Kyle Smith

A couple of days before break I ordered a gigabyte of RAM for my laptop (it had 2×256 MB previously) and a new battery because I think I’ll continue to use my trusty 500 MHz PowerBook for another year at least. The RAM arrived today and the battery should be showing up tomorrow.

My little spending spree has carried into break as well. I bought Orson Scott Card’s latest book in the Ender’s Game series, Shadow of the Giant, on Saturday and started reading it this morning when I woke up. Unfortunately it only lasted until about 3:30 PM. It definitely is an awesome book as you finally get to see how Peter becomes the hegemon (which is alluded to in many of the other books in the series but never explained). I also enjoyed it because you finally learn that Peter is a good guy, which you would never guess from Ender’s Game (although it seemed to be hinted at in Children of the Mind).

Other acquisitions include:

• Robin Williams: Live on Broadway
• MST3K: The Essentials (which consists of Manos: The Hands of Fate and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)
• High Fidelity
• Serendipity (for several reasons, but we’ll leave it at the fact that John Cusak and Kate Beckinsale are in it)
• String Quartet Tribute to Godsmack (to round out the randomness)

I think this is the end of my spree though, with the exception of the new digital FM transmitter for my iPod since my analog one can’t be used in Vermont. Mostly the spree is over because I bought 7 DVDs last weekend [too lazy to link]: Matrix Revolutions, Return of the King, Napoleon Dynamite, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Donnie Darko (director’s cut), Pulp Fiction (2 disc set), and Shaun of the Dead. In addition to 3 - 6 full albums and EPs on the iTunes Music Store recently.

Aside from watching most of those, the plan for the week is to finish up my project for IBM (dowem will be pleased with that, I’m sure) and to do a couple of assignments that are due shortly.

Finally, if you’re looking for new music, check out Cary Brothers’ EP All The Rage — it’s incredible.

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Things have quieted down again, hence the lack of posts.

Went and saw Constantine on Monday because there was no Cinema 10. It’s definitely one of the better comic book adaptations I’ve seen — I would say it’s on par with X-Men and Spider-Man. In terms of other good movies to see, I finally caught Girl with a Pearl Earring on HBO last week, which was pretty interesting. I also recommend going to see Sideways if you get a chance.

Brendan showed up on Wednesday so it was necessary for us to get big beers and wings at Eben’s and then hit up Flip Night later on. I did learn a lesson afterwards: when cleaning up empties and the like, never decide to finish a bottle of whiskey because there’s “only” a few shots’ worth left in it.

Bryan and Eli showed up on Friday, so about ten of us spent the evening at Maxfield’s — good times. Eli arrived bearing gifts: a signed copy of Scott Loveland’s book Software Testing Techniques: Finding the Defects that Matter. Hopefully I’ll be able to clear out the rest of the books in my queue soon so I can read it.

Speaking of it… The queue currently has: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Catcher in the Rye (for class), Consolations of Philosophy, and Gaiman’s American Gods. Anyone have any recommendations for other good things to read?

Pictures: 1, 2, 3, 4

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Just saw the announcement from yesterday that Russ is the new president of the Open Source Initiative.

For a while there it didn’t look like 2004 would end well, but things have picked up this past week.

I finally heard from Progressive on Wednesday and learned that my car was totaled, so I spent the afternoon visiting car dealerships. I ended up getting a 2004 Pontiac Grand Am which is almost identical to my Alero in terms of features and is identical in terms of the body (they’re the same car just different brands and prices). Maybe tomorrow I’ll put up some photos of it.

Yesterday was my first chance to really drive it when Adam and I went to Burlington for New Years. We had planned to check out some of the First Night activities but ended up spending the entire evening at the Vermont Pub and Brewery where I sampled just about everything on the menu (with the exception of their hard cider and their IPA).

Other than that my week has been filled with quite a bit of reading [1, 2, 3], movies [1, 2,3,4], and music [1].

One thing that peeved me was the poor customer service Apple has for the iTunes Music Store. I recently discovered that all of the music I’ve purchased that’s older than a couple of months won’t play on my desktop machine because iTunes thinks that it was purchased using a different account (it wasn’t, and the machine has been authorized to play it anyway). After waiting a couple of days for a response I received a lovely canned reply pointing me to two knowledge base entries I’d seen and found to be of no help. I even mentioned that those two specific entries didn’t solve my problem when submitting the ticket. Part of the problem might be that some of the tracks were decrypted and iTunes might not be matching the owner info properly, so now I need to figure out how to rescue a few dozen (or a few hundred) songs I purchased.

And in some other bad news, it’s almost time to return to school. The return trip to Potsdam is happening Wednesday. If I were truly fortunate Residence Life will have not filled Jim’s newly-vacated space in our apartment.

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Today was an excellent day. Except for the prolonged tour of the Adirondacks. Mike C., Eli, Jesus and I went to the Lake Placid Pub & Brewery where we enjoyed delicious food, a wonderful vanilla porter (”Papi’s Porter”, named after David Ortiz of the Red Sox), and some cigars. This will definitely have to become a semesterly tradition.

I liked the porter so much that I picked up two 1/2 gallon growlers of it (the largest jug they carry). Hopefully it survives the feast at Eli’s tomorrow afternoon!

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23 out of 27 beers were free tonight. The luck of the Irish prevailed!

Happy Turkey Day everyone! I’ll be in the lab working on stuff around 10 am while you’re all enjoying yourselves.

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Been an interesting day. Around 5 Eli, Mike C. and I decided to go to dinner at Eastside Mario’s in Cornwall. We three unsuspecting college students drove north to Canadia where we were stopped by the authorities for 45 minutes due until our identities were checked out. We did eventually make it to Mario’s where we had several excellent rounds of drinks and a decent meal.

Upon return to Potsdam Eli and I proceeded to Maxfield’s while Donny took care of some business. Alex was cool enough to join us there and the four of us spent several hours hanging out. There are a pair of pictures here.

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Jim Lynch is sooo fucking metal.

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After having numerous issues with Gentoo in the last few days, I finally decided to bite the bullet and install Ubuntu this morning. I managed to get it installed within an hour, but had some issues because I interrupted the post-reboot installation of the remaining packages and then had issues resuming the process after configuring apt to use the local COSI mirror.

I also spent a good portion of the afternoon trying to get XFree86 working (finally realized that it was a combination of missing modelines and bad refresh rates). I was pleasantly surprised once X was up and running because Ubuntu not only has some nice, clean menus, but they also include gthumb, gimp, and a ton of other popular desktop apps by default. Additionally, for the first time ever, my laptop’s power management stuff is properly configured so I can actually suspend my laptop without getting a kernel oops.

Went to see Paul Horn (senior VP and director of research for IBM) talk as part of a Shipley lecture. The talk was very good, especially because in answering Donny’s question about teaching open technologies in academia he mentioned that it’s great that Clarkson has started embracing Linux and that open source is great (if only we had time to talk to him afterwards).

We did catch the attention of a reporter for the Watertown Daily Times who asked for some reactions to the talk. Eli and I then took him to the COSI Lab and spent the better part of an hour explaining Linux and open source software.

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Been a busy frickin’ week. My new Kyocera SL400R camera arrived on Thursday. Thanks to Russ, who brought his SL400R to the Great Wall last week and got me interested in it. Plenty of pictures from this weekend (around 200) should be appearing in the next few days after they’re vetted (including shots from the open house Clarkson held on Saturday).

I’m looking forward to Cinema 10 tomorrow. Last week’s movie, Valentin was good. So good that I preordered the DVD from Amazon yesterday (it’s coming out on October 12th). If you have the opportunity to see it, do.

Picked up a shiny new coffeepot for the COSI Lab tonight with McCabe and Allison. This one has a timer so now coffee will be ready for us in the morning before Tino’s class.

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