Brian's World

Encrypted Pants

I wrote a blog last night, but when I finally went to post it my wireless died and it failed to post. Of course my wireless had been dead for some time, so WordPress failed to autosave. Alas I’ll try again.

I am going to issue a decree: People should not wear codes on their pants. I realized this obvious problem this morning while eating breakfast in commons. Someone was cooking eggs at the cook your eggs at 700 degrees station (Yes, the students turn it to max everytime they use it) and I noticed someone had letters on their pants. Now typically when I see a bunch of letters, my mind automatically assembles the word and would recognize it but this case was different. The letters were all skewed at different angles, shapes, overlappings, etc.. it was junk. My mind spent more time than it normally does trying to turn this bunch of letters into a word. I had to stop it, because starring at someones pants for too long is always a bad thing and if the code on they were trying to convey to me was that important, they wouldn’t have placed it on their pants. So please, if you are trying to communicate to me using some type of cypher, encoding, hash, code, or cryptosystem, please do not place it on your pants.

In other news, tomorow will be my 7th day of feeling lousy. Today my stomach was upset from the hours of 12pm to 7pm, which was pretty terrible. I ended up skipping dinner, under the feeling I wouldn’t be able to keep anything down so I ate some elf crackers at BARH. (They ran out of pretzels FYI) I was worried, because that wasn’t holding me over very well and it was already past commons closing time so I was unsure what to eat. Typically I would have just muched on bread or crackers, but they don’t have those items in free abundance here. Katie came to the rescue and suggested I get a sub, which proved to be a very intelligent choice. I ate a grilled chicken sub with lettuce and american cheese. No mayo or other dressings. While it was partially tasteless, it didn’t upset my stomach and provided me with some much needed calories. I sometimes enjoy tasteless food, its refreshing to just eat something and not have to worry about what the next bite will taste like.

I recently got my beta invite to PMOG, which is a pretty neat game when it works. Essentially its a Firefox plugin that runs a game, you get points for surfing the neat and can “place” things on sites you visit like mines, portals, crates, etc for other people with this plugin to find. I wish I had thought of something like this sooner. Unfortunately the extension doesn’t work well in Firefox 3 beta 3, and it likes to sign me out without telling me. You can check out my profile here. If you want an invite, let me know and I’ll shoot one your way if I get one.

I have a story about resources to tell, and the resource monitor, but I’ll save it for another time. I should get to bed so I can start feeling better sooner.

Goodnight moon.

Feeling Better

I am feeling better from my ailment now. I’m not sure if will be healed tomorrow, or I’m just feeling better because it has been a long day and I will be going to sleep soon. I did stare at myself in the mirror last night and command myself to get better, I think that step was important because if I think I’m getting better, I will get better.

A lot of the time things I say aren’t taken as well as I wish they were. I can spend a lot of time getting very excited about an idea and planning it out and all hyped up about it just to find that when I share it I am either a) the only person who cares about it because the issues is of my importance anymore or b) I am wrong and that is that. When someone else presents me with an idea I assume they are excited for it and have some reason for presenting it to me. While they are looking for my feedback, they are almost always looking for that feedback to be presented in a positive fashion. If I think their idea is dumb I won’t say “well I think that is a dumb” because thats not effective. Instead I’ll try to redirect their efforts towards something that makes a little more sense. Of course this would imply people present ideas to me, which I can’t say has been done since high school.

A lot of those stupid MySpace surveys and stuff out there raise the question “if you could talk to anyone at all, who would it be?” I think my answer would be myself, 10-15 years from now. Throwing aside any time-continuum problems, I think that conversation might be one of the most ensightful I could have. I find it very hard to ask people for advice, which tends to be very complicated when you imply my information is free policy. Telling someone you asked for advice about stuff doesn’t work out well usually… but thats ok. I’ve found that I tend to be the best source of information to help me, which is problematic when I don’t have the solution right away, or even a path to get there. Yes, in various components I’m sure I align with some population that could offer advice, but that alignment is very rare. Maybe advice is the wrong thing to seek, I might I could be best serviced my an ancient chinese proverb or something like that… hrm.

Since I can’t go a blog without saying something about Concerto.. we’ve been pushing for this deployment of the system within a week or two which is great and all, but that seems to be all people are thinking about.. at least all that I know they are thinking about… but the loop tends to not include me. I think I’m thinking ahead, but for all I know I may be thinking about some midpoint between now and then. How am I to know? Today’s meeting was pretty lame, it was myself and Battista for the first 30 minutes. Then DiTore showed up; and finally we were graced with the presence of August and Brian. Needless to say it was very ineffective. I tried my best to outline an agenda and do stuff, but I fail as per SOP.

I need to fill up my cup of water before I go to bed, which I should do soon. I have to stay up later on Friday and Saturday because Commons doesn’t open until 9:00am.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring to be exact. I will likely write some code, do some boring homework, and then sit like a log. Sometimes there are exciting things going on in my life… oh wait.

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.