Brian's World

Curley Qs and Loopdy Loo’s

The title of the blog is pretty great, rarely do I have a title that is as neat as that one. And its kind of relevant to one of my latest frustrations: my hair. I know, anyone who knows me very well must be worried, because my hair is the same every day, day after day, since the first time my mom started combing it over to the right when I was of the age one starts to develop comb-able hair. Earlier in the week I was having issues where this group of hair on the right side would droop down onto my forehead, causing me to push at it attempting to get it to go back with the rest of my hair combed over.. well now I’m having the opposite problem, my hair is now doing some very strange curl thing right where it used to be drooping down. Now it goes up like I hill and then down on the side of my face, even worse.. instead of just doing down like before, its now preceded my a mountain.. as if to indicate to all checking out my hairline “hey look over here, there’s something dumb here”. Needless to say I have been applying much water to try and resolve this situation, and the barber better be open on Saturday morning or Presidents Day.

Today I installed Firefox 3 Beta 3. I like it as much as I like Internet Explorer I think. The “Home” button has dropped into my “Bookmarks” bar, leaving me with forward, back, reload and stop for my primary navigation buttons. I’ve found this the same on Safari as well, the Home button is no where to be found! Personally I enjoy the one click return to my safe harbor of the internet, knowing that I can easily click the small but welcoming house and return to my Google Hompage. Once I’m “surfing” (I hate to use that as a verb here), I don’t like to type addresses.. I like to click things.. and the entire game of hide-and-seek-the-home-button is not fun for me. But it does seem to do much better on the Acid2 test.. thats always pleasent.

Its been raining cats and dogs today, now it might be snowing. All I can say for sure is the weather on my bed is dry and there are no clouds above me.. yet the ceiling is off white. I enjoyed removing all the ice from my car.. I especially enjoy trying to do it without using the scraper thing. I sucessfully cleaned 3/8 windows on my car without using the scraper… as well as the roof of my car. I couldn’t use a scraper to remove that block of ice duh. I would expect a wikihow article soon, “How to clean your car without any brushes”. Awsome!

Ok, I’ll tell you the secret. The trick is to forcefully hit the ice to loosen it from the car, and then rotate it. Use 2 hands, position them diagonally from each other, and then hit the ice. You shouldn’t break the ice, just disturb it slightly.. keep your hands pressed there, and then rotate them. Repeat as necessary.

Lately I’ve found myself more “jittery”, which some might falsely identify as energetic. I attribute this jittery-ness to the increaseing mountain that is Digital Signage… Speaking of which. It is my great honor and privledge to introduce you to Concerto, the new name for what was “digital signage”. You can check out the logo when I find a link to it. Yes, the name might sound dumb.. but thats actually a trick its playing on your mind. By sounding dumb you’re like “hey, that doesn’t make any sense now does it?”, but just thinking about that too yourself is causing you to think of the name Concerto and the digital signage.. see if we picked a name like Digital Signage you’d be like “…” because its so obvious it requires no thought or post-processing.. and its all in the post-processing. If find the logo does similiar things, it secretly looks like a blue xbox controller that someone mashed up. But thats ok, I like blue, xbox, and mashed potatoes. Hence there are no problems. Actually I’ve always had a secret desire to be good at photoshop/art and its never panned out. I can read tutorials and I can replicate them, but I fail at doing good stuff. The “best” thing I’ve ever “made” is this: http://katieboudreau.com/images/headerbg.gif and I’m sure others could do much better. Ha, I found a secret sample of the Concerto logo: click here for a draft of it. But I have found myself pretty motivated to work on it lately, I’ve gotten to content uploading, which I’ve opted to make one of my larger challenges. Its all fun though.. I am looking for ways to convert powerpoint slides to images (jpg or png preferred) without installing Open Office.. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

When I explained the Digital Signage development cycle to Katie it clicked how ineffectient it is, but its too late to tweak it I think. We’ll just keep on going until we finish.

My stomach is making noise that it is hungry, so I should go to bed. If the waffle mix doesn’t have vomit in it I might make a waffle for myself tomorrow. This week its been terrible, blueberries, some strange oat/nut mixture today.. actually it was probably bananas.. but those are just as bad as nuts in my book. Tomorrow will probably bring banananutberries… at least Sodexho has the reusing old food thing down pat.

Goodnight moon. Catcha on the flip side.

Cold

Today is February 10, 2008 and its been like an entire week since my last post. Yea, I know.. I’m feeling deprived of my thoughts as well. I came down with a cold or something last Wednesday/Thursday that limited my mental abilities. This cold still exists, and I am running critically low on handkerchiefs, but thats neither here nor there. I do believe this frigid cold weather is not helping my cold, but I will try to combat that by wearing my hat anytime I am outside.. even if it makes my hair all staticy and terrible.

Last week while walking to chemistry on Monday I realized something interesting. In high school I looked forward to attending classes on a daily basis. Yes, there were those days I didn’t look forward to a test in class x or something, but in general I wanted to go to school and I wanted to be in class. I’m college I’m finding quite the opposite, the majority of my classes are not events that I look forward to. Its not the material, so much as the style/format and social interactions that occur there. I do find some classes boring, but I do not recall being bored in high school when I didn’t care about the subjects. I payed attention because the information was being presented in a way that facilitated my learning. This entire college idea of lecturing in a medium to large class sitting in a banked theatre just doesn’t work for me. I feel more like I’m in a movie than in a learning classroom. What I also find interested is the mass desire to do well and get as good a grade as possible. When we’re given “individual” assignments I enjoy working as an individual. If I, an individual, do not know the answer to a question I, an individual, will try to find that out in the resources I have; be that a book, the internet, notes, etc. I do not believe in the “lets work this out as a group so we can all do really well on it” philosophy. Sure, I’m susceptible to get an 80 on an assignment the group can generate a 100 on.. but the 80 is a more accurate representation of what I know and thats what matters. I’m off topic. In high school I woke up every morning at 6:00 excited to head into school that day.. now a days I wake up at 7:00am dreading the classwork. I don’t like it, but I have yet to find a solution.

In other news, I started logging every position the shuttles ever hit.. or at least every one we download. The hope is to predict shuttles arrival based on past data. I have an idea for the algorithm, I just have to write it at some point. It should be interested to test out, seeing as I rarely do work that extends beyond the internet and computer screen.

Oh yes, today ‘Anonymous’ had lots of protests or something like that outside Scientologist locations. I did not involve myself in any said meetings because being ‘anonymous’ implies people don’t know who you are. Since I do not own any good masks or disguise kits, it was not logical for me to attend. It is an interesting struggle. I don’t have a very strong opinion on the matter, but it seems the “Church of Scientology” as a cooperate entity is moderately uncool… but I think people should be able to practice whatever faith they want. You won’t see me practicing any faith that charges some obscene monthly fee to get my E metered. Personally if I want to pay to get metered I will park somewhere I shouldn’t and fail to pay the meter, I will not hold onto tin foil covered toilet paper roll and watch a small stick move… maybe thats just me.

Valentine’s Day is coming up this week on Thursday I believe… that will spell failure for sure. I am not good with the romantic stuff usually, but I will try. I don’t remember a.) what I did last year and b.) was it sucessful. Therefore I am not very likely to show lots of improvement.. unless I’ve already processed that data and learned from it. I tend to doubt this as it typically requires conscious work on my part, and I tend to remember things done when conscious.

I have work to do, or I have to go to the bathroom. I’m not sure which I’ll do.

February

So its the start of February. I’ve always disliked the first r in FebRuary.. its so out of place. If the last r was lonely it should just enjoy having an a and a y to border it, imaging being that big F up from that is completely unguarded on the flat side.

The superbowl is going on right now. The people next door have been preparing since 5:00am or so when they turned on the loud music. Just a few minutes ago they threw 2 large objects at the wall… probably like a toaster or something that didn’t bounce off. I believe this correlated to the Giants scoring some type of points. Alas, visual inspection has determined that the flying object did not breach any of the walls that I would care about, like the walls behind my closet.. so I think I’m ok.

Last night I saw Untraceable, it was a pretty great movie. It was about the internet, and fbi, and dead people, and everything else that makes a great movie. I was confused why this techno agent had failed to change their homepage from the Vista Welcome to the internet junk. Their computer was running very fast, lucky for them. The bad guy died at the end, and the good guys lost… and the internet did prevail. It was moderately accurate from a technical standpoint as well. Sure, they didn’t try as hard as they could have to block this website, but I guess the movie needed some kind of plot.

I got a bunch of work done on shuttle tracking this evening, http://stuttles.rpi.edu. Now all the shuttle positions are logged in the archive table, so we can eventually predict when shuttles will arrive somewhere. It should be a neat algorithm.. i.e a lookup table. If anyone has a smarter idea that would be appreciated as well. Digital Signage got a little work as well, not much though. I determined I really don’t like building a class that builds an array of classes inside itself. Even though I wrote both classes, I don’t like the level of abstraction.

Ugh, the Patriots lost the SuperBowl. Typically I wouldn’t care, but the people next door are Patriots fans, and they feel it is necessary to shout their frustrations at the top of their lungs. I do not have ear plugs.

Goodnight moon.