May 2003

With all this Breaking News talk about the capture of Eric Robert Rudolph, there doesn’t seem to be ANY mention whatsoever about the man most ruined by the media of all time: Richard Jewell. If you’ll take a step back to 1996, he was a security guard falsely implicated by the media for the Atlanta Olympic Park bombings after the FBI questioned him. I think that the FBI is pushing it under the rug, and the media is really embarassed about breaking story that at the time had no credibility. I would really like to see another (or maybe this would be the first) apology to Richard Jewell from the news agencies on the air in light of recent developments. Afterall, they were responsible for ruining Jewell’s life (he only got one cheesy, low-pay book deal out of it!).

On a slightly unrelated subject, while I was searching for links, I came across this link for CNN’s Olympic Park Bombing special page. Talk about a blast from HTML’s past!

I just realized that this is my 200th post to my LJ. I’m such a dork, but a dork who hasn’t done much LJ’ing for having had his journal for over a year and a half! But I guess given the number of posts today alone I’m doing my best to rectify that!

On that note, I have only invited 3 people to join LiveJournal (yay to , , !!). I would like to take this opportunity to encourage some of my other friends out there to join up and get an LJ. If you need a code, I have some extra codes lying around I would be happy to give you!

I just went through a month’s worth of work-related e-mail sitting in my inbox just crying out for attention. I feel bad that I’ve been ignoring it. I was gone for a week, then I was gone last weekend, now I’m taking classes. I don’t know what’s going on.

In any case, I sat down this afternoon with my Sprite and three chocolate chunk cookies and I went through about 50 back e-mails and did about 3 hours worth of sysadmin-related work This was classic sysadmin work – updating aliases, assigning new passwords, etc. That was good stuff!

So many things going on in life right now. Here’s a brief overview:

- I’m trying to sort out my schedule for next year to make sure I can both graduate on time and avoid having to take any mundane classes my senior year. Namely, I skipped taking Calculus 1 my freshman year here at RPI, but it looks like I will need the extra hours of credit, and I can only get those hours from taking Calculus 1. If I take it at RPI, that means having to take the dreaded Gateway exam (dum dum dum!). The Gateway exam (for non-RPIers) is an un-timed exam of 10 problems (all calculus problems) given via the computer where in order to get an A for the course, you have to score a perfect 10 out of 10 on the Gateway. I got a B in Calculus 2 because I was unable to acheive a perfect score >:-/ My current plan is to see if I can take it at the State University of New York (SUNY) Albany campus this summer, which would both be cheaper (about $400 compared to $3600) and I wouldn’t have to do the Gateway! I have a meeting with my faculty advisor about this tomorrow morning, I’ll keep you posted.

- I’m involved in several web-related projects for RPI, many of them are pretty cool. The latest thing now is to develop a mapping solution that the entire campus could use. More details on that sometime in the next week or so. The other project in the more immediate future is to put together a Community Service hours tracking solution. This would help students report their community service participation and hours so that when they graduate they would receive a transcript of community service hours just like they do for their grades. Sounds pretty cool, right? I’m also working for a company in Albany consulting with them on their web presence.

- In other geeky news, I’m revamping my homepage a little bit. I’m actually toying with the idea of adding the two most recent entries from my LJ to my website. My only concern is that my website will load considerably slower if LJ is expereincing technical difficulties (see my earlier post today!). I might try it out and see how it goes. A lot of people do this with their blogs, but not many people do it with embedded LJ’s. It should be interesting!

- First public announcement: My LJ friends have known for a few weeks now, but my girlfriend of two years (Michelle) and I broke up a few weeks ago. Friends, stay tuned to the journal for updates. Not much public about this, sorry.

- Classes are going well, the first exam for Discrete Structures in coming up on Monday. I also have 6 chapters and a case study to read for Abnormal Psychology! That’s like half of the book! But really it’s interesting stuff so hopefully it will go quickly

All right, time to get moving for the day. Look for updates on each of these things throughout the next few weeks!

I’m not one to complain at LJ (in fact, this is my first quasi-complaint in my own journal), but I must say that I’ve noticed a rather sharp degredation in the quality of service over the past few days. According to the status page and , they are uploading new code that improves the service. Over the past few weeks I haven’t really seen much improvement in the quality and availability of services (quite the opposite, in fact). I hope things clear up soon, best of luck to our LJ Dev’s

As I mentioned late last week, Katie, Val and I went to Katie’s house in Herkimer, NY to visit her parents and stay overnight this past weekend. While we were there, we visited the Herkimer diamond mines and ate some good food (Katie’s mom went to culinary school!). On Sunday we drove to Cooperstown with Seth, one of Katie’s friends from Herkimer, to see the Baseball Hall-of-Fame. Check out the photo album links above for all the details and images of both days.

Of course, as you may have noticed, updating my journal on the road didn’t work out as I had hoped. For some reason my cell phone has very weak signal in Herkimer, and almost no signal in Katie’s house itself So alas I spent the weekend having fun without the internet! Perhaps in the future on other roadtrips I will be able to update more frequently instead of a few days after the fact.

On Saturday night I went to see Bruce Almighty with Katie and Val while we were in Herkimer visiting the Diamond Mines (more on that in a seperate post). What a funny movie! I thought it was more like Liar Liar than Ace Ventura, but it was still incredibly hilarious. It also had a cute romance plot.

So as not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, I’m going to cut the rest of the review!

You can read a plot summary and lots of good and bad things about it at the IMDB link above. The one major criticism I have about the movie is that they took the “you need to pray, god is listening” thing a bit too far. I do have to say that Morgan Freeman played a very believable god character (much better than Alanis Morrisette in Dogma!), but at the same time I felt that by the end of the movie I was having some religion spoonfed to me.

I don’t think that they were necessarily trying to convert anyone, but I do think there was a religously-motivated agenda someone somewhere was trying to push. I wouldn’t necessarily mind that because it was a Jim Carrey movie, afterall, but it was a little overtly obvious.

I think the review from Delaware Online said it best:

“Bruce Almighty” looks like Jim Carrey’s big return to the kind of broad physical comedy he made his name with. And it is — until about two-thirds of the way through, when it turns into a very special episode of “Touched by an Angel.”

Everything else was classic Jim Carrey and absolutely amazing, my only complaint being that it was a bit too religous. If you can look past that, it was a great movie!

This weekend Katie is taking me home with her to Herkimer, NY (about an hour West of Albany). Valerie Guilbeault, Katie’s friend whom I also know from freshman Minds and Machines class, is also going. It should be a cool trip! We’re going to have dinner at her house which is awesome because her mom is a gourmet chef! Then we’re going to scope out the diamond mines of Herkimer.

Sunday we’re going to drive to Cooperstown, NY, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame among other things. I’m not sure what else we’re going to do there, but there is also a neat looking art exhibit that we might stop in a see.

In any case, being the huge dork that I am, I can actually hook my laptop up to my cell phone and update my LJ from anywhere I want. So I might actually update my journal a bit more often Ooh, it might actually turn into a travel log!

There is a new community out there for RPI students: [rpi]. It’s brand new but seems like a good idea! A competitor for Lily??

So I ended up dropping Engineering Dynamics. There are a few reasons for that. Actually, I just gave away the end of my story, but trust me, I didn’t spoil anything! Read on if you’re interested

Freshman year I took a class called Introduction to Materials, which when combined with my credits from high school for Chemistry 1 and 2, give me credit for Chemistry of Materials 2 (makes sense, right?). At the time, credit for ChemMat 2 was meaningless because I was leaning away from being a chemical engineer. However, it’s an option for the multidisciplinary elective for computer systems engineers (that’s me!).

So I took Intro to Materials first semester freshman year, and I thought I was doing horribly. Indeed I was getting C’s on the quizzes, D’s on the exams and labs, and failing the homeworks. But the thing I was doing right (that I didn’t realize at the time would be my savior) was that I was going to my professor’s office hours. Actually, I was spending an hour every Wednesday morning at 8 AM in his office going over homeworks and lectures with him. Was it helping? Sort of. More importantly I was earning brownie points which would be most helpful when the curve came around. Did I know about what curving was and the entire brownie points system at the time? Of course not. I was new.

So on the last day of class, right after I got back a D on the last test, right after a clueless day of review for the final, I filled out the pass/fail form, had a secretary in the Dept of Engineering sign it, and turned it in. I did study for the final exam, but I really only needed to “pass” the class and I was home free!

Of course here I am two years later and much wiser, needed that damned class to graduate. Technically you aren’t allowed to reverse a pass/fail. But I went and asked to reverse it, telling them that I needed the class to graduate. Without actually checking my story, the lady said ok, signed my “Remove Pass/Fail” form and sent me on my way!

So I now have credit for Introduction to Materials, and thus ChemMat 2, and therefore have fulfilled my multidisciplinary elective The next logical action was to get the hell out of Engineering Dynamics! I can now save my $1.08/min for a better cause, sleep in a bit more in the mornings, and focus more on my other classes (read as: get A’s in Abnormal Psychology and Discrete Mathematics).

I’m also still on track to graduate next Spring Still getting out of Rensselaer as planned – I like that!