Brian's World

The Price is Wrong

Today has been a pretty boring day, reminiscent of times last semester where I would just sit in my room and do very little.  Speaking of which, that reminds me I need to vaccum.  I might also wash my sheets and towels today so they are pretty fresh when I come back to school after winter break.  No sense carrying them in both directions if I can wash them here and leave them.  I am confident they can survive the lowered temperatures and such.

Yesterday RPI TV had the final budgetting meeting for this year.  I gave up towards the end of the meeting and just left.  This year’s process was much more open than past years.  Instead of simply asking at a business meeting “does anyone care what we buy?” like we might have done in the past, all were invited to the budgetting meetings… officier or not.  My primary goal was to get a server for the club.  As “Station Manager” I am responsible for broadcasting productions and managing the station.  Broadcasting productions consists of me burning a DVD and dropping it off on someone’s desk.  A task that is purely time consuming.  A small robot could do that portion of my job.  As for the “managing the station” component, I do very little in this regard.  I complain when people fill up the hard drives, and complain when people take equiptment without telling me, or break stuff without telling me.  My impression of “managing the station” has always been that I should be able to tell you the status of anything that the station owns.  I cannot because there is this general belief that the person taking the equiptment is the person who needs to know, which is very counter intuitive when I go looking for X and its not there.  I can hardly call RPI TV a station, so I’m not really sure what I do.

But I decided that we need a server to stream productions live online, better serve past productions online, and hold all the archives.  RPI TV has poured large buckets of money into cameras, cables, tripods, and other “in-the-field” production equiptment but has poured less than a paper cup full of money into actually distributing what we do… and members ask why no one on-campus cares about us or knows about us.  My ballpark figure for any decent server is $2000, for much less than that you aren’t getting anything that will perform well, nevermind have the capacity to handle growth.  Realistically I would have liked to ask for a figure much higher, like the $3k or $4k range to get some better specs.  I acknowledge that redundant power supplies, extra NICs, and more hard drives aren’t going to help the server perform better in the short term, they provide very useful redundancies and supports that can help make the investment last significantly longer.  I’ve worked on servers with 3 power supplies that are >10 years old and still doing a great job.  No, they can’t do things as fast as newer servers but you don’t have the downtime you might need to swap out a power supply and put a new one in.  No one here really cares about uptime though, this server stuff is all a toy… it sounds very similiar to the approach the club has always taken to distributing their work.  I conclude this paragraph the same way I did my component of the junkie meeting.  To me it doesn’t matter what the club buys, I’ll work with a $1 server if I have to.  My input only reflects what I feel is in the best interest of the group for the future.

I am halfway done with my finals.  I have 2 this semester, and the first one finished up Wednesday night.  I think I did OK on the MatSci final.  There was an unanticipated large section on polymers, something that my class was poorly taught.  I made up something about simple structures meaning something, so maybe the partial credit will kick in.  Of course the problem on resistivity was junk.  I get the impression the person responsible for the question was intentially trying to ask everything that wouldn’t be covered in an electricity or circuits class.  Unfortunately this didn’t really reflect what we learned in class, in lab, or on the homework, which was mostly review material from my circuits class.  Monday is my final for circuits.  I’m feeling pretty comfortable with it.  I have a pretty good idea what will be on it, and I know what problems I’ll get stuck on.  Reminiscent of finals in high school, I feel that I actually know the material and will do decent on it.  I’m certainly not going to get an A, but I won’t fail the thing either.

RPI got hit with a pretty bad ice storm thurday night/friday morning.  As a result power and heat were out when I wokeup yesterday, so I quickly evaccuated to the Union.  BARH seemed to have stable power by the time I got back to my dorm (10:30pm), but the apartment complexs on campus were still out.  Those residents were told they couldn’t stay in their apartments.  The union, armory, and a hotel were available for those needing a place to stay.  I started to think to myself, where would I stay if I was told I couldn’t stay in my dorm.  I certainly don’t have any friends that I would feel comfortable asking if I could crash at their places, and my general impression is that you couldn’t stay in a hotel room alone.  That would leave crashing at the Armory or Union as most likely candidates.  I’m no expert in spending the night in public places, but I am lucky I didn’t have to resort to either of those alternatives.  I guess going home would have been the easiest way to avoid the situation, though I don’t see why I couldn’t sleep in my dorm.  I do have my mummy bag here, and if it gets below freezing inside the building I suspect there are larger issues.

I think its time for me to get some dinner.  I could really go for some Arby’s, but the closest one is not here.

Challenges

Classes have officially ended for my fifth semester here at RPI.  I have 2 finals in coming days, one in Material Science this Wendesday, and one in Electric Circuits the following Monday.  I am concerned for the Mat Sci final, whereas I think I can pull my weight in circuits when that final comes along.  Both classes involve some challenging material, but I’ve found that my circuits professor (Don Millard – Take him for any class if possible) has done a good job teaching the material, and teaching how the material will get used.  In Mat Sci the material is taught well, but the applications are not.  There are labs and stuff, but those poorly reflect the quiz material.

It snowed this morning.  I was lucky enough to wake up in time to catch the the tail end of if coming down.  I would estimate we got between .5 and 1.5 inches.  The roads and everything have melted, but some of the sidewalks are covered with ice.  I haven’t been down to the main part of campus today, but I can assume similiar conditions exist there.

Speaking of conditions, the RPI TV elections were last week.  I will be remainind as Station Manager another year.  I will blog in detail about this at a later point in time, but I could use some suggestions from anyone who is a video compression expert out there.  What format should the “Archive” copy of produtions be stored in?  The full resolution quicktime export is a bit large, but clearly the flash web streaming copy won’t cut it.  Does anyone have any suggestions for a fair balance between quality (something that could be edited again if needed) and file size? Please comment or email me with you suggestions!

MSN needs to do more to block spammers.  I have recieved hundreds of spam IM’s over the past few weeks.  Maybe they could disallow links from being sent to someone unless they are your friend OR you have said something back to them.  I hate these “We need to chat ASAP” messages with a link to some foreign website.  I haven’t tested what is on these websites, but I hardly think it is material we need to talk ASAP about.  And for those of you “Using my work account, IM at …” I wonder why can I not IM you at work if you can IM me.  And shouldn’t you just use your personal account to contact me if thats where you expect to respond.  Dear Microsoft, please fix.

As I eneded another semester of classes, I recieved 0 good parting words from any of my professors.  Millard set the bar high by saying something (Given it was about three guys and their dogs), but most other professors ended by discussing the final or saying “thanks for coming”.  That advice will definately get me somewhere in life, I will make sure to always thank people for coming, and give them a good briefing of any futher activities I’ll require of them.

I do some of my best work when I’m facing a challenge or a problem.  Right now there aren’t a ton of challenges on my to tackle list, and as a result I’m finding myself generally unmotivated.  I want to do stuff, and I know what I have to do, but the drive to do it isn’t always there.  Throughout middle school and high school, I was always challenged by the latest problem with computers and technology that needed solving.  Almost as importantly as the solving was the time requirement, things needed to get done in a certain time block because another assignment required it.  In college I can’t say I find myself frequently charged with such tasks.  Look at the start of Concerto.  Initially I was writing tons of code.  I was challenged by the fact that nothing else existed like it, and we weren’t sure if it was going to take off.  Fast forward a few months, Concerto is stable and working.  While there are still tasks on the todo list, none of them have strictly bound time requirements that others are depending on, and none of them are peticularly rewarding to me. [Given I question how rewarding the Concerto project as a whole has been to me on a regular basis.]  There are an abundance of challenges I’d like to take on, but I’m constantly told by others I don’t have the time to do so, or that it is pointless. I understand that, but that has rarely stopped me in the past.

I’d like to get a lot done this winter break, but I’m less than confident I will.  I know other things will come up requiring my attention.  A balance would be nice.  For example I would like balance the paper I have to write for my Tech Writing class with the work I want to do on other projects during the study days.  Unfortunatly the paper doesn’t really care what other tasks I personally want to do, it just wants me to do it because that is what I am suppose to do as a good author.  I don’t like writing when directed, I like writing with a purpose and a passion.

I wanted to end on that note, but I should put out an offer… I’ll be in the Western Mass area for around 4 week starting next week if anyone has any challeges they’d like me to look at in person.  I volunteer most of the time, but will take money if you insist.

Thanksgivings

I’m back at RPI after Thankgiving break.  It always feels short, but it was just about the right length.  Any longer and it would have been cramping in on Christmas break, and any shorter would have made for just a long weekend.  Of course I got very little of my todo list accomplished, as expected.  I was really hoping for a homework day or a dedicated time I could accomplish some of this stuff, but that was simply not allowed.  Others had too much they wanted to do, and I had too little time to do it in.  This is how most breaks go.

As a result, I’ll be terribly busy for the next 5 days with all the work I planned to do over break to get ahead.  I think I’ve completed all the work due tomorrow, but I’m not 100% sure of that… there is the MatSci lab that I have no clue on its due date.  Everyday I have at least one assignment due, which would be cool if I was ahead by a day or two.. but I’m not.  My daily schedule doesn’t look like it will permit me to get ahead either.

Right now I smell Chinese food and I am hungry for it.  Its rare I smell food and want it, and even rarer that the food is Chinese.  I don’t like most of the food specific to asian countries, but I’ll eat white rice, the chinese-food version of chicken fingers, and the beef in broccoli/vegetables combo.  Soy sauce all around.  I do not like fortune cookies.  The concept that a cookie can tell me anything about my life is just about as logical as saying that the patterns wind blows grass can predict the future.  If by future you mean the direction of a shadow from a cloud then yes, anything else.. I am slightly more skeptical.

Facebook has been frustrating me.  My account has issues where it constantly gets logged out.  I login, surf around then WHAM, “You need to login before you can do that”.  Now I just quit the site, which is exactly what their business model wants me to do I think.  I would throw blame in the server replication realm, but thats just me.  Stupid facebook login.  Please fix soon, or loose me to Orkut or something… because thats where the cool kids definately are.

I had an opportunity to view Twilight recently.  It was surprisingly good.  I thought it was going to be Juno with fangs or something like that, but it was refreshingly not bad.  I wouldn’t say I swoon at the sound of a romantic movie about a family of vampires and a female (turns out its not a female vampire like I originally thought), but having a vampire meant that things couldn’t be terribly boring.  I did not read the books or hear much of anything about the movie, except that I was going to it, so I went in with a pretty open mind.. similiar to my viewing of Rent (the movie).  I didn’t know much about both movies, and if I had know the plot before hand I probably wouldn’t have liked them very much.. but they both turned out pretty decent.  Speaking of Rent, I could definately see Twilight the musical hitting broadway in a few years.  I think I enjoyed a few things about the film.  A) It wasn’t about the popular kids.  No one was the star of the basketball team, nor the most popular kid in school.  Actually, it was about social outcasts.  B)  I cannot recall mention of Dracula, or many of the common elements that are associated with vampires that are often overused in films with vampires.  (i.e people getting attacked, people hunting vampires, bats, coffings, zombies, etc) C) The main male character didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was thought out first.  Whether this is how real life works or not, I do not like it when the whole movie is talk talk talk talk talk, blah blah blah blah blah… everyone is saying all these words because they have nothing else to hold the movie together.  Overall a good movie, would see again/see the sequel(s) when/if the come out.

Quantum of Solace on the other hand was certainly not a 007 movie.  It was more like a 003.5 movie, or James Bond Lite.  I recall 0 cool new inventions, 0 plot, and minimal action sequences.  I think the most action packed parts were James Bond on the move.  That would be James Bond in the car, James Bond flying the plane, James Bond walking on the edge of the building, and James Bond in the taxi.  If this was Grand Theft Auto or the Travel Channel the plot might have made sense.  I thought the entire movie’s “plot” was actually just a warm up to the actual movie.  Quick mission, James Bond kills the eco-terrorist, on to the Russians or some real threat.  Maybe they needed a few dollars to get them though this economic downturn..I don’t know.  I expect the next 007 movie to be decent.

Mistaken, I consumed the chocolate for the 1st of Decemeber on my Advent Calendar.  I think I’ll take a Reese Peanut Butter cup to it for me to enjoy tomorrow, when it is actually the first of Decemeber.  I’m tired, off to bed for now.

Good Night Moon.