Checksum Arcanius

Last night, in yet another sign that the music industry establishment is in its death throes, I went into the music production business. Local artist Daniel Moretti decided to cash in a four-year-old coupon to hold a studio session at Chez McElroy. The result of about five hours of work is a four-minute-long song that is a quite impressive piece of music, although I still need to do a little production work on it. Entitled “Over and Over,” download it below for a listen!

Daniel Moretti – Over and Over

Looks like predictions were just in the nick of time… Grades began to be posted today. The Capstone grade is preliminary — the grade I get at the end of next quarter there determines my grade for all three Capstone quarters.

I will fill in the rest when they are posted.

Looks like the Dean’s list is likely (Yup); With a good grade in 499, I can even maintain my hard-fought 3.7 GPA average (Yup). Stupid Biochem (Yup).

A friend of mine mentioned to me last night (ie, a few hours ago) that I had not yet posted grade predictions for my most recent quarter. Thanks to her reminder, I am now correcting this oversight.

Biochemistry (BioC 405): 3.0
Computational Bioengineering (BioEn 485): 3.9
Neural Engineering (BioEn 499C): 3.9
Advanced Digital Design (CSE 467): 4.0

LAN party today, 1-whenever, and I fell asleep at 3:30 or so. Just got home, and people there are still going. So much for youth!

Now that finals are over, I finally took the chance to relax a bit. I went with Shai, Dan, and Todd (and almost Courtney, Nic, and Natalie, but the movie sold out before they go there) to see I Am Legend. I have been pretty pumped about this movie since Dan let me know about it a while back. It seems that the premise is just too cool to screw up too badly. Of course, that didn’t stop the 1970s version with Charlton Heston, “Omega Man,” from attempting, but even that movie was not a complete bust. A modern version with Will Smith was a pretty sure-fire thing, right?

Right! This story actually has a happy ending. I did enjoy the movie — my first in quite a while to be honest. It had funny moments, intense moments, a few too few thoughtful moments, but overall it was a good ride and did enough right with the compelling premise to be a good way to get back into the movie-watching swing of things.

I Am Legend gets a 4 out of 5 on my movie scale.

Stupidtown (aka Biochem 405) ends in 10 hours. I can’t wait!

A few months ago I picked up a Motorola RAZR V3xx phone along with a new 2-year contract from AT&T Cingular AT&T. I have been quite happy with the phone, and I have even managed to treat it considerably better than my old T720. The phone’s slim profile lets me keep in in the pocket with my wallet; the T720 had to live with my keys, which were not the nicest to its shiny finish.

At any rate, back on Thanksgiving day, my phone started sending MMS (aka “Multimedia”) messages instead of the regular SMS (“Text”) messages. This was confusing to recipients because they thought I was sending them blank slide shows, and it was distressing to me because I’m sure MMS messages are at the very least as expensive as SMS messages. So today, I finally stumbled across the solution to this vexing problem, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Apparently, this bug shows up when there are too many messages in the phone memory. By deleting every message in my inbox after giving the same treatment to my outbox, the problem simply went away. And this occurred despite the memory being nowhere near full — I had over 450 messages in my inbox, and that rated only a 4/7 on the memory usage meter. Nevertheless, clearing my messages promptly did the trick. I guess this world could use a good test engineer. Of course, I’m sure it could use a good developer as well. <g>