Bursts of Temporary Insanity

E-book Content Farms

2011-04-24T11:38:00.002-05:00

So I recently came upon this "publisher" of e-books. They seem to take 30 page articles written for dirt cheap and try and sell them as "books". From reading reviews, it seems like they don't take too much time to edit them, and will post up anything they think they can make a buck on.

The questionnaire they ask potential authors to fill out is quite telling. They seem to think that a $50 flat rate is a fair rate for something that they'll turn around and sell for $10 a copy, and then they proceed to never even disclose the names of the authors.

I guess this is what the democratization of publishing gives us. Content farms full of junk sold for as much as they think they can get away with.

How not to respond to an accusation of distributing spyware

2011-03-22T13:54:00.003-05:00

Take a look at this interesting android-security discussion thread.

Here's what I see happening:

1. Avast researcher finds someone who has a hacked version of the Walk and Text app, which caused their phone to send out a text message to their friends.

2. Avast posts a blog article about this, complete with screenshot and disassembly

3. App developer posts broken-english response and demands the blog post be taken down, while claiming that the app wasn't posted by them, and they didn't have a harvesting page up on their site

4. Avast responds that they confirmed that the harvesting page was up previously

Now the denial in step 3 makes no sense. The app in question was analyzed and determined to contain that URL, and the message was sent with that phone's sender information. So this developer, who should have just stayed shut about this now has basically ended up tossing what little reputation his company had into the toilet. Brilliant

User understanding of iframes

2010-05-26T14:35:00.002-05:00

I was reading some comments about Facebook and privacy, and one thing that freaked people out was seeing their friends next to a "like" button strewn across the web.

Of course from a technical standpoint the like button is just an iframe coming from Facebook itself, and the same origin policy prevents the containing site from seeing the contents of the iframe itself, but how does a user know this? To them it's CNN knowing who you are, even though CNN never gets to see any of the traffic between you and Facebook (it just does iframe src= and then it's up to the browser to send cookies etc.).

Facebook can perfectly respect privacy here, and still many users will feel as if their privacy is violated.

Unfortunately I have no real solutions for this. Anyone have any ideas?

Capital One: Don't train your customers to become ID Theft Victims

2010-02-10T19:18:00.002-06:00

So I got a call from someone claiming to be from Capital one wanting to discuss how some changes in the law would affect my account. He proceeds to state the last 4 digits of my account number and that he'd need to confirm details of my account before proceeding. In other words, he wants me to give info that can be used to access my account to someone who called ME. If you need to send me information like that, use your web site, a letter, or an e-mail. Don't make me give out my personal information to someone who calls me, as I can't really be sure they are who they say they are.

Insecure Security

2009-08-14T11:13:00.003-05:00

Chase Bank has decided to throw all common sense out the window with their username and password policy. Let's start with their username policy:

Must contain 8-32 characters
Must contain at least one letter and one number
Cannot include special characters (&, %, *, etc.)
Cannot be the same as your Password

OK. What do we have here? Let's throw out any usernames the customer may have used at other sites and make them come up with a new one. This won't increase forgotten passwords at all. This is within the realm of sanity, until they impose their password policy, which is the same as the username policy with the additional requirement that it can't match the previous 5 passwords. In other words, the passwords cannot contain any symbols. Why would they make such a requirement!? Can they not write some simple unit tests to verify their handling of punctuation?

Random thoughts on ballot-stuffing detection

2009-06-23T14:53:00.002-05:00

Here's a random thought I had while musing about the controversy in Iran regarding its elections and possible ballot stuffing:

Consider a system which has pairs of unique stickers printed. Now when a voter finishes their voting, then the voting official will take one of the stickers and place it on the side of the voter sign-in logs, and place the other sticker on the ballot. Ordinarily this would cause voter-privacy issues. But if the voter sign-in logs are sliced in half beforehand (ideally cutting through the sticker leaving a non-unique portion attached to the name of the voter, the unique portion of the sticker separate from the name of the voter) and then each individual unique sticker-piece is also separated from all others and shuffled, then after the election you have a set of verified ballot IDs that are guaranteed to be issued to unique voters.

A couple notes:

There is theoretically nothing stopping someone from hijacking a bunch of pairs of stickers, and stuffing the ballot box that way and then attaching them to the voter sign-in logs right before slicing. However, this scheme reduces the time for that attack to "until the voter sign-in logs are sliced".
This also allows for easy verification whether a particular voter voted.

On Prioritization in Software Development

2009-03-03T09:29:00.002-06:00

I've been thinking for a bit about what makes software go from good to great. I realized something: the number of features is irrelevant. No, what makes software great is the little touches. Tiny little things that make your life easier. The itunes music player has a perfect example of this. On a feature-by-feature comparison with Windows Media Player, it probably loses big time, but it does the right thing more often. I can't exactly quantify what those are, but I know I enjoy using Itunes more than Windows Media Player.

The standard thinking about building a software product goes like this: You create a list of features. You sort the features by priority. Then you start writing specs. Each of those specs has subfeatures that each have their own priority. What ends up happening is that you end up selecting a large set of features due to optimistic scheduling. Then each of those features ends up having to cut back its scope or lose polish.

What happens next? Well now all those really neat things that would have made your product really awesome end up getting cut as they're "nice to have", instead of "must have" for the features.

Those "must haves" might be on a checklist for a business customer, but for an end user, those kinds of things aren't going to make them fall in love with your software. No, the "nice to haves" are what will make your end users love your software and tell all their friends.

SharePoint lists inside web part pages in modules

2008-03-11T15:51:00.002-05:00

This is a wonderful solution to a deficiency in the SharePoint documentation: If you have a web part page in a module inside a feature, the "List" property of the View for the list is the URL of the list, NOT the template ID for the list as the documentation implies.

Moving assemblies around

2008-02-06T09:46:00.001-06:00

If you're in a situation where you need to move .NET assemblies around, you might run in to situations where you have non-signed assemblies that need to go to another machine (for testing, for instance). If so, the sn tool is your friend. The -Vr option allows you to disable signature verification for a particular assembly (or all assemblies, but this is dangerous!).

ASP.NET Tree view of object structure

2007-08-14T17:17:00.000-05:00

Okay. Let's say you have an object tree in ASP.NET and you want to display it to the user.

For our purposes, let's say we have a DataNode class with the following fields: name, description, an array of children, and a link back to its parent. To be able to do this nicely, we need to implement two interfaces, IHierarchicalEnumerable (henceforth IHE)(this one is clear from the docs), and IHierarchyData (henceforth IHD)(this is seen in the docs but is not clear).

Now for the IHE interface, we need to implement a GetHierarchyData function. This returns an object that lets one navigate the hierarchy of another object in the hierarchy. We'll choose that object itself, so we have:


public IHierarchyData GetHierarchyData(object enumeratedItem)
{
return (IHierarchyData)enumeratedItem;
}

In addition, IHierarchicalEnumerable is a sub-interface of IEnumerable, so we need to have a GetEnumerator function. Just use the enumerator of whatever data structure holds the list of children:


public IEnumerator GetEnumerator()
{
return children.GetEnumerator();
}

That's the easy part. Now for the IHierarchyData:
GetChildren needs to return an IHierarchicalEnumerable. We can just return "this", since we know how to enumerate our own children.

GetParent returns the parent object of our current object; HasChildren should be obvious.

Path does not look like it is actually used, and neither do Item and Type, so just return something there for completeness. Now to get the tree view to display what you want, set its TextField to whatever property of your object you want (such as Name). Note that this must be a .NET property, a public field is not kosher.

Soon I'll work on allowing editing of this hierarchy.

Listening to music

2007-06-08T21:03:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that I tend to listen to the same pieces of music repeatedly for a few days (weeks?) at a time and then moving on. Some music I've done this with:

many of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas
Smetana's Vltava
Some of Chopin's Preludes
The soundtrack to Rent
Rachmaninoff's Preludes
First movements of Rachmaninoff's 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos and Variations on a theme by Paganini
Dark Side of the Moon
Stairway to Heaven

And, most recently, Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo theme. All of this music is, in my opinion, awesome. I'd highly recommend anyone listen to that music if they have not.

Dreams

2007-05-17T20:17:00.000-05:00

Every dream ends eventually; some sooner than others. Even the good ones we wish would just go on forever.

Evaluations

2007-02-18T22:22:00.000-06:00

Ah evaluations, how I loathe thee. Why must I determine if Stephen "Champions and models continuous self-regulation and self-improvement" when I can't even determine what that means? What good does it do even if I can eventually get an idea? I doubt my PM would interpret it the same way, or any of my teammates.

There's a reason flowery language should be avoided when actually communicating: it hinders communication, which defeats the point of language. I can attempt to figure out if Stephen "evaluates himself and tries to improve his weaknesses". However, I still don't know if that's what "Champions and models continuous self-regulation and self-improvement" means. If it isn't, then I guess my evals on that were worthless. If it is, then why not say it the simple way? It doesn't sound as lofty, but at least it's actually something that I can understand without guessing.

Here's another example: "Demonstrates a sense of urgency, a propensity for action, and confidence in the likely success of project plans and initiatives." Any tries for understanding what it means?

Now this isn't my only complaint with design studio evaluations, but it's one of my biggest ones. If I feel like it maybe I'll continue to elaborate

A Post !

2007-02-14T22:23:00.000-06:00

Well I think I'll actually make a post here, because the last one was depressing.

Unfortunately, the topics I want to write about are fairly depressing. Anyway, I can either write about DS evaluations, or about the lack of preparation Grindor has gotten for the ACM international finals. Any input would be greatly appreciated. I will write about one of these within a week of now. Any other topics to write about would be appreciated. Post here/IM me/talk to me with ideas :-)

Where am I (going)? \?

2006-05-18T01:46:00.000-05:00

Well, that question I can answer with a lot of certainty: I am in Omaha, NE anticipating begining an internship at Mutual of Omaha after completing my junior year of college at UNL. Unfortunately, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle seems to apply to me now, as I don't really know what I want to do with myself. Sure there's my senior year, but if I really wanted to, I could leave JDE and finish up my studies in a semester. Then what?

Where to from there?

I could find a job, or I could go on to grad school. But why? What would I research? I have at best a couple faint ideas, but no real research experience and don't really have the time to start. Maybe I should just start flipping coins, I don't know. And at this late hour I think I'll just go to sleep as I have every night recently: uncertain about my velocity, certain about my position.

On friendship

2006-04-29T18:26:00.000-05:00

During my time in high school and college, I have been burdened with an ability to think clearly and creatively about math and computer science problems. Normally that sounds like a blessing, rather than a burden. However, it does not feel like that.

The primary reason is because of the interactions with others it creates. Some people seem to think of me as nothing more than a CS/Math resource. Here's a sampling of some AIM logs:

(19:51:56) Anonymous: where are you
(19:51:56) Mntl Chaos : not here
(19:51:58) Anonymous: help help
(19:51:59) Anonymous: math

(22:31:29) Anonymous: help us?

(18:29:51) Anonymous: yuily
(18:29:51) Mntl Chaos : not here
(18:29:56) Anonymous: what is the antiderivative of (4x-5)/(x^2-3x-4)
(18:30:54) Anonymous: yuliy
(18:30:55) Anonymous: sorry

(16:39:50) Anonymous: hey do you know what the integral of 1/4^x is?

(12:05:25) Anonymous B: hi Yuliy
(12:05:25) Mntl Chaos : not here
(12:06:12) Anonymous B: so...I'm still working on this shell assignment for CS
(12:06:28) Anonymous B: and there are 2 cases that aren't passing (both for the same reason) and i can't figure out what is the matter
(12:07:00) Anonymous B: do you have any time this afternoon/evening when you could look at it? (it's due tomorrow at 9 O:-))

(12:44:33) Anonymous C: Sometime, I would like to know how to interface PHP with C++ (if that's possible).

It's as if all I am is a tool for getting homework done without learning material.

This leads me to wonder how many of the people I would call "friends" are just being nice enough to me to get help with homeworks. Some people don't even do that. All I get is a "thank you soooo much" and then I don't hear a word from them until the next homework is looming on the horizon.

When my grandmother passed away, I was gone for about 5 days. Only a couple people even noticed, seemingly. Those few that did actually seem to care I am honestly grateful to, and I will remember that kindness.

Ugh. I don't want to think about this any more. I just want to be a human being, not a computer/homework help resource.

Grindor

2006-04-11T22:05:00.000-05:00

I've been pretty busy the past couple days, so here's a brief update: Today was the Java Challenge. We had to design a program which would control a set of space ships that would fly around collecting energy. This energy would be used to allow the space ships to move or to fire at the other ships. We were placed on a map with five other teams' programs and tried to accumulate as many points as possible. We ended up placing 41st out of 78 teams that submitted programs.

Well, tomorrow at 8 am the actual contest starts. 5 hours of fun! We'll have to make sure that we all stay awake and useful during it. Scores will be posted on the ACM ICPC Finals web site

Austin and ICPC Day 0

2006-04-09T22:47:00.000-05:00

Today Derrick, Travis, and I went up to Austin so that Travis could look at apartments. It was fun, I spent a couple hours grading, though. That was less fun.

When we got back, we took advantage of the start of free food. This was catered by the hotel and good. As we were leaving, we ran into a student from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology who said that he wanted to go to UNL, but was rejected by JDE. Ah, the irony. I'll avoid naming names here, but this should narrow down the possibilities.

Right now I'm typing this from a cyber cafe which is really a giant chance for IBM to show off their research to a bunch of nerds. There's also a giant (~8 foot x 8 foot) chessboard in the middle of the room. Tomorrow we start the day bright and early by returning Travis' rental car at 8 a.m. It will be fun. I'll try to update tomorrow night.

Grindor leaves Lincoln

2006-04-08T08:07:00.000-05:00

:Written at ~8:00 A.M.

Well, it looks like Grindor is about to depart this wonderful city for warmer climates. The ACM ICPC is going to be next week. I'll try to post more updates as interesting stuff happens.

I'm a bit sleepy, but I think 12 fl oz of caffeine + sugar should keep me awake enough to drive to my dad's house, where we will leave our cars for the week.

Written at ~8:00 P.M.:

Well, we're in the lobby of the hotel we're staying at. Free Wi-fi = good. Unfortunately, I failed to log in on my JDE laptop recently, so I don't have cached login info. This means that I can't use that laptop. This is now being written from Stolee's laptop. ::sigh::

Tomorrow we drive up to Auston because Travis needs to look for an apartment.

SiRR (again)

2005-12-27T01:11:00.000-06:00

I updated SiRR (SImple Rss Reader) to properly handle RSS (lots of guess-and-check involved here: keep trying different XPath expressions until one matches what you're looking for). It's available here.
Unzip and run setup. It'll prompt you to install the .NET 2.0 framework if you don't have it yet. after that it'll create a shortcut for itself in the start menu. It uses the default icon, sorry. support provided via e-mail (yuliy.pisetsky at the gmail.com domain [put it together yourself]), AIM (MntlChaos), and in person.

Warning: it's extremely fragile. Don't be surprised if an exception occurs. It's mostl likely because the file you fed it was bad. Make sure that it looks like an RSS or Atom feed.

Sirr

2005-12-25T01:33:00.000-06:00

Last night, I installed Visual Studio 2005 on my machine. I decided to test out what I could do with it, and get my feet wet with C#, also. Thus I created a simple Atom feed reader. Point it to an Atom feed (such as the one for this blog: http://mntlchaos.blogspot.com/atom.xml), and it will let you sequentially read the posts on that blog. It uses an embedded web browser with most functionality disabled to display the posts. Links still work, though. Also, the title of each post is a clickable link to the post on the web (opens in default browser).

It's up here, but note that you need .NET framework 2.0, and that I haven't yet gotten it to work on any other machines. Find me online sometime and maybe I can work on getting a deployable version out.

Convex Hull. Yay!

2005-12-21T17:06:00.000-06:00

static List compute(ArrayList points)
{
 if(points.size() < 3) return points;
 Collections.sort(points);
 
 LinkedList upper = new LinkedList();
 LinkedList lower = new LinkedList();
 
 for( Point point : points)
 {
  upper.add(point);
  
  while(upper.size() >= 3 && !rightTurn(upper))
  {
   upper.remove(upper.size() - 2);
  }
 }
 
 for( int i = points.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--)
 {
  lower.add(points.get(i));
  
  while(lower.size() >= 3 && !rightTurn(lower))
  {
   lower.remove(lower.size() - 2);
  }
 }
 lower.remove(0);
 lower.remove(lower.size() - 1);
 upper.addAll(lower);
 return upper;
}

Happy Birthday

2005-12-01T02:16:00.000-06:00

Today is my great-grandmother's birthday. I think she is 85 now. I'm quite lucky that she is still alive, even though she is half a world away now (The town's name is apparently spelled Asipovicy, rather than the (in my opinion) more reasonable transliteration Osipovichy).

DDR

2005-11-15T00:19:00.000-06:00

Before I came back to Lincoln on Sunday, I stopped by Family Fun Center to play a bit of Dance Dance Revolution. I started off poorly by bombing a standard song. Then I went back to some of the 3-4 step light songs and played 5 full games (15 songs). It was fun, but I was tired by the end. For one of the games, a little girl about 5-6 years old joined me. Unfortunately, she managed to change her difficulty to standard, which was about 6-7 steps. The results weren't pretty :-(. Now I have a compiler assignment to do.

Alarm clocks = useful

2005-10-31T17:22:00.000-06:00

Today was interesting.

I woke up at 10:30 and went to check my e-mail. I noticed a calendar popup telling me I had to go talk to Dr. Dunbar at ... 10:30.

So I quickly changed, etc. and ran off to Avery Hall. I talked to him for about 40 minutes about Math Day questions. Interesting questions. Both of us made a few silly mistakes (i.e. improper arithmetic) in working the questions. I really can't say more, or else I think I'd be killed in my sleep. Numerical Analysis was nice, because we didn't have our usual professor teaching the class! We had Dr. Sincovec lecturing to us instead of Dr. Surkan (who has no web page, else I would link to it). After that, it was 3 hours of Team Time. <sarcasm> Yay! </sarcasm>.

Then SAB. I'd rather not post here why, but the suggestion came up that Dr. Rosenbaum should be Director of Housing :-)

Fun day today!

2005-10-24T02:25:00.000-05:00

Today was fun. took a brief look at compilers homework, then it was time for practice ACM contest! GRINDOR! We dominated. Our performance would have earned us 7th place in a regional that included University of Waterloo, which has consistently done well at the international competition, and at 4th place last year was the best team from the western hemisphere. Our solutions are here and the page with information about the contest is here

Note that we solved problem B (Galactic Breakup) faster than any of the teams there, including a Carnegie Mellon team which solved 2 problems in 49 minutes!! :-D

Now Nick's away message is "Yuliy = Uber" due to some assistance which I gave him with physics. And I found out that our compiler homework is now due in a week! In summary, Sunday, October 23 (1023. hehe), 2005 was a good day.

Stupid ITS

2005-10-16T12:21:00.000-05:00

Arrrgh. I can't access my stuff for design studio because (A) either my computer didn't restart itself at noon yesterday or it got a different IP address, and (B) all of the JDE servers are inaccessible from home (down?) (blazer, envoy, and atlanta are all nonresponsive). Ugh. Hopefully they'll be back up monday so I can do my stuff for DS.

GRINDOR!

2005-10-04T20:18:00.000-05:00

Woohoo!

Grindor (myself, Derrick Stolee, and Travis Meinders) won the local ACM programming contest. It was fun. We consumed lots of caffeine and sugar.

Career fair tomorrow. I guess this means that I have to actually get up in the morning : - (. Well I think I'll get back to numanal now.

Why am I still up?

2005-09-23T00:39:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm happy that I've gotten through the day. Last night I tried to make a promise to myself not to hit snooze, because I needed time to study finance and history of rock music. That didn't happen, so I got up 10 minutes later than planned. Then after my first class (finance), I felt like I'd fall asleep any second, so I ran in to Selleck to get some caffeine + sugar into my blood. Compilers was alright. Powerwalking from Avery to Kauffman to Westbrook in 15 minutes was not fun. I had to do this because I brought 2 pens with me but no pencils, and the rock music test was on a scantron :-(

Design studio class was not horribly boring (just highly boring, instead). Hmm... what else happened... I went over to Abel to eat dinner with Megan, and I went to this math problem solving session. I was one of two people there. The other was an extraordinarily bright high school sophmore from Lincoln East (Alex Churchill) who attended MOSP in the summer.

Now I've got a few interesting problems to work on:

find all roots of P_m(x) = x^4 + x^3 + x^2 + mx + m^2

Let x_i (i = 1 to n-1) be the roots (except 1) of x^n -1 for n >= 2. Prove that
1/(1-x_1) + 1/(1-x_2) + ... + 1/(1-x_n) = (n-1)/2

Let P be an nth degree polynomial with integer coefficients and at least one integer root. Prove that n! | P(1)P(2)P(3)... P(n)

Randomness: BoTI post

2005-09-21T16:53:00.000-05:00

I figured I'd start posting again. Thanks for the inspiration, Megan.

This week is annoying. Finance due yesterday, NumAnal homework today, Compilers deliverable tomorrow, history of rock music test tomorrow, NumAnal test friday. YAY! (oh wait. boo)

Next week should be nicer, though. just finance and numanal is what it looks like :-)

What's wrong with this line of code

2005-08-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

double max = 100/12;

in other words boolean foo(){double max = 100/12; if(max < 8.333333) return false;return true;} does not return true

Anyone? No cheating and using a compiler, either!

Programming contests are fun, and then you do stupid stuff like that line right there. (Yes, it is broken)

The work routine

2005-06-22T00:24:00.000-05:00

Well. As was pointed out to me by someone, I haven't updated this recently. So I guess I'll try and rectify that.

My past month has been mostly spent spinning my gears and getting paid for it. Recently we've finally gotten some pages back from design so that we can start coding them. woohoo. Anyway, I've ordered parts for a new computer from NewEgg and a company called SMK Superstore. I'll post more when I'm not about to hit the keyboard with my forehead due to a need for sleep.

End of Semseter time!

2005-05-02T15:10:00.000-05:00

Well, this certainly is fun. Grades time...
UNIX: likely A
Math: likely A
Goddard's class: likely A
Elbaum's class: likely B
Business: A-/A
Semantic Web: ???? (probably an A, depending on paper and presentation)

So we've got 48 hours to write a 10 page paper, create an application, and prepare a half hour presentation. Oh yeah. I've got 2 finals in the intervening time. YAY!

update:
all of the likely things were correct, and Business = A, SemWeb = A

The last 2 days or so

2005-03-24T08:51:00.000-06:00

Okay. Let's see how the last 2 days have gone

Tuesday: wake up at 8. Shower, breakfast
8:00 wake up, shower
8:50 breakfast
9:30 Math
10:45 Done with math, head back to Kauffman
11:00 Software Engineering. Watch as Elbaum picks on Cliff and Brett continuously
12:15 Done with SE, go try to talk to Elbaum
12:35 Finally talk to Elbaum for about 30 seconds, go to lunch
1:10 Done with lunch, about 15 minutes spare before class
1:30 Computer Systems class
3:30 Done with Computer Systems class, try to start working on math homework and simulation
5:00 dinner
6:00 start working for real
8:30 Meet with Joel to discuss math homework
9:15 Back to room to work on simulation
10:20 Group meeting
10:40 Group meeting over, try resuming work on simulation. Abandon old model and start from scratch
11:00 Smash Bros break
11:20 End break
12:30 Go to sleep, alarm set for 6:38 am

Wednesday "The Day from Hell"
6:38 Wake up, check e-mail
6:50-7:00 go to breakfast
7:30: Done with breakfast, start back up on simulation
8:30 - 9:00: Done with simulation, starting write-up
9:30 Done with simulation and write-up. Leave for work.
12:20 leave work, a bit later than planned
12:30 Take picture for ancillary info
12:45 Talk to Swenseth with group
1:10 Talk to Rick with group
1:30 Getting lectured to by Rosenbaum "I don't think it's that bad"
1:40 Start of forum about problems with R&M, Jana just sits off to side to take notes, doesn't say a word
2:30 Industry Panel gives their stories, including "We're FDA-governed" lady
4:25 Done with industry panel, run off to Semantic Web
5:45 Done with Semantic Web, get dinner
6:15 Done with dinner, get complex analysis from room just in case, go off to UNIX
6:30 UNIX starts, take quiz. Think I did well
8:00 finish the lab for UNIX class, leave there
8:10 Get back to room. 50 minutes of freedom
9:00 start working on ERP
1:30 head off to sleep, as brain is barely functioning

Thursday
6:38 hit snooze
6:47 get up, PDFize the deliverable and upload to CVS
7:15 get breakfast with Amar and Aimee
7:35 get back to room, start Math homework due at 9:30
8:30 Finish math homework, play some piano
8:50 Finish piano, get back to room, start writing this
9:05 Click Publish

Isn't JDE fun?

Rejected

2005-03-22T15:35:00.000-06:00

Well. I found out the week before break that I got rejected from EFJohnson. Oh well. Spring break was mostly uneventful, but I got some well-needed rest. And that rest will be long forgotten come Thursday. 2 assignments due tomorrow and 1 on thursday (ERP, simulation, ERP). It's fun. No really. It's fun. Bah. Okay, no it's not.

One more week...

2005-03-04T10:50:00.000-06:00

Yay. Software Engineering deliverable 2 is now COMPLETE!!!. It makes me happy. Also, I had an internship interview at EFJohnson on Wednesday. We'll see what they decide. They said they'd get back to me in a week. I hope it will be good.

Whew

2005-02-18T12:23:00.000-06:00

Well...
After getting thoroughly killed on the first ERP deliverable, I've finally gotten a chance to relax. Yesterday I had a test and a quiz. Both were easy (yay!). Now I'm going home for the weekend tonight. Tomorrow I watch NE Aca Deca state. All in all, I'm in a good mood now, which hasn't been the case for the past month

::Enter Frenzy Mode::

2005-01-28T01:52:00.000-06:00

Well. I think I'm officially busy now. Next week I have a report (Sarbanes-Oxley), a math assignment, a revised resume, a CS lab, and a simulation assignment due. And that's not considering ERP. The test suite is due the tuesday after that. At least I don't have semantic web stuff!

Something tells me I'll be thinking a bit about CS this semester

2005-01-10T00:31:00.000-06:00

Well. I've finally made up my mind. After an email introducing a CSCE 496 course about Semantic Web Technologies, the idea seemed to stick in my mind, rather than float away like most of the other such messages I receive. Anyway, after lots of thinking and asking a few other people (thanks Stolee and Travis), I've decided to go ahead and sign up for it. I wonder how it will go... A CS class on monday and wednesday followed by math, cs, lunch, cs on tuesday and thursday. Oh and toss in UNIX on wednesday nights to eat up 2 hours and you have a nice little semester... Anyway schedule

Monday: Work until 1:45, JDE Business 2:30 - 4:25 ((UNIX 5:30-7:20 if I choose not to stay in 496, otherwise Semantic Web 4:30 - 5:45))

Tuesday: Complex Variables 9:30-10:45, Software Engineering 11:00 - 12:15, lunch, Computer Systems 1:30 - 3:25

Wednesday: Work until 12:45, JDE Tech Comm and Business 1:30 - 4:25 ((UNIX 6:30 - 8:20, Semantic Web 4:30 - 5:45 if I choose to stay in Semantic Web))

Thursday: Complex Variables 9:30-10:45, Software Engineering 11:00 - 12:15, lunch, Computer Systems 1:30 - 3:25

Friday: Work until 1:45, JDE Business 2:30 - 4:25 (easy day. yay! :-) )

Happy New Year!

2005-01-02T13:14:00.000-06:00

Wow. My family is ...err... interesting.

We (very extended family; about 20 people in all) got together at 6 P.M. to celebrate the new year. Everything went well, only between 9:30 and 10:30, EVERYONE LEFT! As a result, I ended up ringing in the new year while watching CNN's coverage of the effects of the tsunami in Sri Lanka. Not exactly how I had planned it.