E-Week Banquet

Last night Phil, Jason, and I went to the Engineers Week Banquet , held at the Renaissance Hotel downtown. I had never been to the E-Week banquet before, but student tickets were only $7 (for a $40 meal), so I figured I had nothing to lose.

There was an opportunity to socialize before dinner, and Jason and I spent a few minutes talking to Meral and Tekin . I especially wanted to talk to Tekin, to make sure that he knew I didn't hate him, even though I gave him a fairly scathing evaluation in EECS 341. Meral is my adviser, so it didn't hurt to talk to her either. Although most of the conversation was typical faculty-student chit-chat, Meral did make a rather interesting off-topic comment, but I'm not going to talk about that here. I also found out that a course in human-computer interaction is going to be offered soon, which is good.

Dinner was delicious, the best parts being the spicy tomato soup and cheesecake with raspberry sauce. After dinner, there were a few preliminary speakers, leading up to the keynote. All of the preliminary speakers sucked, and I was beginning to worry about the keynote. Fortunately, the keynote speaker turned out to be interesting. He was John Nottingham of Nottingham-Spirk Design Associates , and the talk was called "Relentless Innovation". Although his talk focused a little more on "here's what we've done" rather than "here's how we did it," it was still engaging. Nottingham-Spirk has done some very nice consumer product design, and sounds like a great place to work.

Overall, I got my $7 worth.

Midterm Exam Mania

Next week I have 5 exams in a 24 hour period:

• Wednesday, 3:30pm - Computer Architecture
• Wednesday, 6:00pm - Object Oriented Software
• Thursday, 10:00am - Entrepreneurship
• Thursday, 1:15pm - AI
• Thursday, 2:45pm - Computer Security

Guess I'd better start studying over the weekend.

Mediachest

A new site called Mediachest has launched. It uses social networks to help you find friends that have books, movies, games, and music that you want to borrow. Seems like a good idea. It would be nice if I could get everyone in my dorm to sign up for Mediachest. :-) Here's my Mediachest profile .

Cannonball Run

Last night a big group of people from my dorm went tobogganing at The Chalet, which is part of Cleveland Metroparks. They have two 1,000 foot long refrigerated ice chutes, and up to four people at a time can ride a toboggan. It was very fun, and its existence should be more widely publicized.

After we got done tobogganing, we went out to eat at Mad Cactus . The food was pretty good, and we got to sit at a large round table, so everyone could talk to everyone else, which was nice. Also, the restaurant didn't mind doing separate checks, even though we had 8 people, which simplified things. Every time I go out to eat with a large group, where everyone wants a separate check, I start dreaming about the impending cashless society. With everyone paying using a smart card, and restaurant billing software that takes advantage of this, it should be much easier for everyone to simply pay their own bill without causing extra work for the restaurant. Alas, Cleveland does not yet have Octopus cards .

Life Update

Friday night I went ice skating with Jason , Lynn , and Dana. I've only been ice skating a few times before, and I'm not very good at it, but it was free. After a few circuits around the rink spent clinging to the wall, I felt like I might be able to make it from one end of the rink to the other without falling down. Unfortunately, the rink was rather crowded, and I felt like I didn't have enough control to make skating in a group of people advisable. I should go down to the rink sometime when there aren't many people there, so I can try skating long distances without having to worry about knocking other people over.

Even though I suck at skating, I'm still glad that I went, because Josh was there! I haven't seen him in a couple months, because he graduated in December, and then went on a month-long trip to Europe. I talked to him on AIM after he got back, and he also sent me a postcard from Amsterdam, but it was good to see him in person. He starts at IBM in Raleigh in early March, and is moving down to NC next week. He got an apartment in an area of Raleigh that isn't too far from IBM, and was undergoing a lot of construction when I was living in Durham. Apparently it's quite built up now.

I think I've already told most people about this, but in case you didn't know: I got an internship with IBM for this summer. Even better, it's an Extreme Blue internship. I think it's going to be really great. The project I'm going to be working on (what I know of it) sounds very interesting. Also, I'll be at the Raleigh (RTP) lab, so I'll get to see the friends I made during my co-op again. Josh and I are already planning an excursion to Pepper's Pizza . :-) Extreme Blue provides housing (nice) , which means that all the interns live together (nicer). Hopefully I'll form some good friendships this summer, while developing something new that matters. IBM's tagline for Extreme Blue is "Start something BIG!", and that's exactly what I intend to do.

Phil and I went to Rick Wash 's talk on "Trusted Computing" last night. It was nice to see Rick (he graduated from Case when I was a sophomore, I think). Jason and I are doing a report on trusted computing for the computer security class we're taking, and I was able to gather some information and leads for that project. ACM also raffled off some nice Microsoft swag, but neither Phil nor I won anything.

Jason and I are (going to be) working on an application for the Case Cocoa Programming Competition . We submitted a proposal with our idea last weekend. We've only got about two months, so we'll have to be quick, and cut things down to only the essential features. I don't want to reveal anything about the app yet, but I'll post more as we near the contest completion date. I will say that it's not "yet another" anything, and I think it has the potential to turn out very well.

Recently Heard in Class...

Professor: "...but the library said there's a long queue for scanning, and I don't know what that means."
Student: "He teaches data structures. He should know that a queue is a FIFO data store."

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

A new guide to learning Ruby is now available: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby . It's very unconventional, with lots of stories and bizarre cartoons, but it looks like it might be a good way to learn Ruby. I really like Ruby: fully-OO (as in Smalltalk, not Java), lexical closures, and blocks.

Derby Owners Club

Last night Phil, Chris, Dave, and I went to Dave and Buster's for a bit of arcade gaming action. I played Derby Owners Club (DOC). This is one of those quintessentially Japanese game, but fortunately it got a worldwide release. DOC is a horse breeding and racing simulation. You choose the parents of your foal (you can even use previous horses that you have created), and then you train your foal in a series of exercises. Periodically there is a race, and all the players currently playing DOC (up to 8) participate. You get rewards for winning (of course), and after the race is over, you can review the race with your horse to improve your communication and relationship. When you create a new horse, you are given a memory card so that you can come back later and use the same horse. There seems to be a thriving trade of horses on eBay.

That's a fairly utilitarian description of the game, but the reason it's so fun is because it's so quirky. There's lot of Engrish in the dialogs. There's even a pamphlet that explains the game to you. If you get a chance to play this game, take it.

Bram Cohen

The New York Times profiles BitTorrent and Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent) in today's edition. According to the article, BitTorrent traffic accounts for 10% of all traffic on the Internet2 backbone.

The Office

I've been watching The Office from the BBC lately. I just finished the first season, and now I'm watching the second. The show is brilliant. It's a comedy about office life shot in a documentary style. I don't normally laugh out loud when I'm watching a show by myself, but with this show I just can't help myself. Maybe I find it particularly funny because I'm not exposed to British humor that often.

Typical dialogue:

David: "Look whether or not Anton is indeed a midget, or a dwarf-"
Alex: "No he’s a midget"
David: "What’s the difference?"
Alex: "A dwarf is someone who has disproportionately short arms and legs"
David: "Oh I know the ones"
Alex: "It’s caused by a hormone deficiency"
David: "Yeah… bloody hormones"
Alex: "A midget is still a dwarf but their arms and legs are in proportion"
Gareth: "So... what’s an elf?"

Eclipse Talk

I'll be giving a talk on Eclipse for the Case ACM chapter this Tuesday, February 10th, at 6pm in Clapp 108 . I'm going to attempt to make this talk worthwhile for developers of all levels of familiarity with Eclipse. If you're interested in Eclipse, please come, and bring a friend!

Kurt Vonnegut

I got to see Kurt Vonnegut , one of my favorite authors, speak on Wednesday at Severance Hall. In high school I read Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five, and both of them made a big impact on me. I even read the fan fiction novel Venus on the Half-Shell by "Kilgore Trout". Vonnegut is a master at showing the absurdity of life.

Vonnegut's talk was really funny, both in the sense of traditional humor and black humor. One of the best parts of the talk was his illustration of typical plot lines on a graph with two axes: "Beginning and Entropy" and "Fortune and Illness". He showed the progression of typical categories of stories (e.g. Cinderella and "Boy Meets Girl"). Then he showed the progression of Hamlet, which was completely different from the typical stories and defied conventional wisdom about what makes a "good" story. Vonnegut's point was that we all pretend to know more about life than we actually know. We think we know what the good and bad events are, when we really don't know.

I want to read some more of Vonnegut's work now, particularly Cat's Cradle.

SmackDown!

Tuesday evening Andrew , David , David's brother, Andrew's father, and I went to a taping of WWE SmackDown! at Gund Arena. Although I've been a WWE fan for years, this was the first live event I'd ever attended.

Signs are a big part of WWE event, and I took two. My first was a Vince for America sign (a photoshopped Dean for America sign). Just for kicks, I put "www.vinceforamerica.com" on the bottom of the sign, which turned out to be a mistake. The security guard said that no URLs could appear on signs, and I had to rip off the URL. My second sign was Case Department of Thuganomics . This sign was on the back of the Vince for America sign, and the security guard didn't notice it. That's probably a good thing, since I doubt he would have been pleased with my use of the Case logo.

After making it past security, we entered the arena and found our seats. Our seats weren't bad, but the arena was less than half full, which put us near the top of the open seating. Everyone was sitting on one side of the arena, so that WWE cameras could make it look like the place was packed.

There were some good matches, but I didn't think that any of them were spectacular. It was fun to stand up and cheer when the entrance music of my favorite wrestlers hit. You haven't really lived until you've chanted "You Suck!" in unison with 10,000 other people.

I don't know if I'll attend another WWE live event, at least not for a long time. I just didn't think it was worth the $28 it cost. I'd rather watch wrestling via my ReplayTV, so I can fast forward through boring matches.

My Subscriptions

A recent commenter asked me to post a list of my subscriptions. I've chosen to do this via feeds.scripting.com . You can view my subscriptions here (requires account).

feeds.scripting.com allows you to upload an OPML outline containing your subscriptions. You can view the subscriptions of other people, find out who is subscribed to a particular feed, look at the most popular feeds, and more.

Is This Anything?

In the tradition of David Letterman's Is This Anything? skit, I must ask, is this anything? I won it at a raffle held during a Case MUG meeting, and nobody seems to know what it is. My guess is that it was some sort of combination display piece and mousepad for a Newton. Can anyone tell me what this is?

(Note: The text at the top of the item is "L03126A".)

One Year Anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog. My first post was an entry about my new license plate. Since then, I've made a total of 201 entries (including this one). Last year at this time, I was subscribed to around 20 feeds. Now I'm subscribed to 99.

Maintaining this blog has been fun, and I think the blog community (and social software in general) has a lot of growth and innovation left in it. Here's to another year of exploring.