Muhahahahahah....

 

My evil-half-thought-out-plan of not adding anyone to my Face Book Friends thingy unless they discover me first (via whatever means) is progressing well...in a week I've accumulated 4 friends!

 

Now, I'm beginning to think this is a stupid plan, but for the sake of I'm too lazy to change it right now because I have lots of other stuff to do, I'm not going to change it.

 

In any case, so far people have found out about it via this blog and word-of-mouth (I'm guessing).  So let's start a second phase of this experiment: if you have IE (ya ya, I KNOW I need to get comments fixed for non-IE browsers, I just don't know how to fix it), reply with a comment to this post (click view comments at the bottom of the default postview, which takes you to the individual post view, where you click the big "Post comment" button) saying how you found out about my Face Book entry.  I'm also going to add on the rule that only people who have added me to their friends should reply (although I probably wont filter the responses anyway).

Between me and the internet sits my firewall, MS ISA 2004 SP1 (currently).  One of ISA's features is integrated caching (it can also do prefetching and scheduled updates, but I find those features to be more of a pain to manage then they're worth).

 

Now, caching is a great technology and all, and it can really improve performance, but in the past it's been kind of annoying.  Emil (no web site :() runs www.boilerinvasion.org, and so I occasionally try and troubleshoot stuff for him.  Except ISA has this annoying habit of caching that site like crazy.  Consequently, I'm usually more of a hindrance than a benefit when it comes to debugging/opinionating stuff.

 

Fortunately, getting BoilerInvasion to work most of the time was fairly easy — just set the site to tell intermediaries to not cache it (I'm not quite sure what performance impact that's had...any comments Emil?).

 

However, this morning I ran into a wierd bug, which is probably due to caching.  When visiting www.weather.gov to get the temperature before going to class, I refreshed the page (it had been left open from when I went to my earlier class).  And the infromation didn't change.  So I figured it was just IE being wierd and forced a refresh (CTRL+F5), bypassing the IE cache.  And then the results were updated, displaying a nice 52° F.  Then I hit CTRL+F5 again.  And then the results changed back to the earlier values.  Wow!  It dropped 12° in the space of a refresh!

 

So I sat there for a minute or so just force refreshing the page, and it kept alternating back and forth.

 

Cache can be annoying sometimes.  (of course now it's working fine).

Yay!  It's warm!  And the weather is nice!

 

And I'm spending the day inside cramming for a CS251 exam.  Go CS.  Or something.  On the bright side, looking at the previous exams greatly increased my confidence.  But the pressure is still there.

I just finished up Spring Break last week, and it more or less sucked.  I was sick for half of it.  Right before, there was a big CS project due that I completely bombed.  Yay...now I get to take C S 251 again! (at least probably...although that Improbabilty Drive that should be appearing any yesterday now may/may not change that).

 

On the bright side, not everything went horribly.  I got persuaded to join Face Book (www.thefacebook.com), and it looks kind of interesting/neat.  Not sure I really get the point of it though.  Why not just use blogs for social networking?  Although I see the point Jeff Sandquist makes in http://www.jeffsandquist.com/PermaLink,guid,9b24bccb-1515-4509-bbb6-30f8acd113b2.aspx.

 

I also got a good bit of rest and relaxation, which is always good.  And I got to see a FIRST (www.usfirst.org, www.boilerinvasion.org) Regional competition.  Kind of sad to see the lack of actual practical applicability from my high school (let's just say they didn't do so well in the competition).  Better luck next year 461!

The Intranet project at work finally shipped last Thursday before last (or something...2005-03-10).  Yay!

 

Interestingly enough, the usage stats show my load generating app with the largest amount of hits (by an order of magnitude), followed by...me.  I'll see how things go over time.

Sometimes its fun to join a meme.  http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html

 

And I agree with Bruce Schneier that the Department of Homeland Security could quite possibly seek to remove this terrorist manual from the internet (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/03/destroying_the_1.html).

 

Anyway, I'm now actively pursueing Method 1, including acquisition of the probability manipulation device.  I mean, the movie is coming out soon, so there must have been a prop,  and it's pretty improbable that a prop would actually be a working Improbability Drive system...and it'd be even more improbable if it just happened to pop into my hands yesterday all of a sudden...

 

So now all I have to do is sit back and wait.  Muhahahahaha...

My parent's went to Spain last Saturday, and just got back tonight.  They took my camera, so there are lots of pictures :).  I've uploaded them all to a new folder here

 

Enjoy!

 

Editted 2005-02-28 05:44Z:

Hmm...after looking at them, I think somebody had fun with the camera in Movie mode.  Or didn't realize that's what mode the camera was in.  Anyways, it's nice to know that that feature actually works, since I never use it.

First, a bit of backstory.  Last summer I upgraded my Dell OptiPlex GX260 to a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC.  I had a bunch of problems with it, but eventually everything got ironed out and it works, and I love it.

 

Back in December, I purchased an ATI eHome Wonder VE to use a second tuner.  Well, that ran into hardware compatibility issues with my Hauppauge PVR-250MCE, so I ordered an ATI eHome Wonder to replace it.  Finally, after 6 weeks, the new tuner arrived.  It installed fine and everything works.

 

So along comes Friday night, and I've got a bunch of free time; no work until tomorrow, hehe...  So I decide to watch some TV and try out the "Record and view" capabilities of my new dual tuner setup.

 

Hmm...not so good signal.  This is a problem.  Other people have the problem too.  Damn you Purdue Residence Halls!  You let the cable go out for the UMPTEENTH TIME.

 

Now, normally it isn't this bad...just poor signal quality, but if you're really patient it's bearable.  MCE just tried to start recording Battlestar Galactica.  Ooops....fatal error..."A signal could not be detected on 41 SCIFI".

 

GAH.  Thanks for ruining my night, Earhart Residence Hall.

My housing hunt is over!  I actually have a place to live next year.  Yay!

 

This is the first time I've ever rented an apartment, so it's been an exciting experience.  But surety is nice too...especially when there's so much else going on (like the CS project/lab due in 9 hours).

Sorry about not posting for a few weeks, but I've been really busy at work working on the Intranet stuff.  With the target deployment date approaching and the beginning of user testing against the site I've been refining a lot of things on it.  Thank goodness for VPN's!

 

On the downside, practically all my time actually spent on site during business hours is taken up by meetings.

 

This week I'm busy with a lot of midterms, and the week after that the Intranet goes live at work, so there probably wont be many posts for a bit.