Checksum Arcanius

A major road on the way to my house was blocked off by a few police officers. I rolled my window down and slowed down – with nobody behind me – to ask what was going on. I’m a concerned citizen, I figure I should be privy to the information. The cop continued to wave me on without acknowledging me. So I asked again, with the car almost stopped. He looked away, refusing to acknowledge me, and waved me on more insistently. Who the heck does he think he is? I pay his salary. I am a good citizen. I don’t steal, I don’t hurt people, I clean up after myself, I vote, I support the troops… and the guy won’t even acknowledge that I exist. Another complete jack off, just like all cops, everywhere, that I’ve met. If they want my respect, they have to earn it, and they continue to do a piss-poor job at that.

My mom sure knows how to put on a party. Yesterday evening, we were treated to live music, truly wonderful food, and great punch – all in a beautiful landscaped back yard ringed with burning tiki torches. It was quite a site to behold, and much fun indeed. Nevertheless, it is nice for the wedding celebrations to finally be over – now we can start thinking about the rest of our lives once again.

When I returned from my brother’s wedding in Utah, a curious email was waiting for me. Its subject was simply “Business Trip?”

The long and short of it is that I’m headed to Minneapolis on Tuesday night, with my airfare, hotel, car, and food all paid for by Microvision. I can see, kinda, how a trip might be annoying if you have a family and all, but with no dependents of my own, I find the idea pretty appealing. I could get used to touring the world on someone else’s dime, even if I would be working while there.

Of course, maybe I should wait until it actually happens before I make up my mind about it.

Recently, both Dan and Bob insisted that it would behoove me to watch some episodes of Firefly – a one-season Sci-Fi wundershow that got canceled by Fox because no one watched it because no one knew about it. Having seen four episodes with the brothers Moretti on DVD, I think I have to agree with them. The show is (was?) good, on par with the best that Star Trek: The Next Generation had to offer. The stories are well-developed, the shows are fun, the characters are affable, the effects are wonderful, and the universe is believable even though the the idea of a Sci-Fi western “Space Opera” – in the fullest sense of each of those words – seems strange. Truly, Firefly was a masterpiece of television that never saw its potential fulfilled. And if the active fan club (brimming in anticipation of th release imminent release of the motion picture “Serenity,” based on the series) is any indication, Firefly might – just might – have grown to the vast proportions of popularity that Star Trek enjoyed.

For music playback, I prefer Foobar 2000, a feature rich, highly customizable, minimalist music player. Eschewing crap like skinnability for useful features like total customization of the local and global shortcuts (ie system wide shortcuts, even when the program is not foreground), Foobar 2000 is the champion’s choice for music playback. It supports all of the major formats out-of-the-box, has a clean and minimalist UI with two main branches (default and columns), and has a nearly limitless plugin architecture. As for myself, I use the default layout with a heavily modified displayname settings that hearken back to my WinAmp 2 days in the format of:
(Composer) Artist - Album - Track - Title
My display string checks for and conditionally displays each of these fields, so in the case it is missing (as in a downloaded piece of music), the display doesn’t look bad, but intelligently shrinks. For example, if the composer is missing or is the same as the artist, it is omitted along with its parentheses. So instead of looking like
() Screaming Trees - Dust - 01 - Halo of Ashes
It is much more pleasant and looks like:
Screaming Trees - Dust - 01 - Halo of Ashes

Also built into Foobar 2000 are an intuitive single-file ID3 tag editor and a powerful script-based “Masstagger,” a ridiculously useful tool for adding ID3 tags from filenames, changing filenames based on ID3 tags, and other such fancy things. But the kicker comes back to the fact that every command available can have a shortcut. Because I am a WinAmp 2 junkie (may its soul rest in peace), I use the keys z, x, c, and v to control the playback. Z goes back, X starts and pauses the player, C moves forward, and V stops playback. Also like Winamp, I use J to search for a specific song in the playlist.

Since my windows key is so underutilized, I made these same keys global shortcuts, when pressed n combination with my windows keys. So, while doing anything, from word processing to blasting terrorists with an Colt in Counter-Strike, I can start, stop, and navigate through my music without leaving the foreground window. Finally, I implemented the space bar as “jump to random file in current playlist” and made another global shortcut for Win+space. The result is basically total control over all of my music listening without ever interfacing the always-slower GUI.

And, to bring this post full circle: The UI is a simple rectangle. No rounded-corner nonsense; no bright colors. Just a utility that does exactly what it is supposed to, the way it should be done: unobtrusively, and exactly how I tell it to. I guess this is why “I am Debian.”

I recently received an “Advisor’s Worksheet” from the University of Washington, giving me a listing off all the credits I have earned over the years transfered to the UW. The total comes to 139.5 UW credits, a good deal of which are listed as 1XX and 2XX – meaning that there is no exact equivalent at the UW. Particularly interesting is the fact that while Biology and Chemistry credits show up as BIOL and CHEM, all of my Physics credits show up as simply “UW” – apparently, the UW Physics department doesn’t recognize BYU’s, or maybe the UW doesn’t have a Physics department… Perplexing indeed.

All that is missing from the report are the last two classes I took – English 270 (Professional Report Writing) , ENGR 205 (Electric Circuits), the the Associates of Arts and Sciences (DTA) degree that should be posted this week sometime. Happily, the BCC transcript server is down right now, so I can’t find out presently. So, since those two classes do transfer directly to UW classes, I should end up with somewhere in the ballpark of 149.5 credits, a mere 30.5, or just over two normal quarters, from minimum graduation requirements. However, I expect that with Bioengineering and Computer Engineering as my intended major(s), I will be spending more on the order of two years at the institutions.

The family has just returned from Utah, where we attended my brother Ben’s wedding to Kalee. Three action-packed days went quite well. We arranged a luncheon, helped move into a new appartment (including transporting a matress set down I-15), attended a wedding, took pictures, set up and tore down a reception, and decorated a car – all of this took about 45 trips north and south on I-15. It was a lot of driving. Everyone survived and the trip home was quite speedy. The reception up here is this Friday (the 26th) at the Cougar Mountain house, and if you know Ben, I would encourage you to show up and say hi.