Brian's World

Crossing Paths

This summer is starting to wind down.  I finished up my RCOS work last week, with a poster session to be scheduled for sometime in the fall.  Feel free to check out my project, Bonsai Video, to see what I spent my time working on.  I’ve got roughly 2 weeks left before classes start, but I plan to move in early in order to secure my various locations around campus before squatters move in.  In addition, moving in early will provide me an opportunity to work with RPI TV and convince someone that they want to help film senate meetings.

I think most people in my current situation would say they are “moderately overwhelmed” right now, but I like to think of it as just very busy.  Nothing really HAS to get done before classes start, but I know that if I wait for classes to start I’ll be too busy actually taking the classes to have time to adequately do what I’d like to do.  Ideally, I’d like to deploy the new shuttle tracking application and a new senate website before classes start.  Shuttle Tracking is 90-something percent complete, with most of the work consisting of server configuration and some testing when the shuttles actually move again.  The new senate website is a little further behind.  My goal with it has been to make it as flexible and coherent as possible such that the person who takes over my job next year as CIO doesn’t have to scrap the whole thing and start over again like I am.  In addition I’ve got this whole RPI TV video-on-demand/streaming thing to play with.  I’m hesitant to invest too much time into things when someone else might be providing us with a solution or forcing it down our throats… it will completely depend on how well or not well it works.

Lately I have been experiencing a lot of “one upping”, whereby I try to do something decent only to have someone else to do something bigger and better.  Its moderately frustrating when I try to do something that I find challenging and then someone else goes and does something 4 times better like its no big deal.  It makes it more difficult for myself to generate a feeling accomplishment when I know that others are accomplishing more.  Alternatively, instead of doing something better and making my experience less than I intended it to be, there are those who react by writing off what I’ve done as nothing.  Alas I press on.

I believe I would like an order of “Cheesy Bread” from Dominos to eat for dinner sometime this weekend.

My workload is compounded by my parents prompts regarding grad school.  It seems they intensify every week, despite my attempts to keep them at bay by telling them I’m “looking into it” and “thinking about it”.  My will remains the same as it has: I would prefer to get a good job/career thing, but I recognize that attending additional education may make the most sense given the current state of employment in America.  I think that if there was a grad program out there that was of interest to me and wasn’t going to spend time teaching that I don’t care about I would probably pursue it over a job however I haven’t found anything exciting (that said, I haven’t found a good place to look for exciting things).  One of the major turn-offs to me are these faculty recommendations you’re required to get for admission to just about every program.  Personally, I don’t interact much with faculty.  The one class where the professor might actually have remembered my name ended up being taught by an instructor with limited credentials.

Graduation Status

I am entering my seventh semester at RPI this fall, which is more commonly known as my senior year.  If all goes according to plan, I’ll be graduating at the end of the spring semester.

My theory for selecting courses during college has been to choose courses that interest me, and figure out the rest later.  During my sophomore and junior years I opted to take coures without really considering how they fit into my graduation requirements because they sounded neat or interesting to me.  Unfortunately, since I would like this to be my last year of undergraduate studies at RPI, I have to start figuring out how to massage those courses I took into a degree and figure out what exactly I have left to take to graduate.

The largest area I need additional courses to satisfy is the Humanities and Social Science field.  If I’m understanding the requirements right, I need to take 2 4-credit courses in Humanities and 2 4-credit courses in Social Sciences.  Also, I have to take 2 4-credit courses in the same “field”, where at least one of them has a number greater than 4000.  There’s also this thing about taking 22 credits worth of them but whatever.  Unfortunately, most of the courses I’ve taken haven’t fallen into a “humanities” or “social science” realm.  I was interested in taking an arts course that dealt with TV production or a communication course about communication on the internet, but they all have requirements that I’m not interested in satisfying.  I think the biggest challenge is going to be the “social science” section, because nothing cool is a social science.  I’m not interested in economics, psychology, and any halfway decent cognition course is restricted to Game Design majors.  At least the “humanities” section has enough courses that I am bound to find one (Technical Writing for the WWW) that I don’t mind taking.

There is also the problem of “technical concentration” within my Computer and Systems Engineering major.  None of the “concentrations” they offer are particularly appealing to me.  Even more troubling, half of the classes you can take to establish one of these “concentrations” aren’t offered.  Its too bad they didn’t offer a concentration in the internet, but that would likely require a few more courses to be taught about the web/internet/networking.

I believe I can graduate by doing the following:

Fall 2009 Semester – PD2, PD3, PEA, Intro to Economics, Web Science.

I don’t want to take Intro to Econ, but its classified as a “social science” so I will take it, and it expands my options for the depth requirement I have to meet.  While I’m not in Web Science yet, the professor twittered @ me indicated I can be and it should be a pretty fun class.

Spring 2010 Semester – ECSE Design, Any humanities/social science class in the 4xxx level in ECON, WRIT, PSYC, or IHSS), and something to fulfill my “concentration” requirement.

Hopefully someone at the tetherless web will offer a cool course in the spring I can use to fill out my schedule.

I believe this plan will enable me to successfully graduate, but anything is possible at RPI.

Now time to figure out how to stream live HD video on the cheap for RPI TV….

Vonage for TV

I’m going to quickly complain a few things.

I have decided that my family’s Comcast bill is too expensive.  They offered us a promotion last summer to bundle our services and it worked out to a cost little above $100 a month.  This was a pretty good savings over the individual services, including this crazy long distance/local calling plan my mom had setup years ago.  After a few of the promotions have expired and the cost has nearly doubled… the main problem being that TV alone is running us close to $90 + fees.  Personally, I don’t feel like I’m getting my $90 worth of TV each month.  The internet (which I use far more than the TV) is much cheaper.  If the prices reversed, it might make more sense… because I’m not opposed to paying based on usage.  I understand that I can reduce the cost by reducing the channels, but adding removing available channels is a not a trivial thing.

Unfortunately like many others, we don’t have a viable competitor we can consider switching our service to.  Technically we could get a dish, but their “local channels” are really only “local channels large enough for us to care about” which excludes Channel 15 & 12, as well as the new Fox 6 [though Fox 6 has yet to prove its worth to me].  If DirectTV or the Dish Network carried Channel 15 and we could hide a dish behind the house I would look into switching… unfortunately that’s not an option.

Verizon Fios looks like someday they will bundle everything for us, and deliver it over delicious fiber cables, however they aren’t in my neighborhood and I haven’t heard anything about them in the area.  Someone needs to do what Vonage did for telephone service for the TV.  Ignoring some technical issues, I wouldn’t mind a box behind each TV that took in the internet and output channels for me to watch.  Yes, there are websites like Hulu that can enable me to rig up something like that… but it doesn’t beat live TV and the concept of channel surfing to find whats on.  Surfing a TV guide or listing of available shows just doesn’t present the same experience.

Also on the frustration list is Amazon, and their lackluster shipping services. While I don’t expect them to be a Newegg or anything like that, I expect that they’ll ship my stuff in a reasonable time… and when I pay them more for shipping I’d appreciate if they considered using that money to increase the shipping service.  Usually when I buy off Amazon I just use the “Free Super Savers Shipping” service because I’m in no rush to get my order and if they get it out the door within the week I’ll be fine with its arrival within 2 weeks of ordering it.  Last week (July 21) I placed an order on Amazon.  I got to the checkout process and decided to upgrade from the “Free Super Savers Shipping” to the “Standard Shipping” in addition to “Ship my order in as many boxes as you need to get it here fast”… at least that’s what the option meant.  My goal was to get these items to arrive within a week so logically, I paid for the slightly better shipping… the only paid service that wasn’t crazy like 2-day shipping.  Unfortunately I think that money I paid for shipping went into someone else’s pockets.. not the person who actually moves my package to me.

As it stands now, both items were shipped mailed via the USPS.  Now I don’t dislike the USPS… but I use them for things like letters, selling textbooks, etc… not items that I’m expecting any super outstanding delivery with.  One item “Left Seller Facility” on Wednesday July 22 at which point the it was driven around  the middle of nowhere until Monday when the USPS stated”Electronic Data recieved” which is where it stands right now.  I don’t even know if the USPS has the actual package… but at least they know about it!  The other one left a “seller facility” on Saturday, and the USPS acknowledged yesterday that it had electronic data on it.  Neither of them show their locations in the nation’s postal network, and neither of them show any sign of arriving today.  I would have really liked it if when I paid Amazon extra they would have given the package to someone in a reasonable period of time… and maybe given it to someone like UPS or Fedex who track a package effectively… never mind provide a timely delivery.

Upon arrival of these two items, I plan to write a letter to my dear friends at Amazon and inform them of my troubles.