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Quarter of a Century

I’ve officially been alive for a quarter of a century now. Actually, I’ve been in this state since the 12th, but I was eith lazy or insanely busy since then. I didn’t do anything all that special - just went out to eat. I got a couple of cool shirts from my sweetie. I don’t feel any different than I did before 25 of course, but I suppose it’s a milestone of some sort. I expect the 30 mark will hit heavier on me, but then again I hope to be doing something entirely different when I hit 30.

Publishing

Most of what was making me busy earlier was writing and doing experiments for a paper which I submitted. We finally got two of the robots in our lab working with GPS at the same time and on wireless for long enough to do some experiments with the interface which is in itself not all that novel but really hasn’t been presented before. I would have liked to get more experiments in but the sky started threatening and none of our robots do well when wet. So we went back inside and did a little bit of work on the paper. It is a bit better now than it was before, only because we had some more time to really show off what the little system that we created can do. It got accepted to the conference and we turned in our final copies on time, so I expect it will amount to my first published paper, and also my first time as first author on a paper. I also have another paper in the pipeline (third or fourth author on that one) which will make my CV look like I’m actually a graduate student and not just some guy with a BS that has taken grad classes.

Stupid Advertising

There seems to be an advertising campaign lately which just boggles my mind. There are trains and busses and billboards which tout: Fresh Air! Coming soon to select bars and restaurants!. It is obvious what this ad campaign is for - there was recently a new bill which passed in both Ramses and Hennepin county which bans smoking from all bars and restaurants in the counties. I’m not opposed to this kind of a law, but what bothers me is that someone (and probably a group of someones) decided that there needed to be an advertising campaign for it. It’s a law. Laws should be enforced, not advertised. You don’t see billboards all around saying Now in stores: Paying for goods and services! because it’s a law. Di supposed that the advertising campaign was in order to alleviate businesses’ concerns about the new ban. I don’t think that explains the need myself - it’s not like people are going to stop going out to eat downtown because of it.

Apartment Annoyance

This sunday we got a note under our door about clearing out around the windows in the bedrooms in order for them to install new windows. Now, normally I would be happy about this, because the windows in the building are getting fairly old, and it may help the heating in the place. Unfortunately though, the replacement of the windows requires 2 feet of clearance on the inside of the window, which requires me to completely tear down my office, so I couldn’t work at all last night or this morning. They better be finished when I get back today though, otherwise I consider requesting compensation for the $120 worth of work that I can’t do.

At least today they came and replaced the lock so I don’t have to be around every time they want to do maintenance, which may be soon again because our fridge is leaking and we are still seeing bugs around the apartment. le sigh.

Easter

Easter came and went, and due to some extra work, I wasn’t able to travel to be with my family this year. Instead I took Di to the California Cafe at the Mall of America. The environment and the food there were wonderful. Of course we had some fun being out of place - most of the people around us were in their Easter Best clothing, and we were just out of waking up. I was surprised at how many things were closed in the city this easter - Sams Club, Cub Foods, Rainbow.. Makes me wonder what all of the non-christian people are supposed to do.

Unstructured time

It’s taken me a bit of time, but I finally realized that I am horrible with unstructured time and it is ruining my work. I need to schedule the time for getting work done, and get to work early in the morning. I get much more done when I’m actually at school/work than when I’m home. Unfortunately some of the work that I need to do can’t be done at work – for that I have scheduled time when I’m supposed to be working on one project or another. Here’s hoping I can stay on track.

Files, Files, Files

I seem to have one of the hardest configurations of all when it comes to files that I want to keep syncronized. Let me just put a little lowdown on my situation. I have 4-6 machines on 4 different networks that I want to do work on. To further complicate matters, I have my laptop. I would like to be able to log onto any of these machines and get work done. For legal reasons, I have filesets for work, consulting, personal, and school. To make things slightly simpler, I rent a server every month, and can run basically anything I want on it. It houses enough space to hold all of the files I want to work with and because it’s personal, I can store all the filesets on it.

At home and on my laptop, I want to be able to get to all of my filesets, and have them updated. At school, I can only have access to my school fileset. I read my mail on the server, and would like to make it easy to inject attachments I recieve into any one of the filesets. My home system runs Debian 3.0, My laptop is on OS X (no Debian yet), and school runs on linux, but I can’t install extensive programs on there because I don’t have access to change the files. Just for happy-fun-time, I’m also space-limited on the school machines, so I archive off old classwork every semester and only keep the most current semester available at all times, with other semesters available when I need a file from them. Ideally any tool I use would be able to be compiled for OS X, linux, and sparc (some of the machines at school).

In my dream world, I would login to any of these systems and it would automatically sync to the server, and when I logout it would automatically sync to the server again. If it was really nice, it would check back with the server periodically and sync again or the server would tell it when files change on the “master” copy. This “push” type thing is important for both my home machine and the laptop, which I rarely logout from. Of course, the laptop goes with me a lot, and some of the networks I deal with are not secure, so the tool should use ssl, and not key off of the IP being used.

Right now I’m using unison, with a single syncronization directory with separate ignore paths for the separate filesets. It works okay, but not as well as I’d like. It’s also getting crufty. I would like to switch to something possibly involving cvs, svn or arch.

Other stuff

Other than that, life is just getting interesting with work and school and everything wanting more of my time. One of the papers that I have been working on off-and-on for the past year has been accepted to a conference, so it will need to be dragged out of the past and updated with some new experiments and more work. The conference is in Greece, so there is a possibility that I will be heading there sometime this summer. I have been on a budgeting binge in the last week and I think I have everything worked out in gnucash the way that I want - I may post a bit on how I finagled that soon. Also big things happening in Diana’s life.

Life

Things have been fairly slow around this week. It is mostly due to it being spring break, and despite trying to get myself motivated, I seem to sit around and do small things or nothing all day. I expect this to be a problem in the near future, because I have a project that I need to work on soon for at least three different entities, if not four. This state unsurprisingly doesn’t help my mood.

Debian

It seems that lately it is mandatory in any Debian developer’s blog to comment about the Etch release proposal. I have to say that I don’t like the idea of dropping so many architectures without a stable. One thing that made debian appealing to me was that I could not only run it on the old sparcs at my school (and put to use an otherwise unused machine), but I could also run it on old Mac LC IIs. I nuderstand that neither of these archs will be going away, but the fact that they all need to now deal with the fact that stuff may “just break” like it does in unstable every once in a while disheartens me. At the same time, I agree that we are in desperate need of a shorter release cycle and I think that dropping archs is the best and quickest way to get the job done, as it seems to be mostly a manpower issue. I’m pleased with the SCC idea and think it will be beneficial both to architectures on the decline and new archs (like amd64 was).

My packages are in desperate need of attention. This will be remedied soon, hopefully.

News Reading

Lately I have been using NetNewsWire for reading my RSS and Atom feeds. I find it excellent, but I am unable to cope with it’s client-ness. I used bloglines in the past but fear that it isn’t really for me - I am not a fan of their stated future business plan. I seem to be in need of a really good server-side aggregator. Planet is not right for me - I need something that keeps track of what I have read. It would be nice to have a server-side aggregator with an interface similar to NetNewsWire, which I have become fond of. The hotkeys and reading is really cool. Current plan is to look into Feed on Feeds and hope that I can extend it with some JavaScript and/or CSS in order to have it mimic the hotkeys of NNW. If others have some suggestions, I’m all ears (or at least my blog is).

Well, I can’t say I have been the most forthcoming on here about what is actually going on. Most of life is stuck in the same old same old every day. Over the last few weeks, I have been working, playing, and sleeping. Unfortunately I think that playing has taken up a lot more than it’s fair share.

The change: World of Warcraft. I bought it a couple weeks ago because there are a great many people playing it.

The good:

• The world is huge - 2 weeks and I haven’t even seen half of the world.
• The social aspects - playing with friends is really the best part of the game. This game doesn’t encourage as many new friends as City of Heroes, but it’s still wonderful
• Ongoing story - quests really drive the game. There are thousands, and some are in chains so you can see the whole story unfolding.
• Graphics - it has won awards for it’s wonderful graphics, and I can see why. Sometimes it is fun to get to other parts of the world just to see the scenery. Localities in each area have different properties, and the transitions are fluid.
• Multi-Platform - while it would just rule to also have a linux client, I am happy that I can play the game both on my iBook and the Windows installation I keep.

The bad:

• Playing too much - this is the main beef with the game. I think I’m going to try to restrict myself to playing for less than 2 hours a day from now on. It’s simply taking up too much of my time.
• Technology - as expected, the game takes too much processor and graphics for either of the machines I play it on. I am glad that Blizzard let me play on this old laptop (it doesn’t officially meet the specs), but it has awakened in me a desire to upgrade which isn’t really healthy right now
• The “other” social aspects - Di was bitten hard by someone who got sucked into games. I am confident that I will get bored with the game soon, but she has reservations. I have made a pact to myself that I won’t play when she is around because of this - most of all, I have a problem if it affects my love.
• Limited updates - I have yet to see a MMORPG which actually delivers on making the game more interesting for me after the initial month, which is probably why I’ve never played one for longer than a month.

As expected, the good are better than most other MMORPGs that I have played, and the bad are all the same. I really think that the MMORPG model is flawed, at least for me. It captures interest because the world is new and fresh, but then the quests all seem to be the same, the world becomes less and less novel, and nothing updates. If someone wants to keep my interest for longer than a month, they will have to show me that they are actually making major content updates frequently. At the same time, the game cannot be unfinished when I buy it. I think I would pay good money for a game in which there are a set number of quests and things in the world, and they actually were depleted after a while. The respawn world just bugs me for some reason. Things don’t just appear from nowhere in the real world, why should they in the game world? Also, I shouldn’t be able to save the same child from the deadly disease, save the same tower from ruthless robbers, kill the same big boss guy, as everyone else. Once the big boss guy is dead, he should be dead for everyone, forever. The MMORPG model does not allow for this to occur. A game that does that might actually get my attention for longer than the “free” month (that I pay $50 for).

At any rate, the time for me to get more actual work done has come. More updates on everything else later, I guess.