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.