I was browsing through some old bookmarks this morning when I came across this clip of Redefined, one of Madison’s a capella groups, performing a medley of some classic NES soundtracks. Definitely worth it for anybody who’s played classic 8-bit games, sorry about the crappy video quality (wasn’t me).

[The Legend of Zelda]

It’s been a while since I’ve had Campbell’s soup in such quantities. All I’ve eaten since 10:30 last night is two cans of chicken soup with stars. Hurrah for wisdom teeth. Who thought those were a good idea anyway?

• Outscoring Tim 69,630 points to 20,040 in Text Twist, finally losing to “sables.” (Tim had the legitimately impossible word “quoits.” What the hell?)
• Visiting Grandma Witt’s house, seeing the Joswiaks and Donald Witt family. Getting free wifi off some neighbor’s unsecured network (with better signal strength from next door than I get across the house at home).
• Finding out at Grandma’s that my mom tried to specify Bowling for Soup’s A Hangover You Don’t Deserve to my aunt for my sister’s gift exchange list by saying it was the album with “1995” and “Always” on it…. The album actually holds “1985” and “Almost.” Nice work mom 😉
• Christmas at home with amazing prime rib.
• Heading to the Meyers’ after supper to watch the Packer game and play Scene-it. Those who have ever asked me about any movie will be surprised to learn that between my dad and I, we pretty well dominated the game. Adding in Dan and Randy with some key scores, and the results were Guys: 2, Girls: 0.
• Teaching Dad to use iTunes to store his CDs on his computer in compressed format. He was pretty impressed with how easy it is to import music, make a playlist, burn to CD, etc. Chalk one up for Apple, despite the ugly compatability-layer bloatedness of iTunes under Windows. He was also very impressed with the high quality iTMS song previews, which sounded great on his Klipsch computer speakers.
• Transferring some music over to dad’s computer from my desktop by plugging the tower into nothing but the wall & the router, and facilitating the file transfer via Wifi on my laptop. I was very pleased that Gentoo handled the new network environment without a blink.
• Jalapeno beef sticks from Maplewood Meats
• A CD of better flamenco music than we found to buy while in Spain

That’s all I can think of at the moment. It’s great to be home with the family again, and to have nothing to do. Just waiting for the grades to come in, and my break will be perfect…

Merry Christmas everyone!

Every time I come home after being in Madison for a couple months, it amazes me anew just how quiet it is here. Being in “the country” (aka a more sparsely-populated suburb) is a pleasant change from the continual background noise of Madtown…. though a bit unnerving for a little while as well. It’s good to be home, though.

Catching up on issues of Popular Science, I came across this awesome quote from a letter to the editor:

“If it weren’t for our presumptuous desire to learn, humanity would have the same aspirations as a herd of cows.”

Awesome quote… on the other hand, cows never had to take finals. I’m glad those are over with. Except for ece 352, where even the final was awesome. We got a cake! (It was Prof. Schulte’s birthday. (That’s Prof. Lipasti in the picture))

Speaking of birthdays, Happy Birthday to Dave Dreyer, who is 87 days older than I today, and to Jacob Michael LaSota, who is 86 days older than I tomorrow. lol… think about that.

Hollywood makes me angry. So does the U.S. system of government which gives Hollywood more say than me (since Hollywood has more money). I had written about 2 pages worth of a rant here, but decided it wasn’t worth posting. If you ever want to hear my opinion on Big Media, just ask. To give you a one-sentence take home message: I feel that Hollywood, through its utter uncomprehension of technology and inability to cope with a changing market place, is buying legislation behind our backs in our very Congress to take away our right to use legally purchased media in legal ways.

Standard disclaimer: IANAL, and it’s midnight before my last exam. I’m a bit tired. Otherwise I probably would have let it go like every other apathetic American.

I learned a valuable lesson when taking pictures for a panorama today. Make sure nothing moves in and out of your overall picture while you’re taking it, or the stitching-together process will get a little weird…

Taken from outside the Louvre, in Paris.

[click for higher-res]

Had finals last Thursday (AIS 172), Saturday (ECE 230) and Sunday (STAT 311). Haven’t gotten any grades back as of yet. I think all went well enough to keep my A’s in those classes, which is somewhat unfortunate since I took AIS 172 pass/fail… Statistics would be the most questionable as far as pulling out an A. I vaguely remember blogging about my ECE 270 bench exam about 2 weeks ago, but I got my exam back, and that officially went well. Ended up losing a total of zero points for the semester. Now just one final left (this Thursday) in ECE 352.

I know people have told me to check them out before (especially Scott), but I finally got around to trying out podcasts yesterday. Pretty cool stuff. I’d recommend Security Now! for the security-minded geek (but not for the faint of heart… it’s pretty technical), or the well-known TWiT, hosted by Leo Laporte of The Screen Savers fame (back in the good ole days before G4).

One thing I learned about from my brief initial foray into the podcasting world is a program called Hamachi. Hamachi is a really cool super-secure tunneling peer-to-peer VPN solution that allows you to create virtual private LANs across completely unsecured network connections and even does NAT traversal on both ends, if at all possible. Potential applications: remote desktoping into enlight-server without needing to open up an SSH tunnel through CAE all the time. Or, remote connecting to my computer in my room from anywhere in the world with zero worries about security and virtually no limit to the interactivity between my remote computer and the local one. Ex) Windows file sharing. Why not, when as far as Hamachi is concerned, the computers are on the same private LAN? Very cool.

Today I made great headway (ha) on my Christmas shopping… Jeni and I went to the mall, but all I managed to purchase was one present for a friend. Nothing for my family as of yet. (Does that make me a bad person?) Anyway, after that we went to Wendt and studied for a while. I got a goodly amount of 352 taken care of, and it was nice not to be sitting in my room by myself to do that 🙂

Now tonight I am working on combining the pre-panorama photo series I took in Europe into actual panoramic images. My poor laptop is feeling the limits of its 1.67 GHz processor, as it just spent an hour blending images of the city of Barcelona, only to have me realize when looking at the finished product that I didn’t center the images correctly, causing bad things to happen that made the output unusable…. Sorry, powerbook. I’ll try harder next time.

No, not really, but it was still pretty funny to see Thunderbird flag this past week’s Microsoft Student Ambassador newsletter as a scam. (See photo below, click for more detail.) One of the new features of Thunderbird 1.5 (currently in release candidate status), is that it will attempt to recognize emails that are scams, phishing attempts, etc. The MSA newsletter was flagged this past week (and I’m sure the other weeks would have been as well, had I been using Thunderbird to read them) because of the way that the author screwed up the links. (Or more likely, because of how Exchange server screwed them up)

All of the links in the email were doubly-redirected through mail.microsoft.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp. If I understand correctly, this is intended to be used when *viewing* an email in Exchange server’s web client, so that you get some pretty “back to Exchange Web” or some such frame above the link you click on. At some point in the email composing process, though, all the links in the outgoing copy of the message were redirected as well, so that they bounce through mail.microsoft.com twice. For example, the email’s link to the Windows Embedded Student Challenge (www.windowschallenge.com) appeared like this in the letter: http://www.windowschallenge.com. Now on first glance that looks ok, but if you hover your mouse over it, you’ll note that the actual URL of that link is rather bizarre. If you click on it, you’ll note that it dead ends at Microsoft’s Exchange server login page. Uselessly, might I add. So because the text of the link named one URL, and the actual href (where your browser will go) of the link points to mail.microsoft.com instead, Thunderbird flagged it as a scam. (This is a common tactic of phishers… they’ll title a link “ebay.com/renew_your_membership_now_or_bad_things_will_happen” but set the href to something like “http://www.yousuckbecauseyouweredumbenoughtoclickonthislink.com/”, which will look like an ebay login page, but actually just steal your account info.)

The mistake wasn’t malicious on Microsoft’s behalf, but deceptive, nonetheless, and Thunderbird would have none of it:

Throughout the semester as I’m taking notes in lecture or discussion, if the professor or TA says something humorous, I try to write the quote down at the top of my page of notes. Unfortunately I usually forget it there and never see it again, but this semester I’ve been coming across these quotes again as I’m studying for finals, and I thought I should share some of them.

Prof. Moo Chung (Stats 311):
“As you can see, computing the probability that [some equation on the board] is less than t is quite difficult. I mean you can write it, and for me it’s easy, but for other people it’s very hard.”

Prof. Sean Teuton (American Indian Studies 172), displaying his amazing arithmetic skills (amazing for an English professor, I suppose):
“[The Zia are] demanding $1 million per year for every year New Mexico continues to use their ancient symbol [on their flag]. So the Zia have this lawsuit, it’s in the millions of dollars now.”

Kevin Piper (AIS 172 Instructor), with a quote that I really hope isn’t true, for the sake of us all:
“A favorite party trick of [English] grad students and professors is to take a novel and say, ‘Everyone thinks this is a romance novel, but I’m going to prove that it’s actually a realistic novel,’ or whatever.”

If I find more quotes as I go through my ECE 352 notes this week, I’ll toss them up here, too. Then maybe over winter break when I go through left over stuff from last year I’ll find my quotes from Prof. Sigurd Angenent, who is by far the funniest professor I’ve ever had, not to mention being an excellent mathematics teacher. I highly recommend him, if you’re going to be taking any Calculus in the future.

Jared and I played our greatest racquetball match in our 1.5-year history tonight. To give you the background, racquetball games are played to 15 points, with 2 of 3 games winning a match. In the past 1.5 years, I’ve won zero matches and about half a dozen games against Jared, which is dismal, given that we play weekly. (So I’ve won about 6 of around 150 games.) Not only that, but I have a tendancy to lose with less than 10 points… so most of the games aren’t really even close. I suppose it’s fair, since Jared outscores me on tests with about the same frequency that I beat him in racquetball. (Though usually he’s right behind me or tied if he doesn’t outscore me)

Tonight though, tonight was different. The first game I opened strong and beat the living crap out of Jared, 15-6. I’ve never beat him that resoundingly, ever. The streak continued in game 2, which could have clinched me my first match win ever, had I not screwed up around 8 points and ended up losing 12-15. Sad. The game though, was awesome. We fought nearly half an hour for that game, including one amazing volley that I swear must have lasted 5 minutes, including both of us completing off-the-back-wall saves. What a good time. Definitely the best I’ve ever played.