School
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I've been having an interesting problem: two almost-adjacent two-hour classes that require me to run back to my dorm after the first class is over, so that I can recharge my laptop. Annoying? You bet.
I researched an extra battery but found out that one would run me $180, and I wouldn't be able to use my docking station with it. So I came up with this:
"This" being a 180-watt-hour battery pack constructed from two UPS batteries and a car adapter. Now I can run around for eleven hours without having to plug in - although my...
Those guys actually went around to pick people up, too.
Apparently someone that received one of the aforementioned handouts decided it would be a great idea to add insult to injury. The guilty party scanned the handout containing all of my contact information and posted it to the armpit of the Internet, 4chan's /b/ board.
It's amazing how long you can spend safeguarding your privacy, yet how quickly those barriers that you've erected can be broken down with one fell swoop.
Some wonderful people decided to hand out roughly 150 flyers containing my name, phone number, e-mail and IM addresses, and Skype name to various people on campus. Now that I'm receiving a deluge of phone calls and e-mails IMs and Skype requests, I figured I'd let everybody know that I may end up changing my phone number and e-mail address if things keep up like this.
Thanks a lot, world.
I don't know what's so hard about operating a microwave: turn the dial and, if necessary, add some water. Yet in two weeks my entire residence hall has been evacuated three times, due to someone not following the "1-2-3" directions on the back of their food, then leaving the microwave and letting the entire floor fill with smoke.
This will become commonplace, I take it?
Somehow I'm not at all surprised that everybody in the laundry room has a laptop on them.
Does anyone remember my giant Wi-Fi antenna? I think it's now safe to say that I no longer need it; there are Wi-Fi access points located every fifty meters or so. The only place I've been so far where I haven't been able to get a Wi-Fi signal is the parking lot - residence halls, dining commons, laundry room, everything has Wi-Fi. It's a welcome change from having to use an antenna just to get a signal in some classrooms.
I wouldn't think that a...
Here's a short list of things I've learned, considered, and/or regretted these past few days:
When someone pulls the fire alarm at 6AM, you should grab a jacket, NOT your computer. Rochester is cold in the morning.
Always take a towel to the showers. An embarrassing mistake I made my first day, I ended up drying off with a shirt.
I really should have finished my streaming server before coming here. Aside from WITR 89.7, the campus FM station, there isn't an awful lot of radio around here, and the WFNX...
And so begins my final full day in Boston for a long while. It's a feeling that I knew was coming since last year, but finally set in. I'll be making my last rounds around the city in the morning, and plan on finishing up the packing in the afternoon, leaving Saturday morning for the 6.5-hour, 400mi / 650km trip to college. Hopefully it won't take me all that long to get situated there so that I can come back and detail the move-out and move-in.
Anyway, the past few weeks have been rather eventful:
My rooming situation has been up in...
It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when...
If you’re wondering where I’ve been lately, no, I didn’t go to Europe again. That’s off the radar for at least another five years. I’ve just been incredibly busy the past week. There was only one day this week that I got to bed before 1AM, and having kicked my Mountain Dew habit four weeks ago, it goes without saying that I’ve been tired too. The third academic quarter is coming to a close, and of course teachers are rushing to get grades in. In this week alone I ended up plowing through three different model AP exams in...
So I think I've kludged together a way around this problem.
Run mbox2eml on my Thunderbird mailbox
Import resulting e-mail files to Windows Mail (aka Outlook Express)
Import Outlook Express e-mail to Outlook 2007
Write a VBA macro in Outlook to open each e-mail, delete all attachments that are HTML copies of the plaintext messages, and finally remove all recipients that aren't my e-mail address, saving each message.
Import the resulting Outlook mail back into Thunderbird and EIS for Palm
...
Remember when I blogged about those pesky 700k e-mail messages that various school staff send out?
Did you know that those things crash Eudora for Palm OS?
11 minutes, 37 seconds. Why?
Walk into library, find computer in the lab with the good computers. Wait for the machine to log in. Meanwhile, upload assignment to school mail server from laptop.
Get kicked out of the good lab because a teacher wants to use it for a class.
Go to the other lab, begin picking computers based on availability. The fifth one is actually connected to the school network's Active Directory server, and it takes three minutes to log in. Wonder why one lab is good and...
In response to yesterday's post, I went to the supermarket today. While a two-liter bottle is still (for now, at least) $1.64, the price of a twelve-pack has gone up to $5.59. Cans are 355mL each, and 0.355L * 12 = 4.26 liters in a case. At that rate, I could have picked up nearly the same quantity with the convenience store price of $4.58, or six liters for $4.92 at the supermarket.
In other news, the senior class at school had a photo taken yesterday for the yearbook. In the few minutes before the photo was taken, I sketched a...
I currently have on my left monitor an essay due tomorrow in Language and Composition, and on the right monitor an in-progress Java implementation of the game Mastermind due on Friday. A good way to stimulate both sides of the brain at once, perhaps?
...contains references to GNU, Mozilla.org, Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, The Great Firewall of China, Comcast, and RealNetworks. Should I scrap it and try harder to not let the "open-source extremist" in me show?
A particularly humorous discussion as presented in my Statistics class yesterday:
Teacher: This graph shows the distribution per year of total computer virus infections. Notice that numbers remained relatively steady until 1999, when total infections "shot up" quite drastically. Can anyone tell me what happened in 1999?
(Various suggestions offered here.)
Teacher: It's simple, really. Windows 98 came out.
It's my final year in high school. I'm taking four college-level courses, for which I hope I can accrue a few college credits and opt out of some core curriculum classes in college that could otherwise be spent productively. Exactly who in computer engineering is going to need Language and Composition or Economics?
If there's one thing I wish were different about this year, it's that my school had more computer programming courses. Our two options are "Introduction to Computer Programming" and "AP Computer Science", both taught using the Java language. The problem is that Intro to Computer Programming spends most...
I certainly have been posting more than usual, haven't I?
Sometime last year, my school ditched their old circa-1978 Tandberg Educational Language Lab and replaced it with a newer Sanako lab. The new lab uses PCs instead of cassette tapes and, perhaps most important to this post, new headsets. While they were in the process of getting rid of the old lab, a couple of people and I asked if we could take some of the old headsets. Unfortunately, these old headsets used a 6P6C connector instead of 3.5" stereo connectors, so we couldn't just plug them into a computer and...
I almost feel guilty about not updating, regardless of the fact that I'm talking to a massive network of computers, which are being stared at mostly by people I've never met in my life.
I wanted to hold off on this post until I received some parts I ordered last week. As you already know, I upgraded to digital TV earlier this month. I decided to take things one step further and finally order the component-VGA transcoder I've been talking about for the past year or two, along with appropriate cabling to hook up the gadgets I have that can run...
In physics class yesterday I managed to figure out that our school's PA system emits a 500Hz tone to signify the beginning and end of a class. So...
A bit of fooling around later, I managed to figure out that the tone could be represented by a square wave. I then reduced the sampling rate to compensate for the fidelity of the system until I got a near-exact replica of what we all hear in school.
Better yet, it passed the test of getting me out of History class five minutes early. Now that's quality!
Given people's reaction today, I apparently look ridiculous if my hair isn't sticking straight up. Who would've guessed?
Today, the school administration executed the absolutely brilliant plan of holding a fire drill in the middle of a 25°F rainstorm. We weren't allowed to stand by in the parking lot and instead were forced onto the frozen front lawn, which made for a sort of Slip and Slide made of snow and ice. Due to policy instated back in 2006, we're no longer allowed to have jackets or sweatshirts on our person at any time during the school day, so the entire...
I suppose it's a well-known fact that large communities such as schools and cubicle-departments are disease incubators. It only takes one to spread something to an entire class; that class can easily pass it to another floor, and before long there's a large-scale outbreak. This school year, I managed to escape two outbreaks of strep throat and one of laryngitis, along with a particularly nasty strain of whooping cough (for which I was identified as a possible infectee and carrier, and thus had to take azithromycin for a week anyway).
On Friday, it seemed that my luck had run out, just...
This morning I attempted putting a wireless card into the server hosting the website, so that I could turn off some of my routing hardware (specifically, the Magnum ST80 hub and CompUSA switch) while I'm out of the house. For whatever reason, the machine kept BSODing on startup, which is a development I haven't experienced involving my wireless cards (Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE PCMCIA cards) since I quit using Windows 98. I pulled the card out, and managed to take part of the bay door with it. I didn't have time to tweezer out the third or so of the door...
Midyear exams begin (and end) this week, so my schedule's a bit hectic and looks like this:
Tuesday: Calculus AB Honors from 8:30 to 10:00 and Ethics from 11:00 to 12:30
Wednesday: British Literature Honors from 8:30 to 10:00 and Spanish IV Honors from 11:00 to 12:30
Thursday: No exams scheduled (to be read: "Study for Physics the entire day.")
Friday: Physics A from 8:30 to 10:00 and AP European History from 13:15 to 14:45
Saturday: The SAT from 8AM to noon.
Having completed the Calculus...
Here are some raw numbers I've come up with while looking through my e-mail archives:
Average size of a teacher's e-mail to a single class: 17kb
Average size of a teacher's e-mail to all of his/her classes: 58kb
Average size of a faculty e-mail to an entire grade: 287kb
Average size of a faculty e-mail to everyone in the school: 682kb
Average size of an IT department e-mail to everyone in the school: 7kb
Total size of all e-mails received beginning July...
I had an unusually good day today.
School's ripping out its old "Tandberg Educational Language Lab" from the '70s to make way for a new computerized system. As such, anybody that wants the equipment (headsets, audio cassette decks, and a control unit) is free to take it with permission from the Modern Language department. Today I picked up a headset; it uses an RJ-11 head instead of a stereo or mini-stereo head, so provided the two use the same signal I should be able to create an adapter with ease. If not, another trip to Radio Shack. Tomorrow I'm going to...