Brian's World

Nine is not in the afternoon

I do not believe 9:00 is in the afternoon ever. It can exist in the morning, at 9:00am, or at night at 9:00pm. I’ve taken time to review the music video for “Nine in the afternoon” I have determined Panic at the Disco has their AM and PM confused. Originally I thought they may have had their afternoon and night confused, as they probably tend to play concerts at night (maybe around 9:00) so it makes sense for them to adjust to that being afternoon in their daily schedules. The music video presents no points to back this up as members of the band prance around in pajamas. That said, I do enjoy the song they tend to play first “We’re So Starving” where the group apologizes for being gone and taking time to write more songs. I find it humourous when they remind listeners 5 times that they need not worry about the band changing, when just recently they dropped the ! from their name. I am confident this is a significant change for the band. Yea, I know.. you’re probably thinking the same thing I am.. since when do musical artists care about punctuation… something is clear up. Maybe its because there is no ! at the end of Civic, or something like that.

If you haven’t figure it out by now, I attended the “2008 Honda Civic Tour Featuring Panic At The Disco” last night. The tour played across from my dorm, in the RPI fieldhouse. 4 bands performed, Phantom Planet, Hush Sound, Motion City Sickness, and of course Panic at the Disco. I think I enjoyed Panic at the Disco the most, the others were less appealing… maybe because I didn’t know any of their songs. Phantom Planet did play their “California” song, but that song has bad associations in my mind (it was used as the “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties” song for a web-radio station I set up a few years ago) so that song playing doesn’t inspire any calming memories or anything like that.

My ticket was for the “General Admission” section, which (little to my knowledge) didn’t have seats. I was expected to stand for >4 hours listening to music while being crushed by other people. That is exactly how I enjoy spending my Saturday night! The entire “lets see how densly we can pack ourselves” game has always been my favorite. Not. I understand some people like to move in correlation to the music being played (I am not one of the people if you haven’t caughten on yet), but there are some of us who would much rather have a seat with a predesignated space for ourselves. This allows me to better focus on enjoying the music and the performace, and not wondering who is molesting my right side. Needless to say, I took a seat after the first two groups performed. I was feeling weak after standing without being able to move more than 3 feet for a long time. The good seats were taken, so I took a seat off stage right. I couldn’t see much because of the lights poles in the way, but I could hear decently and isn’t that what concerts are about?

I did have a great seat to observe the security staff, who would assist people who were crowdsurfing to negotiate the wall they had seperating the crowd from the stage. I found that all female crowdsurfers were gently carried down, and friendly allowed to escort themselves to the side of the stage to get back into the crowd area. I found that most, *not all*, male crowd surfers were helped down, not always as nicely as a female, but then they were frequently shoved or pushed to the side of the stage by the security staff for doing nothing different from a female crowdsurfer. There were several instances were they were a male’s shirt was grabbed to assist in his removal from the stage, this practice never happened to females.

Being at the concert got me thinking about artists in general and their profession. I guess I get frustrated, maybe jealous, when I hear the story of group like Panic at the Disco who became famous while graduating high school. While I haven’t spent time biographing their members, I think there is a low probability most of them have attended college (at least for the academics). I spent my afternoon studying physics, they probably spend their afternoon relaxing with friends, family, or fans who would do anything to be next to them. Tomorrow will be the same for both of us, and probably the next day after that. Yes, I guess they have to put on shows somewhere in their.. but the show is established once and repeated several times. Its not like each show is terribly unique. They are going to play the same songs they’ve been playing for quite some time and people are likely going to clap their hands and scream in response to them. Where else but music does someone screaming at you imply something good. If I was at a programming something or other, and someone started screaming I would immediately prepare to evacuate and protect myself. Someone may have died, gotten severly injured, or the internet may have died. I guess it frustrates me, I’m likely going to be talking to a computer for the rest of my life. I like that, not because I enjoy feeding data to the machine, but because I like leveraging the machine to distribute data to others. There is a low probability I will ever have “groupies” or very dedicated fans. There is a better chance that I will get struck by lightening than I will “go on tour” in my “tour bus”. I didn’t show any extra signs of support for the musicians last night because I don’t think they did anything challening. It was not their first show, and it wasn’t their last show. I could have probably heard the music on my computer or something much clearer, without the dense people around me. I am likely going to spend some time thinking how I, as a computer person, can go on a “tour” and have people pay for me to do the same thing over and over again. I guess if I have to, I’ll wear tight pants, but only if there is someone to pick them out and iron them for me.

Othernews… I thought the dirty business would be cleaning itself up, that has not been the case though. I’ve simply found the infection spreading. Luckily I know that some immediate actions will happen on my part this week to temporarily put the problem at bay.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, or would like to join my group going on tour please let me know. I plan on getting sponsored by a car, and we’ll be eco-friendly by purchasing carbon offsets for our servers.

Good night moon.

Raining Friday

Its Friday again, the same thing that happens every 7 days. I would really like to blog about uplifting news one of these weeks but thats just not how things seems to go. I’ve usually been able to say that amidst the problems, at least topic x is going well but I dunno, I’m having trouble identifying what that x topic is.

Classes ended for me at RPI, so I have Monday off to study for my finals which are next week. I’m finished with Intro to Perl, which was probably the best programming course I’ve taken here at RPI. For once the professor actually new what he was talking about, and if he couldn’t answer your question he could find the answer within 5 minutes of lecture ending. I wish there were more classes/professors like that, where you actually learn things you can use. For example CANOS (Computer Architecture, Networks, and Operating Systems) is pretty much useless. Sure, I learned some basics of computer architecture, but nothing I ever plan on using really. I do not plan on designed processors or motherboards. Some of the operating systems and networking concepts were interesting, but 3 weeks wasn’t enough to cover that portion of the class.

I frequently ask myself what I might want to do for a future career in life. I always imagined getting a degree in “Computer & Systems Engineering” would imply some ability to do practical things with a computer. So far I haven’t learned anything to that effect. I had always shied away from Computer Science because of its theoretical roots. I dislike learning theory that lacks an application, but I’m willing to spend time on the theory of something if an application requires is. Who knows what I’ll be doing with whatever degree I end up with.

A great example is Database Systems, a class who’s description and syllabus looked rather promising. Unfortunately I can say I’ve learned anything useful in that class. I almost know the theory behind building a database management system, and I’ve almost learned the practical applications of a database (given I already knew most of this stuff). Some of the really important topics like clustering and load distribution were out of scope, and the implementation I was really looking forward to playing with like crash recovery and database optimization were none existent. I guess I got some credit for taking it, but thats never been a reason I do anything.

I would consider sharing positive news about Concerto, but I don’t have anything positive to report at this moment. I have come up with a witty phrase that symbolized my views on the project, but I’m saving that for a later blog related to trees.

I’ve also started work on a pet project of mine, it has the potential to be neat but I’m looking for help. Essentially I need people to review something and offer some feedback, requests, etc. To do this you must be able to “sign” a confidentiality agreement. By sign I mean convince me you’re not going to tell anyone, or let anyone see you testing this out. No, I won’t be compensating you for your work until I made money off this, which given my luck won’t happen. But if you have good input who knows. P.S. I reserve the right to decline your invitation to help if I feel you may be in a conflicted position.

I guess I’m going to review some notes or something like for my finals. Dinner was unpleasant tonight. I wasn’t in the mood for Commons, so I went to the Rath and order a chicken tender combo. After waiting there for 15 minutes, while the 2 staffers left to help at the sandwich station, I finally got my food. The chicken was small, and the fries were just dumped on top, leaving no room for me to put any ketchup or anything like that. I ate half, and threw the rest away. I guess I should have eaten at Commons.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re having a nice day.

Dirty Business

A few things going down today. Word on the street is someone is out to get me, that’s never pleasant. By calling it out over the internet, I hope someone will think twice if I don’t pop up in the usual places over the next few days. I don’t like wearing my raincoat’s hood, it makes it very difficult to identify if someone is coming up behind you. I also don’t like how the sun rises over BARH in the morning, around 8:00 or 8:30 its just peaking over the building when I’m walking back up the Burdett Ave stairs. Scanning the roof for snipers is very challenging, so I usually resort to running up the several flights of stairs in a randomly generated pattern.

That said I am surprised in the preventative actions some are taking against us, its not like we’re forming a militia for a coup d’etat or anything like that. I would say we are much better military strategists than that thank you very much. As usual, I’ve assumed my typically counter-intelligence role, I find data mining to be one of the most effective forms of stockpiling. Sure, you could stock pile munitions, food, even people… but they all take up space, and require funding.. data on the other hand tends to be cheap, and only takes up neural connections. To assist me in this task I’m going to recruit what I call the “Miner49er”. No, you cannot see him yet, and you probably won’t be able to see him ever thank you very much. Some people have imaginary friends who they talk to, I have imaginary friends that scour the internet for data.

I was also surprised to see a former ally actively ignore me. I thought that my communications had gotten lost or misplaced, last time we spoke the phone system was acting up at his location so I thought no big deal right. Everyone has busy points when they forget things. Clearly this was not the case, the project I started on was continued without me signed off on the completion of my stage, essentially leaving me hanging for several months. There isn’t much I can do now, because the audit trail is extremely weak at best. I guess I’ll just keep watch, and if I see this project take off to anything more than the demo status I’ll elevate my reaction.

All this thinking has got me interested in business intelligence software again, specifically reporting software. I’m familiar with Cognos 8’s Report Studio and Query Studio and I’m looking for a tool similiar, without the pricetag. I’m willing to jump though some extra hoops to set it up, but the ad-hoc query defination system needs to be slick. So far I have found nothing to this effect, but I’ll keep searching. You might be thinking what business does Brian has that requires intelligence? Good question! Well the fact of it is I would like to experiment with leveraging these tools for Personal Intelligence. I could create my own dashboard, tracking data important to me, providing an executive summary outlining what I might want to drill down into.

I successfully did not eat one of the 2 remaining cookies I have for the week. That means I will be able to eat that cookie later in the week.

Good Night, and Good Luck.