tbradshaw.net

QuakeCon is coming up again. I can always kind of feel it coming. I start to get more random emails and IM messages from people that I see each year at QuakeCon, friends start asking about the status af the event, a person can just tell it will be here soon.

And sure enough, while I was still in Boston laying on Leary’s couch like a hungover bum: the phone rings, and it’s Alric.

While he was quite obvious last year before I left Texas, I’ve been asked back as Director of Volunteer Services. Which is a little bit glorified title for “guy in charge of organizing 1500 volunteers and scheduling 100,000 man hours”. It’s a really difficult job, but comes with great satisfaction. Luckily I don’t do it alone. The one and only Elgn Melinko Davidson has committed to being my Assistant Director, and I’ve been hearing good things about Redeye and Mr.Bacon returning.

I’ve got lots of ideas and information about QuakeCon 2005, most of which I won’t be speaking about anywhere because of the necessary secrecy of the event planning and some forthcoming NDA’s about the event. However, as far as I know I’m totally free to talk about my own processes and suggestions when it comes to the event, so I’m probably going to be the most transparent exec you’ve ever heard from.

To start off with, I’m going to hit my big bulleted list so far this year:

• Bigger Staff - I need a significantly larger staff this year. Last year we scraped by with just myself, Melinko, Redeye, Bacon, BFD, and Matt. But really we made it only because everyone was so amazingly talented and worked too hard. My software probably saved our ass too. This year I’m going to need to expand with more management.
• Quality Staff - Along with a bigger staff, the demands that I put on my staff are tremendous. There are some cushy jobs at QuakeCon, none of them are in Volunteer Services. I’m going to be looking for dynamic people with extraordinary people skills and the ability to manage themselves and many others effectively, kindly, and efficiently. Most importantly, I need a staff of volunteers that I can trust, implicitly. I will gladly take the fall for any and every mistake made by any of my staff, but I can only do that because I trust that they are always doing their best and the best.
• New Volunteer Pool Organizational Methodology - Yeah, I shook everything up last year. And I’m going to do it again. This year I want to encourage volunteers not just to fill in gaps that we have as we go, but to actually commit to a Team of volunteers that will tackle problems every day. Expect to be able to say, in advance, “I love registration, and I’ll be happy to work there three hours every day of the event.” And we’ll honor that and thank you tremendously. This will also be the way that the Setup Team works, instead of just clocking availability… you’ll commit to one or two days of hard labor at the management of the BYOC team. Last year I turned away volunteers that I had scheduled to work because there wasn’t enough work. I hated it. I want to be able to honor my schedule to the fullest.
• Security Spun-Off - Security should have never really fallen to the volunteer desk in 2004, but a successful plan didn’t exist and security had to happen. In a way I’m proud that when something had to be done, the event organization felt that we were the department that could make it happen no matter what. We almost pulled it off. This year I’m pleased to be losing BFD from my team to join Polecat as Security Managers that fall under our Director of Operations, Nash. He always wanted to move up in the ranks anyway, and I’m too young to retire.
• Night Management - I don’t want my volunteer desk to close. QuakeCon is 24/7 and I want to be too. Unfortunately we almost died going 24 hours a day and had to close the desk several times. It’s cool though, we’ll be better.
• Software Improvement - The QuakeCon Volunteer System behaved admirably for a prototype thrust into production. It’s going to get some TLC and some serious improvement. Enough to make a full blog posting, and not just be a bullet.

There’s tons more I have planned, both for my department and working with other departments. But this is a good start, and hopefully will excite some of those QuakeCon people out there that are excited to get started. Don’t worry, the Volunteer Services organization is rolling already. Hopefully I can keep everyone out there “in the know” as much as I can by writing right here in my blog.

So I’m a little behind the times on this one, but I couldn’t help but rant a little bit on some CNS-CIS relations here lately.

A good portion of the people in the department may have noticed that our department webserver was unavailable for a portion of this week. It seems that our system was “compromised” and CNS decided that the correct course of action was to block the webserver from accessing the internet. Seems fair so far…

Only the system wasn’t really compromised. A user was running a copy of php-nuke on his personal page, and it got exploited. So there was a script kiddie that could execute commands as a regular user on a server that we happen to host. There was no risk of significant damage to any other files or resources in the department or at the university than simply the files of the user that had left his website unsecure to attack.

Eh, not really a big deal. I mean, it’s something that needs to be taken care of relatively quickly, but a single user account that is partially compromised so that a person can execute commands as that user certainly isn’t going to break the bank. In fact, so far, there hadn’t even really been anything significant that had happened, just a little IRC traffic. (I’ll get to that in a second.)

So what would the correct course of action be? Oh, I think that Josh Ballard had it right when he sent an email to the department and told us what was going on and asked us to check up on it. We checked up on it, sent back our results, and figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. After all… it wasn’t a big deal.

Sometime after he reports it to SIRT, someone decides it’s a great idea to block our entire department webserver from accessing anything on the internet. Which, I might add, isn’t only our department webserver, but also our primary DNS server for the department.

Does this seem like a rational course of action to anyone else? Because it seems rediculous to me. One user’s account starts chatting on IRC to a channel that they think sounds fishy, and suddenly they are going to black the entire computer science department from the world wide web? Wouldn’t the other pages served from that computer–say professor’s pages, research groups, and courses–be a little more important than a problem with a little personal page?

I would think so, in fact, I see it like this. CNS oversee’s the entire campus network. In a sense, they are like custodians of a large digital apartment complex and after they found out that a single apartment in our building left the door open, they immediately closed off the entire building and wouldn’t let any other tenents out! It’s a ridiculous overreaction.

Of course, there are also the other little things that have me kind of worried. Like the reason that we were contacted at all. It seems that the account was running an IRC client that was connected to a channel called #badr00t, or something like that. Wait a second… you mean that CNS is scraping all IRC traffic to see what channels everyone on campus is talking in? Could a person possibly think of a more obvious invasion to privacy and possible abridgement to freedom of speech than to have CNS watching every chat room everyone on campus goes into to see if they approve of the topic? Holy shit!

This is just clearly a bad thing all around, and the “bad” part has nothing to do with a dumb little php-nuke exploit. (And I’m not even going into the little things, like them blowing off Cole–our department linux admin badass–like a little kid, even though he was the most available person with the ability to handle the situation.)

Maybe the security guys over there are just a bunch of space cowboys that once they spot something, collateral damage just isn’t important. I’d like to think that someone with the power to blackout users from the rest of the digital world would be a person that would carefully contemplate the results of their actions before just blowing away connections like it’s nothing.

The final thing that I find most humorous, is that the traffic that they “spotted” and the open port they found that alerted them to the problem… those aren’t even things that students aren’t allowed to do on their own. This isn’t the English department where students’ computer use is limited to Word. This is the Computer freaking Science department. Here students are welcome–and encouraged–to do things like “open ports”, write servers, connect to IRC, write IRCbots, whatever. Even writing virii probably has some educational value. (Not that I would encourage virus writing, I think there are many better outlets of valuable coding creativity… but writing a killer virus could probably get you a job with the government… so why not?) This kind of monitoring may be catching an exploit this time, but next time it could very well just be spying on some student’s graduate project or something. Or who knows how much CNS pokes around.

The whole situation just makes a guy upset.

Another trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts has come and gone now. As I write this I’m sitting on a rather turbulent Air Bus that’s shaking it’s way from Chicago to Kansas City.

As usual I’m sad to leave, but it was getting about time. It’s amazing how expensive things are in Cambridge. I don’t know how many fun conversations I had with people just about the differences in prices of things in Manhattan, Kansas compared to Boston. I managed to pay for only about half of everything I ate and drank this trip and I’m still way over budget, heh heh.

Since St. Patrick’s Day I had several more great days and nights at The People’s Republik. Leary even suggested that I change the name of my gallery from “St. Patrick’s Day 2005″ to “A Week at The People’s”, and that wouldn’t be so far off. Leary has a great eye for good peeps and they all make me feel right at home when I come to visit. You’d think I was a local or something.

One night Dani and Hartford took a cab over to Kendall and went to Legal Seafood for a nice dinner. I got to try some famous New England Clam Chowder and dig into a huge plate of wood grilled fish, scallion’s, and shrimp. It was all really good.

Another night Martha, Hartford, Leary, and I had some fantastic sushi delivered to the bar while Hartford and I played hours and hours of darts. We had planned to head over to the Boston Billiards Club for some eight ball, but ended up staying with Leary at the People’s and just getting drunk instead.

The next day Hartford took me up to the North End (one of the Italian sections of town) to this great galleria for an Italian cafeteria experience, followed by a trip to Mike’s Pastries for some canolli.

My last night there I spent hanging out with Leary and The Ed building constructions out of bar straws.

Lots of little events that covered a mostly tame last few days in Boston. I couldn’t have asked for more. I had a crazy and exciting St. Patty’s Day followed by a nice vacation. The last three days have almost been less like vacationing in Cambridge and more like living in Cambridge. I’m all about keeping my options open, but I could definitely see myself on the east coast after I finish at K-State.

Of course, no reason to get my hopes up yet, I’ve got a long way to go before I finish at K-State. But I guess that just means a few more week long excursions to visit Leary before it’s all said and done. That I can definitely look forward to.

It was inevitable that St. Patty’s day was going to be a great time, but I figured I’d blog a little bit about it anyway.

The night transitioned from all day drinking to all night drinking when Patrick and I got left the People’s and went into downtown Boston to the Avalon for the Dropkick Murphy’s St. Patrick’s Day concert.

The concert was over the top. It was pretty clear that this was a “Big Deal” to the Boston crowd, especially the portion of the Boston crowd that is into punk music. (Which appeared to be a pretty big cross section, young and old.) The stage was overflowing with special guests of the band, and occationally with damn near anyone that could scramble to the front.

I had a great time. It was definitely one of those experience’s that one can only have in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day, and that’s exactly what I’m here to experience.

After the show we headed back to the People’s to get in on some first class boozing. The crowd was pretty thick and I had a great time getting hammered on beers and Belfast Bombers while hanging out with the locals. My camera definitely wasn’t prepared for the club atmosphere, but I was able to tweak with the photos enough in Photoshop to salvage some of them. Besides boozing with the crowd, I spent quite a bit of time chatting with Lindsay, and then Patrick and Martha. Leary even made it back over to the Peeps around midnight to continue the drunken revelry.

Besides the generally wicked fun crowd, there were certainly hilarious moments that just about had me dying laughing. A constant charm was Ian, the boxing Frenchman, who was sporting a snazzy green foam Killian’s mowhawk. You can see him in the picture of Lindsay. The next moment to remember was when Martha and Jimmy exchanged shirts. Oh man. Jimmy is probably six foot, six inches tall, and when Martha decides to swap shirts with him for his classic St. Patrick’s day shirt from 1983, Jimmy decides to put on Martha’s tiny little cardigan sweater. I tried to get a picture, but it just didn’t come close to encapsulating how hilarious it was to see him come out of the back room in that festively green cardigan. Ha!

Then, when closing time rolled around and it looked like things might slow down a bit, they didn’t. Some Michael Jackson music started, and Chris and I started doing some moves from Thriller. (Acting like a Zombie might be the only dancing that I can pull off). But things escalated with Chris and Sara got up on the bar and started dancing to the next song (can’t even remember what song it was). It was some fancy footwork and quite the show, especially when Chris started dancing on the beer taps! Ha ha! Pelvic thrusts leading to flowing beer has never been quite so funny.

That was a pretty good bookend for the night, so we stayed just a bit longer while the bar closed out around 2:30am and then I had a Belfast for the road and went back to Leary’s to crash on the couch.

Operation Exceptional St. Patrick’s Day — Mission Accomplished.

The day has started great. A nice shower, my green hat, favorite green shirt, warm flannel underneath, and Patrick and I were off toward Cambridge to get back to the People’s Republik.

We got back to the Peeps just in time, it was only about 15 minutes before the corned beef and cabbage was ready. And man-oh-man was it good. Of course, it wasn’t “just” corned beef and cabbage. It’s corned beef, cabbage, potatos, carrots, bread, mustard, water, and a breakfast drink of champions, a tall white russian.

Since then I’ve been relaxing and preparing for another meal of corned beef and cabbage as soon as dinner time rolls around. I’m considering going to a Dropkick Murphy’s concert tonight. I think it’ll be pretty badass to be at a Dropkick Murphy’s concert in Boston on St. Pattys’ day. I guess they sold out 6 nights in a row for this show. Sounds impressive.

Almost as impressive as this puppet show that was given to Leary and I by a co-owner of the People’s with a St. Patrick puppet that sang and danced to Irish folk songs played on the stereo. Too damn funny.

So here I am, laying in bed at Patrick’s place after my first night back in Boston. It’s great to be back.

I spent the vast majority of the day in travel. My previous blog stated that I had missed my flight but I was going to still make the connecting flight. Turns out I misundertood the ticket counter lady and she was talking about me still making a convienent connecting flight that happened later in the day.

I was really pleased with the re-arrangement. I still made it to boston, I was only a couple hours later than expected, and my layover in Chicago actually shortened 20 minutes.

Since I’ve been to Cambridge I’ve already been greeted at the door to the People’s by a incredibly cute girl, been bought several drinks, traveled down Mass Ave to watch a live band, text messaged some friends, and had a damn good time.

I’m really excited for St. Patrick’s day tomorrow. I’m charging up all of my gadgets here at Patrick’s in Braintree so that I’ll be ready for a full day. I might even tag along with Patrick to a Dropkick Murphy’s concert tomorrow night, just because I can and he invited me.

I took some pictures today with my phone, and I hope to get them uploaded sometime soon. However, for now, I’m going ot get some sleep so I can have a really full St. Patrick’s day.

Yeah, so I missed my first flight. I was cutting it close already, but then I accidently went to the wrong terminal. The time it took to get to the next terminal was too long (even after paying some taxi 10 bucks to high tail it over to Terminal A).

I’ve got it fixed up though, I’ve been put on standby for United flight 1262 from MCI to O’Hare. It boards at 2:44pm, departs at 3:14pm and I’m not sure when it arrives.

However, I’m going to make my connecting flight just fine from O’Hare to Logan, so no real changes in flight time. All in all I’m just out about 17 bucks. 10 bucks for that rediculously over charged trip from Terminal C to Terminal A in a taxi (which I left my freaking ID in), and then 7 bucks for a beer here at MCI where I’m sitting in the sports bar right now.

More updates when I get to O’Hare if I have enough time to hop online.

It’s 4:00am on Tuesday, March 15, and I’m taking a break from studying econ to do a little blogging and clear the head. One of the biggest things floating through my head right now is my agenda for getting everything done that I need to get done before leaving for Boston tomorrow morning at 10:00am. It’s (unfortunately) more than I really have time for.

Which means I need a plan.

• 4:30am - 10:00am : Study for econ510 exam
  • Read and re-read the chapter summaries for 6, 7, 8, and 9.
  • Go over the homeworks online and do them.
  • Re-read the chapter summaries and go over the key diagrams, key formulas, and summary tables.
  • Study the review questions at the end of the chapters.
  • Take frequent breaks to eat, move around, take caffeine pills, and/or goto Dara’s for high energy drinks an snacks.
• 10:00am - 10:30am : Get ready for the next day.
• 11:00am - 11:45am : Econ510 exam. (Cross fingers)
• 12:00pm - 1:00pm : Go to the office.
  • Return Cole his economics text book.
  • Identify critical support tickets that need to be completed today.
    • Any tickets that are obvious blocks for other people. (Don’t want to leave anyone blocked while I’m out of town.)
    • Any tickets that are software requests. (Those are easiest done in batches and I’m pretty sure several are waiting.
    • That one ticket that Sterling told me to get done before Spring Break. (I don’t remember which one, it might have been a software request.)
    • Prepare these tickets in a list of Firefox tabs so I can kill them one by one after lunch.
    • Check to see if the cis690s05a group is working yet so that the cis690 class can begin work.
    • Create ticket for installing gtkradient on several of the lab computers for cis690 students.
• 1:00pm - 2:00pm : Lunch with Mo. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good chat, I’m looking forward to lunch.
• 2:00pm - 3:00pm : Do whatever it takes to get cis505 dropped. I’m guessing:
  • Go to Willard and get Drop Sheet.
  • Come back to Nichols and talk to my advisor, Mrs. Forgie and get a signature.
  • Return to Willard to get the class dropped, get told about my hold.
  • Call the Cashiers Office and beg them to lift my hold for just one day so that I can drop this class and I will try my very hardest to pay my outstanding tuition ASAP.
  • After hold is removed, Drop Course.
  • Do the happy dance.
• 3:00pm - 6:00pm : Back to the office and go about the task of mercilessly slaughtering as many blocking tickets as possible from the list compiled before lunch.
• 6:30pm - 7:30pm : Come home to The Bunker and say, “Hi” to everyone before I leave.
• 7:30pm - 9:30pm : Pack my two book bags up with clothes and stuff for the trip.
  • Toiletries : (soap, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, DO)
  • Clothes
    • Favorite Hats (Especially green hat for Thurs)
    • Favorite Shirts (Especially green St. Patty’s Day Guiness shirt that Dani gave to me in 2001)
    • Jeans, Underwear, Socks
    • Gadgets : (digital camera, batteries, phone, phone charger, laptop, laptop charger, headphones, game controller
• 9:30pm - 9:30am : Sleep, finally.
• Wednesday
• 10:00am - 12:15pm : Drive from The Bunker to Kansas City International Airport
  • Call my parents, let them know that I’m leaving and say, “Hi”.

Well alrighty then. Now that that’s settled. I’m going to get back to studying econ.

Yiyeah!

I previously mentioned my scheduling screw up that lead to the possible complete bombing of an Intermediate Economics exam. For whatever reason (I’m pretty sure it was the late syllabus), I scheduled my flight to leave for Boston completely oblivious to the date that my instructor Yasin Janjua had set well in advance.

It was completely my fault, but I asked him if I could take the exam early so I wouldn’t miss the exam completely.

Graciously, he has agreed.

Unfortunately (for me), the time that he had available was Tuesday at 11:00am to 11:45am. That’s a pretty brutal timeframe for me to study for the exam, especially since I’ve been heavily slacking in that class over the last several weeks.

That’s okay though, I’m not going to be in any way ungreatful for this fantastic opportunity. It’s going to mean a lot less sleep, but I’ve got a plan.

The cis690: Game Programming course is really kicking off this week. We’ve laid the ground work for the entire mod, divided the class into three teams for developing on the framework, assets, and new features, and we’re off to the races. The goal is to have a quite attractive showing at the Engineering Open House scheduled for April 9th and 10th.

One cool addition to the development teams has been me. I’ve been teaching this class as a TA for the entire semester so far, but Dr. Wallentine also offered to allow me to take the course as well. It’s been kind of weird, because there’s a gap between student and instructor that I’ve been struggling with. Dr. Wallentine made it very clear one which side of that gap the next portion of the project I’ll be on. I’ve been tossed into the mix and added to the assets team as a first class developer.

It’s a mixed blessing, but something I’m ready to handle. First the bad. I’m already really weighted down with the workload I’m attempting to carry (and barely succeeding with a mixture of success and failure), so the addition of yet another project onto that pile is a little worrying. However, this is really the type of stuff that I would rather be doing anyway when it comes to a game development course. This kind of coding is very rewarding and of the instantly-gratifying variety.

So another big project has been put on my plate, and while I probably shouldn’t have this much on my plate at the same time, I’m still looking forward to it.

This has, however, solidified my tentative plans to give up on 505. I sent an email to Dr. Banerjee letting him know that I won’t be attending the course anymore. And–HOLY CRAP–I just looked up the drop dates. It appears that I can still actually drop a class until March 20th! I has resigned to just letting it die as an F, but it looks like tomorrow, getting 505 dropped was just added to my agenda of things to complete.

Could this semester actually be salvageable with decent grades?

So I’ve been doing some grade forecasting, to try and determine what my GPA is going to be at the end of the semester. While I’m just generally curious, I’ve also been seeing the impending doom of my 505 grade. The writing is definitely on the wall, and so I don’t think it will be too long before it’s all over.

The primary problem? I overscheduled. I’m currently enrolled in 18 hours, a heafty feat. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, but it appears that 505 and 520 at the same time is not something that a student wants to attempt. My good friend Cole Hoosier is pulling it off–but he’s an exceptional student with great work ethic (compared to me for sure) and less extra-curriciular stuff. (Read: doesn’t get plowed with friends all the time like I do.) But even Cole is struggling a little bit… this is just hard stuff.

Not just hard, but too much for me. So I started considering my grades, in a couple fashions. First, projections for all classes:

• cis690 - Games Programming - A - Pretty sure I’ll get an A from the course. Though a lot of people would say that it would be rediculous to teach a course and not ace it, it still depends on how Dr. Wallentine rates my performace in the course and the student related work that I do.
• math551 - Applied Matrix Theory - C (maybe D) - While I’ve aced the exams so far, I’ve been pitiful about turning in labs and homework assignments. It might be more than I can pull off to get a C.
• cis520 - Operating Systems - A (maybe B) - Cole, Dan, and I do great work. I’m really pleased with the quality that we’re cranking out, and I have no doubt that we’re going to ace the course. The only think that could hold me back is missing so many attendance quizes. eh.
• cis505 - Programming Languages - F - I’m very behind. 520 and 505 take so much time, that I really only have time for one of them. So I’m going to try and make 520 rule. I don’t really forsee being able to catch back up in 505.
• econ501 - Intermediate Econ - C (maybe B) - This one should be an A, but I just haven’t been paying enough attention or showing up enough. I got a C on the first exam, and I’m expecting about the same on the second exam. (Maybe worse, but I hope not.) I’ll pick it up enough on the final to pull at least a C, might be a B if I get lucky on the next exam and kick the final.)
• arch301 - B or C - This one should be an A too. But I’ve already a bit too much. I think I’ll be able to pull a B, but it might end up landing a C.

So that’s my projects for the year. They are all pretty realistic, so I think that’s a good indicator of exactly what’s going to happen. So calculations give the GPA range at: 2.6 to 2.0. Not very good, but not completely embarassing.

Now lets pretend that I would have been knowledgable enough to drop 505 before the last drop date. The range becomes 3.2 to 2.4. Now that’s not too shabby. A 3.2 would be a world of improvement from my previous performance, and a little more than a 2.4 wouldn’t be too shabby either.

I really doubt that I’m going to pull the high end of that range, I would expect to probably be in the bottom third of the range. But it still shows that I’m not doing horrible in my classes. Instead, I’m doing “okay” in my classes, and I totally screwed up when I scheduled.

However, I want to take a second to target what a common misconception is regarding my scheduling. It’s not really the course hours that are an issue. This was a doable schedule. What really burned me was not knowing that 505 was going to be so tough. It’s not that Dr. Banerjee didn’t warn me, because he certainly did. The problem was that the first assignments in the class were so fun, that I didn’t want to drop the class. The problem with my schedule is simply that 505 and 520 are in the same semester. It’s not to be done by any but the most studeous. Like I mentioned before, my buddy Cole can pull it off. But if you’re a “traditional” student like me that likes to go out on Thursdays and party each weekend. Then it’s not something that you should do.

I had a pretty good weekend. It started of with some Friday night 520 project work, where we started work at about 6:30pm. We made some great progress and actually decided to stop at 11:00pm at a good stopping point that presented itself. We had only bug fixes to go, with all of the significant code completed.

Saturday Dan was out of town, so Cole and I started on 520 around 2pm and worked until about 8pm. We made great progress and had some very nice commits. But the time that 8:00pm rolled around, we had reached another good stopping point. And by good stopping point I mean we were done with the project a week in advance! Oh yeah! There were just a couple bugs left to squash and so we figured we’d let that go until Sunday.

That’s because Saturday night was the Opening Night of The Bunker Beer Pong League. Before playing, Llama, Dave, and I went to Happy Valley and had a great Chinese cuisine meal. (Not an easy thing to find in Manhattan, KS.)

When we got back to The Bunker, Brandon was there waiting for us and it was time to get ready for the event. I started creating the statistician sheets so that Dave could keep track of stats while officiating the round. After creating the statistician sheets and taking a bathroom break, I was stunned to find that like 15 people were waiting in the basement to kick things off. Awesome!

The league play went awesome with one notable exception. I sucked! I mean bad. I had a 0% shooting average on a game, which is–by far– the worst shooting average that happened that night. It was very embarrassing when the highest watched game of the night, Sparkle Motion vs. No Sandbags (that’s my team), was marked by the humiliating defeat where Llama just trashed talked all over me and had all the sauce to back it up. He played awesome, and made me look really bad. Dang it. I’ll be back for you Llama! You just wait!

It was also too bad that not all the teams could have been present. A couple teams being gone is no problem. It was kind of a shame that the Psychedelic Muffs showed up too late for any league play. They did play some great exhibition games, though.

I think I’m seriously going to start getting some practice time in. I’m thinking that after I get back from Boston I’m going to fill some cups up with water and start getting my form down.

Anyway, so then on Sunday after a very full night of Beer Pong, Sunday started up with Cole, Dan, and I working on 520 for most of Sunday. They started around 4:45pm, and I started around 6:05pm for what was going to be a relatively easy shot at the 10% extra credit offered at the end of the project.

It turned out not to be particularly easy, but we had some really great commits and Cole went the extra mile last night to really make ExecV a reality. I just need to follow up with some code updates to our shell and I think we’re going to be good for both the assignment and the extra credit.

It wasn’t a really heavy party weekend, there was way more homework done than partying. But I had a great time with both. Coding 520 with Dan and Cole is truely a pleasure, even if the assignments are a bitch sometimes, and it’s just impossible not to love BPL. Overall, I’m happy with the outcome.

So it turns out that I scheduled my spring break departure for Boston just about an hour too early.

One of the things that I did right at the very beginning of the year was schedule all of the exams that I had in every class into my calendar. I was pleased. Not a single exam during the week before spring break. But there was a wild card, it seems that econ510 didn’t give out a syllabus right at the first day, and it took about a week to get the syllabus. By then I had forgotten to mark the exam dates.

It turns out that Exam 2 is scheduled for 10:30am on Wednesday. I need to leave Manhattan by 10:00am Wednesday in order to make it to Kansas City on time for my flight to Boston. Crap.

I’ve talked to the instructor to try and schedule something to take the exam early, but I’m not completely sure if he’s going to be able to cut me the slack I need to take the exam early. But man, I hope so. I’ve offered to take the exam either Tuesday afternoon during his office hours, or even just an hour early on Wednesday before I leave for the airport. I really hope that one of those times works for him and I can get a little points squeezed out for the exam.

Not that I’m particularly prepared for it, but it’s Economics. It’s like the definition of easy and fun.

Once again I found myself wandering around the net when I stumbled upon BloGTK another blogging client. This particular client seems to be even closer to what I had in mind when I started to consider writing Boof.

This time I’ve (thankfully) found less of a WYSIWYG interface and instead found something much more “geek like” that I can edit the source code directly. BloGTK has spell checking, is able to save and open blog entries, can edit entries that are already submitted, has some basic preview functionality, and generally looks pretty good.

Looking at the goals and constraints that I have written on the Boof project page BloGTK is only short in a couple areas:

• Syntax Highlighting
• Gallery Support
• Plug-in System?
• Support for multiple categories on a single post.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the codebase is completely modular already because I haven’t really looked. Syntax highlighting is a matter of getting a gtksourceview element in there. Gallery support would be much more of a doosey.

At this point I’m quite curious if I should be looking at starting a new desktop blogging project, or if I should be contributing to someone else’s project to get the functionality that I want.

Right now I’m undecided. This program is very close to what I’m going for.

Update: This entire post, including this after-the-fact update, have all been submitted with BloGTK. I’m quite impressed. This would definitely be the first one of the desktop blogging applications that has behaved as-desired on the first try!

I’m definitely going to be downloading the source to this application and checking it out.

The good news, those sleeping pills had me in slumber land in no time. I didn’t toss or turn or anything, I just laid down and then I was out like a light.

The bad news is that I’m just waking up and it’s 3:30pm.

That’s okay though. Now I know. Next time I’ll take a sleeping pill at a reasonable hour, and I should be able to tackle the day no problem. I’m optimistic.

In order to wrangle some life management issues in, I’ve got three new attempts at getting my act (more) together.

First, my room is getting trashy. I used to have a slow build up of trash in my room, just as I naturally was a bit lazy about disposing of garbage while engrossed in whatever I’m doing at the time. However, my recent insistance on eating at home and not going out to eat as much (which is working very well) has led to me having a lot of meals at my computer in my room. This has increased my dish dirtying an order of magnatude and probably double or triple my trash generation. My room and my personal habits just aren’t prepared for this kind of volume.

So on a great suggestion from Mo, tonight I picked up a much bigger trash can so that I can throw away garbage naturally without overflowing the tiny office trash bin like I did before. I also picked up a perferated bin that I can place dirty dishes in to accumulate safely until they are taken to the kitchen. It kind of reminds me of the trash thingies at Panera where they have a trash bin and dish tote next to each other for customers as they finish. I’m hoping that this new duo of room enhancements will drastically cut down the trash in my room by providing an infrastructure that should make cleaning up a little here and there like thrice as easy.

Next, my out of control sleeping habits. I can’t seem to get to sleep at a reasonable hour, nor wake up at a reasonable hour, no matter what I do. So I’ve finally buckled down and purchased an over-the-counter sleep aid. I picked up a generic (equate) package of 25 mg doses of (for all those RN’s and psychology students reading this) Doxylamine succinate. It says to take one tablet 30 minutes before bed time, so hopefully 30 minutes from now this stuff will knock me the heck out. We’ll see.

Hopefully this will be three more steps towards getting back on track.

Lately we’ve been reveling over the amazing effect that the enormous magnet on my new subwoofer for the Jeep has on CRT monitors. Careful not to get “permanently” close, we’ve been swinging it around now and then and marveling at the range of effect. From like three feet or more away I can get seriously noticable color shifts and kind parametric transformation looking effects.

Then, as JD was at his computer downstairs, it becomes joke time. I rush upstairs, grab my massive subwoofer, and trot downstairs. Dave and Jesse are in Jesse’s room and so I quickly toss in there, “Hey, want to see me mess with JD?” They both reply, “Yeah!” and rush out.

I pick up my subwoofer from off the stairs and go into the laundry room, just opposite where JD put his computer. Suddenly Dave realized what was about to happen and went into JD’s room to be ready for what was about to happen.

I start waving my subwoofer near the wall, knowing that his monitors were about two feet away from me on the other side of the wall. As expected, JD’s monitors start massively distorting and color shifting in the other room where he had no idea what was happening.

I hear, “Whoa… Whoa… WHOA SHIT! What the hell!” erupt from the other room while Dave and Jesse try to play it off like they don’t know what’s going on… and doing a moderate job at it. Then, after looking around–not even knowing I was downstairs–JD yells, “TRAVIS!!!” and then bolts out of his bedroom door and looks into the laundry room.

I put on my most innocent face, still holding my sub near the wall, and just reply, “What?”

Then we laughed and retold the story to each other.

Again I have made the jump back to Gnome. Primarily because of my recent fandom of Planet Gnome. It’s not really a fan boy scenario though, I already have a couple of those scenarios. Instead, it’s more of a genuine geek curiousity. These guys are talking about doing cool things, and then I usually want to check them out.

Though, it’s hard to overstate how happy I am with XFCE. These guys do a great job and for the first time I am really happy with my X experience.

So why the change? I just miss some of the bells and whistles that the bug kahuna of Gnome brings to the table, and I want to check out more “on the edge” geekery. How would I go about this change? Simple.

I loaded a fresh Gnome environment and immediately set about making it behave as closely to XFCE as possible, heh heh. This included the layout of my gnome-panels, the whole nine. Anything I could do to make Gnome look and feel like XFCE was the first thing that I did. And I came damn close.

• Taskbar is nearly identical. Actually, I little nicer than before.
• Panel is pretty close. I kind of grew fond of the little side pop-ups on shortcuts that I would use for alternatives. I’m left with drawers now. They are adequate.
• Focus is the same, if not better.
• Window management is greatly inferior. XFCE did the “right” thing with dual monitor setups. I still don’t know how gnome manages to completely overlook the behaviors that make dual monitors from good to great. (Like providing some resistance for placing windows with an edge on the seam.
• Small window or modal dialog stuff sucks in comparison. (Well, technically the windows in Gnome aren’t supposed to be model, but the little popups that would normally be modal.) They pop up right in the center of the entire virtual display, making me read over the seam. Barf.
• I grew accustomed to using a right click on the desktop for an application launch window instead of having to travel all the way over to a menu or panel button. It was just really convenient. But having a “start” button like windows isn’t horrible, I guess.

But all in all I’m pretty happy with the setup. It’s close enough that I don’t feel like my productivity is hampered, and I enjoy the new bells and whistles. We’ll see how long I last before the little things drive me back to XFCE.

Yeah, so it’s coming up on 3:00am and (big surprise), I can’t sleep. I was really doing good today, getting up and on campus earlier than I have in weeks, and I was slated to get tired and go to bed at a reasonable time.

Then the unthinkable happened. I got tired too early. I ended up crashing around 7:30pm and sleeping until around 11:30pm when the phone woke me up. And then I haven’t been able to return. Dang it.

But unfortunately, I don’t want to really start doing anything, because I’m so OCD about all of my little projects that if I start something I’m going to end up staying up all night until it’s completely finished.

So instead I decided to do a bunch of little things that have been in my inbox, here’s the rundown:

• Updated the beer pong league information with the latest team addition.
• Read Slashdot. Twice. (It was just as bad the second time.)
• Headed to Planet Gnome and read the latest from the Gnome guys. Planet Gnome is quickly becoming one of my favorite reads. Of particular note:
  • Software patents moved forward in the European Union… despite public outcry and (more surprisingy) despite the rejection of the idea from a lot of the member states. It looks like the EU might be the perfect government. Everyone in charge appears to be completely insulated from any kind of accountability.
  • Because of the patent thing, the gnome websites are “blacked out”. I just hit “ctrl-a” to select everything to read anyway.
  • Talk about the easy-fix tag in bugzilla. It’s supposed to be a way to mark “entry bugs” for new developers to tackle. Sounds awesome, I want some.
  • Some more bounties have been launched for gnome. Previously it was desktop integration bounties, now it’s memory reduction bounties. Hot. I really like this bounty system, and I hope to be able to participate sometime.
  • Some interesting talk about making web-apps with Python. It got me thinking… I wonder if Mono based ASP.NET will be possible with Python in a “real” way. That might inject enough free software love into the idea of ASP.NET that I might stop gagging at the sound of it. Though, I don’t manage any of my sites on my own servers anymore, so I don’t know if it would matter to me or not.

After new reading Planet Gnome (and thinking I want to finish planet.cis.ksu.edu–but not now so I’m not up all night). I went over to Planet ArsLinux just to see what they are up to. Kind of fun stuff, just not as geek heavy as I like it.

And then the unthinkable happened as I fell into the deep crevass of the blogging abyss. I did one of those online “What _____ are you” quiz thingies–and I’m about to post my results.

Which File Extension are You?

May the geek gods of blogging elitism forgive me for perpetuating that meme.

So over the past couple weeks I’ve had a huge problem trying to get up and attend class and not staying up all night. I’m happy to note that today is the first time that I’ve been on campus before noon in over two weeks. Besides getting more done at work, I’m looking forward to attending classes again.

I feel really out of touch having missed so much class, so I know I’ve got my work cut out for me catching back up. But I think that actually showing up for class will do wonders for my homework grades, since I won’t have to teach myself all of the material from scratch just to complete the homework.

On the agenda for tonight: going to bed earlier than last night and waking up in time for 505! (We’ll see…)