• • Trucksess.com • •

Journal 2002-11

Current entries

2002-11-27, Wed (Day 739, temperature at 10:01: 21.5°C, difference: -0.9°C): Classes today were more empty than typical due to the Thanksgiving holiday. I ate the end part of my lunch with the student publications coordinator, Andrew. We were able to have a full conversation without mentioning the publications office until when we were leaving.

I cleaned up the floor of my room this afternoon so it is slightly easier to walk around and open my refrigerator. I also sorted the bag of loose items that normally go in my desk drawers. I am not putting all of those items in my drawers since it will just clutter them up.

At Sharples I ate dinner and got picked up to go home at about 20:00. I reimplemented the ~aol wrapper script on the home Mac so that way Internet Explorer can use the RAM disk as a cache.

On Thanksgiving my family went to the Cracker Barrel in Plymouth Meeting. I watched a good amount of TV Friday evening and got through all of the digital cable channels. There are finally enough channels where you can find something on. After celebrating Thomas’s birthday on Saturday I went back to school in the afternoon.

2002-11-26, Tue (Day 738, temperature at 10:01: 22.4°C, difference: +0.5°C): I stayed up from 11:00 since I felt too tired getting up at 10:00. I ate lunch with Andrew. After class this afternoon I went to DuPont for a science center tour at 16:00. The tour lasted about an hour and canvassed the extent of the science center construction. While the construction near the research annex is in the early stages the large lecture hall and science commons are mostly there. The rooms in front of Cornell already had the first coat of paint and temporary heat. The design appeared to have a number of nice touches already and the layout of rooms was non-linear, which gave the building character.

I ate dinner with Caroline who has been up since Sunday at 09:00. She doesn’t know why she cannot fall asleep. Chris, Olivia, Helaine, Ben, another Ben, Jason, and Geoff later sat with us. I went to Sharples at 17:30 expecting that I would spend less time there. In the past when I would arrive at 17:00 I would often need to wait 20 minutes or more for others to arrive. I would expect not to leave Sharples later if I arrived at 17:30 since my departure is more dependent on when others leave. Despite using this logic I didn’t leave until after 19:00, much later than normal.

Since I got up late today it took several hours in the evening to do the initial daily stuff such as writing in my journal and reading Swatmail. I didn’t get to Beardsley to finish my poly sci paper until closer to 22:00. I didn’t leave Beardsley until close to 01:00. I took my time doing the daily closing stuff so I didn’t go to bed until 04:30.

2002-11-25, Mon (Day 737, temperature at 10:01: 21.9°C, difference: +0.9°C): Today I ate lunch with Ben, Kevin, Danielle, and others. I went to a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of the C++ language. He gave a talk at 16:00 in Kirby about how to make best use of different programming styles to write more maintainable code in C++. I ate dinner with 12 other people at the same table, which made for a very compressed group. I ate with Chris, Kevin, Kai, Renee, another Ben, Mike, Helaine, J.J., Geoff, Anna, Matt, and Ellie.

I went to Kirby again today for a second lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup at 20:00. I arrived a few minutes late. This lecture about types of programmers was more crowded than this afternoon’s talk so I had to sit further away. Bjarne is soft-spoken so it was slightly difficult to hear him from a distance.

The deadline for my poly sci paper was extended to Wednesday at 12:00 since Valelly wanted to return our midterms beforehand. The midterms for the late afternoon section that I am in would be ready tomorrow morning so I am going to wait until after then to read over and finish my paper.

I didn’t go to the Wallingford-Swarthmore school board meeting since I went to the second Stroustrup lecture. I also said earlier to Ben that I was not going to be at Phoenix ed board at 21:00. Instead I cleared off my desk so the remaining space can be used for electrical devices. I placed my cell phone on a permanent place on my desk so it can be charged when not in use. I also put some stuff into my drawers.

Almost the entire top of my dresser already has electrical devices on it. The top of my desk would be most efficiently used if I did not put papers on it since I cannot use electrical devices from my drawers, which is where I could put the papers instead. I didn’t put any loose papers in my drawers since I would rather have non-electrical objects be located in my drawers for now.

I also moved my clock radio thermometer more towards the front of my desk so the temperature readings after today may be different. There is much more airflow around the unit so the temperature value should better represent the temperature of the entire room. The surface of my desk looks oddly clean since it does not have any papers on it.

2002-11-24, Sun (Day 736, temperature at 14:18: 21.0°C, difference: +2.3°C): I didn’t hear my wakeup alarms at 10:00 so I got up after 14:00. I ate a late lunch in Sharples and started my poly sci paper at around 17:00. I ate dinner in between two groups but I paid attention to the Kai, Jeremy, Caroline, J.J., Renee, Andrew, and Christopher group. Anna, Emily, Phil, and E.B. were sitting to my left.

I finished my writing the draft for my poly sci paper tonight and returned to Wharton to get my bottom desk drawer working. I managed over an hour to bore a screw hole with my larger Swiss army knife that aligned the drawer better. I cleaned up and put a piece of black construction paper on my keyboard tray to cover up writings on the bottom surface. The black color also makes the keyboard area less distracting.

After 00:00 I did the log rotation this week, which went without problem despite the trucksess.com changes due to the cplog.pl (copy log) problem. I changed the return for HTTP 404 errors since the maximum bandwidth usage for a single day this month now would put me over my limit if every day was that busy. The previous custom error page was about 5 K, which is many times greater than the normal GNetCache response.

In other words taking the GNetCache down ended up using more bandwidth due to the larger size of the error page. Until the demand goes down I changed the 404 error response to just say “ERROR.” This return string may also make it more likely that hosts stop using my address as a cache since it seemed like just returning an HTTP 404 error did nothing to reduce the number of requests.

I didn’t go to bed until after 04:30 but I did get a fair amount of stuff done today.

2002-11-23, Sat (Day 735, temperature at 10:01: 18.7°C, difference: -3.8°C): After eating lunch with Renee I made changes to a Phoenix article. I then joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by using my credit card for the first time. I went to Mertz field at 15:30 to watch the end of a cricket tournament but the entire contest seemed to have already finished since nobody was there. I went to the Tarble Gym to watch men’s basketball versus Connecticut in the Equinox classic. The Garnet won 64-46. I went directly to dinner at 17:00 and stayed until 18:30 with Caroline, Jeremy, Kai, Bill, J.J., and Ani.

I did the laundry in the evening but I didn’t have enough quarters. The change machines in Parrish and Willets were out of change so I had to be more creative to get coins. I went to the vending machines in Wharton, Parrish, and Willets but the Wharton and Willets machines were still out of service following earlier vandalism. The Parrish machine would not accept dollar bills so I had to go back to Wharton to get what dimes and nickels I had left. I put in $0.75 or $0.80 in credit, got $0.50 chips, and received one quarter per bag. I needed four quarters so I got four bags of chips.

I replaced the missing screws in my desk drawers later tonight. The screw hole for the middle right drawer was not straight so I needed to use writing pens as props to force the screw in straight. The bottom drawer was even worse. The end of the screw from before had broken off and I was unable to cut the piece out in two hours. As a result I went to bed at 04:45.

2002-11-22, Fri (Day 734, temperature at 13:42: 22.5°C, difference: +1.6°C): Today served as the capstone to a rather bad week. I got up at 13:40 thereby missing my classes today as well as cutting into my time to revise my psych senior project paper. I got my newspapers and then went to the Wharton C basement to work on my paper. Two people were playing Ping-Pong but I needed to ignore that and after they left more people came to work and talk in front of the other computers.

Sometime between 15:30 and 16:00 I finished and sent the paper to the Beardsley printer. I get to Beardsley and the printer is turned off since it doesn’t have toner. I then sent the paper to McCabe and picked it up there. I finished reading the printed copy a few minutes after 16:00 and went to Papazian to turn in my paper.

My computer did not crash this afternoon even though I had LimeWire open. I have the feeling that the particular lab computer I worked on yesterday in Beardsley is the problem. It is the second iMac on the outer ring from the left when walking into the room.

After turning the paper in I returned the 21 library titles I checked out for my psych project. The books and journals filled my book bag and two supermarket bags. I only used eight sources in my paper so it seemed odd that I thought I needed this much material. Originally I was going to write a page per source so I would need 15 sources in that case but I also wanted to have some extras in case a particular source was not that good. Instead some sources were good and had more than a page to offer so that changed the page per source idea.

I went to Sharples to eat for lunch and dinner. The food tasted pretty good. The first thing I ate was a prewrapped turkey sandwich that appeared to be from Sharples catering. After having other things, I finished by eating Cloister vanilla ice cream at around 17:30. By this point I was feeling full. E.B., Emily, and others arrived and sat at the table in front of me. For some reason I lost my appetite at that point but I still needed another glass of water.

I get up quickly to do that and when I sit down I feel a little worse. I quickly drink the glass so I can leave but Jeremy and Caroline sit down with me. I tell them I needed to leave but Caroline got mad so I compromised and took a break. On break, I ran to the bathroom since at this point it felt like I was going to throw up. I didn’t encounter the warning signs of the glands in my neck starting to swell but since I am so tired my body may have missed the cues already.

I get to the bathroom and at first I feel ok but then I think about that turkey sandwich, which I now think is bad and then I throw up. I clean myself up, go back downstairs to get my stuff, and then leave. Originally I was going to go out tonight and possibly take a nap but at this point I changed my plans. I did the daily stuff, took a shower, and went to bed before 21:00. However I could not fall asleep by 00:00 so I essentially wasted three hours since I could not realistically do anything else with that time. I eventually fell asleep after 00:00 but it did take awhile.

Looking back, I last threw up in Sharples on 2001-12-22 at about the time Richard Reid attempted to blow up a plane by lighting his explosives modified shoes. I thought that something else might have happened today since I have been thinking that things are quite precarious but it appears nothing of that sort happened.

I also don’t think any of the food I ate today was bad since I did not feel somewhat sick until when I lost my appetite.

Even though I thought the turkey sandwich was bad I had to think that it was bad instead of my mind telling me that it was bad. Also, I didn’t begin to feel sick until I got to the end of the ice cream, which was unusually cold and new. I think eating a lot set the stage for puking and when I lost my appetite it made me sick to my stomach and getting up quickly to get a drink did me in.

2002-11-21, Thu (Day 733, temperature at 07:02: 20.9°C, difference: +1.0°C): I got up at 07:00 but didn’t fully wake up until 07:30 when I went to Sharples for breakfast. I walked with Kai to the Swarthmore Presbyterian Nursery School at 08:45. The early visit was to meet the director, Martha Tucker. Kai and I met her at the playground and following that I returned to Wharton to take a short 30-minute nap until 09:45. I walked back to the school then. My child development observation session with three year olds lasted from 10:00 to 11:00. The environment was novel and interesting enough where I didn’t realize how tired I was.

I ate lunch at 11:00 with Kevin, Renee, and others. I stayed until 12:30 since more people sat down later and I didn’t feel like getting up. I went to Beardsley computer lab in the afternoon to continue writing my psych project paper. I planned today to not go to class or the Phoenix editorial board meeting to have time to write my paper. I also was not planning on going to pub night.

At about 14:25 saving my paper in Microsoft Word to my computer caused the public area Mac to hang. The AppleTalk network activity arrows in the menu bar were active at the time of the hang. I restarted the public area computer and I saw that my computer was no longer on the network. I walked back to Wharton to restart my iMac. While there I also rebuilt the desktop but not through TechTool. I avoided using TechTool since I didn’t want to lose file comments and then have to restore them. It took a half-hour to get my computer going again. I returned to Beardsley and continued writing. I had 13 pages written by dinner.

In Sharples I ate dinner with John and Ani. I finished the draft for my paper this evening by about 21:00. At around 19:00 my computer crashed again while saving my paper in Word so I went back to Wharton to restart my computer. I didn’t rebuild the desktop again but instead I quit LimeWire since file uploads may have conflicted with network activity from AppleTalk file sharing.

I had time to go to pub night since I finished my paper draft early so I went from 22:00 to about 23:20. I was going to stay at Paces longer but the beer ran out. Back in Wharton I did daily stuff which took a long time since I was getting very tired as the night progressed. I went to bed after 05:00.

2002-11-20, Wed (Day 732, temperature at 10:01: 19.9°C, difference: +0.4°C): Today I ate lunch with Kai and Ryan. I went home at 14:00 to activate my credit card. I found out a few days ago from the home mail that I actually did get approved for my FMFCU credit card. Previously I was told that if I received a response to my credit card application through the mail then I was not approved but I would have been approved had I received a phone call. I needed to activate my card from my home phone.

While at home I also ate a slice of Dad’s birthday cake and changed his Yahoo! Mail marketing preferences. Even though I rarely get spam in my Yahoo! account my Dad gets lots of it. I thought for a while that his marketing preferences were part of the cause. I found out that a number of options in that set of preferences needed to be set to ‘No’ so that Dad would receive less spam.

Up in the student publications office after 17:00 I didn’t have dinner since no one took the initiative to order it as a large group while I was there. For a few weeks now and probably for the foreseeable future The Phoenix as an organization will no longer subsidize dinner. Therefore people in the office need to pay. The amount I paid from week to week hasn’t really matched the food I got but hopefully it balances out in the aggregate.

I go to Beardsley computer lab at around 21:00 to continue writing my psych paper. I was really tired by then so even though I wrote one page in an hour, which is typical, I was falling asleep while writing the page.

Jason wrote an article about a lecture tonight and I posted it to the online edition as a web special. I didn’t leave the publications office until sometime after 01:30. Since I need to get up tomorrow at 07:00 for a child development observation at 10:00 I went to bed once I got back to my room.

2002-11-19, Tue (Day 731, temperature at 11:01: 19.5°C, difference: +3.0°C): I dreamed that I was standing in a large, mostly empty parking lot in Portland, Oregon.

I got up at 11:00 to sleep an extra hour. I ate lunch with Joan and Sophie. I went to career services at 12:30 for an interview prep and practice session. Class this afternoon was tough to get through since I felt that I needed to work on my psych paper while in class. Even though Valelly lectured for almost the entire class period, which he normally doesn’t do, the class still did not seem that bad.

After class I called Dad. The Internet went down sometime around 16:15 and didn’t come back up until about when I got back from dinner at 17:45. As a result I fell more behind in what I needed to do today. I ate dinner with Jesse. Deshi took over Sharples dinner and offered Indian food from Jaipur, a restaurant and caterer in King of Prussia. The food outperformed my expectations. Even the food that didn’t look very appealing tasted good.

I spent the early evening working on the trucksess.com situation. My hosting company 34sp replied to my question about cplog.pl and said that this log rotation script was causing a load on the server. They said that a better solution would be to use cron to copy the logs. I read the posts on the 34sp support message board about cron and then e-mailed 34sp asking them to setup a cron job to rotate my logs. I don’t have to maintain the cron myself, which would require that I ask for shell access. Requesting shell access would mean any damages caused via the shell would be passed onto me.

I didn’t get to Beardsley to continue writing my psych paper until 00:00. Inside of 01:30 I wrote three more pages, so now I have six out of 15 pages written.

I read e-mail rather quickly upon returning to Wharton but the Gnutella Forums bogged me down significantly. The quantity of posts did not pose a problem but the links I clicked through from the posts took extra time. I did find out some interesting things though. Most of my findings came from Slashdot or the links from that site. The earth’s magnetic field is deteriorating and the poles may switch, which may cause a few side effects such as animal navigation problems.

The HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) project in Alaska apparently is a bad thing since it can be used as a military weapon or wreck the ionosphere. Also, at least two ISPs are publicly saying they are blocking P2P in some way. PenTeleData said they are only blocking uploads while an ISP in Idaho prohibited peer to peer usage entirely. Both providers cited bandwidth and legal concerns as the motive for blocking the protocol.

I didn’t get to bed until 07:00 and that concerned me quite a bit but what I learned late today partially made the strain worthwhile.

2002-11-18, Mon (Day 730, temperature at 09:08: 16.5°C, difference: -3.6°C): I woke up to the sound of beeping, which I recognized as my uninterruptible power supply (UPS) alarm when it is on battery. I looked at the light on my speaker and seeing that it was out, had belief that the power went out. Then I checked the hallway and saw that most of the lights were out except for a couple.

I was able to wake my iMac up from sleep and while the AppleTalk network was down, an in progress file upload in LimeWire showed the Internet still worked. I knew my computer may need to be shut down if the UPS was about to use up its battery power but I really needed to go to the bathroom. I figured my UPS would last through the outage so I walked down the hall to use the bathroom. Barbara the housekeeper was there so I apologized and asked about the blackout, which she didn’t have any details about.

Next, I went upstairs to use the bathroom and by the time I got back to my room my UPS exhausted its battery and shut down. At this point I realized how uninhabitable my room was. I was starting to shiver due to the cold, the power was out, and there is very little floor space due to stuff all over the floor.

I figured the power was not going to come back on for a bit so I was going to walk around campus to see how extensive the outage was. As I started getting dressed the power came back on and my computer automatically started up like I have it set to do.

I checked to see if Milhouse was still up and it was not so I went to the publications office to restart the server. Had the power not gone out today Milhouse may have went for a full 30 days of uptime, as it was up for 24 days as of yesterday. The new server, Troy McClure, appeared to not be connected to a UPS yet but it restarted automatically and the file sharing component came back up without intervention.

I turned on Milhouse, ran Disk First Aid on all of the partitions, and rebuilt the desktop. It took about 10 minutes to rebuild the desktop on Select Storage, which was the main reason why I didn’t leave the office until 10:45, already 15 minutes late to econ class. However, after rebuilding the desktop, file sharing came up very quickly after restarting the server.

In Sharples I ate lunch with Ben, Emily, Laura, Sarah, and others. I checked out more books for my psych project early this afternoon.

I noticed this afternoon that my error_log on trucksess.com started growing again and I saw that the cplog.pl script that I uploaded again was renamed to cplog.pl.34SP, which didn’t replace the earlier renaming since the file system is case sensitive.

Then I checked my Yahoo! e-mail and read a message that 34sp sent me, which said I was running a Gnutella process that crashed the server twice. I was asked to remove it. I removed the GNetCache, which included the Tri-co host catcher as well as the associated data files it produced. I replied to the e-mail telling 34sp that I removed the Gnutella cache. Also I asked if the cplog.pl script, which doesn’t deal with Gnutella, was also a problem since that script in particular was renamed whereas the GNetCache appeared untouched.

The Wallingford-Swarthmore school board committee meeting was tonight at 20:00. I started walking to the Strath Haven Middle School at 19:20, passed the corner of Harvard and Yale Ave at 19:32, reached Copples Ln from Callender Ln at 19:46, and arrived at the middle school south lot at 19:54.

Nick sat next to me at the meeting. He graduated with me from Ridley High School in 1999. He is going to Neumann College but he also took some time off in New Mexico. Nick gave me a ride back to campus, which combined with the short length of the meeting gave me time to go to Phoenix ed board tonight. The ed board meeting time is now earlier at 21:00.

After the meeting I went to Beardsley to continue writing my psych project paper. By 00:00 I had written three pages in total. Back in Wharton the fire alarm went off due to burned food in the east second floor kitchen.

Afterwards I helped Kai figure out what was wrong with his computer. Most notably after today’s power outage his computer kept shutting down unexpectedly. It also made a noisy motor sound and emitted an odor. He took his computer apart and after some component isolation we determined that the top hard drive was making the noise and much of the smell. The bottom hard drive was not unusually noisy but did smell somewhat. I went to bed at around 04:00.

2002-11-17, Sun (Day 729, temperature at 14:39: 20.1°C, difference: -0.4°C): Like yesterday I wanted to sleep late today as well even though that means I will have less time to write my psych senior project. I went to Sharples soon after 16:30 to eat. This was my first three-plate meal but yet I got there early enough where I didn’t see anyone I wanted to sit with and no one sat with me. I started my first plate with pasta, my second with a roast beef sandwich, and then had a plate of fries.

I felt really bad in the early evening mostly since I ate so much food in a short amount of time. I went to McCabe to gather sources for my psych project. I spent a long time searching Tripod for books and I didn’t leave McCabe to start writing my paper until after 23:00. I managed to write a page from one source in the Beardsley computer lab before leaving at 00:00.

I ran into a problem with the weekly log rotation. For some unknown reason my cplog.pl script on Trucksess.com started giving for many requests a premature end of script headers error. These errors filled my error_log. It seems that demand on the GNetCache has increased, as this week’s access_log was almost a megabyte in size, three times larger than last week’s log. At some point in the past couple of days my cplog.pl script was renamed to cplog.pl.34sp. This renaming caused the log copying and rotation to not work so I did not have today’s requests. I uploaded a new copy of cplog.pl to the server and no errors occurred in the error_log even after a couple of hours.

I didn’t get to bed until 05:00 in part due to the complications with the cplog.pl script.

2002-11-16, Sat (Day 728, temperature at 13:12: 20.5°C, difference: -1.0°C): I decided to sleep late today since the swim meet didn’t start until 14:00. I ate a late lunch in Sharples and then went to the Ware Pool at 15:00 for a swim meet against Franklin and Marshall. I sat with Kevin and stayed until the end of the match at 16:30. The men won 126 to 79 and the women were narrowly defeated 103.5 to 101.5.

I ate dinner with Andrew. Following that I did the laundry in the rain. This is the first time I needed to walk outside to do the laundry while it was raining. Kai entered my room at 23:30 and I went with him to Paces for the Six degrees of Madonna party. Kai and I get there and it was crowded. Compared to last night the lighting was better and there was more dancing space in the back of Paces with it completely open. At the party last night the DJ’s table was in the back as well as a number of speakers placed throughout that section of the room.

Even though I was at the party an hour I only heard two Madonna songs and the rest of the music was lots of top 40 stuff that I didn’t think was great. By 00:45 the party space was so crowded that it was difficult to dance. I decided to leave at that point. I took a shower and went to bed at about 03:00.

2002-11-15, Fri (Day 727, temperature at 10:01: 21.5°C, difference: +1.6°C): For the first time I think in a while I received just one Oregonian newspaper today. Two more specs sat in Raff’s class today. One was from Los Angeles and the other one was from Georgia. For some odd reason more specs seem to sit in Raff’s class than in many of the other classes I took. I don’t know if they are getting an accurate assessment of Swarthmore classes by sitting in on Raff’s class since I think that class is unlike any other.

I had a hard time finding a stable table at lunch today. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday lunches have been thin in finding people to sit with and today was worse than average. I saw a nearly full table that included Emily and Mike but I also saw Anna and another Emily at a nearby table so I put my stuff there. They said they were almost done but I said I just wanted a seat.

When I came back with my food Anna and Emily already left and the table got filled with other bags already. The nearly full table I avoided was now only half full so I sat there. People were still leaving that table quickly and even Chris and Helaine, who sat down about when I did, promptly left. At this point I had the table to myself. People seemed to be really busy today.

At around 15:00 I decided to try alternate routes to the Strath Haven Middle School to see if they are better than the current route that goes by the Strath Haven Condominiums. The weather was dry and cool so it made it convenient to walk. I started off in the Crum woods and headed north from the Crum Meadow. I saw a waterfall courtesy of a concrete dam near the SEPTA train trestle. I crossed the creek on top of the dam, which to me was a major accomplishment since there are very few permanent crossovers for Crum Creek.

Once on the west bank I ventured up the hill towards the Blue Route. The hill did not seem substantial until I was near the top and I turned around and saw how high up I was. The grade seemed steeper near the top of the hill and it was not very easy to get a footing since there were fallen leaves everywhere. Meanwhile the noise from the highway grew louder as I ascended. I felt like I was in a movie. When I get to the top I see a paved bike path and the Blue Route. I then realized where I was. I intersected the bike and walk path that runs alongside the Blue Route. The highway roadbed was down a hill in front of me.

At this point I needed a place to cross over or under the highway. The nearby SEPTA bridge didn’t seem pedestrian friendly so I continued northward to Rogers Lane. I crossed over the bridge, which had a sidewalk but the sidewalk did not remain for the course of the road beyond the bridge. I turned south onto West Brookhaven Rd and then onto Avondale Rd.

Finally I went west on Sykes Ln until it ended at the Strath Haven Middle School fields. I get to the school building and upon looking at my times realize that today’s route takes longer than the old way. Also, more of the roads I walked on today did not have sidewalks and curved more. In some places oncoming cars could not see me so I had to walk on people’s yards.

I headed back taking a different route. I return to Sykes Ln but then I turn east onto Martroy Ln, which ends at Avondale Rd. I take that south and pass Copples Ln rather quickly. Then I reach the Blue Route overpass. I notice a driveway near there on the east side of the road but it goes to private property namely the Nether Providence leaf compacting facility. I take the bike trail north from near there.

I saw a sign that the trail is closed at night or when snow or ice is on the trail. This rule essentially made the route I took today useless since I would start in the middle of the trail at night. Nevertheless I still continued the path north until I reached the point that I entered at. Before my entry point I noticed a clearly defined path into the woods.

After verifying where I first entered the trail I returned to the path I saw earlier and took that back to the Crum Creek. Even though this path started off well by being defined and not being steep, eventually it lost its way, became unleveled, and ran along the steep edge of the creek. It seemed that the way I took before was better. At the dam I go over the waterfall crossover and head back to Wharton.

I was pretty sweaty when I returned to my room at 17:00 so I aired out the inside of my jacket. I also checked for ticks since I went through the woods. I met up with Jesse on the way to Sharples and ate with him, Norense, and others. In the serving area I felt this thing crawling on my right hand and it looked like a large tick. I got it off me and threw it out. The tick may have in fact been a spider. I also realized that I forgot to stay in my room for Dad to stop by. I left for the Crum a few minutes before his arrival. Since this gaffe bothered me so much I went upstairs in Sharples and called home to apologize.

Back in my room I developed the fear that I was going to get Lyme disease and that there were still ticks on me. I thoroughly looked over my skin for ticks and took a long shower. I didn’t see any ticks on me but I did find a fair number of moles and pimples. I also fully changed my clothes.

After taking a shower I got really tired so I took a nap. I may have been genuinely tired, my body needed sleep since I was sick before today, I needed sleep to fight the possibility that I had Lyme disease, or taking a shower gave me the cue to fall asleep since it was already dark.

There was a party with loud music in Harriette’s room but I still slept most of the evening anyway. I finally kicked myself out of bed at 22:40 and got together to go to the Paces party which started at 22:00. I planned beforehand to go at 23:00. I also had this headache before I even got to the party, which I thought had to do with my preexisting or potential sickness. Fortunately I didn’t feel much of the headache during the party except near the end when I felt it much more than earlier this evening.

I got to Paces and while a fair number of people were there I didn’t see anyone that I really knew. Many of the windows in the room were open so it seemed colder there than it did in my room, which I thought was cold. Part of my comfort of going to other places on campus is being in a room that is warmer than my own. Even though the windows in Paces were open it was difficult to breathe due to cigarette smoke. Most importantly no one was dancing and I came to the party to dance.

After about 20 minutes people shut the windows, the air cleared a bit, and people started to dance. Still, the strobe lighting made it very difficult to see throughout the entire night. I danced with a group of people who essentially broke the ice for everyone else. At this point a number of newcomers came to the party and the dancing kicked into gear. I saw Ben, Sydney, Natalie, Sophia, Geoff, Abram, Renee, William, and Norense at some point during the party.

The music was easier to dance to as the night progressed and I felt like staying for the whole thing since I wanted to see how these parties ended. Once many people left those remaining danced more wildly, which was entertaining. At about 01:40 when I thought the crowd at the party was on its way to completely die out a few more people showed up and danced.

Closer to 02:00 things got wild. A guy peed out the window and another guy kept diving onto the inflatable furniture in the room. The party didn’t end exactly at 02:00 and I don’t know when it really did end since the party associates (PAs) were trying to get the DJ to stop but he kept going. The hosts were already throwing out the cups left behind. By 02:08 I got tired of this and just left. I went to bed after 04:30.

2002-11-14, Thu (Day 726, temperature at 13:43: 19.9°C, difference: -0.7°C): I planned on getting up at 12:00 but I didn’t hear my alarm and instead I got up at 13:40. It was too late to go to developmental psych so I went to Sharples to eat lunch instead. I did go to American government afterwards. Valelly is hitting his stride in maintaining an engaging class.

I took a shower before going to the networking and business etiquette reception at 17:00. Career Services hosted this event in the Ashton House. After an hors d’oeuvres period Martha Gay gave a presentation on good interviewing, what to wear, and related items. She also fielded questions throughout the presentation.

Immediately after the event ended I went to the Scheuer Room in Kohlberg for a 19:30 lecture on race relations. The talk focused on referendums to end interracial marriage bans as stated in the Alabama and South Carolina constitutions.

From 21:00 to 22:30 I quickly worked in McCabe to gather sources for my econ term paper bibliography. Pub night started at 21:00 and I didn’t want to miss too much of it. I get to Paces sometime after 22:30 and there are still people entering for the first time. Kai told me later that the crowd arrived late so as a result the place didn’t clear out quickly at 00:00. Remembering the Tracy Ullman show, I bellowed out periodically at the end, “The show’s over, go home!” As I expected no one seemed to care but people did leave in a few minutes.

I didn’t mop the floor but I did dump and fill the bucket, which was not as intensive. My first drink tonight was wine and I had two Natural Lights so I was still buzzing by the end of the evening. My state also made it kind of hard to do physical stuff anyway.

Pub night cleanup finished at around 00:30, which helped me get to bed before the sun came up and still do the daily e-mail reading and Gnutella Forums. I went to bed at 05:00.

2002-11-13, Wed (Day 725, temperature at 10:01: 20.6°C, difference: -3.0°C): I received more Oregonians before going to class today. Econ class today switched into more of a discussion mode although the discussion was not exactly forthcoming. I went to a lecture by Bruce Maxwell at 16:15 in the Scheuer Room. Bruce gave a presentation about the GRACE robot, which participated in a competition this summer in Canada. I needed to leave the lecture in progress after 17:00 for the first Phoenix deadline. Luke got the early edition of The Phoenix Online up at around 19:00.

While Luke was doing the early edition I spent a significant amount of time producing a cover image for the web that looked better. The way I did it before was to rasterize the cover page PDF in Photoshop at 216 pixels per inch. The value 216 is an integral multiple of 72, the resolution in pixels per inch for the web images. I figured Photoshop would be able to more accurately resample the image with an integral multiple.

However, last week I noticed that the actual pixel size of the rasterized image was not an integral multiple of the final file size, 550 by 698 pixels. Tonight I made a number of test versions with various multiples of the final width of the image. I also adjusted the sampling resolution, anti-aliasing, and the sharpen filter.

I eventually settled on sampling at a width of 2200 pixels at 288 pixels per inch, a multiple of four from 550 and 72 respectively. I would not apply the sharpen filter. While I found that the sharpening made the images clearer it caused the text in the teases at the bottom of the cover to look too jagged.

Between deadlines I started gathering sources for my econ term paper bibliography due Friday. I interrupted my research search at 22:00 to go to the publications office for the second Phoenix deadline. I made good progress initially but work on the front page got stalled for some unknown reason so I didn’t finish Phoenix stuff until around 02:00.

After that point I continued working in the publications office taking care of general office issues. I reassigned some Suitcase serial numbers since I now know courtesy of Jeff that none of the available Suitcase serial numbers actually work with version 9. Jeff had the company Extensis send him version 8 serial numbers but the version 8 CD wasn’t sold anymore. The company sent him version 9 CDs instead, which effectively couldn’t be used.

I also took care of the missing Times New Roman font on Quark pages. When I made the new client images I also upgraded Times New Roman but that caused existing Phoenix pages to throw an error from Suitcase about the missing font. Apparently the upgraded font was so different that Suitcase treated it as a new font. I updated the page templates with the new version but the old clients, Itchy and Sideshow Bob still had the old font.

Apparently if a page was made new on those computers or the font association was reassigned on those computers then it would cause the new clients to break. The updated file would actually be referring to the old version of the font and not the new one. I updated the old clients with the new version of Times New Roman and tested a number of pages to verify.

I didn’t leave the office until after 05:00 but I felt good that I got the Suitcase issues taken care of. I read e-mail afterwards but I couldn’t connect to the Gnutella Forums so I went to bed at 07:00.

If I was able to read the Gnutella Forums I probably would have went to breakfast since it was close to 07:30, which is when breakfast starts at Sharples. I didn’t see any point in staying up a half-hour to eat when I couldn’t do much else since I was somewhat tired by then.

2002-11-12, Tue (Day 724, temperature at 12:01: 23.6°C, difference: -1.3°C): Today I first got up at 10:00 but slept until 12:00. I met Barry Schwartz at 16:00 for academic advising after class. I went to dinner with the expectation that it was going to be good and it turned out so. I first sat with Geoff, Jason, Rachel, and Viva. Ben and Helaine stopped by soon afterwards and Renee and Kevin also joined us. Another Jason also sat with us later.

I left my room at 19:15 to go to the monthly Swarthmore borough council meeting. Leaving this late meant I would be arriving just a few minutes before the meeting starts but I figured that wouldn’t be a problem. Interestingly enough a while back when Jeremy asked me about the borough council meetings I couldn’t think of too many hot issues other than zoning and skateboarding in the street. Zoning is an issue in almost any local municipality and for the skateboarding I was mainly drawing on a public comment said at the 2001-09-10 meeting, a year ago.

I get to the borough hall and the meeting room was already filled up and a couple of people were standing along the walls. I found a place to stand and the meeting immediately started with Alice “Putty” Willets as the acting council president. Council President Ken Klothen was in South America. Most of the people who filled the meeting room were there since the council was going to pass an ordinance that would prohibit skateboarding in the business district, train station, and municipal building.

My immediate response upon seeing the notice of the proposed ordinance was that banning it in certain locations would just push it to other parts of the borough. Those who spoke during the public comment echoed that thought. After the comments and discussion council voted to table the ordinance.

At one point the crowd spilled out into the lobby so the door to the council room was set open. In all I would say 45 people were at the meeting, which isn’t many by itself but it is much higher than normal attendance. No council meeting I have been to was close to being this crowded.

The meeting ended a few minutes after 21:00 so the additional comments about the skateboarding ordinance did not make the meeting significantly longer. Back in my room I cleaned my drawers and found that two of my drawer tracks are missing screws and I didn’t see replacements or spares. I resolved to go buy screws at the Swarthmore hardware store tomorrow. I took a shower at about 02:00 and went to bed.

2002-11-11, Mon (Day 723, temperature at 10:01: 24.9°C, difference: -0.3°C): I finished revising my developmental psych paper this afternoon and evening. Following that I picked my classes for my last Swat semester since I have an advising meeting with Barry tomorrow. Ed Kako is on leave so I chose another advisor today with the consultation of Julia Welbon, academic coordinator.

I need to pass 4.5 credits next semester to graduate in June and there are not many 0.5 credit classes so I picked five credits instead. I also wanted to take classes in departments that I haven’t had a class in before since this is my last opportunity to do so.

Since the class I declared on my sophomore paper, Psych 49, Thinking, Judgement, and Decision Making, is at a time that is not in my current schedule I was more open to devising a schedule with different times than this semester. For this calendar year I chose classes in the late morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

That blocking allowed me to get up at 10:00 everyday and combined classes in a row to make most efficient use of time. Also, in no case would I have to rush lunch since I either would be able to arrive late but not have to return to class after lunch or arrive early if I have class afterwards.

I sampled all of the departments and non-departments from the College Bulletin and penciled in courses that I liked in the various time blocks. I intentionally did not choose single-day full afternoon courses since they run for 165 minutes per week while classes in the more standard multi-day blocks are only 150 minutes per week. With a five-credit schedule it is important to minimize time in class. In addition to the psych class, I settled on intro to art history, Astro 3, CS 21, and Environmental Studies 2.

All of my classes are in different academic buildings and I never had classes in three of those buildings, Beardsley, Parrish, and Sproul. Three of my classes are in the natural sciences. I do have to get up before 10:00 on weekdays but I will have all afternoons open. I also will have to deal with large crowds at Sharples lunch five days a week but again I will not have classes in the afternoon.

Our Story was still connected to Milhouse at 02:00 so I went to bed instead of working in the publications office. I was too tired to clean my desk drawers so I couldn’t work on that either.

2002-11-10, Sun (Day 722, temperature at 10:00: 25.2°C, difference: +1.1°C): I dreamed I got arrested for protesting.

Even though I spent more than an average amount of time in Sharples I spent most of today writing the draft for my developmental psych paper. The paper needs to be ten pages making it the longest single paper to do so far this semester.

I ate lunch with Jeremy, Caroline, Todd, Ani, Chris, and Kai. We spent a good amount of time talking about intellectual property and whether or not it was a victimless crime. I wrote half of my paper this afternoon in Beardsley public and then went to dinner.

I saw Jesse in the Sharples serving area so I sat with him in the small room. Much to my surprise Jeremy later enters the room and sits with us. Caroline joins us a few minutes later and Norense much later. Most of the discussion was a debate between Caroline and Jeremy on how great Philadelphia is as a place for young urban professionals. Jeremy thought that while Philly doesn’t have much flash it does have substance. Caroline disagreed and said there was nothing significant to do there compared to New York and Boston.

After dinner, I finished writing my paper this evening and completed the draft before 23:00. In Wharton I emptied out my desk drawers to begin the process of cleaning them so I could fully use them. I also processed this week’s web logs but Audion kept crashing the computer. As a result I had Disk First Aid make repairs to the Spare and Spare A partitions. The Our Story publication was still connected to Milhouse at 02:00 so I went to bed instead of going to the publications office to do work.

2002-11-09, Sat (Day 721, temperature at 10:00: 24.1°C, difference: +1.5°C): I dreamed that the news reported ten New Jersey miners were trapped after their mine flooded.

I got up at 10:00 and ate lunch with Renee, Helaine, and Ben. I went to the Ware Pool for a 14:00 swim meet with Widener. Kevin and Ryan sat with me periodically. None of us really knew what was going on since we have never been at a swim meet here before. The event ended a few minutes before 17:00 and Swat apparently lost.

I ate dinner alone since Sharples attendance was low. I went to Olde Club for tonight’s showing of the “Cask of Amontillado” at 20:00. There were five rows of seats packed onto the stage making it progressively more difficult to see beyond the second row. People also sat on the floor in front of the seating stage. The performance area was normally where the soundboard would be for a show.

The play only lasted 20 minutes so I was able to start my laundry at 20:30 and finish by 23:00. At this time of the week it seems that no one else does the laundry.

Internet Explorer unexpectedly quit soon after 00:00 and that effectively ended my apartment research diversion, which also branched into other Internet research diversions today. I took a shower and went to bed sometime around 03:00.

2002-11-08, Fri (Day 720, temperature at 10:00: 22.6°C, difference: +1.1°C): I dreamed that Jeremy, a few others, and I were crossing the street outside an aquarium that resembled a cross between the Baltimore Aquarium and the Franklin Institute. We were on some island in the Atlantic Ocean.

Crossing the street in this dream presented a challenge since the road was in cut condition and there were several stories between opposing travel lanes. The walls between the roadways were made of large stone blocks and to cross the street you needed to get down these walls. Our group just jumped the distance. Also there weren’t left shoulders so we had to time our jumps so we wouldn’t land in traffic. We had to cross a few streets that involved these steep cliffs. At one point we didn’t wait for the traffic to be fully clear but enough of us landed in the street where the traffic just had to stop.

Today I ate lunch inside of the time block from 12:20 to 12:40 since I wanted to attend the collection at 12:45. The collection in LPAC Cinema started with the screening of the documentary “Ethnic Notions” by Marlon Riggs. I sat next to Emily and Renee. Joan was also with us. William, Abram, and Geoff sat behind us. Following the screening there was a discussion period.

Mark was in the audience so he wasn’t having office hours at his normal time since they would have run from 13:30 to 14:30. I asked him after the event if he was still having office hours today and he agreed to. I met him a few minutes later in Kohlberg to discuss my econ policy memo and term paper.

I got distracted right before dinner doing Internet research on how important having a credit card is for renting an apartment. Dad left a voicemail late this afternoon that I received a letter from the Franklin Mint Federal Credit Union, FMFCU. I was told on 2002-11-05 that if I received a response by phone I was approved but a mail response would be a rejection. If rejected I will apply for a student credit card elsewhere.

I ate dinner with Ani who talked with me about the difficulties of doing a job search in the current economic times. I also talked about my geographic preference on where to live after Swarthmore.

This evening I went to a folk music concert in the combined cinema and theater of LPAC at 20:00. I went to the building early in case there was an early rush for seats and arriving early did seem beneficial. I sat with Andrew and Matt. We chose the seats added in the walkway between the two theater entrances. This location provides much legroom but the seats themselves are less padded than the permanent seats elsewhere.

John McCutcheon and Holly Near were the headliners of the concert. Holly Near was sick and did not have her full voice but she still performed. The concert ended at 22:42 and I went to the Parrish CRC for a senior party. The party was scheduled to end at 23:00 but there still was food left, which I ate.

The credit card apartment research turned into general apartment research later this evening. It got near 01:00 and I couldn’t stay awake anymore so I went to sleep even though I still was reading web pages about apartments.

2002-11-07, Thu (Day 719, temperature at 11:01: 21.5°C, difference: -1.5°C): Today I got a package slip in the mail before going to lunch and when I claimed it the person at the mail window told me to go around since I had a lot of stuff. I enter the mailroom and I have to pick up 27 Oregonians. Most of them were in a paper box designed to hold ten reams. I obviously couldn’t take this with me to Sharples so I dropped it off in my room.

I went to a job search session held by Career Services at 12:30. Pat also gave me an e-mail from an alum who works at a tech firm in Seattle. Even though I felt detached in general classes this afternoon were particularly engaging.

I ate dinner with Caroline, Anna, Matt, Ellie, and Kiyo sat with us briefly. Caroline and I got into an argument about whether it was justified to have $500 million. I thought it was justified but she did not, saying that you wouldn’t be able to spend it.

I went to Phoenix ed board at 19:00 and went to pub night soon after 21:00. Tonight’s theme was Gong Show meaning people would show their talent under the threat of being booted offstage with the crash of a gong. I stayed until the end of pub night expecting people to do stuff but not many went onstage.

Since I was still there at the end of pub night I helped mop the Paces floor, which was dirtier than the Wharton D basement floor after the Phoenix party. I was still inebriated so mopping seemed notably fun.

I opened up the Oregonians I received today after returning to Wharton. With the additions I now have issues uninterrupted from 2002-10-02 through 2002-10-24. I haven’t received the 2002-10-25 issue yet even though I received a number of issues after that date.

2002-11-06, Wed (Day 718, temperature at 10:00: 23.0°C, difference: +0.8°C): I get to class and Mark gives back our econ policy memos. Despite the circumstances I still didn’t feel that great the rest of the day. It appears that the extra time I have spent on writing papers seemed to make the papers worse and not better.

At the beginning of philosophy class Raff reads the sign near the window blinds, “Please take care of the blinds. They break easily.” Raff says, “not easily enough” and when he raises the top blind the section falls off the bracket onto to the floor. The rod that adjusts the angle of the blinds falls on the back of James who is sitting right near the incident. The event evoked much laughter in the class and I still found it amusing several minutes later.

I went to the publications office around dinner for the first Phoenix deadline. I left at 18:55 since I needed to go to a technology discussion in Kohlberg 202. Luke was still working and he finished the early edition sometime afterwards.

The technology discussion was actually a JPMorgan Chase information session about their application delivery division of investment banking. Attendees were well dressed and I was not so well dressed since I didn’t know the event I was going to would be the JPMorgan Chase session. I knew there was going to be one but I thought it was a separate event from the technology discussion.

The presentation was valuable for me to hear especially since I heard real world descriptions of various IT positions available at the company. I also needed to go to a required econ lecture at 19:30 in Kirby so I planned to leave at around 19:30 so I wouldn’t miss much of the lecture. However the JPMorgan Chase presentation was so good I stayed until 20:00. The presentation also ended at that time so I departed before the question and answer period began.

I get to Kirby and the room is overcrowded. I had to sit close to the door on the floor so my perspective was not that great. The lecture was about half done when I got there.

I returned to the publications office after 22:00 for the second Phoenix deadline. I finished by 01:30 and went to bed before 04:00.

2002-11-05, Tue (Day 717, temperature at 10:00: 22.2°C, difference: -0.4°C, Election Day): Today I dreamed on an overcast, almost raining day that Boeing buildings were demolished to Chester Pike at Little Crum Creek. Large brown boulders helped cut down on large waves surging onto Chester Pike from the Delaware River. The boulders were several meters high and located on the side of the road a number of feet into the Boeing property, which in real life is the public recreation park. The Delaware River line had moved up from south of PA 291 to near US 13. I said to my family that without the Boeing buildings Chester Pike would flood more often. We were traveling south on Chester Pike to go to the Crum Lynne Wawa.

I also dreamed Comcast had a multimedia movie shuttle. I rode it either the first night or near the beginning of the service.

In real life around when I had these dreams the National Weather Service in Portland, Ore. posted a statement that wet and windy weather was on the way for that area. The weather pattern changes caused some amount of rain to be forecast for the next ten days. Large swells would also be possible along the Oregon coast. Also, Boeing buildings at the Ridley Park site may be demolished due to reconfiguration at the plant.

Today I ate lunch with Kai, Kasia, and Ruben. Afterwards I turned in my credit card application to FMFCU. Class this afternoon wasn’t that great since I didn’t feel that great. After class I went with Kai to the last field hockey game of the season. Kai and I joined Olivia and Sophia on the stands. We got there at the halftime and the score was 2-0 Haverford. The game ended with Haverford winning 2-1.

I ate dinner with Joan, Annie, Emily, Sophia, William, and Brett. I ate quickly so I could get picked up at 18:00 to go vote. After returning to campus from voting I felt really tired so I took a nap expecting to do my philosophy reading when I woke up. However I didn’t get up until 02:00 and at this point I figured I might as well continue sleeping.

However I could not fall back asleep so I checked election results from 03:45 to sometime before 05:00. I saw Ed Rendell was declared by CNN to be the next governor of Pennsylvania. I also saw that Libertarian candidate Carla Howell didn’t do that well in the Massachusetts governor’s race. Yet Libertarian Ed Thompson got 11 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin governor race. He also won two counties in the state. I went to bed again after 05:00.

2002-11-04, Mon (Day 716, temperature at 10:00: 22.6°C, difference: +1.0°C): I found out after dinner that the files that wouldn’t play in Audion 3 were not actually MP3s but rather MP2s. Previous versions of Audion played them when they had a .mp3 extension but version 3 would not.

After fiddling around I noticed that the type code had some influence on whether Audion would play the problem files. However, adding an incorrect filename extension overrode the type code and caused Audion not to play the file. I changed the extension on the two files that gave problems. LimeWire by default does not share MP2s so I figured that format was not worth propagating.

I walked to the Ridley High School for the Ridley school board meeting at 20:00. Dr. Ignatuk gave a half-hour opening presentation about student achievement. The meeting in total ended a few minutes before 22:00 and was more time consuming than average. Ironically a number of students presumably from a particular class were there for much of the meeting but they attended a meeting that was not typical.

After the meeting I spent hours reading The Philadelphia Inquirer voting guide. Before tonight I had not fully read up on the candidates before any election. I wanted to choose candidates who I actually agreed with in the cases where a libertarian was not running for that office. Also, there wouldn’t be much point reading the guide on Wednesday so I figured I would do it now. I went to bed after 04:00.

2002-11-03, Sun (Day 715, temperature at 15:12: 21.6°C, difference: +1.4°C): I slept straight until 10:00 and then continued sleeping for intervals until 15:00. I went to Sharples for late lunch and also went there for dinner soon after 17:30. At dinner I took Caroline and Phil’s table. Both of them were about to leave. Phil left and Caroline sat somewhere else but left her stuff at the original table. Jeremy and Kai later on sit with me and they said Caroline invited them to dinner but she didn’t join them.

In the evening I squared up the code for the Gnutella host catcher. Getting the code itself to beta quality was not difficult but the practice of outputting a space in each include file was giving problems for the GNetCache. The fix for the problem also took awhile to implement. Returns from the GNetCache would be preceded by several spaces. HTML pages for the Trucksess.com site had the spaces all along but they were less of an issue there since web browsers are more forgiving than Gnutella servents are.

I resolved to fix the problem by only outputting spaces for includes when they are loaded themselves. I wanted to output a space for each include since some of them do not send anything to the browser and that can cause problems. In IE 5 for the Mac, files that don’t output anything take a long time to load and Netscape 4 for the Mac displays a dialog that the document contained no data. I found out that none of the PHP environment variables such as PHP_SELF gave the included filename when called as an include.

I came up with a different method of referring to the directory that the parent file was called in on whether to output a space. If the parent page was in the include directory then output a space since it is an include. Some of the includes couldn’t use the variables that determined the containing directory since they had yet to be defined so I also outputted a space in this case too.

I found out something odd when I was trying to test the slow loading in IE. Apparently 34sp turned off keep-alive connections and by doing so the slow loading in IE stopped regardless if the document outputted anything. I turned keep-alive back on to test the changes I made but I restored the global setting since I figured 34sp turned off keep-alive for a good reason.

Getting all of this done took the entire evening much to my surprise. It was not like any one thing took a long time to do but complications arose that made the task more time consuming to complete.

I filled out the FMFCU credit card application, updated the search index for The Phoenix Online, read e-mail including handling the Analog failure reports for this week’s web log, and read Gnutella Forums. I didn’t get to bed until 05:00 but I did go to bed with relatively little hanging over me.

2002-11-02, Sat (Day 714, temperature at 10:02: 20.2°C, difference: -0.4°C): After eating lunch Ben stops by to pick up his stereo from my room. He stored it in my room after the Phoenix party so he wouldn’t have to carry it back to his room then. I walk with him to Palmer carrying the stereo pieces. Once I dropped the stuff off I decided to go to the athletic contests now instead of returning to my room only to come back again.

I went to Tarble gym to watch volleyball. Swat was playing Gettysburg and Bryn Mawr. I got there at about 12:30 and the first game started at 11:00. The second game ran past 14:00. Swarthmore played Bryn Mawr first and lost 3-2. In the second game Gettysburg beat Bryn Mawr 3-0. Gettysburg also won the game with Swarthmore 3-0.

While waiting for the second game to start I saw Gettysburg warm up for the play against Bryn Mawr. Gettysburg’s warm-up, while pedestrian and non-game like at first, progressively increased in intensity where it got the attention of the referees and the Bryn Mawr team. Gettysburg seemed to be making the most out of their warm-up time. I wanted to see how this team that is doing well in the Centennial Conference actually played. Gettysburg took an immediate lead over Bryn Mawr so their warm-up seemed to be a good way to prepare for the game.

At 14:00 I went outside to the Clothier field to watch the men’s soccer game against Haverford. The score was 0-0 when I got there in the second half. A good-sized crowd came out to watch the game. Haverford scored in the remainder of the game and pulled out with a win, 1-0.

I did the laundry in the afternoon and finished after dinner. Enough people were using the machines where I couldn’t run things in parallel much of the time. Also, the third washer from the left wouldn’t accept coins and someone marked it as broken on the whiteboard.

I had dinner with Akira and at 20:00 I went to Olde Club for “The post-Halloween cover bands show” presenting The Glitter Wars, The Collar Ups, Waif Me, One Ton Tomatoes, The Availables, A Little to the Left, Olde Club, Inflight Rock Band, and LTD. The bands varied in how many songs they played but in general the bands later in the evening played more. The heater near the back of the main floor started releasing steam midway through the night so not only was there smoke in the room from cigarettes but there also was smoke from steam.

Two bands had sound problems and LTD had equipment failure so they couldn’t really perform how they wanted to. As a result drunken people joined LTD on stage and started playing randomly. A guy took the mic and started spouting out a story about something. Most people left by this point since LTD told us they were done. After I was sufficiently amused by the random playing I walked back to Wharton.

I took a shower since I changed the sheets on my bed today and some of us in Olde Club got sprayed with something when LTD was playing. No one there knew what got on us. I went to bed at 03:00.

2002-11-01, Fri (Day 713, temperature at 10:01: 20.6°C, difference: 0.0°C): At lunch I sat down with a number of people by the window and by the time I left lunch I had moved down to the other end of the table with Ben. I also ate lunch with Rasika, Rachel, Kai, and others.

I started the afternoon by reading e-mail but Dad called and said that the cable modem connection at home still wasn’t working. He left a voicemail a couple hours before about the problem which had been going on for a day. I said that I could come home this afternoon.

At home running the Reset Comcast connection AppleScript once makes the connection come back up. I then try to get the connection to break again and it did so a couple of times. The connection did work most of the time I reset it so things have improved.

I then notice that the TV set-top when off now passes through a cable signal different from what channel the set-top was previously on. Before, the set-top would passthrough the same channel it was on without video. Now the set-top becomes passive and lets through the analog channels of the cable band so a VCR or TV could tune those channels. I added the analog channels to the VCR lineup.

As a test I also switched the wires so the VCR was before the set-top. The set-top still worked and the VCR could record an analog channel and the set-top could display any channel. To record a digital channel though you would have to switch the wires. I switched the wires back and Dad drove me back to Swarthmore.

Kai locked himself out of his room and I was on the hall for a bit waiting for him to get back in. I thought Jeremy and him were going to dinner. Public Safety opened up Kai’s room and then Jeremy and Kai said they weren’t going to dinner. So I just walked out. I met up with Andrew on the way to Sharples and we sat with some other people.

I went to the Kitao Student Gallery, Sharples III, soon after 19:00 to see Audrey Chan’s work. I went downstairs in Wharton soon after 21:00 to host the Phoenix party with Ted. There was plenty of alcohol, food, and music.

I started with a beer and then had tequila (40 percent alcohol) mixed with 7UP. I poured slightly too much tequila so the drink didn’t taste that good. The drink also made me feel tipsy rather quickly even though I sipped it. I sat down on the couch and chilled for a bit. My vision also lost range for a number of minutes. I felt better and got up off the couch. Jason pushed me into the dance area and I danced. At this point most of the guests had left so those remaining felt more comfortable and danced quite wildly.

Jeremy and Kai stopped by the party at the end. I mopped the floor after the party finished and used a floor sink located in the crawl space area to fill and dump the mop bucket. To access the sink I needed to go in the men’s bathroom and go through a door once inside the stall.

At one point when I was in the crawl space an alarm and red light went off for about 20 seconds but it wasn’t the fire alarm. I looked at the unit that lit up and the label on it referred to an electrical panel and specific breakers. I didn’t know what the meaning of the alarm was but nobody from Public Safety came over.

I stopped in Jeremy’s room from about 01:00 to 02:00. Caroline was ranting and Kai joined us but he didn’t get involved in the rant. Caroline was mad about the Olde Club staff editorial in The Phoenix. I went to bed sometime after 03:00.


Journal 2002-10

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