Brian's World

I am Ill

I am not feeling well today. It started during physics class, when my group took like 10 minutes to debate if the diode was actually only letting the current go one way. I just sat there and stared, unable to move onto the next part because all the stuff was in front of the other people. Now my lungs hurt, and I cough when I go outside. I think my head may hurt later, but its ok right now. In an effort to get better sooner I may go to sleep early tonight, like 8:00pm or something. I’m not sure yet, we’ll see how I’m doing.

Speaking of feeling sick, Google has made this cool thing called “Google Health” which looks pretty cool. It would be nice to have that stuff online in an accessible fashion. Personally I have no clue what my records say, because only the doctor sees them. I feel as if my health is being kept a secret from me or something. I’m sure if I’m asked they’d let me [at least I hope so!], but I mean that information should be mine by default I think, and my understanding is that Google Health tried to do that. Of course I’m sure it won’t be adopted by any doctor I might ever get, because locations I live in are not progressive with the technology.

In other news, I received an email today reminding me that Room Selection for next year is approaching quickly. Luckily I remembered this topic yesterday so I did my research this morning. I completed my mathematical model of ideal rooming conditions, and the outcomes were as expected. I do believe I may have to adjust my algorithm slightly to account for a reduced set of options I believe.. but this is typical of me. On issues I’m unsure I tend to wait until the end to move on things because I am hoping some divine inspiration will tell me what I want. Living on campus, and not intending to keep the same room as this year, I believe I am eligible for “intra-hall squatting” and the main campus lottery system. For those of you who don’t understand, intra-hall squatting allows me to take a place in the same hall before the main campus lottery system. I am unsure how this process works, but I believe I show up somewhere I pull a number hoping to get a low one. Based on my luck I will receive a very high number, only a few points from being last… but this is statistically unknown to me, so I will keep my hopes up if I choose this route. When I said I had completed the mathematical model it means I produced a model based on the data at hand. I have not a) made a decision based on that model or b) updated the model for any new relevant information… mainly because of a failure to recognize new information.

I had another topic to discuss.. hrm. The Polytechnic‘s News Editor wrote an article about the Senate needing improvement. I wouldn’t disagree with the entire article, I’ve been at all the senate meetings this year, and those I’m not present for the entire thing I watch them later on DVD; so I can attest to the fact the senate as a whole doesn’t do as much as they are capable of.. but I also feel there are pockets of students who are doing a lot, and don’t deserve to be accumulated into this junk pile. One line that got me in the article was as follows: ‘Recently, had its official “launch,” but a number of the links on the “Links” page don’t even work.’ Ignore the fact that the sentence lacks a subject, but its assumed the article is talking about the Links page on MyRPI. I am confused what link is broken, and I almost want to write the News Editor to ask which links they sampled as being broken so we can fix them. To my knowledge we don’t actually test the links submitted by users… but its very difficult to determine the actual cause of a link outage. For example take digg.com, a popular site to share links on. The links the site references regularly die yet digg.com doesn’t get blamed for having bad links as its the server on the other side of the request who is failing, not the directory service. Who knows… not me.

I didn’t really want to plug Google 800 times in the blog, but Google Summer of Code [gsoc] was just opened for 2008. I plan on applying to a project or two this year to see what happens. I won’t be holding my breath, but I know even more about php this year, and a few organizations have caught my eyes.. mainly Moodle and WordPress. I will update more on this later, like in March when it actually starts doing things.

My policy is very clear, information is free. I will tell you just about anything you want to know that I know unless its like a password or something of some intelligence value that I don’t feel your privy to. No, I’m not great at sharing my opinions which can hurt sometimes.. but I try to make up for that with my factual knowledge. You ask me “Do you know what your living plans are for next year?” and I will respond “I do not know yet.” This is because I truely do not know, not because I’m trying to conceal some form of information from you. Sometimes I go out of my way to give people information they probably don’t want, and I tend to make a fool of myself in the process. I think that people should choose what information they want to or don’t want to filter out, I shouldn’t do that myself. I wish more people and organizations were like this. If I had the ability to choose to collect data or not that would be much better than having to actively seek it out. I don’t think its impossible to do either. I’m not asking for an monologue of your entire day, just spits of information that could somehow be relavent for me.

I’m not feeling any better and I really don’t want to be sick tomrrow. I am going to start weighting my options for sleep tonight.