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The theatre department has been running a pretty cool play over the last week called Because He Can, billed as a “techno thriller”. While I didn’t find it too much of a thriller, it’s probably just because of my background.

The show is about an identity theft case where a couple was taken advantage of in a a very comprehensive way by a rather psychotic hacker. I had the opportunity to watch the dress rehearsal last week, and I think it’s a good show worth seeing.

Interestingly enough, the Computer Science department has joined up with the theatre on this show. Because He Can is a single act play, but these performances have two acts. The second act is a discussion session with a geek from the CIS department as a community service for any audience members that may have more questions about the topics that were covered in the play.

If you want to catch it this weekend, I’ll be the geek during the second act of the play on Friday October 1 and Saturday October 2.

I’m way behind on this post, but we had the debut of the Bunker Bar last Friday with a great concert and party.

Last Friday Copus played an amazing show at PJ’s. I don’t know what else to say, because they have consistantly kicked ass so many times that I’m running out of juicy descriptive comments to illustriously elaborate on the fantastic concert that Copus rips out every single time they get up on the stage. Seriously, you should be coming to these things if you weren’t there. (You can download their music for free on www.copusband.com to check them out.)

And then as a special treat, we (the guys at The Bunker) put in the extra time to get the Bunker Bar up and running for the after party. So as soon as the concert was complete, Dave, Melinko, and I sprinted back to The Bunker to fire up the bar. Once we started, Melinko and I served drinks until after four in the morning with no breaks.

It was a pretty good party, with about 50 or so people in attendence. On the 0-10 party meter it probably came to a 6 to 6.5. The bar worked like an amazing piece of engineering, excelling in every way. Only a couple little touch ups were necessary after it was all over.

The main news was the stunning about of booze that we went through. I dropped about $250 on supplies that were devoured over the course of the party. Good times. Unfortunately, the tips that night only came to $97. Ouch. Pricey party.

Dave and I, and the other guys in the Bunker, have been talking about the party, and ways that we can continue to party hardy without loosing our ass every time. We’ve got some ideas, so I don’t think there’s any end in sight.

It’s kind of interesting how the ebb and flow of blog posts vary. It’s not like I haven’t thought about blogging, I’ve even thought about the posts that I was going to make. I just haven’t gotten around to writing.

In a way, this is like a meta-blog blog intro. I’m blogging about blogging. Crazy.

Anyway, I’m not really sick anymore, but I’m not quite well yet either. The sinus effection didn’t seem to get very drastic. Unfortunately the sinus drainage is an amazing annoyance. I’ve managed to get so much gunk in my throat that it effects my speach, and worse, effects my laugh! It’s crazy annoying, and I’m tired of coughing. What I’m really wanting is some kind shop-vac attachment that I can use to just get in there and suck that stuff out.

Probably not going to be hitting the market anytime soon though, so I’m stuck with the Tussin DM that I picked up the other day.

Wow. I some how got sick faster than a college kid can whip up some ramen. Yesterday was great, thanks to Mom for coming up and hanging out with me for the day. Then a little while after she left, I started to get a little bit of a sniffle.

By midnight, I had all of the symptoms of something sort of nasty. Sinus congestion, headache, stuffy nose, irritated throat (just the part over by that soft palette thing where the nasal cavity connects).

I felt like crap by the time I went to bed, but I knocked back a couple Drixoral Cold and Flu to ease the sleeping. I’m pretty sure it worked, I slept pretty well. But then when I woke up, I went and blew my nose.

Nuclear Yellow.

Damn, I’ve been down this road before. This is a sure sign of a sinus infection.

So I’ve been trying to drug up to the point that I can get into work and class today… but it’s not working. The Drixoral quickly gave me a good nostril to breath from, but unfortunately it hasn’t been able to conquer the sinus pressure headaches. Considering the fact that I’m allergic to all major (and a lot of minor) antibiotics, and that I don’t have any health insurance to speak of, I’ve decided to give up for today.

So for the rest of today, it’s me, tomato soup, a great new book I borrowed from Matt called FDR’s Folly, some music, and as much sleep as I can fit in.

I’m going to conquer this sickness with a quickness, booyah!

Yeah, my haphazard disregard for the law regarding vehicle registration and licensing caught up with me last night. A critical trek to Home Depot turned into a nice court date for yours truely.

It started with a critical juncture. We were make awesome progress working on the bar, Dave and I were laying down the vinyl sheet flooring for the bar floor. It became apparent to Dave that he was going to run out of adhesive and we were going to need another tub. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. It was 8:46pm, and Home Depot closes at 9:00pm. Now for a reinactment:

JD: Oh shit! It’s 8:45! Go, Go, GO!

Jake, Ryan, Dave, and Travis just kind of look around at each other… waiting… for about a beat.

Travis:Damn. I don’t even have legal plates for my Jeep.

Silence. Everyone looks at Travis.

Travis:Oh well shiiiit.

Travis sprints up the stairs and out the door as fast has he can run. JD, Jake, Ryan, and Dave start laughing as he leaves.

I made it out to my Jeep in very short order, and started barreling towards Home Depot. It was a stressful drive, I constaintly tried to push the speed limit while remaining ever vigilant (and pretty much paranoid) about the possibility of a ticket. After all, if I were to get pulled over for something as trivial as speeding, it would quickly escalate into something bigger considering my unregistered vehicle and incorrect tag.

But nonetheless, I pushed on down Seth Childs weaving in and out of traffic going as fast as my conscience would let me. (The speed my conscience would allow is left to the imagination of the reader.) As I approached Home Depot, I could see a long line of cars leaving the Manhattan Mecca of home repair and I feared I was already too late. But I sprinted into the doors and bounded into Home Depot with enough time to spare that I received numerous confused looks as to my distress. There was plenty of time.

I briskly walked over to the Floor Adhesives section in isle 4 and picked up another $6 tub of Carpet and Sheet Vinyl adhesive, and then trotted over to the checkouts.

Confident in my success, I text messaged Dave and JD on my way out of the parking lot with “Mission accomplished. Comin’ home.” I was just about to send another text message when I noticed a police officer driving behind me.

I immediately started the self-concious driving style to insure that I didn’t make any minor infraction that would lead to bad-plate complications. I changed lanes into the right hand lane to prepare for the turn onto Anderson from Seth Child, and the cop remained in the left hand lane. I released an audiable sigh of relief.

Then, as I was just about to turn right, the police vehicle swerved behind me and flipped on his blinker. I was nailed, and I knew it… the lights just weren’t blinking yet.

Sure enough, as we approached a convienant location to pull over, the lights came on. The officer came up to the car, and lo-and-behold, this was the same officer that had pulled me over on my motorcycle months ago and let me off of an aggregious amount of fines with not so much as a warning. I knew I wasn’t going to be so lucky this time. And now for another reinactment:

Instrument of Justice 1: Hi there, sir. It looks like your license plate is about to fall off.

Repressed Citizen (Travis): Yes, sir.

Travis takes little quick breath as he hopes futily for one second that he was just pulled over to be told to put another screw in his license plate.

Instrument of Justice 1: And since it was just hanging there, I decided to go ahead and run it.

Travis: Yes, sir.

Instrument of Justice 1: Do you know of any reason why your plate wouldn’t come up?

Travis: Yes, sir.

Instrument of Justice 1: And why would that be?

Travis: I just recently purchased this Jeep from a dealership in Missouri, and I have not yet received a title so that I could register this vehicle. This plate is the plate from my previous vehicle, a 93 Chevy Camaro.

The conversation continues…

I could go over the entire affair, but it’s not really worth the time. There were a few interesting aspects though. First, even though my tag that is currently on the Jeep was paid in full until March of 2005 for my Camaro it wouldn’t come up at all for the police officers. Second, I didn’t have proof of insurance in the vehicle… it was back on my desk at home. I also didn’t have the bill of sale for the vehicle in the vehicle, so I didn’t even have proof that I owned the Jeep at all. It took quite some time before they managed to get everything ran to insure that my story checked out and the Jeep wasn’t stolen. Oh yeah, and he called in backup too, so there was an extra officer to keep me company.

In the end, I ended up with two tickets “Wrong tag on car” and “No proof of insurance”. The amount was the great one though… “MA” (Jake tells me that’s short for Magistrate). Instead of getting a normal ticket I can just pay and cry about, I get to show up in court on October 5th at 8:00am to talk to a magistrate and find out how much it’s going to hurt.

And I’m betting it’s going to hurt.

Long story short, I just totally bombed my first math510 exam. We haven’t even gotten the results back yet, but I don’t need them. If I get perfect all of the problems that I mustered an attempt, we’re looking at like a 50 percent. Realistically, more like a 40 percent or so.

This actually took place this previous Wednesday, but I was a little too upset about it to blog at the time. I took this failure pretty bad, and the worst thing is, I didn’t really see it coming. During the study time that I did have, I felt reasonably confident about the material. I was no combinatoric whiz, but I had a pretty firm grasp of the core concepts. Little did I know that I was afflicted with a book dependancy.

For those that haven’t ever been hit with a book dependancy, I’ll define my term by example. See, whenever I was working through homework problems, I would struggle a little bit (as most students do in math510) but eventually prevail. Most of the time, elements of examples in the book could be examined or combined to make plausible solutions to the difficult problems. I came out of most of the three homework assignments feeling reasonably confident that I had the answers correct, and sometimes a little fuzzy on what it took to get there… but generally okay with the concepts. And with my homework scores, I was doing pretty good.

However, while I was churning through homework problems pretty well, I was started to development a dependancy on the book. Rather than memorizing a good portion of the concepts, I was starting to learn where they were in the book and how they were applied. So while I can certainly crank out some good combinatorics homework, it lead to a serious problem during the exam. I was unable to conjure the gimmicks and tricks for these problems out of the air. I was so used to using the book (and Cole) as a resource for problem solving, I had not committed to memory most of the techniques used to solve these difficult problems.

On an exam, that’s game over. And it was game over for me. I failed this test with flying colors. Then, while waiting outside of the class for Cole to wrap up (his undoubtedly excellent exam) I heard some students talking about the solution to a couple of the problems. Every time they mentioned the solutions, the complete concept would instantly jump to life in my head. On the way back to Nichols, Cole and I were discussing problems and solutions and the exact same thing happened. He talked about a solution, and the entire process to solve it just exploded in an excited neuron firing spectacular.

I had a book dependancy. I had been using the text book as a device to trigger memory recall for the concepts of the class. Normally, you’d want to use the problem types as these kinds of memory triggers. So when you run across a question like “Prove that when 10 dots are placed into a square with 1 unit sides, no two dots can be farther apart than 1/3 square root of 2.”, you think something along the lines of, “Oh yeah, I should split the square into 10 minus 1 squares that all happen to have a hypotenus of 1/3 square root of 2 and pigeonhole that beeyotch.” Instead, all I was thinking was… “Shit. I remember that problem… I think it was on the top half of that one page that had the wheel of letters opposite it. What did that damn thing read?”

So yeah, I have to find a different way to attack math510. My lousy study skills led to a big fat F and I need to fix it. But clearly I’ve been learning a lot from this experience and it’s lead to a lot of introspection. After all, this is the first time that I’ve ever failed an exam in my life (that I showed up for and/or tried, anyway).

First, I need to space out my math homework some. Doing the homework all in one night has lead me to concentrate entirely on speed and not enough on comprehension. (Hence the book based memory recall, it was more important to find an authoritive source immediately then “remember it on my own”.)

Second, drinking after failing an exam worked pretty well. Let’s hear it for Jack and Coke!

Third, failing an exam isn’t the end of the world.

That third was is particularly important. After that exam I had seriously started wondering if I should change majors into something easier, or if maybe I was getting too “old” for college already, or was just going to fail anyway. Really depressing crap. But today Cole and I did a little experiment with the grading formula/scale for Dr. Zongzhu Lin, and I’m really still okay for the class with this failure. Due to a little “bonus” for improvement in his algorithm, along with his lenient grading scale, I’m definitely still going to pull out with a “C or better”. And if I get B’s on the next couple exams (only two left), I will still end up with a B out of the class as a whole. That’s okay, B’s aren’t bad at all! Even an A is mathmatically possible (but so unrealistic I just include that fact for humor).

The best description of our bar is paraphrased from Dave Plumb’s Dad when he stated (roughly), “That sounds just like one of those things we always talked about doing in college, but never actually did.”

All of the progress that was made this last Monday is an illustration of The Bunker’s ability to take awesome ideas and actually bring them to fruition. This full day’s work brought several more landmark accomplishments.

The biggest is the completion of the plywood subfloor. This was certainly no simple task, primarily because of a little planning oversight on our part. It was a simple oversight really. We were really considered about the structural integrity of the subfloor and especially concerned about the rigidity of the bar structure. As I like to put it, “This thing should be strong enough to hold an entire cheerleading squad on it for a good picture.” Talk about a great way to motivate five aspiring bar constructors to greatness. Though, in the process of designing an ultra strong subfloor and bar, we never really considered fully the process of covering that subfloor with plywood. Dave said it best when he said, “When we were planning, we always just said that we do this, this, and this… and then we cover it with plywood… and then we, and so on.” For whatever reason, we just concluded that covering the floor with plywood was just a “given”.

Well, it wasn’t really a given, but we made a great effort to design a series of floor panels made from three forths inch plywood that would cover everything and provide the basis for a water tight seal without being too difficult to cut and install. Llama and I worked for several hours while Dave served up dinner for Alpha Chi sizing and cutting a series of seven flooring pieces around all of the super structure.

But before we got the floor glued down, we set forth our next landmark. The bar was “given a home”. Previously we had worked on the bar kind of in the middle of the room (surrounded by 6 mil plastic sheeting) to insure that we could get everywhere that we needed to be. But before we added almost three sheets of three fourths plywood to the weight of the thing, it was time to move the bar into it’s final resting place. We surrounded the bar and moved it right into the corner of the room. It fit great.

Then it was time for another special treat. TJ Rothwell had came back into Manhattan to visit for a weekend, and then returned again so that he could see a Copus show at PJ’s. This meant something extra special for the Bunker Bar, however, because TJ picked up the skillz0rs of an electrician during his time in the D.C. area. He took it about himself to properly wire the Bar with a couple perfectly executed electrical outlets. It’s a great design with the romex running under the subfloor and up to a couple outlets under the bar. The power comes from an electrical patch cable that makes our bar plug into the wall just like an appliance. HOT! The setup even includes one of those outlets like in the bathroom so that if anything gets wet it will flip a pseudo breaker and prevent any kind of harm or damage. Just absolutely phenominal work by TJ on the Bunker Bar. He even walked away from his bar construction this week with a couple shares ownership of the Bunker Bar, the first non-resident to ever own common stock in the Bunker exchange.

After the bar was put into place, it was time to adhere and screw down the floor. It was a bit of an arduous process, with the boards being a very tight fit, but when it was done we could “Land an F-15 on this thing. Well… if we could get an F-15 in the basement on approach… and it would take a lot of work to make it longer… and… yeah” (To quote Dave again.)

We also took the opportunity to “test fit” the precut countertops that JD and I had completed last Wednesday on a trip to Kansas City (with a little help from Kari and Mrs. Hillen). They looked SO hot.

That’s the latest update. We also remembered to talk some more pictures, but it will be a bit before I get the image gallery server up again so I can start posting a bunch fo pictures. Great stuff. The Bunker Bar is really coming together great. And it couldn’t be happening to be a better bunch of guys.

I received an email back from Dr. Hubbard regarding my missed exam yesterday, and with great news. I had emailed her to simply ask if the grade was still salvagible or if I should drop the course.

She responded by offering to let me take the exam if I dropped by the Geology office today. I just returned from taking the exam, and I think it’s safe to say that this class has been saved by the hugely gracious accomodation from Dr. Hubbard. Overall, I think that I did pretty well. There were five or so questions that I was just kind of “eh” on, but feel like I really nailed the essay portion. It was like I could read the text book while I was writing. (I couldn’t of course, I left my books out in the office while I was taking the exam.) But it was great.

This has been one of my worse morning/days in a long time. And it started off very unassuming.

I woke up uncharacteristically alert and well rested well before my alarm went off. But, I didn’t really have the feeling that anything was “pending”, or needed to be done. (In hindsight, I’m not sure why I felt that way… I always feel like I have craploads of stuff to do.) So, for whatever reason, I went ahead and went back to sleep. Each increment of 30 minutes I went ahead and continued to sleep, and while I felt good each time I woke up… I also felt pretty damn good about continuing to sleep.

First I slept through eece241, Intro to Computer Engineering. And while I like to chat and hang out with Cole during the class, a person gets just about as much accomplished sleeping as they do attending one of Dr. Stanton’s lectures.

Next, I slept through geol100, Earth in Action. This class is actually pretty cool, but after weighing the odds of having an attendance quiz today, I decided that I would rather sleep. (Yeah, I know, that’s never a good idea. I don’t know why my decision making faculties were so in the gutter this morning.)

Next, I slept through japan191, Japanese 1. I don’t know if I would really consider this a genuine “sleep through”, since I’ve already decided that I’m going to drop that class. But I had decided yesterday that I was going to use the class time to take care of the administrative hassles of dropping the course. But, at this time, I just finished sleeping and decided to get up.

Sleeping all day is pretty lame, but things really weren’t going “bad” so far, they were just going “slowly”. This is the part where it gets bad.

First, I decided that I was going to take care of some financial crap and continue to try and get that sorted out. I started with a “pay now or we’ll collect” letter that I had recieved for some reason here recently from SBC. It was regarding our old phone line, with them saying that I still owed over $75. This was clearly impossible, on the 28th of July I had called, requested to pay my entire outstanding balance, and cancel the account entirely.

So I gave them a ring, and long story short, I was told that I had only paid the previous balance, and the pro-rated balance for the pay period that hadn’t ended yet when I called. I gave them a little shit, because the math didn’t work out at all for what he was telling me. I looked more like they had left the internet bill running for an extra month, but he wasn’t particularly helpful and I decided to just say, “Screw it, whatever.” and pay the balance. I found enough room to scrape the bill in under the limit on my credit card and charged it.

I still don’t have any idea how “I’d like to pay my entire remaining balance and close my account” can be possibly miscontrued to “I’d like to give you money, have you cancel my account, but then a couple months later nail me from behind with a shitty extra bill when I’m broke.” But then again, I don’t know telecom-speak.

So just when I was finishing up with that annoying mess, I get a little instant message from Cole where he asked, “Well, what did you think?” I didn’t have a clue what he was referring to, so I replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. :)” And then he dropped the bomb: “The geology exam today?”

Ah shit. That was today? Seriously? That’s just great.

So now, instead of just dropping Japanese… it’s entirely possible that I’m going to have to freaking drop Geology as well. Seriously, maybe I can just take a wad of hundred dollar bills and burn them in the street. That’s about the bang for buck I’m heading for with my dumb ass regarding classes this semester, so far.

Anyway, I fired off an email to Dr. Hubbard, the excellent instructor that teaches the course (if you’re reading this and need a science, Geol 100 with Dr. Mary Hubbard is a cool choice), and I’m waiting to hear if she thinks that I can pull out of the course with a B, or if I should drop it. I really hope that it’s recoverable.

So next up on my agenda of doom is calling on Apple to check on the status of my AppleCare. I don’t know if I remembered to blog this, but my laptop has been dead for a little over three weeks now. The kicker is that they somehow managed to fuggle up my AppleCare program so that no one could provide the AppleCare services that I paid for. Actually, to Apple’s credit, they wrote an exemption on the spot and helped me out a bit… but my laptop is really sick and needs more TLC than that.

After a long time on the phone with Apple, the lady was very cool and has a shipping box to be overnighted here so that I can ship my PowerBook back to them and get it fixed. However, she mentioned (and I already knew) that if it looks like any of the problems with the laptop were caused by “accidental damage”, the service reps will call me back to provide a “requote”, where they tell me how much it’s going to cost me to fix it.

I love my PowerBook, it’s probably the most utilitarian piece of computing equipment I’ve ever owned. As such, it goes with me everywhere and I’m a very active student. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve pretty much beat the crap out of this thing. In hindsight I wish I would have taken care of it, but I think that’s just because I know this repair job is going to cost me an arm and a leg. So even though Apple did the right thing and took care of me quickly and correctly this time, I still left the situation feeling bad. I know this is going to hurt, and I’m pretty broke right now.

At this point, I was in quite the crappy mood. For those that haven’t seen me in a crappy mood (it’s relatively rare and difficult to discern), here’s what that means. Outword, I’m still just about the same. On first glance, it’s not even easy to tell that I’m having a pissy day. The symptoms are still very much there though. I get horribly unmotivated, almost apatheticly depressed. (Not really like a serious depression, but I really don’t feel like doing anything) I also get a little bit short tempered, and kind of meanly cynical. But, that’s pretty hard to tell unless you know me pretty well.

I do feel a little guily about not doing much, while I’m unmotivated, and that was particular strong about me not attending work today (or econ530, or math510). Especially when I found out from Sterling that Service Pack 2 is going to be forced out by SIRT here soon at work. This is bad news for me, because we have not tested yet what SP2 breaks on our systems. This means that I need to get to work pretty damn early tomorrow… that service pack may very well roll out at 4:00am on all of my systems whether I like it or not. Grrr.

Anyway, so that means that I didn’t do jack crap for the rest of the morning/day, until the afternoon rolled around.

Thankfully, things started to get much better after that. I have kick ass roommates–we started working on the bar–and TJ came back to town for a show tonight and did some more kick ass work on the bar. I’m about to clean up for the Copus concert, I’ll blog more about TJ and the Bar Construction soon.

It is with much disappointment that I think I’m going to have to drop Japanese.

This is a real waste. First, I’m out at least half the tuition. Second, I’m genuinely interested in the subject material. I find the class very entertaining, and I’m learning a ton.

Unfortunately the time requirements for this class are killin’ me. So far we’ve been given at least eight brand new vocabularly words each day, with quizes on these words scheduled each Monday. This is hours every week of study time, above any homework. This will mark the second weekend in a row that I’ve not studied any Japanese at all, and will be the second Monday that I completely bomb the quiz. (Last week I didn’t even go, pre-frustrated with what I knew would be the outcome.)

I think I’m going to cut my losses, and chalk it up as an expensive learning experience (which is all college really is anyway). Importantly, I think I know how I could really help myself plan for success next time I take the course. First, I’m going to continue to study the language outside of a classroom setting. I think that knowing the alphabet well before going into the class would make a huge difference in my ability to succeed. Being a completely visual learning, having everything be auditory without any visualization of the words and/or sounds is almost worthless to me. So I’m going to continue to study the hiragana and katakana, hopefully reaching a mild proficiency reading and writing. Then, next Fall, I can go into the class already knowing the beginning words, and hopefully being able to take notes!

Anyway, I think I’ll probably take care of dropping that tomorrow. (Also, this means I will have no classes on Tuesdays… w00t)

It consistantly amazes me how poor our physical network is here in the Computing and Information Sciences department. This has been reinforced yet again after today’s power outage. After a few seconds of zero power, suddenly half of the network as dropped off of the face of the Earth.

At first it was attributed to a Windows problem (hence, Cole was really excited to blame me), since most of the Windows labs didn’t come back up as expected after the outage. But then, it soon becomes apparent that the workstations came up fine… they just don’t have a network to connect to.

A little bit more investigation by Sterling, Earl, and Cole find that everything “behind” one of the large switches has been thrust into some interdimensional void. (or, at least, won’t respond to a ping.

A switch going out doesn’t necessary indicate a poor network, until you start looking at some of the specifics. For instance, lets say that we were to take a gander at the lab computers in n128. You’d find that n128w02 is still running, while the rest are kaput. “Why is that?”, one may ask. The answer would be as strange as it is obvious. n128w02 doesn’t go to the same switch. That’s right, randomly selected computers connect to randomly selected switches.

Or, better yet, to use a little tiny bit of that math510 class I’ve been suffering through. We have four (or so) “major” switches in the building. However, they are all bridged, so treat all of the switches as equal. Then, lets say that we have 200 computers in the department (a little low, but not bad) and we’ll assume that we have a port for each computer. Each time you have a computer, run a cable all the way back to the computer and then pick 1 port from any of the switches. Next, we need to rule out any possibilities that might have more than say, five consecutive computers in consecutive ports. (That would be too easy, our network isn’t that easy).

To find the answer to this problem, follow these simple steps:

1. Ignore the previous paragraph.
2. Realize that this network will continue to prevent you from correctly troubleshooting or diagnosing any network issues for the rest of your career as a student.
3. Place head in hands.
4. Sob.

Oh yeah, we also have cat-3 running to a good portion of our building. The cat-5 that we do have was yanked (yes yanked) through conduit that was too small. And it sucks.

While I’m a little late on the blog, I’m pleased to mention that construction on the Bunker Bar has begun. I figured I would go ahead and document the progress so far, minus the pictures. (We do have pictures; however, I just don’t have a gallery server up yet.)

The Bunker Bar project has been a long time coming. Since the famous (infamous?) “Shot Party” back at Apartment 7 last year, it has been clear that the open-bar style party was an instrument of pure college bliss. In addition, I love bartending. And while my day job is a little too good to give up, if I didn’t already have a great job, I would definitely be working down in Aggieville cranking out the drinks for the masses. The next best thing is bartending private parties when the vibe hits.

As our time at Apt7 was coming to a close, the criterian for a new house was formulated. JD and I started by looking for a house that would be perfect for the construction of a “real” bar. After a few houses, we came across just that house. The Bunker, 2058 Tecumseh.

The second (lower) living room was perfect. It’s very large, had a dedicated kitchen for bar backing, and provided everything that a couple college guys could possibly want to build their own collegiate utopia. Oh, but wait, there were five bedrooms at the-as-of-yet-unnamed-Bunker. JD and I brought on Dave and Llama next, followed in short order by Alex.

After settling into the Bunker, (and after QuakeCon was over), Dave and I took to the whiteboard to start drafting a bar in earnest. It took a couple days, probably five or so hours of design, and we had ourselves a “blue”-print and a materials list.

Late last week, Alex and I went to Home Depot and picked up the vast majority of the raw materials that were necessary for the Bunker Bar to begin construction. Next, that Saturday when JD was out of town, he picked up an absolutely critical saw. Then, on Labor Day morning, Dave and I made the final materials purchase before construction began.

Construction began that Labor Day Monday and continued into the night. Progress was swift, with Dave and I banging out an amazing amount of precision cut and fitted structural elements with some help from the rest of the Bunker.

By the end of the night, we had a superstructure of a bar with a 14′ surface that was so stable that I could ram into it, and Dave was laying on top of it without any worries of structural integrity. There was a huge feeling of accomplishment from the entire Bunker, and it was great to see everyone getting as excited as Dave and I had been for weeks.

There is still tons of work to be done, and we’re already a little behind schedule with our plans for completion. But regardless of how long it takes to complete the bar, it’s going to be phenominal. And we’re making sure to take pictures for the entire process, so I’ll have some great documentation soon.

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally took the time today to go back and complete driveClean. The solution was simple (carefully placed os.system() calls), but the time off definitely helped. When development was going in earnest for this solution, giving up on using the API directly in lue of making shell calls seemed like a failure condition. But, now that the script has been on hold a while, anything that gets it working feels like more of a victory condition.

I also, inadvertantly, learned a lot about the modern interface for scheduled tasks in Windows. The days when “AT” was the command line tool of choice has passed, but until today I didn’t realize that the new scheduled tasks interface was at least as featureful.

At first glance, it certainly appears that the scheduling of tasks had returned back to the days of yore… click some boxes, and your box is set up. But thankfully it looks like the scheduled tasks interface indeed still considered the needs of enterprise system administrators. This time they made a metafolder (kind of like the Start Menu is now) full of these .job files that are atomic units not tied to anything specific about the machine. So a simple copy to another computer fully configures that same scheduled task on another computer.

Pretty smooth really.

Not too long ago, I made a pretty significant change in my workstation environment here at CIS. A core feature of that new scheme is the use of two computers (one linux, one windows), to complete the fully featured work environment.

Unfortunately, not long after the setup was complete there was an unrecoverable hardware error with the Windows computer. Go figure.

Well I’ve finally gotten a new (to me) workstation to replace the Windows half of my work environment. It’s setup, and thanks to a hardware upgrade in preparation for more work with the Game Programming Curriculum both computers have dual monitor. This occurance lead me to investigate x2vnc… and it is glorious. Now instead of being limited solely to RDP action, I have a quad-headed workstation with two glorious gentoo heads and two foul Windows heads.

Before anyone gets too excited though, no, there are still two flatpanels, not four.

And speaking of my work environment. Tyson plays lots of classical music lately. I mean lots.