so stuck inside

Work was more crazy today. They are getting ready to ship the first test batch of modules processed with the new computerized system, but several modules are locked up in my area of responsibility and I couldn't process them because the system is still broken, so not-my-bosses have been putting pressure on me to do whatever it takes to get the shipment ready.

My computer is finally holding up nicely so I worked out how to salvage data from my corrupted xD card. The pictures aren't great because the museum had terrible lighting but some of them came out pretty good, so I put them on facebook. Now I am going to go read The Selfish Gene in bed. At least I don't have to go to Canada at 4AM like PJ. Sucker.

i'm gonna tell you that i'm innocent

Here is what I have left from my epic battle with a bag of Cheetos.

As you may have inferred, I have a working camera. I broke down and bought another one exactly like mine from Newegg. It was only $99 for an OEM one and I figure I could easily rack up that much having someone look at my broken one. While I was on Newegg I also got a 2GB memory card for my camera, so I can take an obscene number of pictures now.

Unfortunately I have just been working on computational physics all day so I didn't get to try out the camera much. It's been rainy out anyway.

sunspot cycles

I discovered that deep within the submenus of Photoshop CS is a tool called Photomerge for putting pictures together as a panorama. I put a couple rough panaoramas from my recent Oregon vacation together. The best part is that as long as you have Photoshop open you can smooth over the seams. I tried putting together a 360 degree panorama from La Jolla, and it looked like it was going to blend pretty well, but Photoshop complained about RAM and quit so I will mess with it tomorrow.

I also wrote a Java program that solves Sudoku puzzles. I needed the practice in Java and I wanted to see how hard it would be. The code is hideous but it can solve the last problem in my Sudoku book in 129,000 operations, which is a trifle for the computer. I guess the algorithm I made up isn't that bad after all.

The rest of today was spent playing Ratchet: Deadlocked and We Love Katamari, but I did register for ECE 417 so I can claim a little progress for the day. More jury duty tomorrow.

charged with battery

My digital camera, while awesome in most respects, has recently developed a malfunction that causes it to use up batteries at an alarming rate. As in, they need replacing several times a day.

Even with this handicap I still managed to take quite a few good pictures in the past few days. My parents came out to visit me and I gave them a crash tour of Oregon as I have so far come to know it. The Columbia River Gorge was great. We were lucky to see Mount Hood because parts of it are on fire and this apparently presents difficulties for tourists. We also checked out the wine country to the north, and Newport to wrap things up. It was pretty cool overall.

if it can be lost then it can be won

I had a nice weekend. Mostly because I did no school work. I made peanut butter fudge, went to the department picnic, watched Where Eagles Dare, got on the roof of the physics building (pictures on Facebook), saw Cars, and did no studying for quantum mechanics. I'm flying back to Michigan in a week and I'm looking forward to that.

we promised the world we'd tame it

My iPod went completely insane just now, and only my 1337 skills brought it back from the brink. This of course requires another ponderous overnight 18GB data transfer. I'm getting slightly concerned about the long term prospects of this particular piece of hardware.

I got my last tax refund this week so I decided to spend some of it. I've already established that Corvallis, Albany, and Salem have little commercial value, so on Friday I pushed even further north to the outlet stores at Woodburn. This turned out to be a bust. The only store that had anything decent was the Levi's/Dockers store, and they didn't have anything in my size. This outlet store was simply where 40W/30L pants went to die.

Woodburn wasn't the end of my trip though. Another 12 miles further north lies one of the Wonders of the Modern World: a Fry's Electronics.

I'd never been in one of these before. Let me just say that no other store in recent memory has made me go weak in the knees. They have everything from popcorn makers to solar panels - real ones, not just science kits. Fry's has entire aisles of headphones, so I was able to pick up a pair of inexpensive folding headphones with an awesome response range. They even have Crush, so I picked up a couple bottles. Now I'll never be fully satisfied with Best Buy. Unfortunately Fry's is over an hour away and I don't have enough money to warrant frequent trips, but it's still good to know that somewhere in this state is a store that doesn't suck.

Tomorrow I have lots of work to do for business class, but if the weather's nice again I might try and get on the roof of Weniger and take some pictures of campus. It doesn't look too hard.

regardless of warnings the future doesn't scare me at all

I think it's going to be another fairly manageable week, which is good. I had an E&M exam this morning, which could certainly have gone worse. I might have actually done really well if I'd known what the hell I was doing, which would have been a coup almost worthy of PHY410.

It's already the seventh week of the term. I think I'm mostly past the grueling stuff and classes are now just a matter of making up for some rough spots I had earlier. Today's department seminar was actually pretty sweet, a guy from NIST talking about quantum calorimetry to detect hard gamma rays to fingerprint "special nuclear material" for nuclear weapons inspectors. The results he showed were pretty stunning compared to methods in use right now.

I am currently banging around in Dreamweaver in preparation for my PSM seminar tomorrow. I have no intention of using it except that's what the prof has picked for us to use in our website-making module, so if I figure out how it works ahead of time I'll look as smart as I should. This is especially important because Dreamweaver sucks and isn't as good as FrontPage, which I actually use. So some advance prep is required. Street price for Dreamweaver is $400. I don't think I'd pay a nickel for this crap.

I got to thinking about how I made MSU's SOAR website, and realized that I had no idea where I put all the cool pictures of the telescope. I think I wiped them off the drives, but fortunately I back things up to CD - apparently weekly, back then. I did find the enormous original files I was looking for. Some of them are pretty stunning. I should get out and take some pictures somewhere - I've only broken out my camera once so far this year, to document the migration to a proper desk in my apartment.

pictures

Well I uploaded a bunch of pictures to my photo album site, but I've come to the conclusion that Yahoo Photos sucks. I'm working out a better way to do pictures but I haven't made the new program completely bend to my will yet, so it will be a day or two before the new and improved albums go up. In the meantime, enjoy some pics of Oregon and today's car show. Thanks to Yahoo I currently can't add captions or change the order, so you'll have to enjoy them out of context for now.

In other news, the Malibu goes back to the shop tomorrow for a new Freon-carrying tube and another A/C recharge. Hopefully I can keep some of the Freon this time, I'd like a cold car.