You want me to what?

Trusted Computing Awareness

This is something even the non-nerds should be aware of. For 3 minutes of your time, you can catch up on an interesting and disturbing trend in industry, where the companies that develop your computer are working together to develop technology which does not trust you, the owner & user of the machine...

The animation is rather well done except for a couple typos and odd uses of English, and presents its message in a very non-technical manner. Please take a minute and watch it.

Kudos to Scott for finding this originally.

Weekend

Friday
Kaisa came to visit!
Supper at Atlanta Bread Co
Dave came to visit!
UW MadHatters concert: Me, Kaisa, Stefanie, Dave, and Jared. Overture Center (gorgeous.) by the Capitol. Parking way too far away and making the girls walk in the mist :( (Sorry! I hear that is bad for the hair, and Kaisa's shoes...). Opening act magician and juggler; both good, the latter hilarious. Awesome concert, that I will definitely be getting the DVD recording of. Wow was it great. I'm sad that they have so many amazingly talented seniors leaving this year, especially the guy that sang "I'll Be" (Edwin McCain) and I think "Hey Girl" (O.A.R.) and their phenomenally talented vocal instrumentalist, who sings an amazing trumpet and trombone.
Guitar "practice" after the show. Three guitars, four people (though one of you, and I'm not going to name names, needs to play with us some more... it's the only way to learn :) ) Basically involved playing around and talking, and then being amazed by the musical aptitude of one David G. Dreyer, who can pick up a song by hearing it for just a few minutes. Why do you have to live so far away Dave??

Saturday
Going to bed at 3am. Oops. Hope you were ok for work, Stef!
Dave leaves to visit parents.
Pancake breakfast with Kaisa.
Some cleaning, not much productivity.
Kaisa goes home.
Hang out with Jared, out for a burger at the Nitty
Buy my first 6-pack
Cards with Dave, Pat, Jared, and Jon. Jared claims his Guinness from a bottle (brilliant!) makes him play better.
Stay up til 3 for no particularly good reason, watch some ATHF at Jon's suggestion

Sunday
Wake up and call Dave to make sure he comes back and gets his ID badge, apartment keys, guitar pick, guitar tuner, guitar chord book, and shirt that he forgot Saturday night
Some work around the apartment
Head in to campus at 1, talk to parents en route
Mail in first contribution to Roth IRA
Enter 3605 EH at 1:30pm
Leave 3605 EH for 1.5 hours to have supper at Ian's with Jared
Back in 3605 EH until 11:00, when Josh and Jeni bring me some late-night snacks. Nearly lock myself out of EH, except for a fortunate pressure pocket in the wheelchair ramp that holds the door open.
Back in 3605 EH until 2:45am.
Home to finish last problem from book that I forgot to bring 13 hours ago
Pass out at 4:30am

Except for the last part there on Sunday, it was an Excellent weekend!

Uggh...

Uggh...
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

We'll just say it's been a long day in 3605 Engineering. I got there at 1:30 and only left for about an hour and a half to grab supper with Jared. Thank God for Jared's supper interlude and Josh and Jeni randomly bringing me some late-night sustenance in the form of Doritos, or I would long-since be insane. Now back to the apartment to finish up the last problem and type up some calculations for another project. Good morning everyone.

21 in Review

On second thought, I should not draft a post with that title this late at night. Too much happens in 21 years to condense over a sleep- and C#-fogged brain.

The short story is: I turned 21 on Tuesday. I don't feel radically different, but it is nice to not have any outdated, age-delimited legal requirements in the way of life any more. Thanks a bunch to those friends who took me out Tuesday night! I owe you all one :) If you're not up to anything else, how does Saturday sound? Dave- you're sticking around 'til Sunday, right? Oh, and btw, do you read this blog? lol

A good night to all... I'll try to post some sort of inspirational 21-year review tomorrow, but given the amount of work & meetings I have scheduled, that might not work out... I'll do my best.

Spending class time wisely...

Spending class time wisely...
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

All but two. Anyone know a Swahili honorific B-INAS?

Birthday morning

Birthday morning
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

Aww, Nate made me breakfast!

Dear Nathan

Dear Nathan
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

THIS is how we DON'T store the lasagna.

Much love, Colin

Birthday Supper: Episode 2

Birthday Supper: Episode 2
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

Featuring grilled salmon, asparagus, wild rice, strawberries and fresh bread. Scrumptious. This is that salmon recipe of my dad's that I've told some of you about- if you like salmon at all, you HAVE to try this!

Birthday dinner at Prime Quarter

Birthday dinner at Prime Quarter
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

I'm sorry to all my vegetarian or no-meat-in-Lent eating friends, but this was a great steak! Add in unlimited Texas Toast and salad bar and you've got all the fixings for a quality American meal. What a great restaurant!

NCAA Bracket

I told a couple people I'd put my bracket up here, so here it is.

The picks were determined by the highly scientific process of "I've heard good things about this team," "I like the name of this team," and "Ohio State is going down." (Sorry Paul, nothing personal... but your university's basketball team did just beat us, soundly...)

Without further ado, here it is: Colin's Bracket [PDF], it's half a meg. Blame Facebook. Oh, and sorry about the Geico ads. Again, blame Facebook. In fact, I don't really recommend downloading this at all: Just go look at my bracket on facebook.

Or read this summary:

Elite Eight

Kansas over UCLA, UNC over Georgetown (my two "I have no clue" picks)
Texas A&M over Ohio State (my "Down with Ohio State" pick)
Florida over Wisconsin (my "I love this school, but I hear more good things about Florida, plus Wisconsin wasn't playing so hot in their last several games" pick)

Final Four

Florida over Kansas (my "Continuation of I've heard good stuff about Florida, and they have some Noah guy" pick)
Texas A&M over UNC (my "Why not?" pick)

Championship

Texas A&M over Florida (my "That's who was left in my bracket, and Florida probably can't win twice" pick)

New Study Finds Sleeping on Floor Uncomfortable

(MADISON) -- Results from a recent scientific study demonstrate a correlation between sleeping on the floor and assorted transient aches and pains, reports one scientist from Madison, WI. After an extensive one-night study and detailed introspection the following morning, it was determined that sleeping on the floor overnight was directly correlated with the experience of miscellaneous aches and pains, e.g., a "throbbing sensation" in the region of the right patella.

McCambridge, the lead scientist in the study, suggests that perhaps the awkward positioning of limbs while sleeping on a rigid surface is partly to blame for the observed effects. "It felt like I had slept with my leg twisted around weird," the primary subject of the experiment reports.

The study was originally intended to determine if sleeping on the floor was an effective means of avoiding the excess heat trapped in a room with an unopenable window and an Intel Prescott processor. Results for this original phase of the study are inconclusive, however, as the subject fell asleep too quickly to make the requisite objective observations. McCambridge suggests that in the future, the study be repeated at a more reasonable hour, as the subject reported feeling "drowsy" at 0200 when the experiment began.

Further research into methods of avoiding undesired thermal characteristics of the Prescott series of processors are planned for the future.

That's new

That's new
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

School bus at the bus stop.

You're the tertiary storage; I'm the L1 cache

I'm a web crawling spider; you an Internet mosquito;
You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.
...
fs sa rlidwka
I'll chown your home and take your access away
...
You're outside your scope, son, close them curly brackets
'Cause I drop punk-a** b****es like a modem drops packets

Awesome. Even the non-computer geeks can appreciate the rhymes, though you'll need a bit of UNIX background to appreciate the awesomeness: "Kill Dash Nine" - Monzy

Sorry for the censoring... don't want my blog getting blocked by content filters. I'm sure you understand. -Ed

Update: To answer Craig's question: props to Scott for pointing me to that! [/Update]

Or Better Yet:

Desktop Revitalization: Episode 2 "Gigabit Makes People Happy"

I like gigabit.


And by the time I got this screenshot up here, it's done. So nice.

Desktop Revitalization: Episode 1 "Impressed"

Well, over the past month my frustration with my former desktop PC setup was building to a breaking point. I last installed Windows XP SP2 in approximately July 2006. Early on, I messed around with a bunch of drivers for reading Ext2 partitions and for getting my Netgear WG311v3 wifi PCI card working. Ultimately I found something that was "good enough," but had a couple nasty bugs like: When you turn the PC on, it loads XP up to the point of displaying my wallpaper, and then freezes for about 30 seconds. If you pressed [Enter] on the keyboard, it immediately resumed loading and everything was happy. If you did not (for example, if you instead walked away), then Windows felt attention-deprived, and there was about a 50% chance the machine would hang completely requiring a hard reboot.

Annoying, to say the least.

So, after putting up with that for over a semester, my frustration finally built to the point that I spent the last week copying off all of my data, and last night wiped my drives clean. I also spent some time rolling a custom XP install CD using the amazing nLite utility, which allows you to slipstream hotfixes, PnP drivers, and text-mode drivers, so no more "F6 to install a third-party driver" from floppy disk (who even has those? I mean, besides nerds like me?), and no more "Windows Update found 68 critical updates for your computer." Very nice.

So, I set up about 35 gigs for Windows XP, popped in the nLite disk, and went to bed. Oh, did I mention that it also fills in all those language/localization settings, network options, display resolutions, default passwords, etc, automatically? When I woke up, my fresh, clean Windows XP desktop was sitting there waiting for me. No more "Oh, just one quick question" in the middle of a 30+ minute installation. Also nice.

The main event, though, was Vista. I haven't run Vista on this machine since Beta 2 testing for a Microsoft Install Fest this past summer, which I ultimately abandoned in favor of XP due to lack of drivers. So today, I gave Vista another go, using the Ultimate edition. Installation went without a hitch:


Now I'm starting to dig into Vista, and get some software, like Office 2007, up and running. One really cool feature that I didn't understand the point of when I saw the beta, but kindof surprised me this time around: The Network Map that Vista displays in the Network and Internet Control Panel. For kicks, I set up my PCI wifi card (which Vista already had drivers for, btw), and then was digging around to try and figure out if Vista was using the wireless network or the wired to reach the internet. Here's what I found:

Isn't that sweet? I don't have any idea how it identifies the presence of the switch in there, but that is exactly my setup: DHCP served by the router, cross-overed into a gigabit wired switch as the backbone for all wired communication (e.g., between Myth box and my desktop).

I guess most people probably wouldn't see that as cool, but man, that was neat. How does it work?? I don't think switches decrement TTL, do they? Hopefully by the end of CS640 I'll know!

Live at 'Club 770'

Live at 'Club 770'
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

Not sure if you will be able to see it in this pic, but there's definitely a tenor sax on stage with this rock band. Awesome! They've also got everything from a bell kit to a flugel (sp?) horn. It's pretty sweet.

HOT.

HOT.
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

New power supply: check.

Date changed from 1988 to 2007: check.

Software reloaded and executing: check.

This fountain-controlling masterpiece of a machine is looking /Good!/

Lessons from the Daily Cardinal Crossword

I've taken to working on the Daily Cardinal crossword puzzles during ECE 342 (MWF) and ECE 551 (TR) recently. Why during class? Well, believe it or not, because it actually helps me learn better! I'm somewhat interested in both classes, and for ECE 342, I actually have a really good professor, but the material for both is awfully dry. If I try to just pay attention to the lecture, especially 551 power lectures, my attention wanders, there's nothing to do, and so I fall asleep :(

On the other hand, when I bring the crossword puzzle along, I have something intellectually stimulating to do when the lecture gets too slow, so I stay awake :)

Plus it has the added benefit of increasing my knowledge, as opposed to my other stand-by: pulling out my laptop, which tends to just waste my time :D

For instance, in the midst of discussing p-channel MOSFET differential amplifiers and improving their gain by means of a current mirror active load configuration, I learned this today:

Latin name for Troy

Ilium

Capital of Togo

Lome

Tea serving, in Britain

Cuppa <-- wtf is that?

Cockamamy

Inane

I didn't know any of those clues, but was able to fill in the cross words for all but Ilium. Two boxes there I had to look up, with a few more for a total of 4 today. Not bad.
And just for grins, here were this author's "clever" clues:

Tasty zoo

Animal Crackers

Carrot patch, e.g.

Vegetable Garden

What a geologist makes at the bank?

Mineral Deposit

The sad part is that I actually got all three of those with only about 4 letters each, but I was stuck on "Rim holder" --> Backboard for like 20 minutes, when I had _ _ C K B _ A _ _.

Remember Being 16?

'Cause man, I sure don't.

On the other hand, I did receive some beautiful PIC16F's today from Microchip.

 

Unfortunately, Travis also informed us on the bus back from Plexus that there is no C compiler for the 16F series, only for the 18F and 24F's. Probably because the 16F series uses an accumulator architecture with a limited 8-level stack, I guess.

But seriously. Damn. Why couldn't we have paid more attention when ordering the things? Now we're either going to have to program in assembly or sample new parts and wait another week. Crap.

On the upshot, the PICs came in this awesome ESD bag with a ziplock-esque zipper!

 

More Red Hot Chili Peppers

More Red Hot Chili Peppers
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

Oh yeah- there was a band there too, not just awesome sound and lighting equipment. Actually, the band was fricking amazing. If you're at all a Chili Peppers fan, you should definitely see them live!