• I had a job interview today with Heartland Business Systems in Little Chute (just north of Appleton). The interview went very well and the internship opportunity available at Heartland sounds very cool. I’m hoping to hear back within a few weeks on whether they will take me on this summer. It would be awesome if they did; the stuff I would be doing and getting to learn would be awesome.
• Tim and I are working out the details of a Bluetooth SNES Controller. We found a Bluetooth chip from National Semiconductor, the LMX9820A, which will perform the conversion from UART to Bluetooth.
• I’ve rebuilt my MythTV computer from scratch over the past few days, and plan on finishing up the software installation and configuration tomorrow. It’s looking better than ever, and will hopefully now include support for ripping DVDs and CDs automatically, and emulating everything under the sun for some retro gaming with the SNES controllers I just bought. (Did you know you can wire those directly into your computer’s parallel port, as well as PSX, Genesis, NES, and a whole bunch of other controllers?)
• Along with rebuilding that MythTV computer, I’m planning on setting it up as my primary server. Maybe I’ll actually host something at mccambridge.org for a change… I’ve had that domain name quite a while without really using it for more than DNS resolution. Look for my blog to move over there in the future- I played with WordPress 2.0 a bit, and it looks really slick.

Quick, what’s the number for 911?

No? :shrug: Sorry.

I made $75 and a box of chocolates today. It’s nice to live in a digital world where 95% of people don’t know IDE from USB from PCMCIA (People can’t memorize computer industry acronyms…). Nice because people will pay you if you do know and can explain things to them in English.

I fixed up my old drumming instructor’s laptop today, got his daughter’s Sandisk PlaysForSure MP3 player set up for him, reenabled Autoplay for his CDROM drive (How the hell did that get turned off? Note to geeks: Don’t forget TweakUI in your toolkit.), repaired a failed Juno (eww) upgrade which left his desktop “Juno Internet” shortcut pointing to “C:Documents and SettingsSteveLocal SettingsTempPleaseWait.exe” (and doing just that), checked over his Dell Jukebox synchronization, freed up some wasted clock cycles with HijackThis (The only anti-spyware, anti-msmsgs.exe, anti-qttask.exe, anti-bullshit tool you’ll ever need, except for Rootkit Revealer in the future), and generally tidied up. Then we walked through the process of picking out a new Dell desktop for his home office. It was nice to talk with him again and see how the world is going. He’s an amazing guy.

On a completely unrelated topic, the human brain is mind-boggling. (lol, that’s weird to think about.) I was driving to Wal-Mart to negotiate a CD exchange when U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” came up on the radio. I’ve heard the UW MadHatters’ version of this song before on the CD I bought my sister for her birthday, but I’d never heard the real U2 version. If you’ve never heard the song, it has this really long intro before the vocals come in. Well, I didn’t immediately recognize it on the radio because it was different enough from the MadHatters’ version, so I was just driving down the highway trying to figure out what this song was. Then my brain jumped ahead to the vocals and the first couple bars of that were going through my head against the instrumental intro on the radio. Then the vocals started on the radio and I suddenly realized what my brain was doing… even though I was consciously still trying to figure out where I knew the song from, subconsciously my brain knew the answer and was already running through the lyrics. To the point that hearing the lyrics on the radio gave me a brief sense of deja vu. It was weird, but really cool to have this sudden :snap: when my conscious realized what my subconscious was doing and the two shared some information for a change.

I don’t know if that made any sense, but basically the human brain is an amazing analytical machine and I was awed by it today.

Featuring Mark VanDeWeghe’s away message:

"Nintendo support. This is Bob"

"Yes. I'm calling about Pokemon. I was playing Pokemon and when I went to save my game it erased it."

"Yes, we're aware of this problem. But at this time..."

"I'm not sure if you understand. I had caught them all."

Edit: Seems I should do a little more background checking… Kudos to Jeni’s comment for the Penny Arcade comic which is the real source of the above. Still funny though.

It’s been far too long since we last had a LAN party, so Jared, Scott, TJ, Adam and I got together in Scott’s basement for a long-overdue fragfest. We played Quake 3 Arena for maybe 3 hours or so, and then switched over to Day of Defeat (original mod, not Source, since Valve wants $20 for DoD:Source… bastards). All of the games ran fine for me on my linux box with Cedega (I still haven’t gotten around to getting Windows XP installed), and with help from some quick searching by Adam, even got the native Quake 3 client up and running. It was an excellent time all around, especially since we had at least 7 computers wired up for the 5 of us. I should have taken a picture.

Only downside was having to bring a can of Campbell’s over for my supper, though I did manage to get two slices of pizza down as well. My gums are a little angry about that today though… Only other downside was not being able to drive up Jared’s driveway to drop him off at the end of the night. Don’t know about all of you, but here in Green Bay we got a big slush storm that resulted in several inches of nasty crap on the roads that immediately turned to ice when you drove on it. Needless to say, we took the second, gravelled, driveway into Jared’s place instead, after some exciting slipping back down onto Greenfield Ave.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Huge Windows Metafile vulnerability and zero-day exploit announced 12/28/2005… yes I know I’m late. If you missed it and you run any version of Windows from 98 to 2003, including ME, XP, 2k, etc, follow these steps immediately to partially secure your computer from this vulnerability that Microsoft has yet to patch:

1. Click on Start
2. Click on Run…
3. Type this command and click OK: regsvr32 -u shimgvw.dll
4. A confirmation box will appear to inform you that the DLL has been unregistered.

What did that do for you, besides protecting your computer from viruses that can install themselves just by you visiting an infected webpage? Read Steve Gibson’s detailed explanation for more information, as well as details on how to reregister that DLL once this blows over and a patch comes out.

Note: You are vulnerable to this exploit even if running Firefox or Opera instead of Internet Explorer as your web browser. Run these preventative steps now!

Further Note: Unregistering this DLL does have side effects. It will disable the thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer and other applications. This is a good thing, because it will help prevent you from infecting yourself. See the above link for more information.

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.