day of the $115

By coincidence I spent $115 today both at work and when I got off work. The work one was buying 600' of Teflon-insulated wire for the Mk. V circuit I've been building. Since I was the one ordering it I got to pick the colors, so I went with gray orange gray. (Bonus points for getting that reference.) For the Mk. IV circuit I got stuck with red and yellow, so it looks like a condiment bar.

When I got off work I went down to Best Buy and got a new car stereo. The old stereo may have been reparable, but I decided $115 installed is not a bad deal. Especially for a stereo that actually has a knob and a front auxiliary jack.

On an unrelated note, as I was coming back from Best Buy I saw an H2 on the road equipped with FLIR on a telescopic mast. I have no idea what that's about but it was kind of cool.

what

As not a hell of a lot is going on this evening, I googled myself, and I actually got a bit of a shock this time. Apparently I've been credited in a powerpoint presentation by a Polish materials engineer. This was in regards to my work on nanostructured copper in Tallahassee. I hardly broke new ground but I guess I do a good job explaining the fundamentals of things.

watching wind scalp the white off the waves

All of the clocks in my apartment are wrong. This is made more annoying by the fact that two of them are atomic and one is internet-updated. The atomic ones are wrong because they are actually just 'atomic' clocks, i.e. they get a radio signal from a real atomic clock. Which never gets picked up in my apartment. Meanwhile the clock in my computer's system tray is supposed to update itself by talking to NIST, but some firewall or other miscommunication issue means it never ever works. To add insult to injury, my car's clock runs fast. Also the CD player broke. I'm fairly certain St. Joseph wasn't even involved this time.

In other news the hard drive transplant has taken so far, and I have a red stapler.

Other news in brief: Apparently the G6 is getting a new variant next year but will be more about looks than getting more power. Bush is an idiot (OFN), this time for suggesting we shouldn't have left Vietnam. The new Katamari demo's framerate makes it feel like the game is being played on fast forward.

swiss time is running out

Best Buy had a ridiculous sale on some different Norton software so I picked it up. Unlike Norton 360, it's what I actually expected from the beginning. Unfortunately, not all of the stupid little 360 plugins got uninstalled. I could occupy myself chasing them all down, or finally getting around to the reformat Freeman so badly needs, but instead I have decided to get a new notebook hard drive with twice the storage space, which isn't even going to cost me $120 because I went to Newegg.

I have also been picking which parts I want in the new computer, and it's kind of amazing how useless Best Buy is in this endeavor. It's not just that their prices are way higher - they don't even have some of the upper tier tech I'm after. They didn't have the 160GB Western Digital notebook hard drive, for example. Fortunately Newegg is a good source and will even store the list of parts for later. So I can see all the parts come to about $1600. I'm going to wait a few paychecks. In the meantime I should be able to occupy myself with Freeman's HDD transplant.

but i was haunted by the idea that i remembered her wrong

I have been saving up a list of things to get on Amazon.com but when I tried to order them I failed miserably. I was going to get a bunch more Tribune daily crossword books but all the old ones I don't have are out of print, and somehow I don't fancy a used one. I was also going to break down and get the final part of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio plays after several years of wanting it, but it turns out it hasn't been released yet.

never trust robots

Norton 360 is really dumbed down. It won't tell me anything it's been doing. I have to go three or four screens deep just for it to tell me how many files it's been messing with.

Even more annoying is how it demands it be turned on 100%. I like having the firewall and antivirus but the stupid browser plugin crashes IE and all it does is detect phishing scams, which I can do myself because I'm not an idiot. Norton also demands Automatic Updates be turned on, but I prefer doing the updates manually.

if you're not a machine we're in business

I got fed up with Kaspersky and bought Norton 360. Unfortunately Norton has dumbed down their interface a lot since I last upgraded. At least I can find a screen that calls the firewall a firewall instead of 'Anti-Hacker'. The old stuff was better. I only stopped using the old Norton software because Symantec sabotaged it after they realized you could gimmick it to not require renewal for updates.

The most interesting part was installation. I decided to install Norton without first removing Kaspersky so I wouldn't go without a firewall, and also just to see if Norton and Kaspersky would pick a fight with each other. Norton mostly minded its own business, but Kaspersky decided Norton was a trojan.

The security swap has added to my computer's instability, however. Some Norton plugin now crashes IE every time I close it, producing no fewer than 21 popup dialogs about memory read errors. I am putting off a reformat until I build my new machine. That's going to require like $1600 in parts though.

Also among today's spoils are Lego gummis. I couldn't pass that up.

On another note I am annoyed at my cell phone's adaptive text prompts. It learns words if you type them in manually, but it apparently deletes them if they haven't been used in a while. This usually comes up in the context of swear words.

technology

I went to Fry's today to get 300. I also picked up a new fingerprint scanner since my old one broke. It seems to be cleverer than my old one, which is good since the old one was something like eight years old. I also got a wireless USB hub/print server for the hell of it since they had a good price.

it's the same old thing as yesterday

I recently reread Cryptonomicon so now I'm psyched about encryption again, and thinking about getting PGP for the new desktop PC I'm planning on building. Part of the reason I haven't actually commenced construction is that I'm not entirely sure what its function will be. I do want to be able to play more demanding games, but the majority of the games I play on the PC are older and don't require cutting-edge technology. I am also trying to find entirely new interesting uses that can be accomplished with newer technology.

In other news I spent most of the day figuring out how to build a high voltage test circuit. This will generate a few hundred watts of heat so I decided a case fan would help. While looking at case fans on newegg.com I found this amusing note in a review:

"The reviewer who is concerned about the .4 mm width difference really doesn't have much to worry about as .4 mm is about the width of 3 or 4 human hairs...about 0.015 inches. You should be able to deflect the back plane of your Sonata that much by giving it a dirty look. Then you'll be able to fit all those 88's in there."

Also, I went to Wikipedia at one point to look up resistor technologies, which eventually led me to reading about anamonics, combinations of anagrams and mneumonics that are frequently used in competitive Scrabble. Interesting trick.

this ain't a surfin movie

So I'm a Master now. I have been since Friday but I have been in a very low energy and reclusive mood for whatever reason until today. I would put some details of my defense up but the whole ordeal did not really seem that cathartic for some reason. I presented my work again, not the smoothest version but pretty well. The oral exam consisted entirely of project-related questions so all my work studying wave functions and Maxwell's equations was useless. I would have been better off studying barium titanate and the nature of the dielectric constant. But in any case I passed, with no dissenting votes. I spent the rest of Friday running around doing things like turning in keys and passing off paperwork. Fun. Thanks to everyone who showed their support in one way or another!

Saturday I did nothing. Today I printed off the hard copies of my report. I was under the impression I had to get them professionally bound but they just want Kinkos-level. So I went to Kinkos. They didn't do the world's greatest job of copying but I now have a trifecta of somewhat professional looking reports along with the original template from which they were wrought.

You might expect that now that I'm a Master and a full engineer I would go off and buy myself something to celebrate, like a new PC or car. Today I actually did buy something - a helicopter. A really little one about as long as my hand. Fry's had them for $25 and I couldn't resist. It really is a toy of a thing - it has some kind of styrofoam body, and it will only go forward if you turn right, not left. Even so, the thing is a marvel of miniature engineering. Somehow it works by infrared control, and the materials used are lightweight but certainly strong enough to protect it from all the knocks it's taken so far. It even has a working tail rotor and an interesting double main rotor for balance. The thing brings me some joy and keeping it in the air requires no small skill so it gets a lot of your attention when you fly it. The biggest downside is that I have to turn the fan off or else the helicopter will just blow away in the airflow, so the room gets hot while I'm flying. That's not a big price to pay though. I have a helicopter!

The PC and car are still in the brain crack phase.

Anyway, it is back to work tomorrow. It will be a little different now that I am not preparing defense material - I have to go back to doing real work. It's going to be a short week though, as on Thursday I am flying back to Michigan for ten days or so.

Also, I updated my video game reviews.