I'm afraid this is going to be a pretty uninspired post, as I haven't taken any pictures of interest the last couple of days. Instead I've put a picture of myself in warmer, less rainy times (so to speak).

The past three days have been fun.

Thursday morning was definitely an 'alternative' class day. My Computer Science 420 class met in The Barge so that we could discuss term project topics. It looks like I will be doing a project on Garbage Collection (the programming language kind). My German class on Thursday took place in the form of a chat. Unfortunately, the Black Board chat applet proved to be extremely unreliable, so most of the class consisted of people explaining they were having issues connecting.

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I didn't feel like studying about half an hour ago, so I decided to see if I could get a good shot of today's lunar eclipse. There were a few things I neglected to take into account:

1. It was freezing out
2. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
3. The grass was cold and dewy, and I was wearing flip flops.

So I was a little cold after running around outside like that for a good half hour. I finally settled on the shot with the trees, since the moon itself was not very photogenic. This photo was taken with 1 minute expore. Getting the angle right was a little hard, since I had to put the camera down on the ground.

Anyway, enjoy...

 

Two classes, two lab sessions, random spare time in between. Not the most extraordinary of Wednesdays, although my meeting this morning (about www.crousecommunity.com was pretty interesting.

Fall has definitely set in here, so I've taken a few pictures of the landscape. Clockwise from the top left:

• Taylor lake at dusk.
• The tree I posted earlier here, except without leaves now. It's interesting to see how some of the trees lose their leaves pretty much overnight.
• Pieter Hooimeijer calling his parents at around 12:30pm today. Now y'all know what that looks like
• Taylor lake up close. There's some ducks in there actually, if you know where to find them I took this from just over the side of the lake, with the camera close to the water.

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Another game, another great victory Here's some photos of Sunday's game (Colgate International Community Patriots vs. Regulators (correct me if I got the name wrong...)). More kudos to Kaleena for sticking around and taking these pictures. Clockwise from the top left:

• Bunch of guys holding hands
• More of me standing there not doing much. See also: previous, nearly identical picture.
• One of our goals during the first half.
• Nii Noi giving another great reason why he should be in the field...

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It's been a busy couple of days -- sound familiar?

Short version of Wednesday night to Sunday morning: I spent most of Thursday and Friday preparing for World Expo in one way or another. At Tae Kwon Do practice on Wednesday I managed to seriously botch most of my attempts to break wood; a little painful and slightly nerve-wrecking. Fortunately it went a little better on Thursday night, and on Friday it went just as I had hoped (the wood broke). See pictures below. Saturday will go into the history books as 'the day of much great food' -- Pizza Hut for lunch, Dinosaur BBQ for dinner and Oktoberfest food for... well... second dinner.

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It's been an insanely busy couple of days. Between the soccer game, my presentation for the Computer Science department and my usual pile of work, I haven't had much time to take a break from things (or sleep for that matter).

The soccer game on Sunday went reasonably well. It was about 4 degrees C and raining constantly, so it was a rather cold and wet game (to state the obvious). It brought back memories of playing handball at the Keet in pretty much the same conditions. Anyway, we won 4-2, and aside from a few minor goof-ups I didn't screw up all that badly... woohoo. Had fun too. Credit for the pictures goes to Kaleena, who supported us despite the poor weather

Soccer photos:

• Top Warming up a little before the game (for as far as possible).
• Second Professor Tomljanovich of the other team. Scored one and assisted one.
• Third Me, myself and I waiting for the other team...

On Monday I spent a good chunk of my day preparing my presentation for Tuesday. Kaleena and I stayed up the hill for a good couple of hours to facilitate this, but I still managed to run out of time. I subsequently overslept on Tuesday, so I had to rush a little in order to finish everything. It all turned out well though -- the presentation went pretty well. I presented a project I did over the summer -- Oak Associates' NTSNeditor.

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The weekend's finally here, and of course it's pouring outside. I haven't done much the last couple of days, except get my assignments in on time and going to class. So far my semester's track record is pretty good; I've only missed about 15 minutes of class this semester (this was on Tuesday when I was finishing my ACM application). It's nice to be on top of things; now if only I got on top of the giant pile of papers/clothes/dishes that is room 305.

I don't have much to report about Thursday and Friday (hence the blank spots on the calendar to the right...). I particularly enjoyed my classes the last couple of days. The main reason is probably the fact that I've actually slept decently the last few days. Instead of concentrating on staying awake, I could actually concentrate on my professors -- great stuff. On top of that, all of my classes had one or two interesting things going on in terms of the material. In COSC 304 we're doing push-down automata, which is one of the first topics I genuinely haven't done before. In Economics Professor Mandle convered monopolies. That's something I did do before, but it's been so long that it hardly makes a difference. In German we're combining a lot of things -- the cases, vocabulary, telling time, etc. COSC 420 is currently focused on scope.

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Wow Wednesdays are exhausting. I went up the hill at 9:50am, worked there until 17:30 and didn't come down until just now. Last night I worked on a CS 304 lab until around 1am, then got up at 8:30am to do the writeup. I wrote the C++ source in a single go, and after fixing the compilation errors it actually worked. Not bad for someone on NyQuil and a fairly complicated assignment...

I also worked on the Colgate blog for a bit; I'll put up a link when that goes up. For now, it's time for me to head to Tae Kwon Do practice...

 

Six weeks and a day down, nine weeks and three days to go (minus Thanksgiving break). This weekend wasn't all that noteworthy; except for a visit by Michael on Saturday and a meeting on Sunday I just stayed in and tried to get caught up with work. Yesterday (Monday) I met up with the people at the communications office to talk about their plans for a blog on the Colgate website. They gave me access to their site, so I proceeded to build their entire site in a couple of hours. Probably not the wisest decision in terms of planning, but oh well...

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Here's a shot of the bag-of-food I received on Friday. More news later when I'm done with my work...

 

It's been a decent week, between having Monday and Tuesday off and not doing so much on the other three days. Last night was particularly awesome, when I was handed a giant bag of food by someone saying 'Your parents went through a lot of trouble to get this to you.' Well looks like I won't be going hungry anytime soon. Thank you

Recent work department

I made some changes to www.roaix.info a couple of days ago. I removed the description and keywords META tags. While these tags still had a little bit of use back in 2002, nowadays none of the major search engines use them. I also added some hidden links to the menu page. All of this should improve the site's ranking a little bit. In the meantime, www.faldara.com seems to be doing fairly well in google. Every so often I manage to compose a search string that'll actually pop up this website...

In the meantime, AJ's moved the entire site back to his server in The Netherlands. The trouble at WorldWide DNS seems to over too, so all is good now (as opposed to last night, which was a little frustrating...).

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Remember that musical cartoon with Kerry and Bush singing 'This land is our land?' Well the makers have released a second cartoon. Get it here. If that doesn't work try my local mirror: here.

I'm running a mirror of the movie because the JibJab site is currently getting hammered. The movie just aired in the Tonight Show as an exclusive, so a lot of people are trying to get it for themelves now. I think it's very well done -- a little slicker even than the original. Enjoy!

 

In the good news department: my economics exam went much better than I thought. In fact, if I'm not careful, I'll be getting higher grades for Economics than for Computer Science. I think I may have some repressed Econ-anger issues; I've been very anal about getting this grade. Ah yes... perfectionism...

Open Source should not be ripped off department

I posted a comment on www.opensourcecms.com, a website that runs demos of all major content management programs. I recently discovered that Blog:CMS is listed there. It's basically a ripped off & rebranded version of Nucleus together with a bunch of plugins that were ripped from various other sources. Having tried Blog:CMS and having concluded it's a time-waster, I decided to leave this message:

Blog:CMS adds a lot of random code changes to the Nucleus CMS source code. Unfortunately, these changes have made Blog:CMS less stable and much more buggy than Nucleus. In addition, I found Nucleus to be easier to customize and generally less time-consuming to use. The userbase is a lot wider than that of Blog:CMS, which is basically a one-man show.

And in case you're wondering: yes that did make me feel better. Especially because the 'maker' of Blog:CMS has a link to this page. In the meantime, Kaleena's laptop is now blocked from the Blog:CMS support forum, oh dear. *evil holler*

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First of all, congratulations to Kaleena who will be going to Korea this winter to research her family history. Her fellowship proposal was accepted today. Makes you wonder what I'm going to do with mine doesn't it? Yeah, me too.

In related news, I got back my COSC 304 exam today. Turns out it wasn't quite as terrible as I thought it would be. Now let's hope my Economics exam wasn't a total loss and all will be good...

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Vice-presidential candidates face off

Today marks another great day in America's elections -- the debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. The New York Times headlines: "Cheney and Edwards Split on Iraq Policy." Seems like that's a little obvious; not a very good headline.

Overall, the debate was pretty interesting though. When gay marriage came up, the discussion inevitably turned to Cheney's daughter. Edwards politely used this as an example. Cheney, in turn, simply thanked Edwards for his "kind words" and chose to forgo his remaining 80 seconds of response time.

The rest of the debate was generally more interesting than last Thursday's between Kerry and Bush. Cheney and Edwards were actually responding to each other's arguments. Kerry and Bush were much less 'interactive.'

New York Times reports (read: buys AP article) on Dutch government websites

In another recent goof-up, The New York Times reports that Several Dutch government Web sites remained offline Tuesday after an attack by hackers protesting unpopular policies of the right-wing Cabinet, the government said.. Darn right-wing CDA! In addition to this, the article has a less-than-stellar explanation of what a Denial of Service attack is.

And in my humble little life department...

After much deliberation I have settled on a Kodak DX7440. It's a little bulkier than the Nikon Coolpix 4200 (which I was considering earlier), but has a few more features. It also looks/feels a little sturdier.

Beyond going to the mall, I didn't do much of interest, unfortunately. More news & pictures as they occur...

 

October break is quickly evaporating now. I have one more excuse left to procrastinate: a trip to the Carousel Mall in Syracuse. Have a look at the floor plan. If you're not impressed, have a look at the little box that says H&M. Now picture the biggest H&M you've ever seen. Now look back at the other boxes on the map...

As always I've been making some changes to the site. I redid the banner once or twice and finally settled on what is up there now (to state the obvious). It's based on a poster I did during the good old days (see the picture on the right). I've also fixed a few bugs. One of them was a fairly innocent security flaw, which I reported on the Nucleus forum. My fix will be appearing in the next release of Nucleus *pride*.

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I've added the Captcha plugin to the comment forms. Basically it adds an image that looks a little like this:

In order to post a comment, you'll have to copy the characters in the image. The idea is that this will prevent spammers from using an automated program to post links to their sites and such.

Alright let's see if this works *posts comments to his own article*...

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It's official: the first 5 weeks of the semester are done! This can mean only one thing: October break is here. An incredible four day weekend to catch up on sleep, do some homework and generally admire the empty campus and the locked buildings.

It's around 23:30h right now, and I'm typing away in the dark while Kaleena is 'preparing' for her LSAT tomorrow morning (the T stands for 'incredibly hard Test'). Despite my Economics- and Computer Science exams, the last couple of days haven't been that bad. The site has seen a lot of progress, both under the hood and... well... not under it. I'm pretty happy with the way it works right now.

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