Kyle Smith

Nothing much to report for the last two weeks. Last week I was distracted for most of the week by the midterm for Tino’s grad algorithms course. Spent a few hours chilling at Maxfield’s with fellow victims afterwards [1]. Then I realized I had a group presentation for another class and spent most of Saturday and Sunday preparing that.

The weekend before my parents were visiting so I took them, Allison, and Eli out to dinner at Maxfield’s on Friday and on Saturday we drove to Montreal to hang out for the day [2].

This weekend should be interesting because Cloudchaser (ne Brendan) will be visiting. There’s an open house on Saturday, but I’ll be across town taking the computer science GRE subject test — something I’m not looking forward to, having gone through the practice book and seen some of the questions. Hopefully most of the schools won’t hold it against me, since taking the subject test is optional for 5 of the 6 schools I’m applying to.

Hmm. That reminds me that I need to finish my statement of porpoise, as Eli likes to call it. *sigh*

Picked up Halo 2 Tuesday morning from EB in Massena and have been playing it quite a bit the last two days. Definitely better than the original. Still need to get a real multiplayer game going though.

Also decided yesterday to investigate whether anyone had written a quotes plugin for WordPress. Found some guy had written a had to display a random quote, which I then hacked up to display them all and to support quote categories. The result can be experienced here.

Update: Also, if you get the opportunities you should see the following movies: Seducing Doctor Lewis (hilarious), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Incredibles (awesome). Don’t bother watching Story of the Weeping Camel.

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Been a busy week since my last post. I didn’t have a whole lot of homework to do last week, but I spent a good chunk of time reading for my Intro to Philosophy mid-term and developing a presentation that I gave on Friday to my Intro to Public Speaking class (both went extremely well).

Hung out with the usuals on Friday and Saturday (access to pictures available upon request). Decided that I would like to take a several-week break from any libations after the results of Saturday night, which unfortunately means I may miss out on tasting Randy’s Irish stout

Tonight Allison, the newly-returned Eli and I went to Cinema 10 and saw Control Room. Since then I’ve been in the COSI Lab working on Tino’s assignment in the hopes that I’ll get it done before the end of the week (in C# no less).

This coming weekend should be pretty quiet as my parents will be up visiting on Friday and Saturday and on Sunday I’m sure I’ll be busy studying for Tino’s mid-term. Plus, the “freakin’ angel” of the group will probably be away, so partying just won’t be the same with nobody to egg us on.

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This weekend was rather quiet. Friday night was spent watching TV and drinking a little bit of beer. Spent most of yesterday in the lab doing COSI stuff and working on some grad school stuff. Last night Mike M., Allison, and I went to see Ladder 49 at the Roxy (got to see Jesus there too) — an excellent movie that I’d recommend everyone go see. Also stopped by Mike C.’s last night and watched some Invader Zim before taking off.

Today was spent in the Lab working on an assignment for Tino’s class. Didn’t get it done, but I have most of the questions started so hopefully I can finish it tomorrow.

Sweet! I just saw an ad for James Spader’s new show Boston Legal — guess I know what I’ll be doing at 10 pm.

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I managed to complete my TC313 proposal successfully tonight. It just reinforces my notion that I’m a clutch player. I’ll procrastinate until the very last moment and then *bam*, I work non-stop and complete whatever needs to be done. Obviously not the best way to do things in the real world, but it seems to work quite well in college.

Now it’s time to relax and watch Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex Vol. 2 since I’ll be busy busting my hump on Tino assignments and grad school applications this weekend.

Oh, and I’ve been quietly posting photos over the last few days [1, 2].

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Been a long day. Tino was cool enough to give back the second homework assignment and the quiz from last week. I definitely need to take more time to do the work for his class.

I originally planned to do a significant portion of my Professional Communications (TC313) proposal today, but the morning was killed by Intro to Philosophy and the afternoon was an assortment of other smaller things that kept popping up.

The plan for tomorrow is to finish the proposal so I can work on assignments 3 and 4 for Tino on Friday & Saturday and then catch up on Systems Bio on Sunday.

Hmm. Crap. There’s a COSI Work Day on Saturday. Mike and I hope to get the new lab build all deployed and the bugs worked out of it. There are even a few people willing to do some usability testing so hopefully we get some decent ideas on how to make the lab build easier to use.

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Well, Donny was wrong. I did not kill Randy. But I may kill foser if I ever meet him in person. And whoever decided to release portage 2.0.51rc1 today. It took me about an hour to get all of the issues worked out of it and get both my laptop and my desktop updating to GNOME 2.8.

Unfortunately Randy, there is no new photographic evidence in the mounting case that he and dowem should get together.

Aside from the sinus infection I apparently have had for the last few days and almost missing Tino’s class this morning it’s been a good week so far. Sunday night was spent in the lab doing work and watching Old School. Monday night involved more work and a trip to the movie theater to see Cellular with Allison. Last night Donny, Allison and I went bowling and after learning just how bad at it we were, decided to go see Resident Evil: Apocalypse instead (and then I tried to catch up on some sleep).

What happened tonight? You guessed it: more work.

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Today: Spent some time in the lab before temporarily giving up on work and opting instead to watch The Boondock Saints because Randy had never seen it. Watched a little of the Notre Dame v. Michigan game before going to Massena for supplies. The remainder of the night has been spent working on a paper that’s due Monday for Prof. Faber’s Professional Communications class.

Friday 9/10: Party in our apartment. We were originally going to do “An Evening with the Rat Pack”, where we’d sit around watching old movies and drinking martinis, but I overestimated the availability of such movies in northern New York. Instead we had View Askew Night which consisted of watching Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Mallrats. We started around 5 or 6 PM and fizzled around 1 AM. Tip: when going shot-for-shot with someone, be sure to verify that you are in fact using the same units of measure as the other party. Pictures from the event are here.

Sunday 9/5 – Thursday 9/9: Absolutely nothing happened for 5 straight days. Randy and I beat Ghost Recon so I went out and bought Crimson Skies and Rainbox Six 3: Black Arrow so we’d have something to do.

Saturday 9/4: Went to Ottawa with Donny and Allison to see Garden State, which turned out to be an awesome movie. Man is downtown Ottawa deserted on Saturdays!

Friday 9/3: Grilled a bunch of meat and after a decent pre-game, ended up going to a party at Corey’s for a while before returning to the apartment because of an inebriated member of the party. Several hours of surly wandering later, the evening came to a close.

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Donny, good to hear that you’re back — that means you can go clean out the lab and finish the lab build since I can’t seem to access animal remotely these days.

Nothing much happened today. I got to sleep in until 11 for the first time in a month or two. Spent the day hanging around the house watching Monk, Iron Monkey (I didn’t realize until today that it was originally released 11 years ago in China but only made it to the US in the last several years), and various other movies on TV.

Also did some GRE prep stuff. Only 4 more days to go!

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Finally got to play with my new 20 GB iPod yesterday. I really like it. It’s significantly smaller and lighter than my original 5 GB model and the earbud headphones that came with it sound better than my old ones.

Today I went searching for Bill Hicks’ Arizona Bay at music stores in the area. Best Buy didn’t have much of a comedy section, but a lone copy of it awaited me at Borders, which I quickly snapped up. The CD has already been ripped and transferred to my iPod for listening.

Not much else went on today. Spent the evening reading stuff online and then finished a book of PKD short stories. Hopefully I’ll find some time this week to finish reading Smart Mobs, At Home in the Universe, and perhaps Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I suppose I should also continue to study for the GREs, as I’m scheduled to take the general test on Thursday. The only thing I’m concerned about is the analytical writing portion of the test which I think will pose a challenge because I’m not particularly fond of writing serious essays.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad birthday. Got to have dinner my parents, my aunt & uncle, and one of my brothers and his wife. I picked up a couple of new books [1, 2, 3] with a gift certificate that my parents gave me to Borders. And as a present to myself I ordered a new 20 GB iPod on Thursday. According to the tracking page it should be arriving home tomorrow.

On the way back to Pok this afternoon there was another massive storm just as I was crossing the Massachusetts-New York border. I’m starting to consider not driving that route again if I’m always going to get drowned by a storm every time. Apparently there were a few turkeys that appreciated the rain though, as they were lounging around on the grass near the Taconic. They were so close to the road that I could have doored one and had a decent dinner.

Pictures are here

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