|
since my last post, i've finished work at google, moved back to waterloo, and am now knee-deep in schoolwork. like last term, this term looks like it'll go up to eyeball-deep sometime between around midterms, although hopefully the workload will abate shortly thereafter. "abate" being a relative term, of course. i'll probably still be busier than i'd like.
first week of classes flew by.. i spent a large chunk of it procrastinating doing my work term report and a smaller chunk of it actually doing my work term report. also, classes. the softie schedule this term is very mondy-wednesday-friday heavy.. all our core lectures and tutorials are on MWF. most softies are also taking distributed and AI, the lectures for which are also on MWF, but tutorials are on tuesday and thursday. i'm also taking astrophysics, which has a tuesday-thursday lecture. anyway, the end result is a very light tuesday and thursday, but a marathon of classes on MWF. i don't really mind it that much, since i don't pay much attention in class anyway.
even now that i'm back, i'm finding i'm using my powerbook as my primary machine. i've attempted to set up my old desktop as a multi-purpose server (file, web, ssh, etc.) but ran into a few (minor) problems that i haven't gotten around to solving yet. i'll probably get around to doing that sometime this week, but even so i'm not sure how useful it'll be. meh well.
[ 0 Comments... ]
if Cringely is right (which even I'm finding hard to believe).. well.. wow!
[ 0 Comments... ]
so the contest is over.. didn't go as great as expected. we ended up 12th out of the 83 teams that were there. we just barely got the bronze medal (they give gold to the top 4 teams, silver to the next 4, and bronze to the next 4). bah.
during the award ceremony, they screwed up and gave gold medals to the bronze winners, which was pretty funny. after everybody was up on the stage there was some confusion with swapping of medals and such.
anyway, after the ceremonies and stuff were over we went to a "surprise" celebration, which was to a ranch where they had a rodeo. the rodeo there was way shorter than the one we went to in mesquite, and so it wasn't that annoying. they also had food and games and stuff.
flew back to mountain view today, back to the old grind tomorrow.. :)
[ 5 Comments... ]
something else i was wondering about seems to have been answered here. it says that vista can run on the intel macs, which i figured would be possible. the interesting thing is that the aero glass effects work. i wasn't sure if the intel macs would be powerful enough to handle the full bloat of vista, but it seems like it can. this really gives apple the advantage, because now vendors can pump macs even more with a "vista-ready" bullet point. given the hoopla over microsoft's plan to label PCs as "vista-ready" for this christmas, this could be a pretty big deal, and get even more people buying a mac at the end of this year.
the question now is, will microsoft start hacking things onto vista so that it doesn't run on mac hardware? some people say that the whole bootcamp thing is good for microsoft, since they sell a windows license for each person that uses bootcamp. i don't see it that way, and i don't think bill gates is going to see it that way, either. they either allow vista to run and risk losing a chunk of their consumers, or they stop vista from running and get lambasted by a tech community that already hates their guts, and possibly get slapped with another antitrust suit. let's see what they pick..
[ 0 Comments... ]
.. or maybe it's n+2. whatever. in san antonio now, which is nicer than i expected. it's a very walkable downtown, which is more than can be said for most US cities. i find it's on par with boston or manhattan for walkability, but much smaller.
we had the opening ceremonies today, which just went on and on. summarized, they said that baylor university, the ACM, and IBM are all gods. that's what i got out of it anyway. a lot of self-congratulation (they even had prizes for themselves!), but whatever. it's a good thing that they host the contest, and they do deserve the kudos, even if they have to give it to themselves.
what else.. there was a practice session today where we tested out the environment a bit. seems pretty decent. they had some login problems (the password they gave us didn't work, we had to enclose it in quotes for it to work) and some printer problems (it didn't work at first, then they fixed it), but other than that it was pretty solid. there was a second practice session that we didn't go to since there wasn't much point.
each evening here they a "IBM cyber-cafe" which is pretty cool.. they have terminals and some board games and presentations on stuff from IBM people. some interesting topics, but it seems like most of the presenters are more marketing-type people and so don't respond to well to technical questions. they also have a giant chess board set up in the middle of the room (for a sense of scale, the king is knee-height) which is constantly in use :)
tomorrow we have the java challenge, which is some "fun" competition where we'll have to write some sort of AI thing.. don't know details, but i'll see tomorrow.
[ 0 Comments... ]
so the bbq last night wasn't really a bbq, but the rodeo was definitely a rodeo. i'd never been to a rodeo before, so i wasn't sure what to expect. turns out it's a bunch of smaller events, most of which involve some form of pseudo-animal-cruelty. bull-riding, bronco-riding, sheep-riding (for 4 year old kids), carriage racing, steer wrestling, and steer catching were some of the events that i remember. the steer wresting was pretty impressive.. they released a steer and a cowboy on a horse had to sort of jump off the horse and grab the steer by the horns and wrestle it to the ground, while it was trying to run away.
there was also an event near the intermission where they invited all the kids who were 8 years or less from the audience (there were literally hundreds!) to try and grab a ribbon off of a calf (or some smaller animal.. not too sure what it was). there was like a stampede of these little kids and the calf, and i'm amazed that nobody got hurt.
[ 0 Comments... ]
so, i'm in dallas right now, blogging from the (hopefully) free wireless internet in the marriott hotel. there's a UW alumni bbq/rodeo thing here tonight, and then tomorrow we're off to san antonio for the ACM finals.
the actual contest is on wednesday, but they have a "java challenge" on tuesday (don't know what that's about) and a bunch of other random events before then. i'll be heading back to mountain view on thursday.
[ 0 Comments... ]
so al gore came to google today to give a talk on global climate change and global warming. it was really good - he went in depth on a lot of stuff, had a surprising number of facts to back up his arguments, and seemed genuinely committed to fixing things. then again, he is a politician. :)
regardless, there's a movie/book combo coming out on this talk that i encourage everybody to watch/read.. it's called "an inconvenient truth." something that particularly grabbed my attention was the fact that if the ice on west antarctica or greenland melt/slide into the ocean, the worldwide sea level will go up by 20 feet, and 100 million people will be forced to relocate. some scientists claim this may happen as early as in 10 years' time. looking at the images that gore had in his presentation of antarctica, it seemed like it was happening awfully fast.
check out climatecrisis.net for more info.
[ 0 Comments... ]
so, it finally happened. apple announced boot camp, which will allow dual-booting mac/win on the intel mac machines. it seems like apple is going to go hardcore after the PC market.. and they'll get it, too. leopard will come in time for the christmas shopping season, whereas vista won't be anywhere near ready. guess who's going to be put front-and-center in the stores this winter? once people start using macs, they're not going to go back.
also, quote from the boot camp page: "Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries." :)
[ 2 Comments... ]
seeing as i haven't blogged in a while, i figure it's time for an update. last weekend we went to muir woods to see the redwood trees. they were HUGE. well, tall. some of them were pretty darn thick, too. some of them were hollowed out and you could stand inside the trunk. they used to have a drive-through tree, but supposedly that fell over or something. there's only a handful of drive-through trees left. the sucky part was that it was raining the entire time we were there, including the part where we went on a 6-mile hike and got soaked. but it was still fun :)
this weekend we saw V for Vendetta and went spelunking. V was pretty good - I didn't think it was quite up to the level of the matrix, but it was good nonetheless. spelunking was even better. there was a 165-foot rappel down into a massive cavern, followed by a guided adventure crawl through the caves. the crawl featured some cool formations with colorful names such as "the meat grinder", "the pancake squeeze", and "the 40-foot chimney". they were pretty much what they sound like, and we went through them all. since we had 10 people, the tour (which was supposed to take 3 hours) ended up taking us 5 hours. lots of fun :)
[ 2 Comments... ]
|