• • Trucksess.com • •

Journal 2002-12

Current entries

2002-12-21, Sat (Day 760, temperature at 11:31: 23.1°C, difference: -0.2°C): I am going home today.

2002-12-20, Fri (Day 759, temperature at 17:55: 23.3°C, difference: +1.3°C): I got up in time for dinner but not in time before the sun set. I ate dinner with Danielle, Brett, Todd, Geoff, and Sophie. For the rest of the day I was in the student publications office. I first tried a pre-release version of MacSFTP that the author offered me in an e-mail reply today. I got an error message the first time I tried running a particular block of AppleScript code but if I ran the script again the computer would then freeze.

Then I worked on getting the Phoenix image script working on computers other than Itchy. I first needed to figure out how to use and edit Photoshop actions and once I did that I saw that I could not set a path to the startup drive but only to the particular name of the startup drive. Since all of the computers in the office have differently named startup drives I couldn’t have image files be stored on the desktop like before.

I made changes to the script and actions to locate all files on the server and while making the changes themselves did not take long everything else did. It took a while to initially figure out the actions and debugging took some time since it took a while to run the script after making a change.

Locating all of the files on the server appeared to double execution time. It also decreased reliability as a number of times the computer would freeze with network activity on a certain image. It looked like if changes were made to the Phoenix partition on another computer then Photoshop would freeze.

Even though I left the publications office a little after 07:00 I still left too early to see the sun rise from there. I ate a yogurt and went to bed at 08:00.

2002-12-19, Thu (Day 758, temperature at 12:30: 22.0°C, difference: +0.5°C): After eating lunch I compressed almost all of the boxes on my couch and newspapers on the floor to my closet. It still is not possible to sit on the couch but there is not as much stuff on it as there was before. I do have much more floor space now though.

I went up to the publications office in the evening and burned CDs. The office also needed to be cleaned, which I started, Ben and Liz continued with, and I finished. I also tried using AppleScript with MacSFTP but I still had freezing problems like I did on my iMac, so I e-mailed the author. I didn’t finish burning CDs until 06:00 and I finished vacuuming more thoroughly than done earlier after 07:00. I couldn’t see the sunrise from the office window this morning since it was cloudy and raining.

From Parrish I went directly to Sharples for breakfast and just started feeling tired then. However I was up late enough where I needed to do things when offices were open now since they would be closed when I would get up later. I read e-mail and Gnutella Forums since there was some time before 09:00 when places would be open. After then I checked my mail and turned in my econ course evaluation to the department office. I went to bed at about 10:00.

2002-12-18, Wed (Day 757, temperature at 11:44: 21.5°C, difference: +0.3°C): I dreamed that a bag of hard pretzels I got from Tarble was dated Jan 20 1999. I noticed this date while sitting at home and told Mom about it. I also lived in Wharton too. In addition the bag was re-dated and re-priced a couple of times. The newest date had not expired yet but there was another date that was soon after Jan 20 1999. I was going to see Linda, director of Dining Services, to show her the bag.

I only bothered looking at the date when the pretzels I was eating became really hard. When I opened the bag a couple of days ago I didn’t remember noticing how hard the pretzels were, meaning the bag seal managed to keep the pretzels fresh until they were opened.

I also dreamed I was walking around campus at 02:00 but it was bright enough to see somewhat easily. Workers were removing sheets of ice slush from flat stone covered walkways. I was at a building that resembled Kohlberg only it was bigger and the center archway could allow cars through instead of just people like in the real Kohlberg. Near the archway was a canopy that had multiple ladders in a few locations resting on the roof of the canopy and the base of the building.

Under the archway on my right side was a flooded part of the street. A worker with a large shovel was trying to move the water elsewhere but I told him to unclog the nearby drain. With his shovel he created a suction that caused the drain to start working again and the ponding on the asphalt disappeared.

Today I ate lunch with Doru, Kai, and others. Doru convinced Kai to support him in Rotaract. John sat with me later. In Beardsley I read over and turned in my philosophy final and then started reading over my econ term paper. I ate dinner with Renee, Jeremy, Kai, and others. Kevin and Renee are leaving today. I finished my econ term paper and turned that in this evening.

I also downloaded and printed out the readings from the poly sci revised syllabus. Back in Wharton I signed up trucksess.com for Google site search and set a robots noindex tag on the pages that have the full document tree listed to avoid each page being counted twice. Google indexed five pages from trucksess.com but all of them are the fully expanded pages and none of them have content of the page searchable. I read e-mail and Gnutella Forums rather quickly and went to bed before 04:00.

2002-12-17, Tue (Day 756, temperature at 12:48: 21.2°C, difference: -0.1°C): I got up at about the same time as I did yesterday and went to lunch. I saw E.B. leaving Parrish with two bags of stuff so I wished her a nice break. However I saw E.B. at dinner so I guess she didn’t leave. I started revising my poly sci project in Beardsley this afternoon.

I went to dinner after 17:00 and started eating with Emily. Jeremy and Kai joined later along with Jason, and others. E.B. sat at the table one over from us with Renee, Kevin, and others. Renee left that table to talk to us at a point and stayed with us for the rest of the time. The primary topic of conversation was finding someone for Kai.

In the evening I went to McCabe to finish my poly sci project. Carolynn walked by and I said hi to her. I finished my project after 01:30. It turned out to be 27 pages and took four full days to complete. The editing time in Word said I was writing for 24 full hours.

I read e-mail and Gnutella Forums quickly afterwards in my room and went to bed before 04:00.

2002-12-16, Mon (Day 755, temperature at 12:50: 21.3°C, difference: -0.9°C): I received my EFF shirt, hat, and sticker from the mail today. In Sharples I ate lunch with Amy, Kevin, and Ryan. I wrote five more pages of my econ term paper before 17:30 in Beardsley computer lab and then went to dinner.

I sat alone in the far reaches of the Sharples big room with the expectation that the table would take awhile to fill. However the opposite happened. Caroline and Renee sat with me and Jeremy and Kai joined us later. The other side of the table overfilled with another group. Our side of the table kept getting wilder as time went on, culminating in Kai spilling a glass of juice on Caroline. That effectively ended things and left Caroline pretty pissed off.

Later I finished writing my econ paper before 22:00 in Beardsley and went to Kirby for the last SWIL movie of the semester, “Little Shop of Horrors.” A number of people came out to the movie.

After the movie I looked at other SFTP clients that would run on Mac OS 9 but I only found MacSFTP, which I already had. I tried updating my upload script with MacSFTP but my computer froze twice trying to send MacSFTP AppleScript commands. By then it was 03:00 so I gave up and read e-mail, Gnutella Forums and went to bed. The peering of Gnutella Forums changed to a much slower route with response times of over two seconds. I went to bed at around 05:00.

2002-12-15, Sun (Day 754, temperature at 11:26: 22.2°C, difference: -1.2°C): I ate lunch alone at first but Caroline, Ben, and Helaine sat with me later. I revised the rewrite of my first poly sci paper this afternoon in Beardsley. Once done, I put the finished paper outside Valelly’s office before 18:00 and went to dinner. I get there and since it is late I go sit at a large table since a bigger group would be less likely to leave completely.

I get to a table with Jeremy, Kai, Caroline, Renee, Kiyo, Anna, Emily, and E.B. They told me they were just talking about me that I rotated my pillows and Caroline developed the premise that I didn’t wash my sheets but Anna disagreed. Half of the table left when I sat down namely one full side of the table. Caroline, Kai, Renee, and Kiyo were left. Geoff and Todd joined later.

I wrote the draft to my philosophy take-home final this evening in Beardsley computer lab and then went to McCabe to check out books for my econ term paper. I returned to Beardsley before 00:00 and proceeded to write five pages of the 15 required before 02:00.

Back in Wharton I did the weekly web request log rotation. The GNetCache requests to trucksess.com show no sign of abating, which is annoying. Milhouse was unavailable so I went up to the publications office at 04:00 to restart the server. I get up to the office and the server wasn’t even turned on. After getting Milhouse operational I returned to my room to copy the log files to Milhouse as the secondary copy and then went to bed after 05:00.

I think I turned computer display sleep off on Thursday since I was getting wake up from sleep problems when I would use my iMac over the LAN. When I restart my computer after a crash I often see a glimpse of what was on the screen right before the crash on restart. With these sleep crashes I would often see a dialog on my screen. Okey Dokey Pro was unable to dismiss the dialog. I turned sleep off so I would see the dialog but the dialog did not show then when using file sharing.

I even used the computer in Beardsley today that crashed my iMac twice on 2002-11-21 but I was unable to cause a crash now. I turned sleep back on before I went to bed today to see if my work tomorrow causes a crash. If it does then sleep conflicts with file sharing.

2002-12-14, Sat (Day 753, temperature at 11:48: 23.4°C, difference: +0.4°C): I dreamed I was in the ticket line at the AMC Marple 10. My family was going to see Lord of the Rings. I pay for my ticket and enter the theater last of my group but am refused entry since the movie name on the ticket was not Lord of the Rings. My family already entered but they eventually came back.

I return to the ticket window and while waiting in line Jeremy and some other guy are entering the building to my right. The ticket seller eventually gives me another ticket but that one is wrong too. I notice it right then so I complain and they finally get it right. Soon afterwards my family is driving south on PA 320 by the Springfield Mall to eat pizza at the southeast corner of PA 320 and Baltimore Pike. The place doesn’t actually exist in real life. We only had about 25 minutes to eat considering the movie starts at 17:00.

Today was the third day for working on my poly sci project. Since I have been working on it for so long and I have other stuff to do I wanted to finish the draft of it today. I still needed to finish writing the descriptions on why I classified each agency into a particular group and write the five-page paper component.

I need to do the laundry this afternoon so I worked on my project in my room until I finished the laundry. After finishing the laundry I did my work on an iMac on the main floor of McCabe. I managed to get almost all of the classification descriptions written by dinner but I did not get to write the paper until 20:00. I ate dinner with Kevin, Amy, and Jeremy.

I made good progress writing the paper since I had spent so much time working on the rest of the project beforehand. I finished the draft at about 22:35 and then left a voicemail for Kai about the party in Paces tonight. I spell checked the paper and left the library at about 23:15.

Kai left a note on my door that he would see me in Paces so I went over there. The party had an invite list and was a pay party so I had to get through that part. Once in, Kai met up with me and then Jason. I had a mixed drink of vodka and Sprite. I talked with Justin for a bit, who I was thinking about last Thursday during the Phoenix hiring meeting. Most of the others there were much more blasted than I got.

People were already dancing and quite wildly too so I took part as well. Jason and Kai danced wildly much of the night to some people’s amusement. Like past parties no one really got that close to me. There were some grinding pairs among others though.

The music mix was really good at first but then it got top 40 really fast. The song “It’s a Wonderful Life” also played three times in a short time span, which was very annoying. When the tunes were good, they reminded me of Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the German radio station I listened to my sophomore year. It made sense to play that music considering it is a Eurotrashed party.

Many people stayed until the party ended at 02:00 including me. What surprised me is how many people hung out after the music stopped and the lights were turned on. I left then as I felt the party was on a steady decline once the playlist became less Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I eventually took a shower and went to bed after 04:00.

I noticed today that I was able to do remote viewing quite well. My ability has steadily been improving over this semester, especially in determining what is going on in Sharples but today I had an increase in perception. Sitting in my room this afternoon I thought people were in the laundry room before I went there to take clothes out of the washer. When I got down there three people were in the laundry room including Ilana, Carolynn’s friend. Someone else took one of my wash loads out too. In total one man and two women were in the laundry room. The other woman, who I didn’t know, removed my clothes from the washer. The man was talking to Ilana when I got there.

Heading back from dinner, before I turned the corner to the Wharton courtyard I thought about if anyone fixed the holiday lights hung outside the east section of the building and an adjacent tree. Earlier the lights hung above the door fell down since the duct tape stopped holding. When I turn the corner I see a woman facing the building standing right at the fallen lights. She didn’t seem to be doing anything to fix them but she was looking at the problem. Later on that night the fallen portion of the lights was hung up over the door light.

While working on my paper this evening in McCabe I thought about how Jason at the Phoenix party earlier this semester danced pretty wildly. I get to the party tonight and Jason is doing just that. Jason also stayed with Kai much of the time, who was my point of contact about the party. I’m not sure if I thought about this after 22:00, which is when the party started and Jason could have been dancing this way.

2002-12-13, Fri (Day 752, temperature at 13:30: 23.0°C, difference: +1.2°C): I went to late lunch and sometime later I arrived at McCabe to continue working on my poly sci project. I ate dinner with Jeremy, Kiyo, Misham [sp.], and Kai. I continue working on my poly sci project in the evening. Carolynn sat next to me in the main level computer area later in the evening. Upon her departure I talked to her for a bit. She came back later and sat two seats down.

McCabe closed at 00:00 tonight due to the exam period so I went to Beardsley, which was still open. People were working there when I got there and were still there when I left at about 01:00.

I took the suggestion of Panic, makers of Audion, to trash the Audion preferences files to see if that fixed the ogg playback crashes. After doing this action I got my computer to crash anyway and I got the iMac downstairs in the public area to crash also. I replied back with my findings.

I got in bed by 04:00 but I couldn’t fall asleep in a half-hour so I got out of bed and worked on my poly sci project for about an hour. My eyes finally got really tired at 06:00 but I still couldn’t fall asleep that easily yet I did eventually.

2002-12-12, Thu (Day 751, temperature at 11:48: 21.8°C, difference: 0.0°C): Well it looks like today’s temperature and time is also yesterday’s temperature and time.

I ate lunch with Ben, Jeremy, Kai, and others. The seating configuration in Sharples was changed to make most of the tables orient the other direction. As a result the sound absorption tiles hung from the roof would be less effective since the sound would not be able to directly reach the large surface of the tiles.

I went to McCabe this afternoon to begin working on my poly sci final project. I need to figure out which agencies are part of the Department of Homeland Security and classify them according to Wilson’s bureaucratic model. Then I need to write a five-page paper explaining the significance of the classification. I wanted to have the draft of the paper written tonight but crosschecking the different documents from the White House website took more time than expected.

At 18:00 I went to dinner with Jeremy, Kai, Kira, and later Ani. I stopped by Wharton briefly following dinner and then went to the publications office for the Phoenix staff hiring meeting at 19:00. The meeting lasted two hours much to my consternation. I continued working on the main level of McCabe until 00:45. Kai talked to me at points later in the evening.

I continued working on the agency list in Beardsley until about 01:45. I returned to Wharton and went to bed soon after 04:00.

2002-12-11, Wed (Day 750, temperature at 11:48: 21.8°C, difference: -0.5°C): I dreamed I was with my family in the Parrish west circle. The grassy area inside the circle had this water feature in it that contained a large bronze-colored vertical wall structure. I was flying with two other family members in this personal aircraft device around the circle a few stories off the ground. We had a hard time controlling the vehicle and we almost crashed it into the waterfall portion of the water feature, which would have been bad.

I ate lunch with a number of people but everyone left by the end except for Todd. I received eight Oregonians today from the mailroom. Brendan e-mailed me today with some problems he found with the online edition. Two errors involved me going downstairs to the dorm computer cluster to see what The Phoenix Online looked like in IE for Windows.

To fix one problem with the online edition I broke up some long words in the living left rail to make it the proper width. The image popup windows for the section fronts didn’t work since the JavaScript window.open command wouldn’t honor the base href. I noticed the same problem with Netscape 6 for Mac but IE 5 Mac did not have a problem with it. I didn’t fix this problem since the solution would likely be to edit the automatic image script, which is thorny now.

When I went to the publications office for my Phoenix interview the heavy rain was tapering off somewhat and the skies were starting to clear. The cloud formations were causing a yellow cast to be thrown onto the landscape. The Wharton exterior looked very interesting with the yellow illumination.

My interview was at 16:30. A new applicant for the Webmaster position arrived after me and I led his interview. I ate dinner with the Third Wing at 17:30. Normally I cannot attend Third Wing since I am in the publications office for The Phoenix at that time. The Third Wing could not use their traditional meeting place upstairs in Sharples since other groups were there. Instead we sat in the small room. The discussion topic was holidays but like usual the actual conversation drifted off somewhere else. Most of the discussion turned out to refer to religion.

I went to Beardsley before 20:00 to work on the rewrite of my first poly sci paper. Soon before 00:00 drunken guys from Phi Psi came in to the computer lab and sang Silent Night. I finished the draft before 02:00 and returned to Wharton. It took a while to unwind so I didn’t get to bed until after 04:30.

2002-12-10, Tue (Day 749, temperature at 07:32: 22.3°C, difference: +0.6°C): I got up at 07:30 today, went to breakfast, and then worked on my resumé. I didn’t have time to comb through the resumé guide to check my resumé before meeting with Jennifer at 11:00.

When talking to people I am focusing on making direct eye contact, which I worked on a little today.

I ate lunch with Renee, Cathy, and others. Today was the last day of class and while child development was organized differently even this last day, Valelly’s class stayed consistently good through the end. I turned in my add/drop form to the registrar after getting Barry to add my fifth course today.

I wrote my journal and got through a number of Swatmail messages before dinner. Student Council served dinner and the shrimp was particularly good. However, other things at Sharples proved problematic. I sat with Caroline but she was going to leave soon. She was in the serving area for a long time due to the ice cream line. I go to get Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and get in the longest ice cream line I have ever seen. After a while I finally get to the front but the ice cream is impossible to scoop, explaining why the line grew so much.

I return to my seat and since I was gone so long another group took over my area. As a result I needed to force my way in. That group moved to a newly opened table after a few minutes. I looked around Sharples and noticed a lot of seats were unoccupied but people’s stuff was there. It seems that the long ice cream lines were decreasing seat turnover and therefore made the supply of available seats go down to the point where it seemed like it was the busy time of lunch.

After dinner I got bogged down on Yahoo! Mail since an automatically sent message from 34sp said that I was over my disk quota. I didn’t believe it at first but I later found out what happened. The log files for the end of the week were counted twice since the disk summary is calculated after the cron job copies the log files but before the originals are zeroed out. Also, Webalizer’s dns_cache.db file grew to 10 MB due to the continuing GNetCache requests. I deleted the file later this evening and I’ll see 24 hours from then if the file grew to the original size.

I went with Jeremy to the Terpsichore student dance concert in LPAC Theater at 20:00. Ben, Kai, and Todd also sat in our row in the lower right seating area. Afterwards, Jeremy, Kai, and I went to Tarble since Jeremy had points to spend. The fire alarm went off in Wharton due to burning food on the west first floor. After the alarm was reset Jeremy, Kai, and I talked outside my room about various things. Norense joined the conversation a few minutes later.

Kai also wanted to show University of Penn’s Huntsman Hall, which he was impressed with even though The Philadelphia Inquirer derided it. Kai went to the Penn website on my computer to show the place off. All four of us crowded into my room despite the increasing amount of stuff in it. Today is the last day for the New York Times bookstore subscription though. My subscription will start again next semester.

It seems that more people are taking an interest in me despite the conditions of my room. It took the rest of the evening to get the daily stuff caught up and I went to bed after 02:00.

2002-12-09, Mon (Day 748, temperature at 11:02: 21.7°C, difference: +0.7°C): I got up at 11:00 and went to the last meeting of Raff’s philosophy class. I didn’t sit down to eat lunch until 12:50 and I had some difficulty securing a seat but the table I sat at cleared out in a few minutes anyway.

I finished and turned in my first econ policy memo rewrite before dinner. I ate dinner alone at first but Kiyo sat down with me for the remainder. After dinner I went to the Swarthmore borough hall for the monthly borough council meeting at 19:30. The skateboarding ordinance was still tabled but the bed and breakfast ordinance made progress this meeting and may be passed next month. The skateboarding measure would prohibit the activity in selected areas of the borough and the bed and breakfast ordinance would permit that type of establishment up to a maximum of two per block.

The council meeting ran a few minutes past 21:30 so I went directly to Upper Tarble to see a fashion show. I arrived to the event 15 minutes late and the show ended before 22:00. Upper Tarble was crowded and more people appeared to be standing on the sides of the room instead of sitting down. I would say about 150 people were in attendance.

Afterwards I finished my child observation paper in Beardsley by 00:45. Claudia and Amy were working behind me on something involving KaleidaGraph. Claudia asked out loud if anyone knew KaleidaGraph. I volunteered and Claudia explained to me that numbers could be entered into the data table but words would not be accepted. I told them that the data type of the column needed to be changed from numbers to text.

I started working on improving my resumé for my meeting with Jennifer in Career Services tomorrow. However, I had a number of things to check, it was late, and I had been using my eyes checking papers much of today. I decided to go to bed instead and get up early before the meeting to finish. I went to bed without having done the daily stuff but I was able to fall asleep before 03:00.

2002-12-08, Sun (Day 747, temperature at 11:00: 22.4°C, difference: +1.1°C): I dreamed I was looking at a large chart of various certificates of deposit. The top had low interest rates and low risk and the bottom had higher interest rates with higher risk. I wanted a good rate of return but also wanted to minimize my risk. The risk was calculated in the form 1 out of n. One certificate in the middle of the chart appeared like a good balance at 10% interest with a risk of 1 out of 3 million. To properly do the risk calculation I asked what time period the risk estimate was for. I thought it was annual but I didn’t know for sure.

I spent most of today writing in the Beardsley computer lab. In Sharples I ate lunch with Emily, Joan, Abram, Sophie, and others. I rewrote my econ first policy memo this afternoon and started my psych child observation paper. I ate dinner with Anna, Ellie, and Matt.

After dinner I went to Beardsley to continue writing my child observation paper. The Mariah Carey song “Make it Happen” entered my head and about a minute later I look up through the wall where I hear someone opening a door near the Beardsley public area. I wait for that person to enter. She got on one of the Macs on the side of the room. Even though there were a few others in the room it became very quiet. After writing a page I went to the bathroom, which I would have done earlier but I figured once I stepped out of the room she would leave. I wanted to see how long she was going to stay. When I got back from the bathroom sure enough she was gone.

I finished my paper draft before 00:00 and did the log rotation after 00:00. The SCCS is going to discontinue Telnet and FTP this Friday so I spent some time trying to find an alternate method of uploading files since Fetch uses FTP. The Kerberos encryption methods that Fetch supports did not seem to be supported by the SCCS and secure FTP will not be included in Fetch until sometime later next year.

MacSFTP seemed ok although it is time-bombed shareware and it does not have an FTP client. I would be unable to use MacSFTP exclusively since many servers still use FTP. I didn’t feel like making a decision now since there wasn’t a clear winner so I just put it aside.

My mistake of not completely converting the base href quote style to double quotes for Phoenix Online pop-up windows added noise to the Analog failed referrer report. I made the base href change last week to try and get WebClipping to work properly with the base href tag. Due to the pop-up window problem I couldn’t easily tell if my change actually fixed the WebClipping problem. I went to bed after 03:30.

2002-12-07, Sat (Day 746, temperature at 12:56: 21.3°C, difference: -1.4°C): I woke up without an alarm and I got out of bed near 13:00. I ate a late lunch and did the laundry in the afternoon. Jeremy and Kai were also doing the laundry then. I ate dinner with Kai, Anna, Ellie, and Jason.

I went with Jesse and Jeremy to the Swarthmore College Orchestra concert in Lang at 20:00. The concert ended a couple of minutes before 22:00.

I found out that I forgot to fully change the base href quoting style for the pop-up image windows on The Phoenix Online. When I ran Webinator it found about 500 errors since the opening quote for the base href was double but the closing was single. I fixed that problem and then reran Webinator later this night.

Kai and I went to the WRC for a party. I haven’t been to the WRC so I went to see what the place looked like. The dance space seemed smaller than Paces although the WRC has a balcony and is better decorated. The music at the party was mostly good.

It took a little longer to get to bed than I wanted to but it took a while for me to get tired anyway.

2002-12-06, Fri (Day 745, temperature at 07:31: 22.7°C, difference: +0.8°C): I got up at 07:00 to start working but realized I could sleep until 07:30 since Sharples starts serving breakfast then. I spent the rest of the morning getting my resumé finished and then completed my Phoenix application. I sent single-sided documents to the Wharton printer and the double-sided job went to McCabe. Also I photocopied my application in McCabe. I left the library at 11:30, which is when my philosophy class starts but I still had to turn in my application. Instead of putting it in campus mail I put it directly under Liz’s door in Parrish.

Philosophy class was really confusing since I was tired. Also I was thinking that I just finished something time consuming but I still had to revise my econ paper this afternoon.

I ate lunch alone since I saw a lot of unfamiliar faces at Sharples and one familiar table was already oversubscribed. After lunch I got my newspapers, exchanged a $10 for quarters from FMFCU, and signed up for an appointment with Jennifer Barrington in Career Services. After briefly stopping by my room I went to Beardsley at about 13:45. I finished revising my paper a few minutes after 15:00 and put it under Mark’s office door.

I spent the rest of the evening getting daily stuff caught up. It appears that the campus events starting with today have shifted to be more performance music and dance with fewer parties. It didn’t appear there were parties this weekend although an Olde Club show was tonight. I took a shower and went to bed at about 00:00.

2002-12-05, Thu (Day 744, temperature at 11:01: 21.9°C, difference: 0.0°C): I slept an extra hour today and the rest of the day became progressively more time crunched. It started snowing early this morning and continued throughout the day. I ate lunch with Kevin, Kai, and others.

Kai told me Reimer cancelled class today so I had extra time to try out my new flat Sharples tray as a sled. Other Swatties and children were sledding down the hill outside Clothier. I soon found that my tray could in fact be used as a sled. Other people who brought Sharples trays that were not flat on the bottom had problems getting them to work. Kai joined me and we sledded down the hill near the Clothier bell tower for an hour.

I got back to my room after 13:30 and changed my shoes since the ones I wore sledding got very wet. I took pictures from my window and went to Valelly’s class a little late. The rest of the groups, which included mine, gave presentations on the Wilson bureaucracy book.

I ate dinner with Kai, Ryan, Vince, Emily, Joan, Renee, Caroline, Brett, Annie, and Geoff. Afterwards I went to the publications office for the last Phoenix ed board of the semester. The meeting ended in about an hour. Back in my room I read the career services guide to writing a resumé, which took the rest of the night. I went to pub night in Paces from 22:00 to 23:00.

I realized a few minutes before 01:00 that I was too late to go to McCabe to photocopy my Phoenix application since the library closes at 01:00. Previously, I intended to campus mail the application before I went to bed tonight. I decided that since the application was due today I would need to get up early tomorrow morning to complete my resumé and finish the application. I finished reading the resumé guide and went to bed after 02:00.

2002-12-04, Wed (Day 743, temperature at 10:00: 21.9°C, difference: +3.8°C): Today was the last class meeting for econ and there was no philosophy class today. I ate lunch early with Kai, Caroline, Renee, Helaine, and others. I did the daily stuff in the afternoon and went to the publications office at 17:00.

The Phoenix restarted Milhouse the server at about that time after 17 days of uptime. Too many pages were being PDFed at once and overloaded the server. One of the layout pages could not be opened after the client machine that was using it crashed and I didn’t feel like restarting the server again. I tried something new and only Andrew and I can do this new method since it requires logging into the server administration application. I stopped and started file sharing and that unlocked the file. Restarting file sharing is much faster than restarting the entire OS.

There were some other problems with the 17:00 pages that I found out about after deadline. The large image on the back page of sports was in 72 dpi and looked bad. The PDF of page 24 was less than a meg, which shouldn’t happen for a color page. Also the PDFs of pages four and six were both page four. Delco, our printer, called us to tell us this a few minutes before I noticed it. I didn’t consciously hear the conversation about the duplicate page beforehand.

No one ordered pizza so after leaving the office before 20:00 I went into Tarble and grabbed some hard pretzels, bite-sized crackers, and a Slim Jim. I started working on my Phoenix application this evening and normally I turn in a resumé also. Since I was revising my resumé to send it out for job applications as well, I spent more time working on it. I had just started the process before I went up to the office at 22:00 for the second deadline.

Two other publications were in the office so I had to work on an iMac instead of a G4. Yavor worked on Sideshow Bob, which needed some extra setup to run the web scripts. When Luke came up to the office he got on a decent G4.

Another publication was using Itchy so I tried getting the image script to run on the iMac I was using, Selma. The only way I got it to work was to mount Itchy via file sharing and have the Photoshop action use Itchy’s Desktop Folder. I then needed to copy the images on Itchy to Selma. The copy images to server step failed so I did that manually.

Two more images in the sports section were PDFed at 72 dpi but the problem was not as noticeable. However the file sizes of the smaller PDFs were five to ten times as small as they should have been.

Luke, Yavor, and I left at around 01:00. Doing the daily stuff now was easier since I did it earlier today so I took a shower, cut my nails, and went to bed soon after 03:00.

2002-12-03, Tue (Day 742, temperature at 11:01: 18.1°C, difference: -2.5°C): I slept an extra hour today and the rest of the day became progressively more backlogged. I got a child development paper back today, notable for the complexity of the sources. In Valelly’s class we did group work and even though I hadn’t done the reading I was able to skim the text quickly enough during class to find important points.

I met Valelly before dinner to talk about my first paper rewrite. After dinner I met Jesse in the courtyard to go to the Friends meetinghouse for the David Horowitz lecture at 19:30. Jesse and I got there a few minutes after 19:00 but there still were a good number of people there before us. Most people streamed in closer to 19:30 and while the center seating area filled up the side sections still had seats available. Horowitz’s speech was convincing and the question and answer period wasn’t as rambunctious as I wanted it to be.

The event ended at 21:00 and I waited with Jesse and Tom so Jesse could have Horowitz sign his book. I talked with Krista from philosophy class for a bit too.

Ben left a voicemail to call the publications office and Liz told me that The Phoenix needed the student publications camera since they had camera problems. I also moved some stuff off of the Phoenix partition to Moe so there would be enough disk space to do this week’s issue. I didn’t want to use my computer while the copy was in progress so I took stationery and objects out of a bag to sort them. I went up to the publications office to give Liz the camera and I also picked up a phonebook.

I get back to Wharton and talk to Kai about his continuing computer problems. He installed a processor fan today but it was too big to have both memory slots be occupied. Therefore Kai’s computer was reduced to 128 MB of RAM, which caused a slowdown. Kai ordered a 256 MB memory module, which may not work on his Sony computer due to the size.

I went to see Jeremy so he could copy my notes for the econ classes he missed but people kept talking to Jeremy instead. I got in a conversation in the hall with Jeremy and Kai about the Horowitz lecture, which Jeremy went to but Kai did not. Todd then talked to Jeremy about the Horowitz lecture in Jeremy’s room while I was there.

Jeremy finally got to copy the notes and I didn’t get back to my room until 02:00. I got tired trying to fix my old flashlight, which was in the pile of stuff on my bed so I ended up putting the stuff back into the bag unsorted and going to bed at 03:00. I went to bed without having read e-mail or Gnutella Forums so tomorrow will be busy with that.

2002-12-02, Mon (Day 741, temperature at 10:00: 20.6°C, difference: +2.4°C): I dreamed Thomas and I were watching a life-sized TV of an outdoor baseball park in Portland, Oregon. The view beyond the outfield pans from right to left and offers a great view of the city skyline.

I also dreamed I was walking to Delaware from Pennsylvania somewhat east of US 202. My route wasn’t very efficient. On the second time I took the route, meaning a different day, a shop owner arrived at his establishment in a car and introduced himself. I spent a few minutes resting in his shop, which is on the west side of the road. The shop is immediately north of a large reservoir that goes under the road I use to get to Delaware.

This afternoon after 15:00 I walked with Kai to the Springfield Square shopping center. Kai needed to meet someone at the John Harvard’s restaurant about gift certificates for the senior class. Kai has been unsuccessful on previous days in meeting the person he needs to talk to. Today he was also unable to meet with her.

I needed to go to the Springfield Square shopping center to use my $25 gift certificate at Borders. Kai joined up with me after leaving John Harvard’s. I wanted to get something having to do with Oregon or Washington but I also wanted to make best use of my time at Borders and choose from a wide number of titles. It took two hours from initial browsing to purchase. The gift certificate covered about a third of the total cost.

I spent most of the time in the store browsing the titles available. I made a point to walk around the entire bookstore to see what titles were there, which I rarely have done when buying books. I didn’t browse all of the titles in the bookstore since that would take too long but I did see what categories were present. Also I closely examined the titles in the computer, reference, nature, and travel sections.

From this perusal I came up with about 14 candidates to make a final selection. Especially for the travel books I was judging how well the pages were laid out and how readable the text was. Overall the books I browsed through looked better than before due to technological advancements but there still were differences in design quality between titles.

I settled on three titles, one about Oregon, a second about Washington, and the third about feng shui. All of my books each cost about $20, had lots of color in them but still had high page counts. I found out later tonight that none of my books were printed in the United States.

Kai and I walked back to campus directly to Sharples to eat dinner at around 18:00. I didn’t have much time between dinner and when I had to leave at 19:20 to walk to the Ridley High School for the Ridley school board meeting. The meeting started at 20:00 and finished in an hour. I went to Phoenix ed board at 21:30, read Swatmail, and looked through the books I got at Borders today afterwards. I didn’t get to bed until sometime after 04:00.

2002-12-01, Sun (Day 740, temperature at 10:49: 18.2°C, difference: -3.3°C): I dreamed I was on the conference side of the publications office with Andrew, student publications coordinator. He got an APC Back UPS Pro 1080 for the new server but it didn’t have a USB port so it couldn’t automatically shutdown the server when the UPS exhausted its battery. I looked at the product list online and for $10 more at $259 he could have got the Back UPS 1080 Pro with USB.

I started talking to Andrew about what UPS I was going to get for my new computer and I begun by saying that the Back UPS Office 280 that I now have can only keep my iMac up for eight minutes. Therefore to have more uptime with a more powerful, power-consuming computer I would need to get a much bigger unit. I couldn’t get to say this implied sentence though since The Phoenix told us to move somewhere else since they were having a meeting with some outside guy in a suit.

As we left Andrew and I commented that we weren’t even that noisy and that they were too soft, which quickly touched off a motivational shouting period that increased in loudness. Andrew and I went to The Phoenix office to continue talking.

The next part of my dream involved being in a baseball stadium in Milwaukee, not necessarily Wisconsin. The stadium especially at the end of the game reminds me of a large minor league park. Somebody catlike was trying to disprove a theory but it involved reconfiguring the baseball field and the change confused the game play thereby ending it. I see the reconfiguration from the upper area of the stadium but when I leave I am in the lower section. Everybody is leaving at once so it is very crowded. E.B. and Phil were sitting in my lower level section and leave in front of me.

I haven’t been in this stadium before so I tried moving towards the center building area since my seats did not have a concession or enclosed area behind the section to explore. I first entered the stadium from the center building but I moved quickly through it since I wanted to see the theory demonstration on time. However, there were so many people leaving the other sections and a large number of people were entering for the next game that I didn’t want to cut through so much of the crowd. I get out of the stadium near my section and enter the Ridley Middle School parking lot. I see Mom at a distance, who apparently is my ride.

This afternoon I wrote an outline in McCabe for my econ term paper and went to Beardsley to write a draft of my second econ policy memo. I ate dinner with Jason and returned to Beardsley to finish the draft and print the journals from last semester. I finished sometime before 21:00.

Then I spent the rest of the evening until 01:00 tracking down a bug in Audion where playing ogg files causes a hang. I went to the Wharton C basement to see if I could reproduce the crash on one of the public area Macs. I managed to get that iMac to hang so I did more tests to figure out what was going on and formulate triggers for the problem. It seems that Audion leaks memory but the leak is pronounced when playing ogg files. Scanning a file during playback amplifies the leak. I sent Panic, makers of Audion, an e-mail explaining the bugs I found.

Afterwards I processed the web request logs for the prior week. The requests to the GNetCache are not steadily declining although more hosts seem to be sending ping requests. The ping requests may indicate that the ERROR return may seem to be filtering through that the cache is no longer available. Before dropping the cache a host should send additional pings if it encounters an ERROR response.

However, it has been almost two weeks since I took down the cache and the requests are still streaming in. Due to this inability of incoming requests to quiet down once the cache is removed, I don’t think it is a good idea to set up a cache since the requests do not stop even after taking it down.

I didn’t get to bed until about 04:30, which sort of annoyed me but I did get a good amount of stuff done today.


Journal 2002-11

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