Mr. Garrison: But I’m supposed to be anonymous!

Okay, so I loaded up the Student Activities website this afternoon on a fresh install of W2k to reserve a room for the DevThugs meeting tomorrow. It asked me to install flash player. “That’s odd”, I thought, “The stuact website is just a page full of links.” I went ahead and installed flash 7 (it’s jhorts machine, so what do I care). I was correct in my memory, the Student Activities website is just a bunch of link. “Weird,” I commented out loud, “I wonder why I had to install flash.” With my curiosity peeked, I started clicking around with my right mouse button (something mac users can’t do). Sure enough, the first link I tried was really a flash app of it’s own. Odd I thought, they did all these links in a large flash app. Stupid, but odd. With a little more clicking I realized a more evil plot was afoot. Every single link on that stuact website is its own flash app. Let me repeat that. Every single link on the stuact website is its own flash app. If you even tried to justify that to yourself in the time it took to read it again, you have no reason to live.

What a night of gaming 2003.5 is under way, and things are finally starting to run smoothly. After my 3pm class we went and picked up 30 tables and 100 chairs from physfac, and moved them to the CS building in just 4 loads. Once classes let out, we got all the desks in the classrooms moved and the tables and chairs inside. Almost done by 5pm right? wrong. Got the networking stuff in, and had to make 6 crossover cables for the hubs. Went to go set them up and two wouldn’t turn on. We finally figured out that the wall jacks in rooms 202 and 203 are dead. all of them. so no people in there. and we had more register than last year. As we say in the bizz, this is not a good thing. We got things moved around and power dropped in from above now though so if more people show up tomorrow we should be able to accommodate them. Heir Sigler showed up without gear so that helps with the space requirements. I think I may go take a quick nap here soon so I can be ready to go for the early morning shift. Oh, and I’m typing this on my new wireless card, and it kicks ass.

It’s days like today that make me wish I had a wireless card for my laptop. The sun is out, there isn’t a single cloud in the entire sky. It’s 71 degrees according to wunderground, and there’s an ever so slight breeze. Just a perfect day. Where am I? Inside, on a dell in 213 because I have homework to do online, and I don’t have a wireless card to do it with.

Speaking of wireless, my dad is finally getting DSL at home. After I moved out. I’m not bitter though, in fact I kind of expected it. He got satellite TV shortly after I moved out last time. What does that have to do with WiFi you ask? We he’s also buying a wireless router/4-port switch. I don’t know what he’s going to do with it since he’s only got the one computer but hey, it’s his money. That may be the last straw…. I think I’m going to stop by Walmart tonight and get one of those linksys pcmcia WiFi cards. It’s time.

Oh, and Wang starts tomorrow at 7pm. show up at 5ish if you want to help us set up, cause we’ll need it. It’s time for me to go back to fixing my 285 code and staring out the window wishing I was outside.

The following was shamelessly pulled straight from the comments section of a /. story.

Kernel collector: Bring out your dead!

Troll: Here’s one.

Kernel collector: Ninepence.

BSD: I’m not dead!

Kernel collector: What?

Troll: Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.

BSD: I’m not dead!

Kernel collector: ‘Ere. He says he’s not dead!

Troll: Yes, he is.

BSD: I’m not!

Kernel collector: He isn’t?

Troll: Well, he will be soon. He’s very outdated.

BSD: I’m getting updates!

Troll: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment.

Kernel collector: Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.

BSD: I don’t want to go off the net!

Troll: Oh, don’t be such a microkernel.

Kernel collector: I can’t take him.

BSD: I feel stable!

Troll: Well, do us a favour.

Kernel collector: I can’t.

Troll: Well, can you hang around a couple of processes? He won’t be long.

Kernel collector: No, I’ve got to go to Microsofts. They’ve lost 9 today.

Troll: Well, when’s your next round?

Kernel collector: Thursday.

BSD: I think I’ll go for a compile.

Troll: You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn’t there something you can do?

BSD: [singing] I have Java! I have Java!

Twack Troll: Ah, thanks very much.

Kernel collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.

This weekend I had to make a choice. I could drive 30 minutes and see esigler get married, or I could drive 8-9 hours to Alabama to see a friend from high school get married. As Beth was the maid of honor at Kerry’s wedding, I think you can guess which one I went to. I hate to put 1200 miles on a car in one weekend though.

Things went well. It was a nice small wedding for Jeremy(the groom)’s family, and afterwords there was Punch and Pie™. At this point, Beth and I found our way back to the hotel and fell asleep for the next 14 hours or so. Seeing as how we had both gotten < 2 hours sleep the previous two nights, I figured it was apropriate. We then drove the 8-9 hours back home. My longest lasting impression from the whole thing is that Arkansas’s Department of Transportation needs to be lynched for the “overpasses”.

Now in 2 weeks, we get to do the whole thing over again for Kerry’s parents. Good times. Good times.

Oh, and Dave D. says that Eric and Jen’s Wedding went well too. I wish I could have been there, but I didn’t really have a choice.

Okay, time for the long awaited update. First, the good news. I’m engaged! Yes, you heard that right. I finally scraped together enough money to buy a nice ring for Beth. We’re thinking of some time in March 2005 for the ceromony. That’s far enough after my graduation to get a job and earn some cash for a honeymoon, car, downpayment on a house, etc. I had some problems getting the ring sized correctly, but I won’t go into the details. Summary, don’t go to Zales. Period.

On the job front, I’m working as an intern at Boeing this summer. I’m not too thrilled at all about where they stuck me, but hopefully I can put up with the dull lack of activity this summer, and get an offer to work somewhere interesting full-time. I will state this now though, if I have to chose between $50,000 on my current project, and $30,000 at some other company, I will choose the other company. That’s really how much I dislike what I’m working on.

It looks like I may have a place to live next semester! jhort and I are probably going to rent one of those appartments down the street from where I lived last year. There’s plenty of room for 2 people. the rent isn’t really that expensive, and it’s not the dorm which is priority number 2 (number 1 of course being deleted).

I got a letter from Boeing the other day which really frustrated me. It’s now less than a month until I start working there, and I still don’t know what I’ll be doing. In this letter, on the cover page, it said my assignment is enclosed. Unfortunately, they forgot to enclose the assignment, negating the usefulness of the sending it in the first place. I’ve got to make 3 phone calls to Boeing now instead of the 2 I originally planned on.

1. I still need to schedule a time to take the drug test.
2. I need to return a call I got 2 weeks ago from my future co-workers and just got the message for.
3. Now I need to call HR and tell them they screwed up.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard that I was elected 2003-2004 UMR-ACM president. Hell, only 2 or 3 people know about my little page here anyway, so unless you stumbled across this thing in a google search you either voted for me or I told you personally! I’ve got some good ideas on how to help ACM grow next year, including things that should have been done this year.

If you want the librarian position for the next couple years, shoot an email over to acm-officers@acm.cs.umr.edu and we’ll start to get the selection process going. We’re looking for someone with UNIX knowledge and at least 2 years left at UMR.

You know it’s time to go to bed when you check your email and your bsd boxen have allready run their daily security reports and emailed them too you! The day star will be rising soon, time to find my bed.