Canned Air

October to January... that's not so bad.

2007-01-31T14:43:00.000-08:00

So I figured I should get back into this blogging thing. I'm not about to recap the past 3 and a half months, or whatever... so yeah. That would be ridiculous.

I will say that I have a house for next year, so no more of this shitty dorm living. Should be a good time, and super nerdy, because, well, I'm a nerd, and pretty much everyone I'm living with is one too... so yeah.

It can be seen right here.

It's supposed to be like two apartments, upstairs and downstairs, somewhat duplex-esque, but we're renting the whole thing, so we have two living rooms, two kitchens, two sets of laundry machines... it's pretty neat.

Othe than that, life is boring. However, I leave you all with this gem from The Lantern, OSU's student newspaper. I beg of you, please read the caption.

Taskbar Shuffle

2006-10-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Busy few days. Cool new app, I think at least. I've been wanting Windows to do this for a while, but didn't really feel like doing anything to make it happen. That's why blogs rule, they bring me the info I'd like to see.

So basically, this neat little program lets you drag and drop your active windows on the taskbar, much like you can in Firefox, letting you reorganize. I always have the same few things open, and like my least changing items to be on the far left of my taskbar, and the ever-opening-and-closing ones to be on the right. I always get annoyed when GAIM or Firefox needs a restart, and it puts my taskbar out of typical order. Yes, that's extremely obsessive compulsive, and I'm alright with that... now I can fix it. This also allows a middle-click = close window, again, like a Firefox Tab.

Anyway - Direct Link: Taskbar Shuffle

via [Lifehacker]

Firefox 2.0 RC1 Available for Download

2006-10-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

So yeah, the title pretty much says it all. I haven't installed yet, in fact I'm only at 50% on the installer download. But I'll be sure to be fiddling with FF 2.0 sometime this weekend, after this week from hell is over.

Details and Screencaps Here
via [lifehacker]

Choose Language and Download Here.

(I highly recommend the Punjabi version)

Another cool thing on the internets

2006-09-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

Coming soon through a tube near you, a brand new Google project that's about 60% through beta. It's called Writely, and it looks to be promising. It's a web based word-processor, with some fairly extensive options. The real intrigue for me lies within the collaboration option. For every document you create you can add email addresses (by the way, login is achieved through your Google/Gmail account) of people who can in turn access and edit any or all of your documents. I can see this getting some serious use on college group projects, if nothing else. It also has something that even Microsoft Word is lacking, to my knowledge, an edit log. Your documents auto-save every ten seconds, and every edit is registered, so at any point (I think) you can roll-back your document to a previous state. So collaborative documents become mini-wikis of a sort in this way, giving you control to undo something if somebody else drops the ball. The next time I actually have to write a paper... when I take a non-math/science based class, I'm most likely going to use Writely, and see how it goes.

Netvibes

2006-09-25T22:33:00.000-07:00

Too awesome to not blog about. That's pretty much the best way to describe Netvibes. It's a fully customizable homepage, that's a more sensible way. You can, after creating an account, add or subtract features at your desire, move them around the page, and even create new tabs within your page for each different type of content, or what-have-you.

The Built in RSS features are my favorite by far. I've tried programs for retrieving blog entries but have never really enjoyed them all that much, and I like to keep as few programs as possible open most of the time. But that's definitely not the only functionality here. It can be set to synch with your gmail (or other POPmail client), ebay, and del.icio.us accounts, as well as other things that I've never heard of. It will also retrieve news and weather for you, and you can set up in page post-it type notes, and to-do lists. The interface is clean, and it hasn't really bugged out on me yet. The lack of obnoxious advertising and gaudy colors is also pretty appealing. It's really pretty damn neat, and completely free.

I just found out about it last night, and am still noticing little things that make it even more worthwhile. I highly suggest giving it a shot... I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Cooking for Engineers

2006-09-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

I was perusing the message boards that I post on, and on the College Life board, someone asked about the trials of learning to cook in an off-campus world, and someone linked him to this site. It's called Cooking for Engineers - being that I am a future engineer and all - it struck my fancy.

The site has 70 or 80 real recipes, plus a random smattering of other walkthroughs, for preparing other things, like marshmallows, for one. Each recipe is laid out step-by-step, with a picture for most, if not all, of the steps. That's not my favorite part though. Along with each recipe, is a graphical representation of the recipe, sort of like a condensed flow chart, that let's you know what you need for each major step and a heads-up for what's coming next. There are no times given, but it offers a pretty sweet overview regardless, and an easy reference for what should be done together, and what should be going on entirely separate. The marshmallow one is a good representation of this, I suggest clicking that link and scrolling to the bottom, just to see for yourself.

So yeah... call me a dork or whatever, but I like to cook, and if someone is trying to make it easier for me, I'm all for it.

I Rule

2006-09-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

4-suit difficulty win - twice in a row. I am the king of Spider Solitaire.

This is my crowning achievement of the summer, and I think that may be sad.

(No comment)

2006-09-06T19:04:00.000-07:00

This is pretty much the ugliest blog ever.

I'm trying to play with some CSS, learn my way around it, and this is the result... Color schemes are hard.

It'll get straightened out eventually, but, for now, I'm lazy.

One if by LAN...

2006-08-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I decide that my titles should be as crappy as possible. This happens to be one of those times.

It seems I've been rocking the LAN parties quite often as of late. We played some Warcraft III last weekend with the guys before everyone left for college, and this Saturday I went to my brothers house and we played the hell out of Red Alert 2. Good times were had on both occassions, but I'm way burnt out... I'm sure I'll recover sometime real soon though.

We went and saw Little Miss Sunshine this week too, on Friday I think (this entry isn't even close to chronological, and I like that). It was good. Since A Scanner Darkly (well, actually since Primer) I've been on an independent film kick. I wish there was a better theatre in Toledo that played them though. Won't matter for too long though. Maybe there's a good theatre in Columbus for 'em.

Basically that's all that happened this week. I pretty much just layed around in recovery until Firday. I'm still in some pain, but I think it may be dry sockets... I'll have to look into it.

A few days (hah!) since I last posted.

2006-08-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

I got my wisdom teeth removed today, and I figured as long as I'm laid up, at least for the day, it's about damn time I wrote something to all (2) of my adoring readers. I'm in a bit of pain, but I'm dealing. Haven't done much interesting in the last few weeks really. Basically my life has been surprise visits from ridiculous family that have been screwing up plans that I had. It's a pretty sweet deal... except for the fact that it blows. Whatever... it'll all be over soon when I'm back at school... speaking of, September 15th can't really come soon enough. I'm so tired of this town. It'll be even worse now, everyone else is going back to their respective semester schools, and I'm left with a month of boredom more or less.

Anyway, that's enough bitching. I'm seriously gonna try and update this bitch at least once a week from now on. I'm bored enough that I think I can commit to that.

New option

2006-07-13T18:59:00.000-07:00

I enabled commenting by anonymous readers, I didn't realize that it wasn't a default option. So now anyone can comment. I had a registered account so I didn't realize that you all couldn't comment. I think I need to say comment a few more times. Comment.

Comment.

That's all.

Comment.

No one should be allowed to get this bored

2006-07-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

So this is pretty much an indication of how my last few weeks have been.

385 chips, 10 layers, each a perfect square, the largest being 10 x 10. Total time: ~30 minutes.

If you couldn't tell, I'm bored as all get out. I think I'm gonna leave the house tonight. Just go somewhere, because I can't sit around anymore. I watched the first three seasons of [scrubs], at about 9 hours each, this past week, a few movies, a lot of tv, played more Guild Wars than I think is healthy, and needless to say I'm running out of things to take an edge off the boredom.

No job, people are unreliable basically. I should have taken the OfficeMax spot when I had the chance. It's probably too late now. So the rest of the summer I'm most likely gonna be bored and broke. Great news I guess.

I have to get out of this house.

Tosh

2006-07-03T18:38:00.000-07:00

This is a hard entry to write. A friend of mine, Alexander Toshio Otani, was in a car accident on Saturday and didn't make it. He was a fellow Chemical Engineering major. I shared several classes with him this past year, and was truly looking forward to spending the next 3 or 4 years seeing him daily in many more. That's not going to happen. He was struck from behind by a drunk driver, and was pronounced dead at the scene. I got the news last night. It didn't hit me very hard until today.

Basically I spent the day sitting alone and thinking. Thinking about all the things that I've considered to just be constant in my life. I really thought when I told him that I'd see him later the last time I talked to him, that it would be true. I've dealt with death before, but it's always been someone older, and it always just seemed to be "their time," not to sound cliché. But honestly, when it's someone my age, even if we weren't that close, it hits home a lot harder. The worst part of it is, he was really an amazing guy. No matter what kind of mood I was in, he could always seem to make me laugh. He was... infectious. I can't think of a time when I saw him without a smile on his face, and I know of so many people who would say the same. To think that he was taken from this world just because some asshole thought he sober enough. Someone innocent died because someone else wasn't thinking.

I don't know... I guess I'm not sure where this is going. Tosh, we're going to miss you. Rest in Peace.

Summer so far.

2006-06-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

So it's been a pretty busy few weeks in my life. If you don't care to read about a list of events that took place... you should probably navigate away from here.

I went to Cleveland for a concert on the Friday after I got back with Ali. We went and saw Tilly and the Wall. It was a good show. The openers were kinda iffy. One of them had a blue velvet curtain that they basically hid behind, while a camcorder that had a line to a TV in front of the curtain displayed what was happening behind it. Needless to say, it was a bit weird. They sucked pretty bad too. If you ever see "Friend" on a list of performers anywhere in the Cleveland area, save your money. Another one of the openers (who had at least one member that went to OSU, apparent due to the BUCK-ID hanging from her beltloop) pretty much were the Decemberists Jr. They sounded alright... but it wasn't their sound, it was all Decemberists, which was a bit distracting front heir talent. Then there was a singer/songwriter guy, who was kinda weird, but good, I enjoyed his set. Tilly and the Wall was fun, they put on a good set, and played for a loooong time too. Well worth the $12. Plus the trip was a lot of fun, got to hang out with Ali for a while, chat, and whatnot, and the area the concert was in was pretty cool.

Next was Windsor with my brothers the next night. Windsor, at age 19 is... well, amazing. Being legal is hella fun (yeah, so much fun that it requires the word "hella"). It was my brothers' birthday present to me, so the whole trip was on them, which I appreciate. They got me very drunk... I had about 12 or 13 drinks... way more than I ever have before. And then we went-a-gamblin'. With impaired judgement I managed to get up $100 at the blackjack table... then promptly lost all of that profit, and the $150 that I was playing with. Lesson learned - quit while you're ahead... and at the very least, while you're even. That was about it for that night. Went back to the hotel room and slept til checkout, then came home and slept more.

Not much happened the rest of the week. Dinner with the parents a few times, random stuff. Then I went to Detroit on Saturday with John and Josh to see Wicked. It was pretty great. Not much to say about the show, some things were good, other things were not so great. But all in all it was well done and what I expected. I wasn't disappointed, nor do I regret going. Detroit, and the trip there and back, pretty much sucks... but that was expected.

Friday I hung out with Michael, and his friends, for a bit after dinner with the family. We went down to the docks with some people, and hung out for a while. This weekend was Jazzfest on the river, so we all walked down there eventually. Then we went to Frickers for some eats... Good stuff. Then it was back home.

__________________________________________________________

To be honest, I started the draft of this post about a week ago, and stopped there... I don't really remember much of the crap I did this past week, and this entry is huge enough. I hung out with Beth on Saturday, we had one of our last-summer throwback hangouts, mall and DDR and stuff. It was fun. Then I bought a TV... that's been consuming my life for a while, what with the ability to play Xbox Live again. Uhhh Brett's Graduation party on Sunday.... good stuff. And a Dentist appointment today (no cavities, what?). And that's about it... I swear I'll update more. Probably with more of a random thought feel than events. I don't do much.

I have a job, that I'm waiting to start. I'll be pushing beds around, basically at St. Anne's Hospital in Toledo. 9:00 to 5:30, 5 days a week, $11.50 an hour... hopefully in two and a half months I'll make a respectable amount of money, and be able to put a Core Duo processor in my 'puter, and a new video card, and a Gig or two of RAM... oh the possibilities. But enough about that. Done.

Summer FT(W/L?)

2006-06-06T19:18:00.000-07:00

So I'm home. I left Columbus at about 3:30 today, and I'm back for three months now I guess. I've been eager to be done with school for some time now, but it's bittersweet. It's definitely going to be weird being home, with parents, and reasonable bedtimes, and maybe a job. The upside is getting to see all the people I haven't gotten to hang out with all year, but I'm really going to miss the ones I've seen damn near every day for the past 9 months. But whatever... if it ends up being terrible, it's only three months, I can deal with it.

Last night was a great time. Final night on campus of the year. We ended up going over to Knowlton, the Architecture building. It's pretty damn sweet. There is a strong downplay of stairs, the whoel building is ramps, with closed off stairs and elevators for those that don't want to deal with the ramps. A lot of the final projects for the architecture students were on display, there were some pretty awesome things, I was impressed at least. A lot of it is interactive too, which is pretty cool. So anyway, I basically was jsut there to hang out, Jean too, and Beth and Ryan were sorta studying, but mostly hanging out. We were there until 3:00 in the morning. A good time was had by all, there was even chair racing, with wipeouts, it was great.

After Knowlton I stayed up until about 5:30 packing shit for home, then woke up at 10:30 and packed some more shit. Had lunch with Jean and Ryan, and then did the full sweep of the room, madesure everytihng was alright, and that wasabout it before I came home... and here I am.

So here it is...

2006-06-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

I haven't truly been avoiding this blog, it's mostly been a problem of no time to do anything that wasn't school. I'm not going to try and comment on every interesting thing that has happened in my life in the past 3 months or so... I don't even remember all of them. I'm just gonna sum up what has been going on lately.

I built a robot, and that has basically constituted the last quarter of my freshman year at Ohio State. It was a whole hell of a lot of fun, and a whole hell of a lot of work. I'm talking about like, more than 30 hours a week working on this thing, every week for the latter half or so of this quarter. Sometimes it was a hassle, but I had a decent team to work with, so the work didn't all fall on me. I did most of the construction on the project, and the others took care of coding and documentation. We didn't do very well in the end, but we didn't really expect to so it wasn't too big of a deal. It was a decent experience, helped build some team skills and problem solving skills, and again, was a great time.

I've put up some pictures on my GooglePages account for anyone interested (the webpage is... subpar, but I haven't done much with GP yet, this is my first publish, as well as my first time using a WYSIWYG editor... so be kind... and no "robor" is not a typo). The page is viewable here. More information can be found at the FEH website's 2006 Robot Competition Page. You can view the document outlining the scenario, and lear a bit more aboutthe project if you feel so inclined.

Besides robot, things have been fairly uneventful this quarter. Basically been doing a lot of school crap. Chemistry is pretty much kicking my ass, contrary to what I expected. We had to partake in an experimental pigment design research lab as the test group for future Chem 123 students. Being in the test group meant that it was extremely unorganized and pretty difficult to accomplish anything, given that the TA's had litte to no idea what was going on. That's basically how chemsitry has been all quarter, and I'm not expecting anything higher than a C in the class. In fact.. a C would probably be a good thing given how I've been doing thus far.

It was my birthday the day before yesterday, I suppose that's noteworthy. I turned 19, for any who don't know, which makes me legal in Canada, and hopefully if border control doesn't suck, I'll be using my status to have a good time in Windsor next Saturday with my borthers. Hopefully things won't get too crazy, and I won't lose too much money to the balckjack tables. A few of my good friends had a little birthday party for me at midnight on my birthday... there was cake and a card. It was great. I also got a tray of brownies thanks to a friend and his excess meal swipes, also pretty cool.

Yesterday was the last day of classes this year, and the FEH picnic. The picnic was a really good time, but bittersweet, as it was the last FEH event ever, unless I become a TA at some point, which is unlikely. To be honest, I'm going to miss it, it was a lot of fun, all year long. I met some great people, and did some pretty awesome things, and it was overall just a greally great experience. Good enough that I would recommend OSU's engineering program to anyone considering the field.

Anyway, this has basically turned to random ramblings, so I'm going to cut this entry off here. Hopefully once exams are over on Monday I'll have some free time with summer beginning and I can update this a bit more frequently.

Thumbs Way Up.

2006-05-02T00:25:00.000-07:00

I need to make better posts

2006-03-08T22:24:00.000-08:00

Nothing much to write about lately, except the shit-ton of work this school has been dumping on me lately. I haven't really done anything interesting of late, and don't really plan to in the future, save going home this weekend for the Musical.

Finals are next week, that should be a grand old time... at least this quarter will finally be over with, and then I can have some real fun. Spring quarter should be great, I get to take chemistry again, finally, after two years of being away, I'm done with physics until next year, I'm getting into an easier math series, one that actually curves grades unlike this bullshit course I'm in right now, and I get to design an autonomous robot with a team that hopefully won't suck. Altogether less homework, no more waking up at 8:30 every day, and less credit hours should make for a good quarter.

I need to expand my music library... I find myself listening to Sufjan and Death Cab too much. I love them, but I need more good music. I have about 10 gigs worth of stuff that I don't even really like anymore... it pretty much blows.

A Concerted Outing

2006-02-15T20:41:00.000-08:00

So not much to post on lately... math grade is slipping, need to work on that.

Um... Sandi and Kyle came to visit this past weekend, and we went to a concert. Got back to my good old pop-punk days with The Starting Line. I had lost interest in them over the years, but the show was really actually pretty good. Maybe I just like live music. Cartel, Copeland, Gatsby's American Dream, and The Suicide Pact opened for them. Everybody was pretty good, save Gatsby. They had some annoying blindingly bright lights flashing the entire time directly out at the audience. Those were the only lights on the stage too, which made it even worse. The music wasn't so terrible, but I couldn't get past the lights. I bought Copeland's CD after the show, I'm digging it.

Got my new digital camera this weekend as well. It weighs in at 8.1 MegaPixels. It takes amazingly high resolution video, with sound too. I'm extremely happy with it. It met all my expectations, and went beyond them. I'm really having a good time with it.

Yeah, that's about all I've got.

College is more fun when you do things

2006-01-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

This has been a good weekend, a lot of fun. We went to two hockey games, and went out and got some real food twice, so it was pretty sweet. I never realized that I was so bored simply because we never went anywhere. So yeah, that was pretty alright.

I ordered a digital camera, since I don't have one, and that disappoints me, but that's been remedied. It's an 8.1 MP, which is ridiculous, I know, but it was only $200, and shipping was free. I figured it was a pretty good deal, and I've been meaning to get one for a while... yeah, I'm justifying a purchase that's too late to reverse.

I don't really know where I'm going with this entry... I just felt like it had been too long since I last updated.

Done.

Homeward Bound

2006-01-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

Back in Oregon for the weekend and it's still boring as hell. I dunno, maybe something will come up, but as of right now I'm doing nothing for the weekend save dinner with my family. I was expecting a little more fun than this, but not being able to drive puts a damper on that. This trip wasn't very well planned on my part.

Other than that nothing is really new. I've basically just been shuffling between classes and the dorm to sit around, haven't done anything exciting... Yeah, bored.

Totally emo

2006-01-16T17:49:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I pretty much suck at life. But I know why, and I may be able to change that around, if I can manage to not suck at smaller things. It's reverse trickle down economics... but with life.

But yeah, dinner was good tonight. Beth + Jean + Pizza = Revelation... and fun.

I drank for the first time the other night. That was... different I guess. I'm told that I'm funnier when I'm sober, and that I'm just stupid when I'm drinking. But whatever.

Yeah, I got nothing.

Rain of Terror

2006-01-13T19:23:00.000-08:00

Today was pretty standard, marked the start of a three day weekend, so that's not too bad. It started raining about 4:00 though. It was a nice rain, just a drizzle, and it was still pretty warm out, so I was enjoying it. That was until I decided to go to a hockey game at about 8:00. The rain had picked up a bit by then, and I, being awesome as hell, decided to try and jump a puddle... unfortunately the pavement on the other side of the puddle was more slippery than I had imagined. I of course slipped and fell in the puddle, it was sweet. Didn't end up making it to the hockey game.

My life is boring.

A few friends are her for the weekend though, should make for a better than usual time. Mostly I just sit around and do nothing, maybe we'll actually do something fun this weekend.

First post / uncharacterictic

2006-01-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

Today is a strange day, the weather is being peculiar. Nearly 60 degrees in January, in central Ohio nonetheless. I went jacketless in January, it was odd to say the least.

As the world was being unpredictable, and I was being ... well, I am, bored between classes, I decided to try something new. I'm blogging, and nothing like LiveJournal or any of that faux-emo bollocks, this is simply a place to collect my interesting thoughts, events in my life, whatever.