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Jul. 12th, 2008 @ 07:48 pm Computer Woes
Current Mood: aggravated
Tags:
I'm recovering from a Windows-related mishap that started with my user profile corrupted and wound up with my entire user directory (including settings and documents) deleted. I was able to create a new account and mostly restore with a combination of backup (several months old) and an undelete utility. I didn't lose a huge amount of work, but I need to remember to keep my backups more current...
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Error
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Jun. 10th, 2008 @ 08:31 pm Spending Money
Current Mood: chipper
Tags: , , ,
Sunday brunch at The Druid in Inman is a bit on the expensive side, but their Irish breakfast is amazingly good.

In unrelated news, some graduation gifts (in monetary form) arrived in the mail from various relatives. Not sure what I'll buy yet, but I have an inkling.

Now I need to write some proper thank you notes...
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Moochery
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Jan. 30th, 2008 @ 09:55 pm More of the Best, Programming and Otherwise
Current Mood: chipper
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Programming:Other:
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L33t
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Nov. 28th, 2007 @ 02:35 pm Entering the Final Stretch
Current Mood: chipper
Tags: , , , , ,
I keep meaning to write a journal entry, then I keep putting it off...

Thanksgiving Break was great. Hanging out with Cleveland peoples, good food (including fresh salsa made by my brother, Corky and Lenny's, IHOP, and delicious Thanksgiving dinner), a rare session of DnD, lots of sleep... I feel rested for the first time in ages.

I had to pay for my train ticket back twice because I either misplaced the tickets for my way back or never got them in the first place. Either way, I was never told that I was supposed to get my tickets for both ways at once. I called Amtrak customer service, and the guy there was either a robot, extremely thick, or just very good at his job as a bureaucracy-enforcing cog. There are advantages to Amtrak, but they certainly don't trail the airlines in terms of hostile customer "service". Anyways, their customer relations people can't give refunds (so they say), so I'm considering writing an angry letter to their headquarters in DC. Probably nothing will come of it, though, so I'll just have to deal with losing the sixty bucks. Still cheaper than flying...

I helped Ginneh with her resume on Monday night, which reminded me why I hate Microsoft Office. OpenOffice may be an approximate clone, but it does seem to avoid some of the more stupid implementation details.

I took up FF XIII again, and it's been eating time I can't afford. Been reading, too.

Still trying to figure out housing for over break, still have lots of work to finish up. I'm going to be plenty busy.
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L33t
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Jun. 1st, 2007 @ 08:53 pm (Dis)Organized Thoughts on the Internet
Current Mood: quixotic
Tags: , , ,
  • Short Attention Spans
    • Tumblr
    • Twitter
    • What will be the ultimate conclusion of this trend?
  • Google vs. Yahoo
    • Yahoo
      • Cool UI stuff (YUI shares the shininess)
      • Cool tagging systems
        • Del.icio.us
        • Flickr (tag clusters are nifty)
        • Will any of this improve their search?
        • Is this the next way to create a web catalog, since the hierarchal system doesn't work so well?
    • Google
      • Local search becomes augmented reality (Google Maps + GPS-Enabled Smartphone = Win)
      • Innovative approach to tagging
      • Translation with a statistical focus --> natural language understanding (they're certainly hiring AI programmers left and right)
      • Focusing on internet security, what's this all about? (That plus customized Firefox running off of a USB key = awesome.)
      • Google Gears = webapps that work offline
    • Yahoo vs. Google = explicit vs. implicit metadata? Cool thought, but certainly an oversimplification.
  • Customization to the max
    • Firefox plus extensions
    • Custom start pages
      • Google has the newly renamed iGoogle
      • I still think Netvibes is the best (and it grows ever shinier)
    • Will such customization (to a less obsessive extent) ever be adopted by general audiences?
  • Unrelated notes
    • eBay has bought StumbleUpon and will likely drive it into the ground.
    • Not related to the internet per se, but Microsoft has a new product (including a new OS?) that looks awesome. Innovation? From today's Microsoft? I'm stunned... Seriously, if those things sell for $5K-10K, they will be well worth it. Go and check out the video.
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L33t
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May. 31st, 2007 @ 09:24 pm In Which Google Indexes Your Cat
Current Mood: thoughtful
Tags: ,
So Google recently had a nifty idea: Have photo vans drive around major cities taking about a bazillion panoramas, then put the results on Google maps, allowing people to do a virtual walkthrough of the area. But, as with pretty much all of Google's ideas, there are worries about privacy.

I think Google is within the bounds of the law on this one. Taking photos in public places is legal. The question is whether combining public images can turn them into a violation of privacy. (Should it? Does this mean changing our definitions of "public" and "private"?)

A related question: Do people have the right to not be unpleasantly surprised by technology?
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Matrix Largo
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May. 15th, 2007 @ 12:41 am iTunes Hacked Again
Current Mood: amused
Tags: , , ,
Apparently, some hackers have broken iTunes DRM (again), so that all your protected m4p files can be decrypted to m4a format just by installing and running a simple tool, with no loss of quality and no duplicate entries in the iTunes library (which is updated to point to the new files).

What's really interesting is that Cory Doctorow linked to this hack from the most linked-to blog on the net. Wonder how quickly (or if?) Apple will send a cease and desist letter his way...
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Jackpot!
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May. 3rd, 2007 @ 10:55 am LOLZ, DRM
Current Mood: amused
Tags: , ,
AACS (the content protection system for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies) has been cracked. Cory Doctorow's analysis is right on: DRM costs years and billions and is rendered totally useless by some hackers in a week or so of spare time.

To make the story more amusing, the AACS is now sending bogus legal threats against everyone who posts a number. Specifically, this number:
9-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Amusingly, Digg (a popular social link-sharing site) tried to censor the story, but gave in after that provoked a virtual riot from its users.

Update: The number is now on over 700,000 webpages and has sparked a variety of artistic renditions, including this song. It's really hard for anyone to suppress information on the internet once it starts to spread.
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Skilled
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Aug. 8th, 2006 @ 05:18 pm Accumulated Fragments
Current Mood: bouncy
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Links to share:
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Junpei
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Aug. 6th, 2006 @ 02:13 am Wikimania
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: "Have Games, Will Travel" Podcast (#69)
Tags: , ,
Today, I went to Wikimania (at Harvard this year; I only signed up for one day of the conference). The panels and speeches I went to were good, but the most interesting thing was the librarian's discussion. One conclusion from that: Librarians are becoming more like software engineers, and many software engineering tasks are moving into territory that's already covered by library science ("metadata is cataloging!"). I hadn't considered this before, but a lot of the issues surrounding the organization and documentation of code are also librarian problems. Have any software companies hired librarians as part of their software engineering divisions? Either way, there's a real need for more communication and training between the two disciplines.
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Wikipedia
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Aug. 5th, 2006 @ 02:07 am More Anime and Not Much Else
Current Mood: exhausted
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Anime club was really great this week. There was more Utena (sometimes awesome, sometimes headache-inducingly incoherent) and the end of Genshiken (I only wish there was another season). But the best bit by far was the beginning of a new series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I don't know how to begin to describe that series, except to mention that it includes a weird club of weird kids making lousy (but hilarious) B-movies with plot elements straight out of cheesy anime, to mention that my previous description doesn't do the show justice at all, and to state that OMG it's like crack!fic of itself!

Today was the intern field trip to the science museum, which was sort of fun.

I bought some things from Amazon that arrived this week: An external hard-drive (my precious files are finally backed up), some music by TM Revolution, Mirrormask, and Advent Children.

I just finished reading Wolf Who Rules. Good book, although I liked Tinker better.

Aside from that, the week was mostly uneventful. But exhausting. And I have to wake up tomorrow...
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Squee!
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Jun. 10th, 2006 @ 03:26 am Things are Good
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Creed - With Arms Wide Open
Tags: , ,
Things are going well. Work is interesting, TurboGears is nifty (yay Python!), and I've got plenty to time to relax. I went to see the Boston Pride Parade today, which was festive but wet (also, I got to hear the Raelians give their spiel, which was amusing). (I can't believe it's still cold and rainy, but with any luck it will warm up soon...)
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L33t
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Feb. 18th, 2006 @ 03:07 am A Few Bits
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Dune - Hardcore Vibes
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Yesterday, Cory Doctrow, sci-fi author and one of the editors of BoingBoing, came to speak at our school about copyright and technology. I thought the history he discussed was pretty interesting, how every new replication technology (from the player piano onwards) has been opposed by the controllers of previous technology, and how each new technology succeeded in coming into use through the protection and support of the law. The question is whether unprecedented corporate influence will prevent the same process from happening again.

In Six Books, we've started on The Prince.

Tonight, there was a "rave"-style dance party (run by the school, so some elements were (predictably) missing).

Also, I recently learned that the AHS wiki is accessible from outside Olin's network. So, if you want to see the class work for Six Books or the material for Twenty-One Grain Bread, take a look.

I have a ton to do, but yay three-day weekends.
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L33t zombie
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Feb. 9th, 2006 @ 02:04 am Rabble Rousing
Current Mood: working
Current Music: Razed in Black - Visions (Assemblage 23 mix)
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I watched The Corporation in FILM, yesterday. It's clearly biased (a bit less so than, say, Michael Moore) but it does manage to provide a pretty good sense of historical perspective, and I don't disagree with it's thesis.

It seems that life is trying very hard to turn me into a Marxist radical. I still blame Camp Tavor.

And if you haven't read this essay already, you really need to (read the whole thing, it's fairly short). I read it for Bioethics in 9th grade, and my recent wanderings have brought me back to it again.

I sent my GameCube in for repairs about a week ago (I think I neglected to mention that). I'm still impressed at how durable those things are; I bought it used and it still worked without problems for many years. They returned it to me today, functional as ever. So, yay.

Life still confusing / pretty good / absurdly busy.
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L33t
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Jan. 10th, 2006 @ 11:50 pm Seriously... Dinosaurs
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Joshua Rifkin - Pine Apple Rag (Scott Joplin)
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(Mornings? What mornings?)

Yesterday, I went to see King Kong. The movie is brilliant, in a way, although extremely cheesy. The acting is superb. And dinosaurs, man, dinosaurs. That movie has better dinosaur scenes than Jurassic Park. There's like a fifty-dinosaur pileup on Skull Island Route One! Seriously.

I've been reading a lot of random books, lately, but there's nothing in particular I feel like commenting on.

A few links:
  • Create an E-Annoyance, Go to Jail- New law extends telephone harassment legislation to make it illegal to annoy someone anonymously online. I guess I'll have to stick to annoying people in person, then. :-P
  • Is the budget deficit $319 billion or closer to $3 trillion? It depends how you count...
  • Apple is now using the Intel chip set.
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L33t
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Dec. 22nd, 2005 @ 08:06 pm Vacation, Almost
Current Mood: exhausted
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I'm over at Uncle Aaron and Aunt Marsha's house. My cousin Ben is here, too. I go home tomorrow.

I'm about to go to sleep, as I'm exhausted.

Just a few things to share:

There was an article about Olin in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, and you can read that for free here. On a related note, here's a document that discusses the founding precepts of Olin College.

On an unrelated note, here's an interesting blog post about Google and recruiting.
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L33t zombie
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Dec. 1st, 2005 @ 10:24 pm Existential Overload
Current Mood: exhausted
Tags: , , , ,
Two weeks remaining. Hosed. Still crazy. I've got a few things to note:

Movies:
  • I saw Blues Harp in FILM this week. Excellent, excellent movie. From the director of Audition, but much less creepy. Plus, it's a gangster movie about a guy who plays the harmonica.
  • In Indie Film CC we saw George Washington. Outstanding acting, very surreal.
  • I saw Slacker in Indie Film CC a while ago, but I think I forgot to mention that. It's sort of like a piece of beat poetry set to film. I also give that a thumbs up.
Random Stuff:
  • .kkreiger- An FPS with beautiful graphics in under 96 kB. Cool tech.
  • An article on a possible change in theology in the Catholic church.
Anime:
  • Naruto wins. Artistically it's nothing incredible, but it's a fun series.
  • Trigun is also good.
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L33t zombie
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Oct. 14th, 2005 @ 11:11 pm Scatterbrained
Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: Aqua- Happy Boys and Girls
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Bah. Tip: If you have a seven-hour problem set, starting at 10PM on the day before it's due is probably not the best idea. I need to get a normal sleep schedule again. Or at least semi-normal.

But, hey, at least it's the weekend.

What else to tell... The second lesson for Engineering Discovery (engineering for elementary school) was on Wednesday (the first lesson was last week, but I think I neglected to mention that). Chemical engineering, talking about pH and testing stuff with homemade litmus strips (cabbage juice is a good pH indicator (add a drop or two to your milk and it will turn red when it goes bad (on the minus side, that will also make your milk turn blue and make it taste slightly like cabbage))). The kids are bright, but hyper.

And I saw She's Gotta Have It yesterday, for Indie Film CC.


A few items of niftyness:

ShinyFeet- Strange name, but it's unlimited webmail with all sorts of bells and whistles, plus unlimited file storage. (Too good to be true, perhaps, and the webmail itself isn't quite as shiny as GMail, but still...)

Nedwolf- A repository of the best free software on the web. Really cool.

OpenOffice.org- Like M$ Office, but free. I uninstalled Word and so on after trying this for a few weeks. (I'm still using Outlook, though...)
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L33t
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Sep. 21st, 2005 @ 04:24 pm Level Up!
Current Mood: working
Current Music: Eiffel 65- Journey
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My computer is finally back to normal. Also, I now know how to fix a broken Linux bootloader. (My Linux-fu grows stronger.)

Went to the "rumble" at midnight last night (think Fight Club, sort of). Lost my match (unsurprisingly). Evil!Alex was MCing.

This is the best game evah.

And have you guys checked this out yet (it's the promo video for Nintendo's new system)? Freaky, eh?
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Junpei
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Sep. 17th, 2005 @ 01:06 am Repairs
Current Mood: annoyed
Tags: ,
I took my computer to IT today to fix a minor problem, but they turned it into a major one. Apparently, running a "repair install" of Windows can totally ruin one's computer. Who knew? At least they backed up my data, but having to reinstall all my applications is quite a pain.

On the plus side, this seems to have fixed all the miscellaneous problems I've been having with Windows, and I have newer versions of a lot of the "built in" software now. On the minus side, it seems to have screwed up my boot loader (it skips it entirely on boot), so I cant access Linux.

On an unrelated note, I finally made myself an account on Delicious, and I've been using it most haphazardly. For those of you who also use that, mind telling me your username there? (I am, as always, L33tminion.)
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Why Me?
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