Tuesday, November 25, 2003

If you ever played Super Mario Bros 3 when you were a kid, you will enjoy this video that Nate sent me. It's someone beating SMB3 in 11 minutes, and with 99 lives.

This may be the last update for a while since I'm going to be out of town for the next week and a half. Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!

1 day to New York.
6 days to San Diego.
22 days to Los Angeles.

Friday, November 21, 2003

Manjunath showed me Piled Higher and Deeper: a grad student comic strip, which is a quite humorous, yet accurate, take on the grad student lifestyle. I like it.

In other news, my faith in sushi has been restored. The back story: I used to really like sushi. But over the past few years every time I've gone it's been a mediocre experience, and I had arrived at the conclusion that I don't like sushi as much as I used to. But today I went to Yotsuba (on Washtenaw near US-23) and had the best sushi I've had in years. So it was crappy sushi all these years, not any lack of ability to enjoy it on my part. Anyway, I highly recommend it. Yum.

5 days to New York.
10 days to San Diego.
26 days to Los Angeles.

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

I haven't done a countdown in a while. Since I'm going to various places over the next month, I thought I would start a few. Here they are:

7 days until Thanksgiving in New York City...
12 days until Micro in San Diego...
28 days until winter break in LA!

What this means, of course, is that the semester has flown by quickly as usual and it's that time of year when I think "where has the time gone" and I have to start working more and staring at the wall less, to finish all my projects and other stuff.

Anyway. So I'm going to San Diego for a week in December for the Micro conference. What's there to do in Southern California that is cool and takes about half a day? (That's probably the amount of free time we will have.) I should know, but I don't.

To use a variation of a phrase I've seen in textbooks: The remainder of this blog can be skipped without loss of continuity.

Man, today I was programming something from scratch and I was realizing I don't know anything about STL. They didn't teach any of this stuff in my classes and all of the major software projects I've worked on have had their own homegrown tools libraries. It took me a really long time to figure out how to define my own hash function for a hash_map. (Learned what a functor was, though.) (Also learned that hash_maps are not part of the "official" STL.) I think part of the reason really is that I learned C++ before the more recent stuff like STL, namespaces, and .h-less header files.

One observation is that the compile errors that show up when you use templates and STL extensively are way harder to decipher.

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Here's a picture from many months ago (May, in fact). It's me wearing a beer hat during bar day:

Thursday, November 13, 2003

I've been getting positive feedback about the new look. Thanks guys!

I also fixed some things so hopefully the IE version resembles the other versions more.

Last night the power went out around 9 and stayed out until this morning (around 6, judging from the erroneous time on my alarm clock). We had no heat. So it was cold and dark. That was somewhat annoying. At least I slept through most of it.

It snowed today for the first time.. just some flurries in the afternoon, no accumulation. It was supposed to snow one day last month but it didn't, so this was the first snow of the season as far as I know. Got to get used to the cold again.. we've been having a pretty warm fall as far as that goes. (For example it was in the 60s yesterday.. 30s today though).

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Wow, I just tried viewing my site with IE and realized it looks quite different and also has some functionality issues. For example when you look at pictures, rather than scrolling the thumbnails it scrolls the whole damn page. Plus this new theme I got going looks quite different. Here's a comparison. Left is Mozilla 1.4 (Opera 7.21 looks the same), and right is IE 6:

Ignore any color differences, that's only because I was using VNC to get the IE image. The main differences are the headings of the navigation boxes and the fact that for some reason IE makes the title bar on top of the page all huge. IE sucks.

Anyway, now you know what it's "supposed" to look like.

Monday, November 10, 2003

Thought I'd mess around with the look of this site. What do you think?

Thursday, November 6, 2003

Technically this isn't going to get posted until Nov. 7. But it's OK, I post date my entries anyway.

Two things today. First, I played racquetball for the first time since the spring. It wasn't bad. I'm still not very good. =)

Second, I saw Matrix: Revolutions. I thought it was definitely not as bad as the reviewers made it out to be. Perhaps it didn't tie up loose ends like the last part of a trilogy should. But that doesn't mean it deserves a 36% on the tomatometer. (Reloaded got a 73% and it was definitely not twice as good as Revolutions.) Plus I went as part of an IEEE-organized movie night (i.e. $4 movie) and I thought it was worth it.

Anyway, it's late and I'm gettin' tired, so I'm going to sleep. If you haven't been getting snowboarding-related emails and want to come, let me know.

Monday, November 3, 2003

I got new guitar strings. I don't play guitar as much as I used to.

Digital cameras are all the rage. I was thinking of getting one. But then.. I don't think it's worth it for me since I'm not really the picture-taking type. It'll be like the MD player I got back in 2000. I'll use it for a few months and then never touch it again.

I'm gonna see The Matrix: Revolutions later this week. Ooo.

By the way, when is good for y'all to go skiing/snowboarding this winter? It would be good to organizizize that.