Checksum Arcanius

Tonight, after a work (which included a particularly useful meeting in which I came up with a new design for the symbol of Arcanius), I went to Robinswood, where frisbee didn’t happen (Jacob showed up kind of on time, Lauren was pretty later, and others didn’t show), so I went with Lauren and picked up dc (of Carrots), and went to Dan’s place for some Texas Holdem, a style of poker explained nicely in this Wikipedia article. Lauren was first out, followed a long time after by dc, and Dan then made short work with me (him having 3/4 of the chips helped, I think, but I also made more mistakes and got worse cards). Oh well, it was fun, and it was also all of our first times playing an even semi-organized poker game. After Lauren got out she kept dc and I entertained with gossip about our graduating class and a variety of jokes. It was good to see both dc and Lauren again, since it had been a while.

A while back, I created a map of the states and countries I had visited. Since I visited Georgia as a part of the Titan Robotics Trip to the FIRST Robotics Championships, I thought I should update that map. Here it is:

This time, I decided to include states that I’ve been on the ground in, even if I’ve only been in the airport terminal. Doing it this way adds Illinois, Missori, and Wisconsin to the mix, which makes me feel a little bit better about my travel accomplishments. There is still too much white in there, though.

Last night, I decided to set up the new wireless router I aquired, a process which included me accidently tripping power to sf2 twice, which, needless to say, wasn’t exactly what I intended. The result is that Silverfir experienced a bit of completely unneccesary downtime. Combined with the fact that I forgot to start up MySQL again, it was a bad day for the server. Oh well, all is well again.

Today, I played frisbee, a process which saw my team get owned again, but I had a great time. Also, the TRC had a hack session which involved generally uninterested kids and a very cool demosration by Jim Wright.

Today, after work and dinner, I picked up a SMC Wireless Router at CompUSA, based on Dan’s suggestion, a solder station at Fry’s, along with 100 CD-R’s for $9, and some Cat 6 ethernet patch cables. I took a picture of the loot, but right now I’m feeling just a little too lazy to get it from my camera and upload it. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get lucky. As for right now, its about 100 degrees in my roo because of all the computer equipment thats on in here.

11:51 and I just got up… Bah…

And now, for some comic relief:

“Now basically, the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive duractance. the original machine had a base plate of pre-famulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing, in such a way that the two swerving bearings run a direct line with the panametric fan“

One of my resolutions this year was to be “early to bed, early to rize.” Yes, I spelled it with a ‘z’, I don’t really know why. I haven’t really kept that resolution, but today it actually happened. The boss is doing a demo, and I wanted to make sure everything was together before he left – so I came in at 6:00 to meet him as he picked up the material thatI prepared yesterday. It seems like everything is hunky-dory, and I’m fulfilling a resolution to boot.

In other news, Gmail seems to only update every 10 or 15 minutes , which is plenty fast unless you are expecting something. So IM it ain’t. And speaking of Gmail, why haven’t I seen any invitations in, like, 10 years? I mean, comeon, I have a faithful public to service.

Otherwise, things are going well. FlicConf rocks my socks, and now it has a contact form too (thus the 10-15 minute delay in Gmail was discovered).

Today, for the first time in a long time (I think over two months!), I rebooted sf2, the server behind silverfir.net. I figured it was time when I tried to restart apache and it gave me a long list of error messages. Nothing apparent was going wrong, but yes, even Linux succumbs to entropy, albeit at a seemingly much slower rate than Windows.

Work was pretty slow today, so I came home early and vacuumed out my truck, a task which was sorely overdue. After this, I went to eat with – and say goodbye to – Maneesh. He’s leaving for New York on Thursday and will be missed. Ben and Jon also came – we ate at Cuccina Cuccina in Issaquah. After this my brother and I went to an FHE titled “Spin The Bottle/Bare Buns Fun Run” that ended up being not nearly as racy as it sounded – we spun bottles to form groups who then “ran” bare fresh home-baked buns to various people in the church. A redeeming factor was that the girl my group delivered to was very nice on the eyes.