Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

April 2005

Trying to Pimp-my-ride a Yugo

I think I'm giving up on the retrofit of my Les Paul copy, and I'm going to cite several reasons why.

(a) I can't find tuners that fit my headstock, and I refuse to drill bigger holes. I thought I had found some, paid a pretty penny for them, and they're *still* too big.

(b) The fretboard has never been that great, and anything above the 12th fret doesn't play right. (Something about the fret heights, I think.)

(c) It's a lousy guitar anyway, so why am I pouring all this money into it? It's like I'm trying to Pimp-My-Ride a Yugo.

How I learned to stop worrying

Woo! Finished with my paper. I'd like to thank Mt. Dew for keeping me motivated through the dark times (11pm-1am), and, of course, my brilliant brain which has found yet another way to feed my growing ego.

I mean, come on. My paper's title:

"How I learned to stop worrying and love the paradox: Information science's dual crises of necessity and identity."

... That says it all right there.

And that concludes yet another wildly successful semester. After my 2 PM meeting tomorrow to discuss this paper, I will have a week and a half off from school. This is a good thing.

Semester is almost done...!

Well, I'm halfway finished with my work for the day. I just turned in our group's final Strategy Plan -- we analyzed the current incarnation of Napster. It is 24 gloriously single-spaced sheets of paper.

Next up: my final DIS paper where I magically tie all of my readings together into one logical theme. I might need a brain break before I start that one.

Babelfish Meme

1. Take the lyrics to one of your favorite songs.
2. Use BabelFish to translate the lyrics from English to German, German to French and then from French back to English.
3. Post the 'new' lyrics and see if anyone can guess what song it is.

Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda is a great film .. I'm a little shell-shocked right now, but .. yeah, that was well worth my time.

Professor pwns laptop thief

Professor pwns laptop thief.

You are in possession of data from a hundred million dollar trial, sponsored by the NIH, for which I'm a consultant. This involves some of the largest companies on the planet, the NIH investigates these things through the FBI, they have been notified about this problem.

Guitar stuff

Over the weekend, I decided to dust off my Les Paul copy, restring it, and enjoy that full LP sound. In the process of restringing, I noticed that my tuning keys were practically falling apart. On a whim, I decided to look into whether they could be replaced cheaply or not. I ended up ordering a replacement set from Musician’s Friend for about $50.

TextWrangler

I recently “discovered” a great Mac app called TextWrangler (from the makers of BBEdit, another great Mac app).

Trent Reznor + GarageBand

Oh, this is too freaking cool: Trent Reznor releases song as GarageBand file for the purposes of remixing. I'm totally downloading this (70 MB). Sorry, Mac users only! :P

Who's on stage?

Sometimes, I miss the Animaniacs.

SLAPPY: Skippy, what is the name of that group playing on stage?
SKIPPY: Who.
SLAPPY: The name of the group.
SKIPPY: Who.
SLAPPY: The group on stage.
SKIPPY: Who.
SLAPPY: The group playing on stage.
SKIPPY: Who.
SLAPPY: You're starting to sound like an owl, Skippy.

Me and Pet Sounds on a Sunday

I found how we will sell The Cost of Being Poor: CD Baby.

Happy Sunday everyone. At the moment, it's me and Pet Sounds, and I dig it.

Power makes me feel big

Heh, I just did my first LJ community moderator thing. I had to ban this user who was being abusive to another user -- so much so that she e-mailed me directly. Apparently, this had been going on for a while behind my back. The posts would be made, she'd plead for them to be deleted, and I'd never know they were posted in the first place.

I like power. It makes me feel big.

In other news, I am once again fully immersed in watching West Wing episodes for hours at a time.

Clean Apartment

See my Flickr photostream for more like this.

Good News

I got in to Indiana!!!!

Linux Stuff

Software RAID versus hardware RAID -- are there any discernible differences? I can see the merits of both: hardware RAID could be much faster (in theory) since all RAID functions are performed in specialized, secondary hardware (i.e. outside of the main data processing bus). Software RAID has the flexibility of integration with logical volume management (LVM) and daemon-based monitoring . . .

What's in my bag?

What's in my bag? This is what's in my bag. Click the picture and, if you have the Flash plugin installed, you can mouseover descriptions of each item. Which is a neat feature of Flickr. </salespitch>

Pictures from Shawn's B-Day

IMG_1019.JPG

Shawn's birthday was April 1st . . . yeah, he's an April Fool . . . anyway, I got my camera back and took some pictures when we were hanging out tonight.