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.

Jon hosted an end-of-the-semester party tonight. We enjoyed some excellent homemade chili over a heated game of Pictionary. One lesson learned there: if you have three separate groups in an all-play, it’s really hard to know who got the answer first. We ended up winning, but there were several times that we didn’t know if we had answered first, or if one of the other teams had, so they gave it to us since we were behind by half the board at the time… Not sure if we can really claim any victory there. Fact is we sucked the whole first half of the game.

After that I learned that I suck at Halo. Like really suck. Only 3 kills when everyone else gets 15 to 25 suck. I got better as the night progressed, but by the time the bus came at 11:45 I was still unchallenged for last place :-/ … we’ll call that a learning experience, and chalk most of it up to my inability to handle the awkward controls. Watching my half of the TV made for a good laugh though. Maybe it’s worth investing in an Xbox to practice on and hack into a media center pc?

Anyway, one of the highlights of the night that most people missed was the pie. I’m going to have to take cooking lessons from Jon. French silk pie = awesome.

Other than that, all my classes are done, and two finals besides. Just 3 to go. Tomorrow will be devoted to a lot of circuit analysis and statistics studying. If anybody’s interested in going somewhere and studying in the morning/afternoon so that I don’t spend the whole day here at my desk, let me know. A brief racquetball/supper respite is planned for the 5:15 timeframe when Jared gets done with his review session.

Just got back from seeing Dr. Brian Greene’s presentation on the concepts of string theory at the Memorial Union. For those who don’t recognize the name, Dr. Greene is the author of The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos, two New York Times-bestseller books on the nature of the universe and current theories in Physics and Mathematics. The presentation was really cool, though he didn’t present a whole lot of material that I hadn’t already heard. If you’re interested in insane physics like Superstring Theory, check out NOVA’s excellent program.

The presentation reminded me tonight of one of the coolest things in this world. Just how much there is to know. For instance, you’ve probably heard of “quantum physics” or “quantum mechanics” or quantum something-or-other. You’ve also probably heard of atoms, and understand that they are rediculously small. Did you realize, though, that the “quantum” scale you’re hearing about is 100 billion billion times smaller than an atom? I, for one, had no idea it was that small. And learning that was one of the coolest things from the whole presentation, because it reminded me just how much I don’t know. That’s awe-inspiring. I wish I had the time (and brain capacity) to learn everything. If college was free, I’d take 120 courses instead of 120 credits before I graduated.

Dr. Greene fielded some questions after the talk, which ranged from the insightful and interesting to the retarded ([Audience member] Q: “If Martians looked at the Earth through a really long telescope (wtf?), would human interactions be like quantum stuff?” [plus 3 minutes explaining this asinine idea]. [Dr Greene] A: “What??” No joke. That exact conversation [roughly] occured.). Any way, Dr. Greene’s ability to hear the rest of these questions and come up with explanations off the top of his head was amazing. Without even pausing to think, he gave answers that both addressed the question and did so with an appropriate level of complexity so that we learned something new, but still based the answer on the groundwork he had laid during his talk. Excellent speaker. I was very impressed.

Here’s some of the stuff Colin has gotten recently (and a bit of what he’s been up to):

Tau Beta Pi bent. I received this Saturday morning at the Tau Beta Pi initiation banquet. These were especially cool because we actually made them ourselves. My triceps can attest to the physical labor involved in packing molds full of oil and sand to be filled by the molten bronze that made these very bents. See earlier post. Well, that process has finally come to completion, and after meeting other requirements, we officially became Tau Bates on Saturday morning.

A solderfree breadboard for playing with electronics / circuits. Got this off EBay for about $25 after shipping. Should make designing circuits a lot easier. (Last time, I physically soldered all the parts together and kindof hoped that they would work…) One project on the todo list: an infrared receiver/decoder that will control my stereo system since it came without a remote and I’m too lazy at night to get off the couch and walk the 2 steps across the dorm room to the volume controls.

College of Engineering Mug. I won this from the weekly CoE trivia question, also located on the College of Engineering homepage. You (especially Tim) should keep your eye on this Wednesday mornings next semester, and you, too, could win.

Microsoft Student Ambassador plaque. This came, a wee bit delayed, this weekend. Microsoft flew us out to Seattle on September 30, for reference. I’m guessing delays in the company that engraved all the plaques. Yes, I understand the irony in the picture. It was the only black thing in my room large enough to lean the plaque against to make it readble in the picture…. Or at least, that’s my excuse.

Finally, I picked up this box yesterday from the DoIT store, along with a static-proof bag of silicon, gold, and various substrates. I was happy.

Needless to say, today’s blog entry brought to you by Apple, and my really cool new 15″ PowerBook G4. Here’s a picture of my PowerBook family: [click to enlarge]

So, in summary: [click to enlarge]

Here’s a picture of the fountain I took at the beginning of November:

Here I’ve changed the colors a bit to make it look like a deeper sunset:

Here I ran the GIMP’s Edge-detect filter, after inspiration from Jeni’s blog and similar photo:

I think the colors on that last are pretty cool.

I found the German transcription of the musical Rent about a year ago or more, and happened to come across the bookmark again today whilst listening to the english soundtrack.

I decided it would be cool to read the German version along with the music, and it was, but I found myself disappointed with the translator. He changed a lot of the lyrics to make the German words fit the melodies/rhythms of the original, but I think some parts lost something in the transition. If you’ve never seen Rent (the musical… I can’t compare to the movie, not having seen it), the following maybe won’t make sense, but for those who have, here’s some snippets of “What you Own” that bothered me:

The form of these quotes will be:
Original English lyrics
German lyrics English translation

…

You’re living in America,
Leave your conscience at the tone.

Du lebst doch in Amerika,
Scham ist selten hier zu Gast.
You’re living in America,
Shame is an infrequent visitor here/shame is seldom seen here

Colin’s take: The original seems much wittier. Granted I’m no master of German idioms, and granted the German, like the english, takes a phrase intended for the physical and twists it to the intangible, but still. I like the original better; it seems a much more “modern” non-anachronistic statement.

…

What was it about that night?
Connection, in an isolating age.
For once, the shadows gave way to light.
For once, I didn’t disengage.

Hat uns jene Nacht geheilt?
Gemeinschaft, einmal nicht mehr isoliert.
Das Licht, es hat das Dunkel zerteilt.
Und ich – ich hab’ mich engagiert.
Did that night heal us?
Community/companionship, for once no longer isolated,
The light, it dissipated the darkness,
And I, I engaged.

Colin’s take: I think the German feels too disconnected here. In the English, the characters are talking about an extremely important moment in their lives, a feeling of connection and companionship that brought them from isolated individualism into some higher realm together where the world was more in order. But the German seems both too uninterestingly direct in asking straight out “did that night heal us?”, and too disjointed, without much flow between the phrases. (I liked the “for once…, for once…” in the English) Perhaps it’s a bit… sentimental? emotional? overly-dramatic? corny?… but I really liked this song in English; I was disappointed in the German.

Boo Heinz Rudolf Kunze.

On the upshot, he left the end of the song alone, which was really cool:

Sterben in Amerika,
ganz am Ende vom Jahrtausend Zwei,
man stirbt hier in Amerika,
um ganz bei sich zu sein.
Doch wenn wir sterben in Amerika,
ganz am Ende vom Jahrtausend Zwei,
dann nicht allein.
Nein, nicht allein.
Ich bin nicht allein.

Dying in America
at the end of the second millenium,
one dies here in America
to be completely oneself.
And if we’re dying in America,
at the end of the second millenium,
we’re not alone.
No, not alone.
I’m not alone. (Nearly word-for-word the same as the English.)