I have heard the song which will resound through my head for days. It has me. I am much like the man here.

It’s very interesting the stark contrast between things I want to do and things I have to do lately. I think it could be because semi-suddenly (it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it) the things I have to do are taking up lots of my time. On the other hand, soon, those things will not take up as much time.

Before the end of next week, have to do: Finish take home final, order parts for the lab, finish SSNSIM (final project), finish Reliable Communication Layer for Java (homework, way past due), make CheetSheet(tm) for statistics, study statistics, grade lab 14, grade final projects, grade final test, proctor final test, run tournament in class.

Want to do: be outside in general, spend time with Di, learn to cook a good dinner, finish watching Airmaster, or continue watching every other anime I have and haven’t watched, download more anime, work on Grit Online Update Tool (GOUT), work on debian/techie blog at base0.net, write in LJ about stuff, debug debian packages, install debian linux on various laptops of friends, take interesting statistics of spam received in the last year, archive mail, watch futurama (disc 1 is on it’s way), read innumeracy, read escher’s window, play with scheme tournament code, learn to code for OS X, create EatWatch tool for Linux, create autozoomgrid widget for use in QT, read up on EigenTrust and NICE

I need to call my parents and chat with them, it’s been weeks and much has happened since. Tonight is the last crappy Thursday ever. It’s nice. Did my finances earlier this week and discovered that without some help from external sources, I would be farther in debt on paper when I finish May than when I started it. Found out yesterday that some of the needed financial help will be coming to me for help in the lab doing ordering, which will be nice. Found out Tuesday that I got charged $25 because my rent wasn’t paid on time. The check was sitting on my desk but forgot to take it down - one mistake I won’t make again. I’ve been looking for alternate sources of income just for a few extra bucks still though, in order to give me some padding. I’ve been thinking that I am perfect at living either exactly at or just beyond my means. This worries me some because I don’t account for accidents which could cost a lot of money, but I haven’t had one yet.

I am, as others aptly put it “in a holding pattern” for the “Elephant”. Brought an Elephant for silvrayn last weekend. Hoping we can pop him joyfully next weekend and shred his remains, and use them as celebration for something I would have taken for granted two months ago. It would be very frustrating and I would be going crazy except that I am very busy with other things, and wonderful things entered into my life in the recent past.

It seems that I write long entries recently. I wonder how many of you actually read through all of them.

I request an audience in the chamber, and I get informed it is my turn. Others may join me, or may be in the chamber already. I enter, make a request, and wait, head raised, staring at the icon above me. The icon moves and suddenly I feel light or heavy. The room is adorned with shiny objects, some reflecting my own image back to me while I stand and think. When I am ready, I exit the room. I have been moved by experience there.

Many perform rituals every day. Do they mean anything?

For some reason, I’ve received a large number of bugs all at once for the BitTorrent package. Of course this comes at exactly the time of year when I have the least possibility of working on them. Figures.

I’ve been looking for a good blogging tool all afternoon today, and the best open-source one I have found is pyblosxom, which I’m incindentally using now in order to write this entry. It is a huge hassle to setup though - much easier to just use LiveJournal, and LJ has much nicer community properties. The problem with LJ: I can’t limit my entries, so unless I want everyone on Planet Debian reading about my weekend drinking, I would have to set everything to friends-only except for ones which have a tech component. Granted, I could just start talking about tech stuff way more often than I do now, but I’d rather not put everyone into that group. I wish there was a way to categorize entries on LJ so that I can just mark the entries I want to be syndicated.

Okay, I’m scatterbrained today, so this entry is unorganized and non-cohesive, as compared to my other ones, I guess.

UPnP

Gave my presentation on UPnP today, which was both a joy and a nightmare at the same time. I didn’t prepare like I had wanted to, so I was just going up and talking about the knowledge that I had gained from researching for 4 hours the previous day. The good part is that the presentation went well by the standards of the class. The bad part is that it went horribly by my own standards. Overall, UPnP isn’t really a deep topic if you have knowledge of the tools that it uses to do it’s job: Multicast, HTTP-UDP, XML, and SOAP. If you don’t have knowledge, it would be a great project to build a UPnP client (or control point as the UPnP forum likes to call it) and a UPnP server (device). You would be forced to learn Multicast - something which I fully understand but haven’t actually coded yet - and the full range of HTTP using SOAP and XML, which despite it’s non-brevity I have to admit could actually be useful.

Overall UPnP is a good idea, and my favorite zero configuration network service location protocol so far. Today we looked at UPnP, Jini, SLP, and Salutation. It is simple, but can be very complex if needed. Unfortunately the creators decided to be smart and use Multicast, which means that most networks will not be able to handle it correctly. The fallout of this - if I wanted to use it in my home, I would have to install a “UPnP enabled” network hardware. It also means that it will never be used on the whole internet. There’s another reason why it won’t be used on the whole internet, however: it is too bandwidth-intensive. Granted, I don’t think there is a way to make a directory-less flexible zero configuration protocol with less bandwidth.

Some of the Mac Advocates (Zealots) out there are probably thinking I should look into Rendezvous. It’s something I’m working on, as well as looking into zeroconf. This is an area I’m fairly interested in, because I think it’s the future of computing - at some point I’m thinking we’ll have mature enough wireless that we will not even consider running cable, and at that point, we need devices to discover local services on their own. Printers is a start, but it could be just the beginning. Within this view are the problems of security, authentication (printing isn’t free anywhere I know of, and even if it was, how long will it take advertising companies to hire people to walk around with devices just broadcasting ads to all printers in range), and human computer interfaces.

Being Productive

Yesterday, I considered myself fairly productive. That was because the night before I actually got a project working (a sensor network simulator in QT), and then I started doing work like grading which always makes me feel productive because it doesn’t take long and it’s something I have to do. I also did the research for 4 hours, which I haven’t done in a while, but I don’t actually mind when I’m interested in the subject at hand. Not enough time lately to do such things.

Today, I don’t consider myself to be productive, even though I have already done laundry and ordering for the lab, and I plan to get some more stuff done later tonight if possible. This weekend I need to be productive - I have another presentation on tuesday on the sensor network simulator, which, while it is working, is far from a final product I could actually present.

Journaling

I’ve considered lately making this journal friends-only and keeping non-Debian related stuff out of the public eye because I like to feed my ego and be in the semi-public eye. This is something I’m reluctant to do because I know people read this journal who don’t have an account on LJ and therefore couldn’t keep up with my daily life anymore (Hi Mom). Luckily, the University of Minnesota is a pretty cool school, and launched UThink, a blog service for any U of M student recently, so I’m thinking of getting one of those and using that for a feed into Planet Debian. Now to make myself a hackergotchi head. On the other hand, I may just use my advogato diary.

I’ve considered abusing LiveJournal recently - a large number of the journals syndicated on Planet Debian are LiveJournals, so if I want to comment on them, I’d rather just have the user’s journal entry to comment on. I’d also be able to see their real userpics in this situation. I’ve considered adding all of the people who are LJ users to my friends list and putting them into a “Debian LJ users” group so I can read them like my normal friends page. I could take the other blogs that are syndicated at Planet Debian and turn them into syndicated feeds here at LJ, which is easily possible since there are no syndication points anymore. After thinking about this a bit, I come to the conclusion that a bunch of these people would probably wonder why I friended them - I would be producing a footprint of friend-adding which is common to the serial adder. So I keep planetdebian on my friends list and read them that way instead, which is just a slight inconvenience.

Okay, that was much longer than expected, and I even have more to say, or at least I did while I was walking here from home.

It feels like Friday.

1.Go into your LJ’s archives. 2.Find your 23rd post (or closest to). 3.Find the fifth sentence (or closest to). 4.Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

2004-02-25 7:07pm “A couple of the non-normal crowd came along, which made the night more interesting (not that it wasn’t bound to be interesting to begin with).”

This week I had my first experience riding on the Metro bus, since the strike is over. I graciously received a bus pass as a gift from a friend’s friend last weekend, so I figured I could use it in order to get to some of the stuff I do on my long Thursday. It was interesting waiting for the bus again. I hadn’t done that since grade school - it seemed that I always had a ride from a parent or drove myself. The ride was surprisingly quick, even though we ended up making all the stops because people wanted to leave or enter the bus at every stop. I made it to class with plenty of time to spare, which I expect most riders on a schedule end up doing in order to accommodate the bus’s schedule. All in all, it was good I guess, in that “nothing went wrong” way. The seats on the Metro are much better than I expected, though.

Today I was pleased to go to Miss Saigon. This being my second theatre experience in Minneapolis (it was supposed to be my third, but that kind of fell through) and my first big name play experience, I was not sure what to expect. The play was wonderful, especially the actor who played The Engineer (Jon Jon Briones), who was from the original cast. I was disappointed to discover in the second act that I didn’t like his “big number”. I was moved to tears at some points, which may or may not be saying something, because I get moved like that when TV shows hit me just the right way as well. I found the story touching, if slightly cheesy. The part of Chris was overacted by a bit, and he drowned out Kim when they were singing together sometimes. Overall, it was a great time - I throughly enjoyed it. Favorite songs: “The Movie in My Mind”, “Sun and Moon”, “If You Want to Die in Bed”.

I’ve been meaning to update more often. Guess that goal isn’t being reached.

Anyway, to finish out my weekend last week, I went with jwendl to see Kill Bill vol. 2, which I thought was much better than the first one, mostly because it had more plot. It seemed like it has a larger variety of influences than the first movie. I do enjoy the style of the first movie, however - the swordfight scene in the snow was exquisite. The new movie had more style, I thought. It may be too plot/dialog for some though.

After the movie I met up with Di and her friend at Gameworks. I hadn’t been there in a while, and forgot the sweet sweet joy of alcohol and games mixed. Justin and I played a few games of DDR - which I happily won, even though I’m horribly out of practice (silvrayn, I’m raiding your apartment soon!). Also got to play some skee-ball and various other games of little importance. Night hilight: genuine high school moment.

The week was fairly run-of-the-mill at school, except that I was strangely late all this week - except today. It’s very bizarre, because I don’t think I’ve been to my Friday office hours on time yet this semester. The crunch is fastly approaching, when all classes (including the one I TA) will have a deluge of assignments and exams at the same time. I have a feeling that I will be a much lazier and happier man 3 weeks from now.

I’ve begun yet another project at work which I’m slacking off on, even though it will not take too long to get finished. One of these days I’m going to actually promise something by a time and actually have it done when I promised it. It’s like I have the old-timers software engineering illness or something where you give time estimates which are best case scenarios and then never come through. Yesterday I went home on my break time to finish it, and then somehow got no work done on it there. Anyway, this is a fairly simple database so I should have it done by the end of the weekend, if not by the end of the day today. It will make my new duties at work much, much simpler however.

I don’t think I’ve told the good news in this forum yet: I am the proud recipient of a TA appointment for the summer, and a promise of a TA appointment for fall and spring of next academic year. This makes me very happy because I didn’t really expect to be able to teach through next year as well. I did have high hopes for the summer, however. It also helps that it is the source of all of my income.

Wow, I have a lot more to say. I’m out of time though, so I will save the rest for a post later today. Note to self: need more userpics.

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This whole thing is so very interesting to me. (The West Wing FanJournals)