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The end has come for the hard drive in my fantastic little laptop. Sadly, it was not a merciful death. Over the last 16 hours the hard drive has come to a screeching, grinding, crashing halt. The AppleCare representative–as expected–was incredibly nice and helpful. We both had a good laugh as I told the story of the last 12 hours of my hard drive’s life.

Then, when it came time for me to pop in the original installation CD I was unable to find it. I’ve torn my room completely apart from top to bottom, but with no luck. I must have accidentally tossed the CD folder. Lame.

I’m pretty upset about things, but I hope that this won’t end up costing me any money. This would be exactly why I purchased the AppleCare. The time without my laptop will be difficult, though.

However, the worst thing about the whole ordeal came right at the end after the technician was setting up my repair order. They require my username and password! That’s right! I was required to state my user name and password in order to have a repair call.

Sadly, since I was unable to boot the computer I had to give them my “real” password, leaving me in a state of shock and dismay. As a computer science student, computer generalist hobbiest, and a systems administrator, I type my password hundred of times a day to access all of the various resources I need in a day.

It was like I had just give a skeleton key to every door I touch, and now I have to change all of locks. Make no mistake, losing my laptop for several days while it is serviced really sucks. However, having to change my passwords on everything, that is so much worse.

I’m pleased to announce that Jesse Printz and I have began an epic journey of discovery and scientific delight with the purchase of a desktop carnivorous plant kit from ThinkGeek for our office at CIS.

We’ll be launching our project site here very soon, I can’t wait!

As Dave put it, “This is a big step!  Are you sure you two are ready for this?”  We definitely are, and as of last night Lindsay and I are on a Family Plan with T-Mobile sharing 700 anytime minutes and unlimited messaging.

I’m very pleased so far with the way that everything works.  I already payed almost $70 for my plan after adding $15 worth of text messaging and $6 worth of internet access to my plan each month.  With the new family plan, Lindsay and I split $60 in plan and $20 in text messaging.  Overall, my personal bill went from $70 to $40, and I think I’m getting a better deal.  In fact, since Lindsay previously didn’t have coverage at her new appartment and it was always a pain to get a hold of her there, I know I’m getting a good deal.

Lindsay is picking up her first personal bill, however.  She was previously on her Mom’s family plan with Sprint and now will be paying a phone bill for the first time.  So in a way, I guess it was two “big steps”.  It was a big step for us, to commit to a joint financial obligation, and it was a big step for her, a step towards financial independance from her Mom.

I don’t know about you, but all this talk about relationships and independance makes me think of a mushy fireworks show.

I left a pretty open ended blog post about wanting to switch to one of the hot new Intel x86 Mac Pros, whenever they came out.  Well they’ve came out, and are just about as glorious as I thought they could be.  (Although they did go a little stingy in the video card department, which I think kind of stinks.)

However, despite my lust for a new Mac Pro, I have decided not to switch.  Instead, I spent about $300 upgrading my computer to bring it up to the latest generation of games and I’m just going to call it good.  I ended up grabbing a new motherboard, a new PCIe GeForce 7600GT, and a new hard drive to bring my PC back into the swing of things.

Now WoW should play great, and I should be able to handle Quake Wars whenever it hits the shelves.  Of course you’ll notice “should” play great, rather that “plays great”.  I’ve had the hardware for a while, but ran into an unexpected problem.  I have a gig of CAS2 RAM of which I’m very happy with.  Unfortunately Vista isn’t particularly happy with it, and even with a gig of RAM it runs out pretty frequently and starts thrashing, killing my sweet frame rate.

I haven’t yet decided what my solution will be.  Sadly, I only have two memory slots and they are both full with 512meg sticks.  So if I am to increase my total amount of RAM, I’ll have to replace everything I have.  Bummer.

But, anyway, the point of this post is to say:  I’m not switching.  At least not for a couple years.  After I graduate, we’ll see.

Well, for quite some time I’ve been procrastinating a number of certain… legalities… in my life.  I misplaced my drivers license long ago in a taxi-cab at KCI airport and my tag has expired for my motorcycle.

I’ve just let it go for months now, just because it sucks to pay the fees for this junk even when the protections provided for those fees are minimally desired at best. (Plus I like having my SSN as my KS-DL id number, I’m not in the sheep-like minority that thinks “hiding” one’s social security number can undo the security concerns of the nation’s security policies.  You can’t re-secret something.)  However, recently two important things happened.

• I turned 25, making my insurance insanely cheap compared to before.
• I started to value “not having to worry if a cop is behind me and can see my tag” more than I valued the $200 it took to get legal.

So as of lunch today, I’m sporting a brand new drivers license–albeit printed on dangerously feeble thermal paper–a new tag, and new insurance from Progressive for the 1991 Suzuki Katana I’ve purchased from Cole.

Recently the Panda Express in the K-State Student Union opened a sushi bar in the middle of the food court.  This has opened a unique opportunity for me–to have sushi on a regular basis–but not without it’s concerns.

I suppose the best way to start a review about Panda Express’s Sushi would be to start with a mini review of Panda Express.  In short: I love it.  I find that Panda Express is apex of homogenized Americanized chinese food.  They take the majority of cliche “chinese” food, and they produce it in mass quantities with a consistancy that is nothing short of professional.  You can get a heaping scoop of Orange Chicken any time of day and night and always expect a charming, savory entree of breaded and sauce covered delightfulness.

Panda Express is not in the same category as Happy Valley or Royal Thai, and when you are looking for authentic or extremely high quality asian cuisine one of those would be a good choice.  But if you’re looking for quick, satisfying, inexpensive, delicious Chinese food, Panda Express dominates the category.  Even the local buffets can’t come close.

So with that out of the way, what about sushi?  I was initially a bit torn.  I love sushi and sashimi in all it’s forms–typically reveling in it even more as it becomes more foreign–but I’ve always considered sushi a premium food.  I think most would agree.  After all, “sushi grade” fish is fish that has been marked of the highest quality.  On top of that, we’re in Kansas here… not the Gulf or Pacific Coast.  Seafood in general suffers greatly at the hand of frozen transport to the land locked midwest.

So the question remained, could Panda Express, the pinnacle of good-enough-to-be-delightful, pull off what I considered to be a premium food?

Today at lunch I decided to find out, and in the boldest way I could think of.  I showed up at the food court at 1:35, after the rush, after the Panda Express Sushi stand closed, and all that was left were little plastic containers of pre-made sushi that had been sitting for an indeterminate amount of time. Not a recipe for success, but that was exactly the point.  In addition, after purchasing my meal I didn’t eat it right away.  Instead I wandered over to my office in Nichols Hall to dine at my keyboard.

My little platter consisted of four norimaki, three nigiri, a little squirt of wasabi, a touch of ginger, and two decorative fake grass things that looked like a cross between wax paper and tissue paper cut with fringe.  Sadly the sushi preparer did not choose to mark my package with what sushi I was served.  While I had no problem identifying my food, I think that the “average” customer here at Kansas State would probably benefit from an explicit list of ingredients.  My particular package had the “nigiri combo”, which was a shrimp nagiri, a tuna nagiri, and a salmon nagiri, and four identical California rolls.

The verdict?  Good!  I was pleasantly surprised, indeed!  Each of the items were very tasty with most of the qualities I’ve come to expect.  They were well formed, they stayed together great, they looked good, they had an excellent texture, and they tasted both delicious and “clean”.   That’s probably one of my favorite parts about sushi, how it just tastes like such a refined, subtle, “clean” food item.

So the one thing that this sushi was missing?   Well, I guess one would say quality.  I was very happy with the dish, it was very much worth the $6.99 that it cost to purchase.  However most of my run-ins with sushi have been at excellent locations and venues to which I have grown accustom to not just “good” or “great” sushi, but “oh my goodness this is like a b-boy dance of excitement in my mouth” sushi.

Panda Express Sushi isn’t going to take the place of Kyoto’s steakhose any time soon as my favorite place to get sushi, but when I’m looking for a nice quick lunch and don’t feel like a heavy carton of orange chicken, Panda Express Sushi definitely fits the bill.

Recently I’ve been getting the urge to start blogging again, but without much enthusiasm for my personal site.  In that vein, I’m going to give it a bit of an overhaul.  Normally a “I’m still alive” or “I’m working on things” post is a little passe, but I’ve decided to work on the site more-or-less live, so I thought that it would be nice to fire up a little blurb.

I’ve also had a request from a number of friends and colleagues have asked me to start putting “reviews” on my blog, since I just like to try new things a lot and then talk about them.  Seems like a good idea to me, as well.  So hopefully in addition to the usual this-is-my-life fluff, I’ll see about getting some decent reviews up here as well.

I’ve been considering the possibility of “switching” (ala, moving to a primarily Apple environment) for quite some time now, but recently I’ve convinced myself that it’s exactly what I want to do.  While I do think that there is a general feature parity between my Ubuntu (or Gentoo) desktops and the OS X desktop, there are a couple killer features that are just worth the switch.

First, multimedia.  I’ve strugged with media player after media player, even took a very brief stint trying to help out Banshee, but time and time again all I want is to run iTunes.  The excellent, crash free(!), library management is exactly what my 16k songs and I need.  On top of that, lately I’ve been having a great time with the iTunes music store.  While I still can’t justify purchases that support the RIAA in any way the free Download of the Month has been very enjoyable… in fact, I would be completely sold if not on the principle of hating the RIAA.  The only reason that Apple hasn’t gotten a nice little chunk of my disposible income (that is, when I have any) is solely that the RIAA are scum.  I’m also digging podcasts.

Second, surprisingly enough, the Address Book.  The seemly insignificant application on OS X is exactly what I want for my contact management needs.  Not only is it slick and easy, it full integrates with my cellphone and chat clients.  Between Address Book, my Symbian60 running phone, iSync, and Adium, contact management “just works”.  And not only does it “just work”, it also works exactly the way that I want it to… seemless and intuitively.

Only two things are holding me back at this point.  The obvious one is cash, though significant money is always just a matter of time.  The second is that I want to wait for an Intel based desktop system like a PowerMac.  I have the peripherals that I want, I just want the desktop computer.  But I also am pretty demanding with my computer, so a Mac Mini won’t cut it for me.  While there certainly appears to be a bit of a price premium of about $600 to join the “professonal” teir of Apple desktop computers, after my experiences with my iBook and now PowerBook… I think it’s just plain worth it.

As a third concern, I don’t really “need” a new computer yet.  It would be nice, but I’m still getting along fine with my current computer.  Maybe by the time September or so rolls around it will be more of a need rather than just a desire.  We’ll see.

Warning: Rant Incoming
Right now, Intrust Bank is treating me to the most financial frustration I’ve ever had in my life. Over the course of the last three paychecks, I’ve paid over $360 in overdraft fees in huge chunks. None have been blatant overages, instead all have been the result of “holds”.

It works like this, when a merchant runs a debit or credit card, they have the option of placing a “hold” on the money before actually making the withdrawl. Despite the sound of it, this money is gone the instant that the hold is placed, even though the merchant might not actually make the transaction for up to a week.

While this money is gone, and can (and will) most certainly cause overdrafts, there is absolutely no mention of this hold on any of the online services. Business appears as usual, only showing up on the online system after the transaction has actually “posted” to the account. Not really that big of deal, just don’t spend more money then you have.

But then arises the challenge. As a college student working full time and schooling full time I’m cutting it close. I have good chunks of credit card debt that I’m struggling to overcome and sometimes I really have to cut it down to the wire to make ends meet. I watch my check book fanatically to avoid overages, but in this day and age not all transactions are initiated by me directly. The vast majority of bills and services are automatically debited from my account. And I can handle that, they tell me what day they debit the account and I’m more than capable of making sure the money is there (at least, when I honestly have the money.)

But what I don’t know, is what day they put the hold on the account for that payment. It’s not the day of the actual payment, and the day of the actual payment is the only day that is ever in writing anywhere. T-Mobile, or Blizzard, or whomever have a due date, and the transaction to make the debit always takes place on that day. But that’s not really the day that the transaction took place. The transaction truely took place on whatever day they requested the hold, because on the day of the hold the money was removed from my account and I can overdraft myself on the lesser amount. The lesser amount that I cannot see.

My local branch, who has been very kind as I’ve called to bother them each week to find out why I’ve lost another $29 x 4 to over draft fees can look right up on a computer and let me know what day the hold was put into place and why I overdrafted. But they’ve never been able to tell me why I can’t see that on the online system. At least, until today.

I called the 1-800 line for customer service on Intrust, to more or less beg and plead my case that showing the “holds” on the online banking system would make my entire life better. She was quick to ask if I knew why that wasn’t the case, and I was eager to hear. Apparently the debit card tracking system is not integrated with system that the online reporting software accesses. Instead, the online reporting system only has access to those transaction that have been “posted” to the account.

Of course, my simple solution would be to simply post the holds. The bank is literally taking out the money and holding it in escrow, and while I’m not an accountant that appears to be a seperate account to me. But they don’t and I’m left blind with only overage charges to remind me of what really happened.

I don’t even have a problem with this practice, this is fine. I just want transparency, I want to see it happen. Of course, the bank is quick to remind me that if I was keeping a checkbook register that I would know how much money I had “really” without using the online system. But in the same breath she would inform me that when a hold is placed, it doesn’t even have to be for the amount of the purchase. Even by the explaination of the bank manager, if a bar runs my card, they might just put a $60 hold on the account to make sure I have enough to handle the night’s drinking. As soon as they place that hold, the money is gone. But if I only end up spending $9 and the bar posts to the bank a week later, I (in essense) get a refund of $51…. but I will never see that happen. However, if it took the bar a week to post, and I had started with $70 in my account and spend $20 at Chili’s that week; I will be overdrafted. Despite the fact that I only spent $9 at the bar and my well kept check register says I have $61 dollars remaining in my account. And the teller’s statement regarding that scenario? “Well, that’s the merchant’s fault, not the bank’s.”

It’s true, I agree. But I don’t care whose fault it is. I want my bank to protect me from financial institutions that I might not completely understand. It might be the merchant’s fault, but if my bank just posted the hold like a true transaction, I would have known there was an issue and I could have avoided any fees or, in my case, huge financial trauma.

This is because holds are invisible transactions, but they are really taking place. Well, Intrust Bank, as I have told your kind customer service representatives, I need help. I need to see these holds taking place, because I do not have the financial stability as this time to leave a couple extra hundred dollars in my account “just in case” some merchant decides to cover their potential risk using my money. I have your credit card with overdraft protection, but thanks to all of these overdraft fees it is now maxed out. I’m not asking for fees to be removed, or the system to be changed. I’m asking that you integrate holds as first class transactions that I can see, so that I can protect myself from “lazy” merchants that do not post their transactions for long periods of time.

Especially, over weekends. As a mere mortal, uneducated in banking magic, I have little idea how to resolve a weekend of transactions that all “take place” on Monday. But it changes from difficult to impossible when there are invisible transactions that no one will even talk about until I’ve already been charged at least $29.

To make it more frustrating, my last two paychecks have been the largest I’ve ever received, because I’ve been working my ass off to try and get ahead… well, at least not behind. And now I sit at -$262.68 and won’t be able to do a thing about it for two weeks, when I get paid again.

This rant about complimentary tech support calls is worth posting, if only for a good laugh.  It’s a little harsh at time, but what good rant isn’t.

These last few weeks have been pretty intense at work.  I’ve found my role in the office has drifted almost exclusively to development tasks (which I like), and I have been lately working on a suite of web applications to take care administrivia tasks and provide self-service to users in our department.

This has been an interesting blessing.  With the first major task of writing an authentication plugin for TurboGears that uses our ActiveDirectory for authenication/user and group management, I’ve found that I’ve been “forced” to learn more in the last few weeks than I’ve needed to learn on the job in a long time.  It’s been a pleasure, but at times it feels almost like I’m studying for a final eight hours a day.

A good portion of this learning process was expected, part of the reason that I selected these projects and designed them the way I did was because of the opportunities for expanding my skillset.  However, as layer after layer of abstraction peeled away I found myself learning lots about areas I wasn’t expecting (yet) to attack.  From function decorators to disttools, from all of this learning I’m really starting to feel like I’m establishing a strong skillset in Python.  And it feels good.  I see my code improving constantly, and in very signifcant ways.

Previously expensive algorithms are being replaced with list comprehensions, duplicated logic is becoming completely unduplicated.  I don’t know how to describe things concretely, but I’m really having a good time.

But on top of this already hectic learning schedule with Python, I’ve also found myself busy with other concerns at work.  I’ve found myself playing the role of “senior systems administrator” a lot lately, and problems both major and minor have needed guidance.  Our new systems team guru, Jesse Printz, rocks; I’ve been spending time working with him to assist on whatever’s at the moment with varying degrees of importance.   His work on the new support wiki has quintupled the speed of progress on that project to the point that now it’s just waiting on my code!

All things considered, I’ve been working very hard lately.  Cranking a solid 40 hours a week  and really making those hours count.  I suppose that’s quite good for the department, all things considered.  And not only could I use the money, I really value the experience developing in Python that I’ve been having.

A while back I was helping Lindsay figure out how much some more RAM was going to cost for her computer (that I ended up rebuilding, yet again) and I stumbled onto the price for some new RAM on my laptop.  I’ve been putting off buying any RAM for my PowerBook just out of fear of the price.

Turns out, it was only like sixty bucks to add 512 megs! So as soon as I could I put in an order at Crucial for a little DIMM.  The results have been amazing.  My laptop feels like a completely new computer.  Besides unimportant things that this has done for my laptop experience (like I can now run WoW on my laptop), it has revitalized my use of the laptop almost one hundred fold.  It surprises me how much that nagging slowness was bothering me.

As such, I’ve been integrating my laptop back into my daily routine with fantastic results.  An auxillary audio cable turns my laptop into the jukebox at work.  The additional RAM avoids chunky audio over the network at parties.  Synergy has brought keyboard and mouse sharing to my workspace environments with a level of simplicity I didn’t know was possible.

The RAM brought so much life back into my laptop, I’m in love all over again.  It’s like a brand new laptop.

Today an “Action Alert” came to my inbox from the American Cancer Society. The American Cancer Society is my premier charity organization and (typically) without fail receives every bit of support I can give. But then this email was sent to my mailbox and I was torn:

The U.S. Senate is about to eliminate guaranteed insurance coverage for mammograms and other vital cancer screenings.

As an active American Cancer Society Relay For Life volunteer, we’re asking you to help stop them. Imagine you or a loved one getting your mammogram or other cancer screening and then being told the insurance company refuses to cover it.

If passed, insurance companies would no longer have to cover mammograms and other life-saving cancer screenings. Pap smears, colonoscopies, prostate cancer screenings, clinical trials, and off-label drug use are all at risk of no longer being covered by insurance companies! Email your U.S. Senators right now. Tell them to oppose S.1955.

So why the confusion? Mammograms and cancer screenings are absolutely critical prevention methods, right? Well, definitely. Each time a mammogram, pap smear, colonoscopy, or prostate screening catches cancer early, it is almost certainly a saved life.

But “mandated coverage” is one of the government interventions to the medical care system that is screwing things up so much. Mandated coverages are exactly why insurance is so damned expensive that fewer and fewer Americans can afford it (especially without the help of their employers, which is a rediculous pairing to start with). It’s simple supply side pressure economics: having mandated coverages force costs up on all insurance companies causing an industry wide supply shift to more expensive/less coverage.

While it is certainly fantastic that everyone that has insurance currently has cancer screening included in that coverage, it’s not fantastic that millions of Americans have no insurance at all as a result. I find the trade off very difficult to support. While those who face cancer with insurance might be tested and hopefully saved, those with no insurance what-so-ever will most certainly find out too late and perish. I can’t support an action that will have the government forcing more people into the latter category. Just because it’s easier to see those that are saved, doesn’t make those that are lost any less important. At least not to me.

I think I’ll just let this particular “Action Alert” slide by.

We had a very strange anomaly happen Wednesday night when we hosted an afterparty for the Copus/Placate show. Someone really tried to trash our house. After the night was over someone had sprayed shaving cream all over a bathroom, stole food from the kitchen and strewn it about, and generally behaved as a petty vandal.

What made this particularly stunning was that just this last Saturday we hosted the Jager Olympics with around 800 people making an appearance at The Bunker. There was no major damage of any kind. The place was a little trashed from the gelatin, but it was cleaned up and everything was proportionally in good shape.

But here on a Wednesday night, where we know just about everyone that showed up in a group of maybe 45, some asshole(s) try to tear up the place. It’s just disappointing.

Update: Strangely, this blog entry was written before the “Partial Set List for Guitar Hero 2″, but it didn’t get published.  Hmph.

Continuing in a long surge of excitement over the potential of Guitar Hero 2, the tides of gaming news brought a partial set list from Red Octane.  Here’s what they have so far:

• “War Pigs” - Black Sabbath
• “Who was in my room last night?” - Butthole Surfers
• “Strutter” - KISS
• “YYZ” - Rush
• “Psychobilly Freakout” - Reverend Horton Heat
• “You Really Got Me” - Van Halen

Can I get a “holy crap”?  With only 6 songs announced of an expected 50+ songs, I already love where they are going with this.  The absence of Van Halen and Black Sabbath from the first game is a very common “complaint” lodged against the game, an unfortunate necessity without the success and budget to get rights for songs with that level of stature.  The Butthole Surfers track is a dive directly into the 90’s alternative rock scene, a challenging era to crack for a guitar game (most 90’s rock was about front men more-so than guitarists).  Rush fills a similar void to the Boston track in the first game, and KISS has to be in a game like this… they are on absolutely everything else that can hold a name on it.

I guess what I’m saying is that this tiny preview of the set list confirms what I already confident in, this Guitar Hero development team really have their heads wrapped around the potential of this game.  The setlist in the first game was well crafted within the limitations that a relatively unknown unknown property can do.  Now that Guitar Hero is a monumental success, the team is rising up to a new level of content, but without losing a single bit of the polished consideration that made the first game so freaking awesome.

I’m pumped.  Can you tell I’m pumped?

Now that the week is over I’ve finally had some time to look back and try to soak it all in. And with it over, I can say that it was too much.

The annual Jager Olympic party at The Bunker was this last weekend and it was truely epic. But, of course, in order to get that epic scale it was necessary to do an unprecidented amount of work. That work began last week with the eBay purchase of a new direct draw beer dispenser. It spiraled out of control from there.

The new draft system is a TDD-3 from True Food Service USA, and looks a little something like this:

In fact, it looks very similar, except that our draft system actually has two taps per tower rather than one tap per tower as shown in the photo. Of critical interest to the story is the following two facts: the system is 70″ x 28″ x 37″ in size (without towers) and has a crated weight of 335 pounds. Not really affordable to ship and not easy to move.

The shipping problem was “solved” by Dave and I leaving at 6:00am on Tuesday morning for the distant town of Springdale, Arkansas to pick up the draft system ourselves. We made a solid trip there and just ended up shoving the draft system into the back of his Explorer with a forklift and then heading back to Manhattan (all in one day/night.)

But this was not before making a couple stops in Olathe, KS. With the initial goal of getting some tips from our good friend “Tard” who is a “Beer Man” in Olathe, we also needed to stop by JD Hillen’s parent’s place in order to use their table saw for a few choice cuts. This is because the arrival of the new draft system brought another major project into the fold: the bar was to be expanded.

Another 3 feet of bar was added to the inside edge of the Bunker Bar, no minor feat. In the course of one week, we built a new subfloor, bar support, and bar surface for the Bunker Bar. This included a dismanteling of the existing bar in order to fit the beer draft system in and relocate the mixed drink station’s ice basin and soda gun manifold.

While that would have been more than enough to fill an entire week of labor, there was still vinyl to be made and cut for the Beer Pong and Beer Bong tournaments along with 90 gallons of gelatin to cook for the Jello Wrestling event.

We ran it right up to the wire when the Jager Olympics finally kicked into gear. We were ran absolutely ragged when the event started and continued to do well and scrape by until it was over. The popular consensus is that this year’s Jager Olympics was the most amazing party anyone had ever seen. Which is awesome, that’s what we were going for.

The events were great. The crowd was massive. We managed to down the pallete of Keystone kegs that were purchased (a pallete is 5) and much of the stock of mixed drinks. The bar was ran in part by residents and in part by a crack team of professional bartenders that came in from Aggieville (including the amazing Kate Collins and followed later by Cheri Freund). But when it was all over, we were mostly just tired. Estimations collected by door guards were aggregated and initial numbers suggest that over 800 people crossed the threshhold to the Jager Olympics with a peak of about 275 at any one time. Over 30 rounds of Jello Wrestling took place with every possible combination of male and female contestants in groups of two or three.

As a house, we were a little bit less estatic. The party was great, the numbers speak for themselves, but there were a few things lacking for us. We did way too much work in the week leading up to the party, and as a result the fatigue crept in now and then. The Jello Wrestling was a little ‘out of hand’ as all of the floor surfaces of the house were completely covered. An emergency scrubbing session started at 5:00am and went for a couple hours after we managed to get everyone out of the house.

But most of all, while we had over 800 people at the house, it was surprising to us how many of those people were complete strangers. I worked the front door for about two and a half hours that fell around the time that Aggieville closed. In that entire time one friend from the CS curriculum showed up that I chatted with. Besides that everyone was a blank.

It’s not that we regret having the party, that’s not it at all. It was truely a legendary event. But we are certainly looking forward to limiting the size of future events in some fashion. I long for relatively tame after-parties from Copus concerts and a return of the Beer Pong League that provided great times every single weekend for months without getting a thousand people we don’t know attending.

Of course, during this week there were still work and classes to be handled by all of the residents, so this is just kind of the bulk of the iceburg. I know I’m really happy that it’s over, and I look forward to many more gatherings–of a more controlled nature–at The Bunker.

Now I just want to rest…

Slashdot delivered amazing news like none other today when they linked to a recently announced…

Wow, I can’t tell you how excited I am to hear about this.  There is an interview over at IGN with John Tam that is definitely worth a read, but here are the highlights that make Guitar Hero II the hottest game ever for me:

• Uses the same guitar(s)
• 55+ new songs
• 40 new songs from big labels.  (With bigger bands now that Guitar Hero is huge.)
• Co-operative multiplayer where there are two (one for each player) tracks for each song. Players select which instrument they want to play, either paired as Lead and Rhythm or Lead and Bass.
• Practice mode.  Even loop a part of a song to practice just that part.
• New characters, venues, guitars.

This is just going to be too awesome!

Sweet action. I just submitted my first (barely) significant patch to an open source project. The patch for Banshee should take care of bug 333893, adding “fuzzy” searching and the ‘-’ (NOT) operator to the search widget thingie.

It’s funny, but I’m a little bit nervous about submitting the patch. While my code is typically quite good, I’m sure that’s at least partially due to the “big fish, little pond” situation here at K-State. So I can’t help but be nervous if my patch will be good enough for the project, and if not I hope that someone will help me get it up to an acceptable quality.

Anyway, this is a big deal for me and I’m pretty happy about it.

For the longest time I’ve been pining for iTunes on Linux.  The reason?  I’ve been fighting linux media players time and time again to just be stable with my large music collection, while iTunes takes it without so much as a studder.

The music players that I’ve messed with the most are Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Muine, soI figured I would give a small review of them while I’m whining, and to be fair, I’m not reviewing them on two fronts.  First as a user, and now as a young developer looking to get involved.

The first was Muine.  After moving from XMMS and XMMS-like programs I hit the ground running with Muine due to it’s simple smooth interface.  I loved the “add album to playlist” feature and was lulled into a happy place by the auto-downloading of album art making that particular window as exciting as a shelf full of “real” CD’s (without the RIAA guilt).  Unfortunately that feature which had lulled me into happiness stopped working when some business with the Amazon developer key thingie got in the way of downloading album covers.  What at first looking like a really busy project that was going to be making my dreams come true in short order, turned out to go a bit stale almost right away.  I was saddened.

After a while I started to long for the library functionality that I enjoyed on my PowerBook.  This was entirely thanks to a recent set of downloads that brought me the collection of Billboard Top 100 songs from 1950 something until 2004.  Suddenly my signal to noise ratio when looking for something to listen to shot through the roof and I needed help finding my songs.  So I decided to give Rhythmbox a shot.  This is the “default” gnome go at an iTunes clone, and it has a lot of things going for it.  The Artist-Album browser at the top fo the window is devine and the over all experience seemed to be snappy.  That is… when it doesn’t crash.  What turned out to be a long standing theme with any media player I use in linux, is frequent crashes when trying to import my library.  For whatever reason there isn’t an open source music player/organizer on the planet that can load 15,000+ songs without crashing.

For a while I could build the library in short bursts with the Rhythmbox in the “stable” branch and then when completed go back to the “~x86″ branch for the increased functionality.  But there were a number of “small” behavioral things that were driving me nuts.  Two examples:

1. I’m feeling a little “80’s” today, so I flip to the “Billboard Top 100 of 1984″ in the browse album and see what there is to see.  Oh yeah!  Right there at number 44 is Huey Lewis & The News singing “The Heart of Rock & Roll”.  That was a good year for Huey if I remember, so I click on Huey Lewis & The News in the browse artist selection box to “drill down” and get the Huey Lewis hits from 1984.  But I can’t… because for some reason selecting something in the browse artist selection box “resets” the browse album selection box to “all” instead of keeping the setting.  Weird.
2. Most importantly, when adding new songs to the library, no progress meter is shown.  When a media player has a strong propensity to crash when loading songs… it really stinks to have no idea when/where/why it crashed.
3. This application is coded in GObject C… and I’m just not sure that I want to learn GObject C.  From a guy that adores Python, C feels like digging the chunnel with a spoon instead of a tunnel boring machine.

So I kept looking and came across Banshee.  First points for Banshee, it looks good.  Really good, sharp and clean with a more modern feel.  It wows me out of the gates with a slick progress meter for importing songs and the ability to asynchronously add songs to the queue to be imported at will.  Super work.   It still has it’s warts, however… it’s written in C# on Mono, which is something that I want to learn anyway… hmmm.  Anyway, the big bugs:

1. When importing new music, CPU usage shoots up to like 100% and lags anything that tries to say otherwise.  Totally impolite, like totally.
2. Still crashes frequently when importing music.
3. Filling my window with songs takes long time.  Say I’m on a playlist and then move back to the unfiltered main window… I can expect several seconds of hardcore “omg run!” from Banshee as it fills the window.
4. Typing “1984″ in the search box will get me the Billboard Top 100 of 1984, but typing “1984 huey” won’t give me anything.

The verdict?  I really need to stop being the needy quiet guy and start being a needy contributer.  I’ve joined the Banshee mailing list and I’m going to lurk for a little while and start to soak up the atmosphere.  Hopefully I can also get in contact with a Banshee developer with some experience for a touch of mentoring to get me started.  We shall see, I don’t know if anything will come of this.  But I do know that the best way to make sure the features that I care about most get attention is to be willing to put some of the work in myself, and I think I’m willing to do that.

Wow! I don’t know what exactly happened, but this morning my doorbell rang and I just had this feeling that my monitors were in. Sure enough, when I get to the front door Alex is signing for my two brand new Dell 1907FP monitors.

The impressive part? The scheduled delivery was anytime between the 14th and the 18th. Turns out that DHL doesn’t mind going just a litte bit faster than scheduled, and I think that’s awesome. This seems worth remembering, since I didn’t even pay for accellerated shipping or anything, I took the free 3-5 day shipping offer that was available to university students through Dell.

The monitors are hella sweet. I was nervous about them being a little different than the monitors that I have at work (which are 1901FPs) but it turns out that these monitors are better in pretty much every single way.

I’m a happy camper.