Zoom-Zoom

Well nothing really exciting happened today, we managed to make it across Nebraska and Wyoming with no real trouble. Today we drove 400 miles across Wyoming and about another 400 miles across Nebraska. That puts us up to around 1,400 for my 2,200 mile trip. Right now I'm sitting in a hotel Evanston, WY taking full advantage of the wireless internet (yes I logged into WoW but I don't really plan to play). It took me a bit to get logged in as it appears the default name server assigned by the hotel doesn't really exist. In trying to figure out why I couldn't find Google I discovered they use linksys home routers as access points which all happen to use the default admin password. With my newfound power I could h4x0r the router and mess up the 'net but that would be pretty pointless and just screw me over.

Anyways I have a few pictures to post. I have a couple pictures of Wyoming from the car, and a few pictures of my car. For those of you who don't know I recently (two days ago) purchased a 2006 Mazda 3, S model to drive around for the next 10 years. In any case I have a couple pictures of the car for those interested. But first Wyoming!



These are the only pictures which turned out, the rest are just of completely flat land and have reflections from the car window. Now for my car.







Now the interior:



Those of your who may have looked closely might have noticed that yes, this car has a manual not an automatic transmission. I currently have like 4 days experience with it and have it down pretty well now. Another interesting tidbit is that you CANNOT see any of the gauges when the car is off as the red is 100% led lights. As an added bonus the white edges you see turn blue at night, it looks pretty cool. I'll try and snap a photo after it gets dark and post it later. Anyways that's it for now. Tomorrow, it's time to cross Utah, and Nevada as we plan to stop in Sacremento for the night (my Dad doesn't want to drive further than that).

California HO!

Well I'm off to California as of today. Right now I'm sitting in a hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska after about half a day of driving like crazy. So far the trip has been pretty uneventful. Nebraska/Iowa are probably the two most boring (and smelliest) states to drive through so I don't think much exciting will happen over the next day or so. Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to post tomorrow.

Vael Down

As of last night my WoW guild has finally downed Vaelastrasz the Corrupt! This boss is considered the second hardest guy in BWL after Nefarion. With Vael down we will once again start making serious progress in BWL.


Now back to packing for CA.

Time is Money Friend

Well it's been a very busy week and a half for me. I've spent most of my week taking care of stuff before I head out to California to start my internship at nVidia. WoW time has been restricted to my scheduled raid times once again.

So what have I done this week (in no particular order)?

• Played with my new Olympus Stylus 600 and Olympus E-500 cameras.
• Test drove more cars than I can count.
• Driving my brother and sister to school/work/events.
• Picking out a new pair of glasses.
• Shopped for Car insurance.
• Compared Car loan rates.
  
• Worked on some school stuff
• Spent a couple days sick with a 101° fever.
• Setup shared internet in a relatives house.
• Went to a birthday party.
• Went to a car auction.
• Got pulled over for driving a white Cadillac.
  

As you can see it has been a busy week, especially as I think I left some stuff out. Now I need to get packed up and ready to head out to CA tomorrow.

Orphan Tour

For some reason my brother decided to take a poor Stormwind orphan along to BWL.



I don't think this is really the right place for children.

AARGGGHH Stupid Server

It's been awhile since I've made a post about World of Warcraft. Some of you may know that I play this game upon occasion. Since my last WoW post stuff has changed quite about. I left my old small guild and joined a raiding guild on my server Perenolde. Since I started raiding with them (I actually started while still a member of my old guild), we have managed to master Molten Core and basically have this dungeon on "farm" status. We have also managed to get Onyxia on farm status, and can get Razorgore in Black Wing Lair down in 1-2 attempts regularly.

Last Sunday my guild was disbanded after our officers asked our guild leader to step down due to some personality conflicts between the leader and some of our membership. Rather than step down gracefully a long argument ensued followed by the GM disbanding the guild rather than transferring leadership. While this could be the death of a guild luckily my guild bounces back pretty well. We have already reformed with new name and leadership and we are stronger than ever. Now to the reason for this post.


Right now we are working on getting down boss #2 in BWL Vaelastraz the Corrupt. Today we managed to almost kill this guy 5 times, our last two attempts would have been kills but for one annoying problem. BLIZZARD HATES US. That's right we had some freak disconnects our last tries which basically cost us the fight. While we had a tank disconnect just as we started the fight and about 2 minutes into the fight we lost another 5-10 players. For this particular fight healing and damage dealing are all very important and we cannot lose that many players and still expect to finish the fight. So we ended up the night empty handed with only our normal Onyxia/Razorgore 2 kill combo. Hopefully we have time Saturday or Sunday to take Vael down.

For those of you interested I have a video of the fight encoded with the xvid codec, with full audio. You can here my current background music and the teamspeak chatter. Two interesting things to note. Just as you see ATTACK show up on the screen you can see yellow text in the bottom left corner which one of the tanks disconnecting. Around 2 minutes into the fight you can see the mass disconnect which doomed us. WARNING: 60mb video! Download here.

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4 P330 H5

After talking with people about all the great old games I've inspired myself to go play some of those old classic PC games I have sitting around.

Ultima 1-8, Wing Commander 1-3, Crusader:No Regret/Remorse, Magic Carpet, Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Dark Forces, Warcraft I, Wacraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal(impossible expansion), Syndicate, Theme Hospital, Settlers 2, Dungeon Keeper, Mechwarrior 2(Wolf Clan Campaign), Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, Fallout and more I can't recall now!

Now I just need to figure out how to run all these things on XP 64, without them running to fast.

The Light - It Burns!!!

So far finals week is off to a racing start. Yesterday I had a cookout out at Vilas park with some friends. The first thing we did was assemble the grill, which took longer than I had expected since we had to many engineers on the project. Once that work was done we got the food on but it took a good 1-2 hours to get it all cooked.

While waiting for food we enjoyed the beautiful weather, and played some Frisbee. After eating we walked over to the Henry Vilas Zoo where we looked at the animals. I hadn't been to the zoo since freshman year, and not to much has changed. For a free zoo they have a nice selection of animals, we saw: Lions, Peacocks, Kangaroos, Bears, Giraffes, Sea Otters, Harbor Seals, and more. Some of the animals didn't appear to be out yet. We were also a bit to late to see some animals as they closed up a few exhibits about 5 minutes before we made it over there :(.

Well while playing Frisbee and looking at all the animals it appears I acquired a nice sunburn on my face, arms, and the back of my neck. Next time I spend more than an hour or so outside I'll remember that I should put on sunblock. You'd think I'd learn I burn at the beginning of the season by now.

(Bonus question: What computer game is my post title from?)

All plants must die

It seems that all the plants have declared war on me. This morning I woke up with my eyes all puffy and watering, and my nose completely stuffed up. Apparently something I am VERY allergic to is spewing its devil pollen into the air in an attempt to kill me. I've tried taking some prescription strength allergy medication, but it has had little effect against to the weapons of the plants. At this point the only option is a mass attack to eliminate the plants before they kill me in my sleep.

At this point there is no hope of a peaceful solution and so it is with great sadness that I declare war upon the cellulose ones.

It's Alive

I can't believe it finally works!! What is it you might ask? It is the Maquina engineering fountain remote server I've been working on the last couple of years. Or original server was written by me in about 10 minutes a year or two back. Since this fall we've been slowly rewriting the server to support several concurrent connections and actually be somewhat feature rich! No longer does it completely crap out if you give it invalid input (actually I lie, it sill dies when you give invalid input only now it's a nice assert!).

You should check out Colins blog (link on the right) for movies and pictures of the server in action. The working version has been the effort of a bunch of people. Tim reworked our ladder network code to deal with disconnects. Colin and Craig have been the primary coders on the new and improved server and have done a good job. I revamped/cleaned up my networking library(it's still not perfect), wrote a logging library, gave some random C++ and system design/architecture help, and have been figuring out how to turn our poor console app into a Windows service (which as of about 10 minutes ago I think I have figure out).

All that's left before we can do an initial deployment is:

• Finish coding the last bits of the server
• Port the server to a Windows Service (my job)

Stuff left for final version:

• Implement User ID Protocol
• Finish Website Design (Mikah where is our Ajax Web 2.0 XML Service Client?)
  

Thank You for Smoking

Last night I saw the excellent movie "Thank You for Smoking". I definitely recommend the movie, it gives some interesting insight into "Spin" and the world of lobbiests. It even comes with some good tips on how to debate someone, just remember you don't need to be right you just need to show the other person is wrong.


This morning I'm heading to Engr to give a talk to high school students about how great computer engr is. I hope I manage to convince someone to become and engr. To be honest I'm not sure how much influence college student has with highschoolers. I could really see making a difference if I worked with them everyday and showed what cool stuff you can do in engineering, but given 1 hour? Hopefully our demo of our fountain remote control project doesn't totally break just before we give our presentation. What could possibly go wrong? Computers never make mistakes.

Afghani food made easy

Since I didn't make the 5 hour drive back home for Easter this last weekend, I decided to spend a rainy Sunday making some Afghani food with a recipe from my favorite restaurant. Well it turns out I didn't have all the ingredients necessary, and I was already hungry and didn't want to wait on food. So instead I made my own cheesy version of Kabeli Palow that was much simpler.

Rather than doing all the work in the recipe I simply browned some chicken in a pan threw in some garam masala, garlic salt, and raisins. I then combined the mixture with some basmati rice, and amazingly it turned out pretty good. It wasn't nearly as good as the food from Da Afghan but it sure was easy to make. I'll probably have the same thing tonight since all I have is some chicken and a 10lb bag of rice left in my apartment.

Dell invents everything!

A recent interview with the Dell CTO has Dell claiming if it wasn't for them PCI-Express, 802.11, 64 bit x86 support and more would never have come to be. While I agree Dell has a lot of power in the industry I think they are taking to much credit for other peoples work. About the only technology I might give Dell some credit for is making Intel support 64bit technology on their processors. They probably had a conversation along these lines:

Dell: Hey, Intel.

Intel: Yes?

Dell: We need 64 bit computers HP is stealing sales from us.

Intel: You have 64 bit processors. Itaniums should be good enough for you.

Dell: We want 64 bit x86!

Intel: Microsoft doesn't even support this.

Dell: I WANT IT!!!

Intel: No.

Dell: We'll use AMD.

Intel: .....

Intel: Would you like anything else with your 64 bit x64 procs?

Dell: Buy one get one free with your processors.

Intel: Ok.

Hell just froze over

Well I think its official hell just froze over. Apple has just announced a beta for a tool which will allow end users to dual boot Mac OS X and Windows XP on their Intel based Macs. This tool makes repartitioning your harddrive as simple as adjusting a slider and it gives you a full set of Windows drivers for the Apple hardware. This solution is more elegant than the previously announced user written BIOS compatibility layer. While the layer allowed you to boot xp it driver support for Apple's hardware was lacking. This makes me want to replace my 17in PowerBook with a MacBook Pro. Except I really can't justify dropping another 2k on a laptop in less than a year.

One of the funniest parts of the announcement shows Apple's attitude toward its PC competitors and Microsoft.

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Newegg is Teh Sux0r

Well the title says it all. I received a replacement mainboard for my broken one today. Only it wasn't really a replacement for my mainboard. Instead of the model I returned I received a inferior model which retails for $30-40 less than my board. It doesn't have even the same set of features as my old mainboard. To top it off the mainboard came all by itself and didn't include any of the cables, a manual, drivers, or any of the other stuff I returned as per Newegg.com's instructions.

After talking to a customer service rep I found I needed to RMA/return this POS board they sent me, and wait for them to get off their butts and possibly send me the correct item. The rep was kind enough to tell me they would refund $20 for shipping the item back (it actually costs $20.49 to ship). Hopefully they will actually credit my account, but as the overnight shipping I was promised on the phone doesn't show up on the RMA order my hopes for this aren't very high. At this point I was better off attempting to fix my mainboard by myself. This is probably the last time I ever buy anything from Newegg.com, or even recommend them to others. It seems that Newegg's customer service is starting to suck as they become more and more popular.

The Quiet Before the Storm

This last month has been rather busy, I've had three midterms, and spring break, over the last few weeks. Break was a quiet time where I had a chance to relax a bit. I played a bit of WoW (not as much as you would expect), went to an orchestra concert, went camera shopping (didn't get anything), and worked on some research/paper writing. Since returning I've been slowly getting back into the swing of things.

Despite the release of Bethesada Softworks' new game Oblivion, the death of my PC motherboard's chipset fan has kept me on track. I won't be receiving my "new" (refurbished...) board until next Monday so I'm still pretty safe. The lack of my desktop has also curtailed my WoW playing to "scheduled" times (laptop != good gaming). This is a good thing as it's now project time at school. This semester I'm developing a secure network poker game, implementing a few real-time networking scheduling algorithms, and examining the effects of using DRAM without refresh cycles as caches in multi-processor systems.

I think I'm going to have my hands full the rest of the semester. Despite all this I've had a pretty quiet day so far. I went to meet with a Professor only to realize he was out of town (oops), and I followed that up with a meeting with a project partner. After my meeting I headed home, ate some lunch, and made up a large pot of chili for tonight (Yummm). I'm probably going to have left over chili for the rest of the week, but this is a good thing as chili only gets better with age.

Kendo Update

Here's that post I promised about the Kendo tournament at the begining of the week.

So last Saturday I got to ride to Detroit, MI for the annual Kendo Tournament. One of our club members was testing for his San-Dan rank and we needed to be out to Detroit by about 2pm. Given the 7-8 hour long drive this meant I was getting picked up around 5:30am Saturday morning. Knowing this I carefully set my alarm clock to 5am Friday night so I would have enough time to wake up and finish my packing.

Saturday morning I awoke to my cellphone's ring to find out that my ride would be arriving in about 5 minutes! I didn't remember my alarm going off so I checked my alarm and verified I had set my alarm to 5:00, 5:00 pm that is. Oops! After a quick scramble during which I loaded my backup up with my clothes and other items I had set out the night, I ran downstairs and found out I had only kept people waiting about 5 minutes. Next we went to meet up with Van #2 which was delayed by someone and so didn't show up until about 20 minutes later. Looks like I could have taken a bit more time packing, instead I spent the rest of the weekend with the feeling I left something important behind (I didn't).

We arrived at the hotel around 2ish and after checking in a few of us went down to the lobby to play poker while we waited for testing to be done (in retrospect I probably would have found the test interesting). At 7pm there was a banquet scheduled which set each of us back around $35. There we were served the most expensive 3oz of chicken with rice I have ever had. One person at our table managed to snag an extra meal (the waiter just dropped it off and said he looked hungry) so we split it up among the hungry people at the table.

Later that evening most of our club got together for a pre-tournament party where we played a round of Texas Hold'em Poker (this is really popular for some reason). After I destroyed everyone at poker (I'm not kidding), we played a couple rounds of Uker and went to sleep for the night.

The next day it we arrived at the tournament only to find we had somehow made it there 10-20 minutes late and had missed the opening ceremony. On top of this fighting begain right away so we didn't have any warm up time. I managed to do alright in my one match but lost in the end to a more experienced Kendoist. I spent the rest of the day watching the various matches and was really impressed by the 5-dan and above matches. I've never seen people move so fast and hit so well. Some of the fights went for 15-20 minutes of overtime until someone scored a point! Google video seems to have one of the semi-final matches for the Yondans.

After watching the finals I got another chance to fight in the team tournament. I was on our second team with the rest of the 1-kyu club members. This was probably the fastest set of fights I've seen. The first and last team members did pretty well and lasted for a whole 2 minutes each. The rest of us? I think we lasted for 5 seconds.

Google Rocks

Well Google has added a dasboard widget that lets me make posts to my blog.  Now I might actually make more posts as I sit bored in class :).  They also have created a gmail preview widget which is pretty cool.   You can grab them both at http://www.google.com/macwidgets/.

So Tired

I'm back from Detroit and pretty wiped. I arrived back here at 2:20 am or so after the long 7-8 hour drive. I'd post more but as I was up for 20 hours yesterday, I need to take a quick nap now that class is done.

Early Morning Kendo!

Today is the day. I shall be getting up around 4:30-5am and heading out to Detroit for the MWKF tournament! The tournament actually starts tomorrow but Kendo club is needs to be out there early as we have some member's testing for new ranks. Hopefully, the tournament will go well and Detroit will be a lot of fun.

The drive will suck though.