it makes me glad it's in the past. That and I lack interest in writing more tinfoil hat MicroSoft stories.

That was ten years ago. A decade ago, with HTML learned from looking at Corel's latest-and-greatest WordPerfect. Nine years ago was the birth of my first self-hosted site under Monolith and later DHS. Six years ago was the birth of this domain--meaning that I neglected to celebrate its fifth last year (so if you need something to drink to, drink to the health of this domain). All of this is oddly apropos of today's lunch conversation.

Which brings us to where I am now, and where I've been. Most people reading this have probably been told, or found out by now, that I have indeed left Brown. I ran off to Europe, came back, interviewed for a job, got an offer call the next morning while attending a funeral, and then ran off to Peru. I shall talk more about this all in my annual March entry, hopefully when I get more pictures posted (I'm still very far behind, and the power unit to my external hard drive holding most of them is not with me). Suffice it to say, I'm quite excited at my job currently.

I want to use the remainder of this post to follow-up on some previous posts. Jingle got merged into mainline-psi, but is broken. Maybe it's the lesbianism, but I've been rewatched A Mi Madre a few times since returning, and Ninette has been on my mind a bit--good movie. Also on my mind, is how I've neglected to mention Carmen! The movie, based on a 19th century opera, was suggested by Sarah and Lisa while we were in Sevilla, so I decided to acquire it and we all watched over pizza and rioja. The version we saw was excellent, starring Paz Vega (also from Lucía y el Sexo, which I've finally gotten to almost ordering, and has been on my todo list for several months now). It's the tragic story of a man who had it all and the femme fatale. There's not much else I can say about it.

Finally, I've been playing around with my phone and writing apps for it. Most recently, I've realized that Sun has stopped releasing for Linux, even x86, so I can't get support for any of the recent APIs such as 179, location services.

I'm back in the states, where in order to protect your freedom, you aren't allowed to have any water on flights originating or terminating within its boundaries. In my absence, this country has gone mad.

Briefly regarding my contact situation: my main laptop had a bit of a problem a while ago with a short, a fire, and the smell of burning plastic/rubber (but the machine itself I think is fine, I just need to get a new transformer, which I should now be able to do as I'm more sedentary). My electronic mail and all other services have been resumed, and my normal e-mail (at this domain) should be used once-more effective immediately since (somewhat interestingly), the machine hosting my temporary e-mail--which I had been forced to switch to since I could not use either my primary nor Brown e-mail anymore--lot service the day I flew back.

Once I get the laptop issue cleared-up and have some time, I'll post more about the past few months. There's a lot of organizational stuff I need to take care-of, and I'm still living in the wrong timezone.

----

As a piggy-back, my honeymoon with the E61 obviously finished:

Bugs: If you try and open the image gallery (e.g. "Insert->Image" from the MMS menu or "Use Selected image for Video calls"), the first-time only seems to initialize the gallery but not launch it (or there is possibly just a very
long delay). Nevertheless, reapplying the same command quickly brings up the gallery.

Different programs can make use of the same components, e.g. you can launch the message writing (e-mail, MMS) from the file manager, contacts, or obviously the messaging component. When launched, these all retain the identity of the launching program, which can sometimes be confusing when switching tasks. If you save the message to a draft, you must resume from the messaging component. My opinion: I think writing a message should launch its own writing process, which could allow for multiple messages, would allow you to switch to the messaging program to view the message you're replying to or regarding, and would be more consistent.

It also won't let you do anything with unknown files sent via bluetooth; you can't even save them to "others" despite it being a default directory.

----

I'm quite annoyed with T-Mobile. I spent hours talking to multiple people, and I still don't know what the reality is of anything. I tried getting their 802.11 WiFi service. I was told that it'd work with my computer, then that it wouldn't unless I got this special Sony card. Well, maybe it would if I could install this software; oh but you have a Mac? Oh, Linux? No, it won't work on that. Also, I have dozens of messages saying that as a T-Mobile user I can just pop down to a Telefonica hotspot, or an Orange hotspot, or your local-carrier-of-choice, and use their service. But maybe not I'm told when I actually talk to a human because despite what the message says, it isn't part of my service, so I can't do this; I could do this if I added it to my plan however, but then there's still roaming fees associated with that.

Roaming charges for the Wi-Fi? I've never seen this fine print, granted I probably wasn't paying much attention to it. Dealing with Telefonica directly for a new plan was its own mesh of mixed messages an unclear communication. A man in Madrid would sell me a plan for three months, but only if I had a Spanish bank account; in Alicante I needed to have a year-long contract. It didn't matter though because Telefonica only sells their data-plan to businesses, despite it being listed on their web site. Basically, "telecoms suck" is a universal.

----

Finally, I've been thinking about base 12 an awful lot recently, and then found that link in my aggregator.

Just over eight years ago, Montgomery Highschool in Montgomery, NJ stepped onto the ice for their first ever ice hockey game, a victory over nearby Ridge's junior-varsity squad at the Chimney Rock arena in Bridgewater, NJ.

The previous year, a group of parents and interested parties approached the township's school board with proposal to bring hockey to Montgomery with a plan similar to the one recently effected by similarly situated Ridge. The group demonstrated outstanding support, bringing with it uniformed players, some very young, but most from sixth-grade through sophomore year. Given the large number of visitors showing their support, announced the board, the group's presentation would be the first item on the agenda. The presentation lasted the better part of the hour and was organized and executed by my father, Walter Wronka.

Despite the presentation, and overwhelming support from the town, persuading the board to adopt the proposed budget items for the team, the battle was far from over as the highschool administrators spent the first months of the school year attempting to find a lack of support, from attempts at biased surveys to after-school brainwashing sessions where we were warned that, believe it or not, hockey was tough, physical, and we'd be up against teams that were more experienced than us--wouldn't we rather have a football team?

Two coaches later and several practices, we had a squad and we played our first JV game, which was a decisive victory. The next year, Montgomery opened with a 7-3 varsity victory over Ewing township, dominating in the game. That year they would go on to make the state play-offs where they would play fifth-seed Summit in the first round, staying within one goal up until the final minutes of play, when, with the goalie on the bench, Montgomery allowed two empty-net goal for a score of 5-2 that would stand at the end. Matt Pentz, Adrian Fedak, and myself all recorded points on goals from Pentz and Fedak, making myself tied for several years as the number-two post-season scorer in MHS history. I gave up three goals and blocked over 90% of the shots faced.

MHS has had trouble since then, failing to make the post-season in 2000 despite high hopes. 2001 and 2002 saw the team rebuilding, having graduated the core nucleus of the team, and while MHS made the state tournament in 2003, winning its first ever postseason game, the team was still unable to advance past the preliminary stages losing a heartbreaker in overtime to 4th-seed Morris Knolls 4-3.

In 2004, the team didn't let down this time, making the post-season as the ninth seed, and advancing to the quarterfinals where they met a familiar foe, number-one seeded Ridge, and lost 4-3. In 2005, they once more failed to make the post season.

Earlier this year, Montgomery won the county tournament. The team would continue to improve throughout the season, eventualy earning the fifth-seed and a bye into the first-round of the state tournament. Montgomery would go on to outscore its opponents 14-4 in the next three games earning a spot in the semi-finals to be played in the Meadowlands this afternoon.

This afternoon Montgomery is scheduled to play its first final-four game in the public school state tournament against top-seed Morris Knolls. I wish them luck, and wish that I could be there to watch.

PHL 1640

I'm currently sitting in Philadelphia International Airport (PHL), having gone through security earlier and got yelled at for putting a quarter, a dime, and four one cent-pieces in the tray. The lady kept asking all people "is this your tray" and eventually "you used an entire tray for 39 cents?" I responded that "i didnt want the (metal detector) to go off".


Through security, I bought a tuna sub while waiting for the plane as lunch, which was not bad when compared with the recent options, but still not remarkable. The best part was that the vegetables, the tomatoe and onions, were quite good. I just finished a Dilbertesque conversation with mother regarding mobile phones in public, mentioning that she had been much louder and that the guy behind us was no louder than if he were carrying on a norm conversation. Her response? "It's just annoying."

Mariott 0116

When we arrived at Salt Lake City (SLC), we had trouble with our car rental
reservations, which had apparently been for the previous month. We ended up with a Taurus, a model of which fondest and most recent memories involved firetrucks coming to my house. The hotel itself was marevellous, giving us no fewer than five nice pillows (and I'm generally quite picky about my pillows, spending much more than a sane person does on my own). They also provided us with a convenience six-pack of 19oz bottles of Dasani (114oz total) for $5, dasnai. Philedelphia on the other hand had the much better tasting Poland Spring. In any event, it is time to sleep.

2006-01-07
hotel 1806

Now back from skiing, earlier I had unsuccesfully tried sending email from my phone. I called T-Mobile around noon and got transferred to wireless. The wait was longer than two minutes so their new system forced me to hang up or provde a callback number which would be dialed in "no less than three hours".

I ordered New England clam chowder in bread bowl from the same place that had a really good lobster bisque the first time I came here, just outside the silverlode lift. the soup had very little clam and the bread provided no desire to eat it.

It started snowing after lunch, and eventually the frozen rain and wind chased us from the side of the mountain we had been on. We stayed on the main slopes until the weather followed us and then decided to call it quits.

At the end of the final run we took, I noticed a missed call from T-Mobile. Five minutes later after packing up the skis, I notice a second and figured 'oh, they have to try three times at least if they retry at al' sure enough, they call a third time, and this time I answer and spend ten seconds gretting silence before finally hearing an automated voice announce that this was indeed their third attempt to contact me and that the automated voice was apolegetic that she could not reach me, even though I was there screaming at it.

2006-01-09
I took a trip this evening to the Park City public library (on Park Ave.). It is somewhat small, but nice and the librarian helpful and a pleasure to talk to. I read a book on Nostradamus, published in 1941. I always find the Interpretation of such cryptic prophecies interesting.

At one point in the book, there comes to the prediction that the Orient will become an area of power--an observation that the author calls obvious, for since before Nostradamus' time until the author's present era, military strategists have held the same belief. Moreove, the author writes, Nostradamus saw the importance of the area during his own time and understood, as Squaresoft put it, that time flows like a river, and history repeats in cycles.

This book presented a not-so-unique opportunity, but one not-so-frequently taken, to validate interpretations made. How many of the existing interpretations were handpicked moments in history? A lot happens, and there are only so many predictions made for each century. Were the recent riots in France predicted by Nostradamus? There are certainly verses that seem to support this Interpretation. On the otherhand, there are also accepted interpretations that France was to be invaded in 1987 and the world ends in 1999, again with France being involved (as the total solar eclipse fell upon it).



At the moment, I'm watching The Phantom of the Opera on TV, a week ago I was nearly chastised for having not seen it previously by someone whom the leading actress reminds me of. It is a quite enjoyable show, and I have always enjoyed immensly a few of the melodies.

Tomorrow we head to Salt Lake City and then the airport to return home. Skiing was fun, and no major body parts were lost to frostbite. I reccomend Morning Star at Deer Valley (the picture at right does not do justice to the experience of being tired and out of practice, and being completely alone on the mountain going down one of the steeper, more difficult trails with a bad mix of ice, packed snow, and loose powder seemingly randomly distributed on the mountain). The food at Deer Valley is also much better than at Park City Mountain Resort.

Finally, I have fallen in love with MacAllan scotch. I had a glass of the 12 year yesterday and it was an exquisite Highland scotch. The Blind Dog is definitely reccomended (unlike the Taco Maker I'm finishing right now), although they seem to run low on wine towards the end of the week (our first four reds were out of stock) although I blame Utah (as an aside, avoid beer in Utah).


2006-01-10 2035
36000 ft above midamerica
On the way out to utah I suggested that airlines should more agressively sell
advertisement time on their video displays. Actually being awake for takeoff this time, I did notice hotel advertisements shortly after the viewscreens were enabled.

While sitting in the airport, I thought of another idea, more akin to guerilla advertising. many airports, including both SLC and PHL, have wireless networks (run by Sprint and SBC/Cingular repectively). Many areas with high population concentrations have people who are using or trying to use 802.11b/g at any given time.


My proposal, since many times there is no useful network anyway (either because there is no network or the network is closed) is a small AP (possibly even this Zaurus I am using to type this, although ideally an integrated device) that sends advertisements to all users in the area. This would be the first practical (i.e. non-prank) use of airjacking. The system would also work for users that cannot use the aiport's system, and therefore it would reach more users and therefor provide the greater benefit when compared to the closed systems currently offered.

I'm accepting vc funds to start up such a project. Once the device is designed, we mostly need vehicles (eg people) to transport them, and of course staff to maintain and grow adverstising accounts.

My old roommate, Beez recently joined the digital world, so he can start putting me even more to shame, by getting a Canon 350D for Christmas. I suggest you go look at some of his work, my favorite being A long walk off a short dock. He had a whole demotivation poster with it at one point, but I'm not seeing it right now--perfect for that disaffected college student. I'd go take a look now, because at one point he actually wore clothes and has been doing progressively less of that. Soon he might not even have a hat.

I went into the city the other day to spend more money, and to pretty much be just like him with my Manfrotto tripod and head. I also picked up a Lowepro Micro Trekker 200 which I think I have fallen in love with. It is small, only slightly bigger than a Tamrac sling bag, but fits quite a bit, including my 20D with the vertical grip attached and the 17-85mm kit lens that came with it, which happens to be the longest lens I own right now.

This also happened to be the kit that I brought with me to watch my highschool play that of the town immediately north of us, which happened to be coached by a former teammate and good friend of mine. It was an exciting game, and pictures are posted in four sets.

I believe the teams were seeded third (Montgomery) and fifth (Hillsborough) in the county tournament, meaning that each advanced by upsetting higher ranked teams. Montgomery had a first year coach, while Hillsborough had a first year varisty program. Montgomery has certainly come a long way since when I was playing for them, for one thing, people actually went to the game (they had jerseys, for another). The team had depth and actually looked like they were playing two-way hockey from whistle to whistle.

Montgomery scored the only goal of the game, but Hillsborough had its chances, including a penalty shot in the second. For all my carping about needing better lenses, these pictures should now provide supportive evidence to that fact. I had to shoot with the aperature wide open, and even then the scenes were overly dark and noisy, which is even more apparent when the scenes are brightened. So, if you feel so inclined, please send me some money, or a nice Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM lens. I'll even mention your name on this web log if you do that! Or, if that isn't an incentive, I'll promise never to mention your name on my web log (at least for certain periods of never).

Congratulations to everybody graduating this December. I got to celebrate with some of the the Brown Sc.M. students, but for the rest of you, we'll need to catch-up sometime.

I know I'll forget people, or not realize people are graduating, but from RPI I know Cory, Bob, and Jess are leaving. Congratulations especially to the graduating freshman!


There's been quite a few of the Sc.M. students I haven't seen in a while, or spent much time with, so it was great spending and evening with Johnny, Austin, and Adam (who, between 3am in the CIT and 12am hockey games, I actualy have seen quite a bit this semester). While Austin is off to work for Cisco, Adam has decided to follow me skiing to Utah in January, and then return to finish out the hockey season.

Congratulations to all, and everyone I missed! You're free now! Unfortunately, living isn't.

For those of you living somewhere else and not knowing, I picked up a Canon 20D recently, as a pre-Christmas present to myself. I was looking at some old pictures from my Pentax Optio 555 and was noticing how noisy a lot of the images were (and this was shortly after complaining how these cameras should be more aggressive about switching to a higher ISO equivalent). I was also noticing that a lot of my images weren't very sharp, so of course I blamed the camera.

I took a few shots to do a quick review. It isn't very thorough, but I also don't get paid for this and it isn't all that fun, so if you want a full review I suggest reading a professional one. Below are some images I took, all with custom white balance.

Parameters
The 20D allows the shooter to set custom values for sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone. The camera came set to Parameter 2 which leaves all of these at their zero-points. Parameter 1 sets sharpness, contrast, and saturation each to +1.


As you can see from the photo on the left above, the neutral settings are on the soft side. Setting to Parameter 1 created much sharper images (right above). These photos were all taken with the EF-S 60mm f/2.5 macro lens.

Below we have the two extremes. I probably should have done a better graduation, and possibly done color tone on its own, but I didn't. On the left we can see is clearly sharper and over-saturated. The right one is with all settings turned down to -2.



Sensitivity
There are much better ways of showing noise than this, but this was the quickest for me. I grabbed the same area out of each picture (towards the upper right) where there is basically a solid wall. A cursory glance shows noticeable increaseses above 200 with a large jump above 400. Still, it isn't anything that is very noticeable on most pictures unless you're looking for it. There is also an ISO 3200 setting using a custom function.

From left to right, ISO 100, ISO 200, ISO 400.

ISO 800 and ISO 1600

Lenses
Below I compare three lenses, the EF-S 17-85mm f/4.0-5.6 kit lens, the EF 28mm f/1.8 prime, and the EF-S 60mm f/2.5 macro lens.

This is the kit lense at its widest.

The two images above were taken with similar focal lengths, the one on the left was the kit zoom lense, the one on the right the 28mm prime. With the 1.6x magnification from the smaller sensor, these are about equivalent to a 50mm prime and the normal human viewpoint.

This is the kit lense at 61mm and the 60mm prime. The zoom at 61mm still seems wider than the 60mm prime, and is clearly less sharp. These images were all taken with the same settings, parameter 2, and custom white balance was recalibrated before using each lens.

This is the kit lens at the end of its range, 85mm.

I just saw my first NHL overtime shoot-out, one of the new rules introduced this season. It was also the first Devil's game that I saw since I started attending Brown, since the only hockey I can get on TV are Bruin's games.

I started watching the (replay of the) game when it was already 2-1 Bruins in the 1st. Broduer apparently sprained something so the Devil's were starting some new guy (Scott Clemmensen). He was solid for the most part, not flashy, and appeared comfortable in net. In one of Boston's last goals, he didn't come out far enough, quick enough, and pretty much just needed to kick his leg out a little sooner to stop the shot.

Kozlov and Gionta both scored, sandwiching Mogilny in the line-up who missed (his Boston counterpart, Bruin's captain Joe Thornton, scored on the only successful deke, moving to his backhand in close and lifting it into the top near corner at close range). As pretty a move as Thornton's was, Kozlov's was brilliant and demonstrated the quickest release I can recall seeing--he moved pretty much straight in, made a slight move to his right, and just as the keeper opened up launched the puck through his legs. Gionta's shot was similar, only his was inside the blocker arm.

Mogilny's attempt was slow. Just before his attempt, I was internally debating who benefitted more from a high-tempo penalty-shot attempt. In most game situations, the shot-taker skates in at high speed, possibly slowing down just before making a move. This has the advantage of keeping the keeper moving, possibly making it easier to catch him off-balance or moving the wrong way. Mogilny looked tired. He came in slow and was forced to shoot wide.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the shoot-out thing. I never liked how the IHL played with tradition, and then they died, and now the NHL goes and implements the changes they made. I liked ties in the regular season. I liked there being two points to come out of every game, and only two points. It was exciting, I will admit, but I think it would have been more exciting if the Bruins had pulled their goalie with 10 seconds left and an offensive-zone face-off, knowing that they were guaranteed one point and had a decent chance at a second if they could keep the offensive pressure on.

Who'da thunk it:


Yep, I'm actually logged into the bane of webloggers, the '00s version of the '90s personal web page with a bad neon color-scheme and starfield background. So the site is still missing many normal features, such as trackbacks and pings, but hey, it's not like I'm using it to blog!

In fact, I'm not really sure what I'm using it for. I've added all my syndicated feeds from its users to it, for whatever reason. I'm really just fooling around with it right now.

Some comments about the interface of LiveJournal are called for. It sucks. It sucked when I first went crawling through the site almost five years ago, and it sucked three years ago. It's really pretty bad, for such a heavily used site, and Six-Apart has not seemed to have changed much. Location of options and features is not intuitive.

They often have a tool-bar-style menu which is a centered line of very-small images. This toolbar is also pretty silly/dumb. It does not indicate whether someone is already a 'friend' or not--you can add anyone as a friend, it will even ask if you want to add someone already added--comeon, even god awful social networking sites like Orkut got this right (the next page is smarter--that's another thing, it often takes multiple pages to do something that should only take one). I added myself as a friend--I don't know what purpose this serves. Finally, on the topic of 'friends', there are no levels of friendsip or association--it's purely directed binary relationships.

I'm finding that I frequently have to use the 'back' button on my browser. I'm hitting pages with no links to anywhere else, I'm hitting pages that don't look like they're really thought about (such as User has no journal here as the entire text sent to me--why isn't there a link elsewhere? Why isn't this in the standard template? Why is there no standard template. Depending on where I go, the layout changes, drastically. And I don't just mean between different user's journals. I should always have a link back to my start page I saw when I logged in. I should always have that menu at the top.

That menu sucks, by the way. What does '...' mean? The menu does not allow for natural movement in many cases, because the submenu changes as soon as you touch the border of an adjoining option during your diagonal movement.

As it was kind enough to mention when I tried viewing my Most Recent Entries, I don't have a journal. Yet I can configure it. And delete it--it is currently 'Activated'.

This is all thanks to LiveJournal's recent implementation of OpenID (formerly Yet Another Distributed Identity Service, or YADIS). I've switched Cork from offering it's own proprietary remote authentication (which nobody ever used) to OpenID (which people do use, somewhat). Logging into Cork with OpenID isn't officially supported yet, but you can keep trying until it does (but it won't make it happen any quicker--well, maybe it will, talk to me). For those of you with Cork accounts (remember, they are the same accounts used on my web log), you can now use OpenID with Cork as a server. See my Cork entry for more information.

Durante los pocos días pasados, pensaba mucho sobre la fotografía. Primero, yo quiero comprar un SLR de Canon por la Navidad (posiblemente, si tengo el dinero). Mi interés de fotografía es posiblemente el mejor cosa de mi viaje al California. Cuando estaba en California, fabriqué varios parches por Qdig, una programa de galerías de imágenes, y saqué muchas fotos (como he dicho aquí).

Más recientemente, veía una página de una amiga (o amigo? no me recuerdo ahora), y decida a colectar todas las fotos de yo en una página. Era una experiencia interesante--volví a vivir muchas experiencias de mi vida de universidad. Qué sorpresa que año después de año, hacemos las mismas cosas--como en estas fotos de 2001, 2002, y 2003 (pues, es NY, por supueso hay nieve). En Providence, hay nieve tambien, y por mi cumpleaños Stella me sugirió que vayamos al 'Swan Point'. Dave saqué muchas fotos--estaba como que David era nuestro fotógrafo privado. Las fotos son muy maravillosas.

Por último, como yo digo aquí, yo tengo dos programas nuevas por Qdig. Yo clasifique mis fotos 'timeless' en mi galería, y ahora hay 72 etiquetas o 'tags'.

Just got back from a trip to L.A. and Santa Barbara, surprisingly the worst traffic we hit was in San Diego. We ended up taking state roads through Del Mar instead of the Interstate to bypass it. We came across an awesome classic car in orange and creme with the apt license plate 'KREMSICL' or some variation thereof.

We took CA-1 for most of the trip which was a very scenic drive, sometimes perilous as remade Volkswagen vans swerved into our lane as they winded down the mountain opposite us. UCSB and Santa Barbara itself were nice. After seeing UCLA and UCSB I've come to realize that it's mandatory for California schools (or at least the UCs) to look really nice.

The town surrounding UCSB was also very nice. We found what I would consider the best pizza I've had so far in California at the corner of Embarcadero del Norte and Madrid Road. We walked in, watched Ali win a fight on ESPN classic, and listened to Interpol recordings.

The beaches from LA on north (north of del Mar) were very nice, especially considering the red tide that showed up in San Diego last week and hasn't gone away. Throughout the entire coast though there seems to be an over abundance of seaweed washing up on shore (again though, much more down south). I snapped some shots of Venice Beach on my phone, as I attempt to capture all the scenes from the Tony Hawk series in images, but it was not too remarkable. I didn't get to see Ollie. I didn't have a board with me anyways.

We had an excellent Thai dinner in Santa Barbara and the next day had a excellent Tuna stake in the Palisades with Anna's friend's cousin at Teri's restaurant. Downtown Stanta barbara was somewhat odd in that most stores seemd to be open only between 0900 and 1730, which coupled with very long sun-lit days, was frustrating when walking around at 2000. Russ's Camera store on State St. is one such store, but is quite nice after being stuck with nothing but Ritz camera stores in San Diego.

Laptop shipped on the 19th, a July 20th ship date moved up 31 days. The part that was 2-4 weeks out of stock shipped one week after the order was placed. I decided on a Lenovo X31 after soliciting suggestions. (Thanks to Cleaner for suggesting the X3x-series. Guim and Prox also suggested IBM/Lenovo).

The laptop is nice and small, although that means the 12" screen also has a low 1024x768 resoluction meaning it will serve as a complement to my desktop (also it lacks an optical drive). I ordered it without an 802.11 card as none of the options were supported,. I also ordered it with the miniumum hard disk drive and RAM options as the IBM prices were exceptionally high for these. The $70 1GB DIMM upgrade I ordered from Crucial would have cost me 10 times that from Lenovo. The upgrade to an 80GB 4200 RPM would have cost me at least as much as purchasing a new 100GB 5400RPM 2.5" HDD.

These two upgrades, with the Intersil/Conextant-based mini-pci card from Eugenius/Senao that I picked up added about $200-$250 to my order. Total cost of the new laptop is under $2300 with extra battery and an extra AC/DC power adapter. This is a little more than I spent on any of my past laptops, all of which have been between $2000-$2400. Apparently my sister just spent over $3000 on her new laptop. Now to see how things work.

Woke up to the first quake since I got out here. There was just a faint rumbling and shaking sensation, and the quake was later recorded as a 5.2.

I updated mutt on Berkeley to 1.5.9. For some unknown reason, they changed a configuration option, or more specifically how it was set, between versions, so mutt complained on start-up but would not offer a suggestion on fixing it. Apparently they changed 'set alternates=' to 'alternates '. Something else to look at is mutt-ng which has some additional features and patches already integrated.

Anna, her flatmate and I went to see the USS Midway, a former carrier that is now a floating museum. Only in southern California will someone think that the CV designation of the ship stands for 'Chula Vista'.

Anna and I went to the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park. We got to see the road runner as well as take a train around most of the place. There was an ape at the end of the train ride that was trowing branches in the same manner as an olympic hammer thrower. It was quite entertaining. Unfortunately, my battery was just able to last the train ride, and the back-up was at home. The last picture I got was of the ape sitting across the exhibit from him.

When we got back, Anna left to help some friends move. Having nothing better to do at this point, I started looking for replacement laptops. I came across the Linux Certified LC2100 laptop. I took a look, hoping it'd meet the requirements set forth earlier. Unfortunately, what they advertise as a Bluetooth expansion port is simply a standard USB port. No internal Bluetooth. Furthermore, the wireless card they advertise with it as an option is Atheros based.

When Anna got back from helping people move, we drove down to Pacific Beach so that she could show me the bars she frequented. The first place we went to, Longboard, was near the start of the main strip in Pacific Beach. Something that I'm not used to spending so much time in the north east is finding bars that don't have Sam Adams. We decided against ordering food in favor of trying the pizza place across the street, Hoboken Pizza, supposedly started or run by people originally from Hoboken, NJ. The atmosphere was very Jersey, although a bit dated. We walked in to hear Billy Joel's Greatest Hits playing, including Anthony's Song, Good Night Saigon, and Tell Her About It. All the pizza I'd had up until this point in California has been, in a word, bad. Insipid, uninspired, and expensive would be a slightly more verbose description. The pizza here was no different, albeit a bit cheaper than everywhere else. The pizza was thin--it reminded me of Nice Slice in Providence, but lacked flavor.

After the pizza we stopped into Anna's favorite place for a drink made of coconut rum, melon liquor, and whip cream. I then beat Anna handily in darts, and we proceeded to leave for the next stop. We instead stopped for sushi at Ichiban PB, which did not smell too good considering we were eating raw fish from them. It was interesting, in that it was the first time I'd heard spanish spoken at a Japanese restaurant (all the help appeared to be latino). We watched the LA Galaxy vs. Real Salt Lake MLS match on the television. I'm not sure who came up with the name Real Salt Lake considering the percentage of Spanish speakers in Salt Lake City is probably comparitively small, and there isn't any royalty system set up in this country anyway.

We stopped at a couple other places, then picked up gelatos on the way back to the car. We stopped at a used CD store, which seem to be popular in southern California, and picked up some CDs to support the used CD market. I picked up a DVD-Audio disc to play with (Fleetwood Mac, for those interested). Apparently it is not very useful.

I semi-regularly delete logs, some I delete more regularly than others. I've taken to storing only aggregate information. I do look at live logs pretty frequently however.

At the risk of verbing an adjective, someone at the Department of Homeland Security is Googling me. I'm not sure why, but it is a little disturbing. I don't think that I have any reason to worry, but I also do not have any reason to expect a random web search for my name from them, especially 48 minutes into a 9-5 EDT Friday.

At least for the moment, my first amendment rights to free speech are not being violated.

The last time someone from DHS/the FBI was using Google to search for someone I know, they popped into his office shortly after.

The first few days of most trips, especially those requiring commercial planes, I take seem to suck. It seems to be a general rule. These last couple of days have been particularly bad and Sod's Law has been in effect. Among other problems that have come up, Machiavelli's LCD broke. I am at a complete loss on how this actually happened. The most obvious problem is a crack in the lower right corner that makes almost exactly 1/4 of the screen unusable, leaving me with a resolution of 1280x427 (and an extra 640x427 res box in the lower left which fits a default 80x24 xterm almost perfectly between the clip column and where the verticle lines running the entire height of the screen start).

So stuff pretty much sucks right now. Anna's out with friends right now, leaving me with a ten year old friend [their own website is pretty hideous with their CSS; also I'm linking this review entirely because of the second paragraph which mirrors the discussion I just had in the grocery store--right, I'm buying Scotch in the frickin' grocery store ... weird.]

My flight from Philly got in an hour early, so I've had some time to Jabber, check electronic mail, and post this. STL is much nicer than Philly when it comes to using laptops, as they have these nice SBC payphone booths with two power outlets all over the place. So I'm charging my phone and laptop (battery died last night ... if I had money I'd get the laptop fixed/get a new one ... also, if there were better laptops) while using the GPRS connection. Fine and dandy. I was fortunate to find what is probably the only working power outlet in PHL earlier, right next to a water fountain around A9 I think. I was able to exchange e-mail with Erica who is also in San Diego now. Small world.

Chris apparently has moved into our new place so far, and I'm being told that it's huge and some people now have apartment envy. CCE is now net-less it seems, so I'm not sure exactly what's going on over there, but I'm assuming he has taken care of switching the utilities and calling someone for Internet access since he's there and I won't be for a while.

Highlights so far at STL besides the power situation include a motorcade and AF-1 taking off. Yay. Now it's time for me to shutdown and board a plane. Soon, hopefully, I'll be landing in San Diego and get to see Anna!

As she wrote, I'm moving. I've got my full deposit back now, and am on my way home after a nap in the CIT.

The day started a bit early, having my landlord wake me up at 0800 EDT. We carried on a conversation for at least five minutes, although it felt like much longer, from me under my blankets and him through the small gap possible with the chain still on the door.

Him: When are you out?
Me: Later today, probably this afternoon.
Him: I thought you were gone.
Me: No, I'm still here.
Him: You told me you were leaving over the weekend.
Me: No, I said I would leave either yesterday or today. In any event, the letters I gave you both said today.

Apparently he had cleaners coming at 1000. He left, I got up, showered, and got dressed. Threw some stuff in the car, came back in and made lunch around 11:30-noon. While I'm using up the rest of my swiss cheese and eggs (yum, grilled cheese and eggs--it'd been almost all semester since I'd had grilled cheese) I get another knock at my door. I open it up, and he opens it up all the way and stands in such a way that it's now preventing me from getting to my food which shouldn't be cooking for all that long. And I didn't turn the fan on because it shouldn't be cooking long enough to cause a lot of smoke. He offers me a deal: I get out by 1400, and he'll give me my deposit back, because the original lease says that [I] have to leave the place how I found it, and you know, that's impossible. Extortion aside, I figure I can be out by 1400 and it isn't worth the hassle anyway--not to mention I need to take my bread off the stove while it still resembles toast. I agree, throw stuff in the car, collect my check, carry some stuff to the CIT, eat the jar of apple sauce I had left over, give away some other food stuff, and then come back. My car is blocked in. No big worries, carry more stuff to the CIT. Carry on a conversation with a fellow tenant who was home sick the previous week, was not moving out any time soon, and had had the landlord burst into her room without so much as a knock (and certainly not the two days required by Rhode Island law). In the past I've woken up to having my door ajar, only the chain still in place. This is quite disturbing I can asure you.

The first week I moved in, he did fix about half the things I brought to his attention. Unfortunately, this also caused other problems--namely fixing one leak caused the same sink to leak out a different place. I didn't pay for water so I didn't care too much--I brought it to his attention and watched as he did nothing. The apartment served its purpose as far as I'm concerned, it lasted me the first year. I had seen Liz's post before, and it makes a good companion to this.

This past week, from 2005-05-07 to 2005-05-14, Anna visited with me. We spent some time in Providence before beginning a three-hop trip to Philly to see an exhibit of works by Salvador Dalí.

They had a lot of art I hadn't seen before (especially a lot of his religious work), but also had my favorite of his paintings and, while they did not have "La persistencia de la memoria" they did have a later work based on it. I also saw two movies on continuous loop, Disney's Destino (making this the second Disney movie that I've seen recently--perhaps they can still put out some decent stuff?) and the silent film written by Buñuel and Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. The latter I also got on DVD because I hadn't realized it was playing, but it also contains about 47 minutes of commentary (the movie itself is only 17 minutes). It's interesting. Dalí was insane.

After seeing the movies (and to some extent before) I walked around. I'm not entirely sure why, but there was a section of the museum dedicated to medival armor and weapons which was interesting, but not particularly so. The other surrealist/modern art was much more interesting. It's also the first time I've really been interested in Miró's work--in particular this piece.

After the gallery, we left to get some food (cheesesteaks of course, but not very good ones unfortunately). It's sad to point out that the Hilltop Sub Station (back in Montgomery on CR-518), where for several years I stopped for cold treats during the summer, is now a pile of dirt.


Prior to leaving Albany for Jersey and then Philly, we stopped by at RPI. Anna had wanted to talk to someone from her former lab (or something like that). We got to see the inside of the new biotechnology building.


The image on the page linked there is a bit misleading, in my opinion. When I was there, there were no plants to liven the place up. The building had a very sterile appearance. Doors lock behind you magically which can be annoying, especially if you're someone's guest and just want to catch a moment of air, then find yourself locked two doors and a hallway away because you switched corridors. The main atrium is long and very narrow. It reminded me very much of the inside of a submarine, except for its height (possibly part of a battleship would be a better comparison). In all, I'm pretty dissapointed by the building. When I got locked out, I decided to stop by Empire's (Pizza Bella or whatever they call themselves this year). They remodled the place. They took out some tables, and have a new drink case where the side table with napkins and the pizza specials used to be. They no longer advertise specials in the store, but the web site seems to indicate that they still have a cheap large pizza. Of course, they haven't brought back the cheap subs. When I got there I tried finding their Buffallo Chicken pizza, which used to be my main staple order there. I saw something that looked like it, and did indeed to turn out to be it, but it lacked the bleu cheese that used to be so liberally smeared upon it. In all, the experience was disappointing. I didn't stop by China House (Green whatever-they-are-now after they got shut down) or I Love this time, but last time we stopped by we did notice the price increases at I Love. Gone are the days of $1 slices. :(

Also while I was in Albany, I stopped in at the Apple store where I was told outright that nine hours of my own time was less important than even less than one hour of an employee's time, even when Apple had the power to reduce my time to one hour and the employee's time to a few minutes. The staff at the store also demonstrated complete cluelessness about Apple hardware. Apparently they are only trained to click candied buttons.

On our return from Jersey to Albany we picked up some White Castle hamburgers. (No link because their web site decided to become braindead and won't let me use it. This means no more searching for stores ... this means they're stupid.) It was good. I'm still eating the leftovers. I still haven't seen the movie. We were supposed to rent it (Anna has an all you can rent membership deal) when we got to Albany, but didn't. I'm promised that Anna will finally see it with me when I fly out this summer to see her. While in Albany we visited her family and took a trip to John Boyd Thatcher Park.

Just as I walked into the CIT this morning, the chant from the end of PBS's Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? came on my iRiver digital media jukebox. It eventually caused me to do a web search, ended up at their site, and discovered they're Brown Alumni.

As a little experiment, I removed all RBL queries generated by new messages into my mail server. My mail rules have held up pretty well and I generally get fewer than one piece of spam through the filters per three-months. I decided to remove the RBL checks for the entirety of March. Previously, from the last week in November to the end of February Ian Gulliver's Messagewall reported only ten messages blocked because of the RBL checks. These checks happened before any other checks, so I was wondering how many of these would be caught by later tests.

March 1st and March 22nd messages (one each day) got through. Overall, this is less than the average three-per-month blocked, but much higher than my one-every-three month averages. Nevertheless, at the moment I'm satisfied and will keep the RBLs off. Spamassassin will hopefully adapt, and the number of spams getting through will return to the RBL days.

For those wondering on my mail breakdown for the month of March, 2005:
2162 messages were rejected, 1901 were to a set of mailling lists where I weed out a large number of messages in general because of broken mail clients. This means 261 is a magic number. Pretty low, I suppose, but that's it.

1340 messages were accepted, 337 were to the set of mailling lists mentioned above. Magic number here is 1003 (number of messages accepted not to the set of mailling lists excluded).

So magic ratio is 261:1003, or one message rejected for every 3.8 accepted (20.6%). Of the excluded set of mailling lists, 84.9% of messages were rejected, mostly because they don't know how to use either In-Reply-To or Reference headers. This brings the average over all mail to 61.7% rejection.

The actual rules tripped over all messages:
1964 Broken Reply Implementations (90.8% of all rejected mail, 56.1% of all received mail)
93 Messages sent as multipart/alternative (4.3% of rejected, 2.7% of received)
90 Messages sent as HTML (4.2% of rejected, 2.6% of received)
48 Messages were sent from a domain which does not accept mail from me (2.2% of rejected, 1.4% of received)
12 Messages got flagged by Spamassassin as probable spam (0.6% of rejected, 0.3% of received)

Note that multiple rules may have been tripped on any single message. 2 missed messages equals a false-negative rate of 0.158% over 1264 messages. The messages were addressesed to postmaster and my personal address (making this the first piece of spam ever received at my personal address, and making it difficult to figure out the cause--possibly spidering, possibly some inconsiderate bloke providing it to someone else.)

After letting Anna go again, I returned home. I was driving in Rocky Hill yesterday and noticed one of those speed signs that are all over this area. I was driving by at about 30 MPH (my speedometer is generally 10% off and read between 30 and 33) and every now and then the sign jumped up to 45MPH. There was no other traffic when I was there. (The picture is from April 1st, this happened March 31st). Eventually a pickup-truck pulled in front of it, but it didn't seem to affect the readings. It got me thinking that they might be programmed to every now and then just shoot out a high number. Probably not, but it got me thinking.


I've gotten good pizza, good Chinese food, and White Castle . This makes me happy somewhat as I had hoped to do all of these. I am falling a little behind in my work however (I had hoped to get ahead in my work this break ...) and I also deleted all the pictures from my winter break in San Diego. Fortunately, I recovered the thumbnails but there were a few nice images lost.

First off, this link about iPods and social isolation is pretty humorous.

Anna is running off tomorrow, leaving the exciting rainy greyness of Albany for the boring monotonous sunshine of the pacific coast and southern California. You can read her description of events so that I do not have to repeat it. Pictures from skiing are posted. We stopped by RPI today which wasn't all that exciting, checked that my CS account still worked and waited for Anna to get her laptop fixed at the VCC. Didn't run into anyone I know. Also didn't get a chance to stop by the Apple store to see about fixing my laptop.

Speaking of which, I've been thinking about what I want in my next laptop. I'm hoping by the time I get enough money to afford one again, somebody will have something that matches the criteria. The AlBook has just had so many problems that I just want to be done with it--maybe for Christmas. Most recently, it was dropped and it looked like stuff had taken on a bluish tint, but this seems to have fixed itself (or I was just seeing things).

A possible replacement would need to have, all with open drivers:
Bluetooth, WiFi, 10/100BaseT (preferably Gig-E), sufficient storage (given current systems this means at least 37.4GB or so although by the time I get the laptop (100/1024*1000)GB is probably going to be the likely average size. I want a graphics card with 3D acceleration, and as stated before, open drivers with said acceleration. Something stable--this should go without stating, which is why it wasn't mentioned earlier. I don't count my current laptop as stable. Also, if it comes broken it gets replaced immediately. I learned my lesson with my first bout with Apple (well, at least one lesson I learned). The light-up keyboard and ambient light sensors on the Albook are awesome though--better than the Thinkpad's LED light. Something similar to these options (something to make typing in the dark easier) is a must-have, and 15" Albook will very likely win only because of this feature. Weight is an important concern, less than 6lbs is a must, less than 5lbs is good. It should not be much bigger than the IBM T20 or the first generation Albook. IEEE-1394 (5-pin) is important--probably necessary now that I have a web camera that uses it. USB2 is necessary and probably universally supported by now. A modem isn't important, nor is a floppy drive. A DVD+/-RW is important. Any 'normal' port (earphones) is important. PCMCIA slots are necessary. I want a free (libre) and open system. This means the system should make design decisions with the user in mind.

I looked at a few computers that my sister mentioned. One looked good except it lacked Bluetooth. Everything else seemed to be there. Bluetooth is, of course, essential as it's my primary Internet access method still, and my means of keeping everything synched. This does place the laptop in a close second with the Albooks--although the recent revisions seem to have lots of incompatibilities. Oh well. We'll see where things are in a year. Any suggestions? Leave a comment.

Kristi, my K700i, acts weird sometimes and the screen flashes. It seems to do this whenever it loses the signal. I'm not sure if it's doing this because it lost the signal, or if the same reason it loses the signal is also causing this. I haven't found any information on it, and I've been assuming that it's just doing this because it's waking up and trying to find the signal. Also, the GPRS connection seems to die quite often less than 20 seconds in (usually it lasts for a while after that)--again, I'm not sure if it is the phone or T-Mobile. The N-Gage seemed to be more reliable, although lately they both have been flaky (and the K700i is faster...) so I'm willing to bet its T-Mo.

I had a Plantronics M3000 die that I had paired to Kristi--and I can't find any information for fixing it. It turns on, and turns off, but won't do anything else. The LED doesn't flash when it's on and it won't pair or connect. I've paired my other one with Kristi now although once I get my bluespoon set up I might just use that again. Speaking of which the Bluespoon AX headset looks great and might just win me back. It has a user replaceable battery--my only complaint with the orignal when it died three months after I got it (FWIW, the M3000 that just died had only been in use for two months to the week, but the other one has been working for almost a year now). The AX also alows you to pair with up to 8 devices which solves my other problems. I saw talk of a Bluespoon 5G but have not seen anything on the Nextlink site or a price anywhere.

During a period of random surfing, I came a cross the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo's book list and noticed, amongst the collection of books on algorithms, microprocessors, and programming languages this wonderful book which got me through 66.2500. It still sits right next to my other computer architecture books.

From a Security Focus article:

Cavicchia was the agent who last year spearheaded the investigation of Jason Smathers, a former AOL employee accused of stealing 92 million customer e-mail addresses from the company to sell to a spammer. The agent was also an adopter of mobile technology, and he did a lot of work through his T-Mobile Sidekick -- an all-in-one cellphone, camera, digital organizer and e-mail terminal. The Sidekick uses T-Mobile servers for e-mail and file storage, and the stolen documents had all been lifted from Cavicchia's T-Mobile account, according to the affidavit. (Cavicchia didn't respond to an e-mail query from SecurityFocus Tuesday.)

Things to learn from the article: encrypt all of your e-mail and instant messages (the hacker's ICQ instant messages were being tracked by the feds), do not give your SSN to companies, never trust somebody else's machine. Do not put data on somebody's machine that you don't want made public (such as pictures). If you don't control everything completely, you don't control anything.

The problem Lou has is that he didn't learn proper grammar. "And I throw it to Who?" "Naturally." Had Lou asked: "And I throw it to whom?", Abbot could have responded "Who," and all those silly problems would have been solved! See how important proper English is?

When IBM came, they got good pizza (for Providence)--more importantly, they got lots of pizza. MS comes, they get bad pizza, and not a lot of it. The crust on the via via pizza just wasn't made right, like it wasn't cooked enough. It's not as bad as Antonio's though which just makes me very ill. I spent most of Tuesday at home in bed because of their pizza. This is the second time it has happened. You might think that I'll learn the third time.

The MS talk wasn't much better. The topic was something linke The Future of Digital Media. Ok, sounded vaguely interesting. They had a bit of schwag to dump too (about 8-10 things) and there were only 24-30 people ... so about 1/3 chance of getting something I could return for $100-$600; or EU$5.

The talk sucked though. It was basically "yeah, this is what we thought, this would be cool, nobody's done this" ... except the people who have. "I got this patent. It has to do with saying, not like 'this is bold', but like 'this is a title' which then means something else says it what it looks like." Wow, welcome to the '80s, don't forget to say hi to the Fonz, SGML, and DSSL while you're here. Oh, wait. The person talking was still in diapers.

The main speaker has fewer excuses--he at least was born when the Fonz was new. The ideas he presented were good ones, but nothing earth shatteringly new. 'We want you to play your audio anywhere in the house'. No shit, we already do that. Same thing with stuff in the car. Boot did an article on that back in the 20th century.

The only other bit of the talk was this confusing thing about 'legitimate' music sources, as if Magnatune is a bunch of pirates. Basically, we had a bunch of project managers come to talk to us which meant they were kinda marketdroids, but without the fancy talking it seems. No real ideas. It's a good thing to spend $180 a year to fund advertising ventures that the companies trying to sell the stuff should be funding.

I also didn't win anything.

and, he's conservative, I like conservatives

On one hand, we have a party full of fascists that are actually attacking the free market; on the other side we have a bunch of liberal-moderates being forced to move towards their authoritarian counterparts or risk alienating those who blindly follow the former. In the middle(figuratively, and not in terms of a political spectrum), we have several groups that are increasingly being seen as "out there" because their views differ so widely from the accepted norm of the "Two".

In a country that has in its history, rich contention between its political rulers--primarily between big government and small government sides--it is noteworthy to indicate that, at the moment, the Two are both advocating big gov't (and more control for themselves); the difference is in what area they are concentrating on expanding government.

Long gone are the great arguments over the benefits of a small federal government. Now we argue over whether the government should provide health care for lower/middle class Americans, or act as the law firm and financial tool for the upper class.

For those who haven't read it, I'll direct you to the open letter to the red states which discusses this specific thing more than I'd like. I mentioned it in my Election 2004 state of the world entry.

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different.

I finally saw the 1984 version of Orwell's 1984. Listening to Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism definitely elicited different imagery than when I read the book a decade ago.

I have posted a new "State of the World" regarding my reaction to and brief analysis of the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Intro follows:

The Election of 2004

I don't know what to think, or what's going on in America. I'm afraid, and I'm not sure what's going to happen anymore. I don't know what to think about our country, or whether I have faith in most of America anymore. I don't know how things went so wrong. Perhaps this, more than anything else, indicates that the founders were correct in limiting who could elect the president.

A bottle of single-malt scotch does little to dull the pain, especially when you need to be able to drive home afterwards. Even after I'm done driving, I don't see how even the strongest of spirits could improve mine.

So the question exists on what went wrong. What has happened to cause this to happen again. This election season featured mudslinging, stretching of the facts, and blatant lies; more so than any campaign since the related campaign of 1988 showcasing Willie Horton. A large portion of the campaign, in fact, seemed to be designed to mislead the American public. More people voted in this election than any other U.S. Presidential election, so voter apathy is not even a question; voter naivety though did play a large part and studies leading up to the election indicated. Moreover, indications with problems trying to vote, and attempts to confuse voters, also caused problems. There have been many discrepancies that have yet to be accounted for causing some to raise claims of tampering.

In a departure from my previous posts which railed against "bloggers" (a.k.a 'those people'), I'll write about something more substantial yet entirely void of content.

As anyone who has ever been to RPI knows, RPI people need something to complain about. They can't live without this. If the world were too perfect, they'd complain about that. Fortunately the world isn't. Furthermore, the administration, out of their love of their students both past and present no doubt, constantly act in a way that supports their students in this regard.

Recently, they have decided to do so by removing "Free E-mail for Life" for alumni. Now, I've tried signing up for this service several times before graduating. The first was when I got the e-mail when I was part of the class of '02. It said it couldn't find me, and that they'd look and get back. No problem I figured, as I was really part of '03 or '04 and wasn't going to graduate in '02. I never heard back.

The next time I tried, the server had been hacked and nothing worked. Every time since then has resulted in the same results as the first time, including just a few months ago. I've never been able to get my account.

Apparently other people haven't had the same problem that I had. They routinely use their account instead of their ISP account or what not. It makes sense,as this provides people a way of contacting them at a known address. It also provides the school a means of contacting their alumni. Apparently RPI doesn't care though, and despite the promise of 'Free E-mail for Life' is now charging for this (this was initially announced for the class of '04, and in the last several months has made its way to the alumni who are outraged).

I don't really have much else to say on the matter. There are still publications that tout this free e-mail for life, apparently one is still in the display case in the DCC. The class web-sites for RPI classes that recently celebrated their 50th reunion also state this.

Dr. Katz is hella funny.

But anyway, Jon Katz, former author of trollbait and Geek Culture articles on /., recently appeared in the Princeton Packet. Apparently he fashions himself a modern Thoreau.

He wrote about web logs.

For those who haven't noticed, I advertise an Atom feed for my web log. It just seemed more standardized than a half-dozen RSS standards, not to mention the political nightmare surrounding RSS I don't have the time to become involved with.

But that's not what I'm complaining about today. Sites that don't correctly state when their items were published--BBC, Heise, I'm looking at you two in particular. Of course, this may have something again to do with the whole RSS nightmare. Can't we all just use Atom <http://www.atomenabled.org/> and get along?

The only interesting thing about livejournal is that it generates a FOAF file for all its users. My <foaf:knows /> section just trippled in size. That's actually pretty scary. Most of the people are <rel:lostContactWith /> and the others are mostly <rel:hasMet /> so it's not too bad I guess.

The problem is that every single livejournal FOAF file I've seen doesn't have a <foaf:name /> element (nor do they have <foaf:given /> or <foaf:family />)--only <foaf:nick />. One of the assumptions of Cork [http://foaf.matt.wronka.org/] was that every user would have a <foaf:name />--which in Cork also includes the <foaf:nick />.

So Cork needed a few changes in places to work nicely [nodeIDs broke for lj users and lj users didn't show up because of their lack of names--both fixed].

Livejournal still sucks more than other blog systems, in my opinion. Mostly because of the users, again. What's the point of having a syndication feed if everything's private? I suppose I can see the benefits of a 'friend only blog', and that would make sense if you could somehow work with people not in the system, but you can't. Maybe I just don't like leaving stuff on someone else's server like that, and then forcing people to register (speaking of which, Cork now has a guest user, user:guest password:guest). I'd probably feel less angst if I knew more about how their system worked, but the last time I tried to learn it wouldn't let me (and it had a horrible navigational interface). So I still say it sucks.

I'm primarilly wondering how much control you have over the FOAF file, if whether you can add people that aren't livejournal users, for instance. Someone can tell me I guess, if you can.