Mr Burns
Mood:  chatty
Topic: TV
This is a quickie, but it's interesting: They are always painting Burns as an evil person. In today's episode they were looking at a giant plane designed by Burns and he says, "It flew at a height of 6ft for 4.5ft, but we found out it was flammable. Then the Furher fired me." What can be more evil than associating him with Hitler?

Laser Danger
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: Anberlin - "Foreign Language", "Change the World (the lost ones)", "Cold War Transmissions"
Topic: News
So much for blogging during break. I've been really busy with the present my brother gave me for Christmas - The Sims 2. That game is ridiculously addictive. I can play for hours without realizing how much time I've devoted to it. So I haven't had much to talk about until now since I didn't think you wanted to know about my fictitious Sim Dynasties.

If you haven't heard about lasers in the news recently, you certainly will by the end of next week. Standard variety laser pointers are quite annoying. People use them for immature entertainment by lighting up movie screens and other's bodies. Professionals use them to look all chic when they make presentations. However, there's a new type recently being sold which is a green laser.

As you may know if you've taken classes in laser theory, the colour of the laser is important because it affects the properties of the laser. For example, green lasers can be made to be brighter and perpetuate for longer distances. In fact, these exist in flashlight size laser devices.

Some morons have been using these green laser flashlights and shining them at flying planes for fun. The problem is that the light is entering the cockpit and temporarily blinding the pilots. As you know, this is quite dangerous.

For normal flying it's actually not too bad if the pilot is temporarily blinded because the plane is flying on autopilot. However, if this were to occur when a pilot was attempting to land a plane, the results could be disastrous! The landing process must always be done manually because the plane does not know with enough accuracy how close it is to the runway. The pilot's sight is, therefore, key to a safe landing.

The scary thing is that the expert on the news said while usually there are ~30 reports of people doing this yearly, in this december only there have been 30 reports already. This signals a dangerous trend.

People need to realize this isn't funny or entertaining. There are quite a few people whose lives are being put in jeopardy. I heard someone was getting arrested by homeland security as a terrorist. I think that's a little excessive, but these people DEFINITELY need some harsh punishments. We can't have this continue this way. It's going to take someone being charged for the murder of 200 people, thus rotting in prison, for this to stop. But I hope and pray it doesn't get to that point.

PS - I got my final grade I had been missing - Power Systems - B+. Thank God for that awesome grade! I have made Dean's List! This upcoming semester I want to finish at least as strong!

My Hot Rods
Mood:  chatty
Topic: technology
My neighbor here at home has been working on his hot rod. He imported the chassis from Europe and bought the motor and tires here in the States. After a few weeks, he's nearly done and has agreed to allow me to photograph it this weekenend. I can tell he's near completion as he's recently been revving up the engine.

Computers are my hot rods. Just as my neighbor could have bought the same car with the engine already in it, but didn't so that he could have the joy of installing it himself, so do I enjoy customizing my computer. I love anything involving customization from adding new physical components to installing new operating systems and configuring them. Another of my personal favorites is configuring the desktops, the digital equivalent of a car's custom paint job. I think that's why I love Fedora Linux so much - every 6 or so months they release a new version for me to install and explore and tinker. Additionally, KDE (one of the desktops for Linux) has nearly limitless opportunities for customization.

When I go to Best Buy with my fiancee I usually urge her to buy the latest $99 Dual Layer DVD burner, not so much because I want to burn dual layer discs or because I want her to be able to burn her own DVDs, but because I want to install it. Any component she buys even for her own computer brings me happiness to install.

For the past year and a half I have been counting down the days to graduation, not only because I will start my life and get married, but because I will have enough money to start working on computers from scratch. I've already found some sites for purchasing some really cool looking cases and can't wait to build my ultimate machines. My goal is to build the ultimate Windows and Linux machines. The Winbox will nearly solely exist for the purpose of allowing me to run Adobe Photoshop without the slightest slowdown. The Linux machine is intended to have two purposes - become my all-purpose machine as I've decided to fully support the open source movement as much as I can and to give me a way to benchmark if Linux is truly that much faster than Windows. My recent tests seem to indicate that it should be a much cleaner and faster run, but I've been running Linux on POS computers designed for Windows 98. I yearn to run it on a modern computer to be able to truly experience the features and not have ridiculous wait times for some of the programs. It'll be quite some months away, but I'll have pictures posted when I begin working on my rods. In the meanwhile, I'll post a picture of my neighbor's hot rod, if it's ok with him.

When Electrical Engineers Think too much....
Mood:  chatty
Topic: technology
During today's morning meditation I had a sudden epiphany. If nerve impulses travel through the body electrically, we have the equivalent of current passing through our bodies. If current is moving, we must posses our own magnetic fields. Then I wondered if this magnetic field might interfere with our portable electronics such as mp3 players and cellular phones. But then I came to a realization that made me gasp. Our body's magnetic field must be very trivial, so it may be our electronic devices which are interfering with us.

As you know if you've taken an Electromagnetic Physics courses in high school or college, when current moves through a wire it sets up an magnetic field concentric to the wire. So if this dot . were a wire going through your computer screen, the magnetic field would be going either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the dot. But another important way of looking at it would be if you had a circular magnetic field and put it by the dot, it would induce a current. The relationship goes both ways, you see. Therefore, the magnetic field coming off of the wire of a device could potentially affect the one in your body.

Am I saying we should stop using electronic devices? The answer must be obvious to you, because I wouldn't be typing this on a computer if I believed that were true. However, I think it is a topic worth studying as we have more and more devices on our person and surrounding us everywhere. When does this become too much? After all, I remember the demo in class where the frog was levitated with a few T's of magnetic field. This is because the magnetic fields were interacting with those within the frog. Now, most of us are nowhere near that much magnetic field ever, but I merely mentioned it as an extreme example of what we could be up against as we have more gadgets on our person.

Digital Life
Mood:  chatty
Topic: technology
I'm back because my fiancee has returned to NYC and I hope to be able to write daily for the next 15 days until I return to captivity.

Today I was reheating some food for lunch. I took it out of the fridge, covered it up, and put it into the microwave for one minute and forty-five seconds. I busied myself during this time by grabbing my utensils and the juice I'd be drinking. I even put dressing on my salad. My food still wasn't ready; it had nearly thirty or forty seconds left. "What's taking so long?", I thought and then amused myself with Homer's complaint to Marge, "isn't there something faster than a microwave?"

It wasn't the first time I'd gone through this sequence of events, but for the first time I realized what had happened to me. The digital world had changed my concept of time. Technology has come to represent to me an ever speeding up of important tasks. When we first got the internet, if I wanted to watch a movie trailer I had to wait nearly 20 minutes. They were nothing more than a novelty because it took so long. Then it shrank down to 10 minutes. Now, I can usually have a trailer downloaded in a couple of minutes on a good day.

The same phenomenon happened with web pages. I remember when an image filled page took a minute or two to fully load. Now it's just a few seconds until the page loads.

But all of this has ended up having a negative effect on me. Things that take a long time are horribly annoying. I used to be able to tolerate the time it took to fill a floppy disk. Now putting so much as a 300k file onto a floppy fills me with dread. My USB 2.0 jumpdrive is much smaller and much faster.

Even burning a CD, which took fifteen minutes on my original hardware and now takes 3 is so drearily long. I want it to go fastter dang it!

So, the microwave, which once amazed me with the speed with which it heated up food, now annoys me with how long it takes. The heating of food, unlike the rest of technology has not sped up. It's not because it's necessarily impossible, but because people don't care how fast the microwave is the same way they care about how fast their computer is.

I fear for my children's attention spans. I think it is definitely possible that some of recent increase in ADD diagnosis may be self-made.

Praise God
Mood:  chatty
Topic: School Stuff
I got a 3.34 for this last semester! I'm soooo happy! I was so scared that I wouldn't do well in my classes and I did so well, my second best semester ever. The class I was afraid of failing, Silicon Devices, I got a B! Yay!!!

Joy and Praise to God.

BTW - I haven't written in a long time because my mom surprised me by having my fiancee fly down for Christmas and they put her in a bag and told me to open it. Then her mom came and we've been planning the wedding and stuff.

Seinfeld Clones
Mood:  chatty
Topic: TV
Ok, I have to admit it for the purposes of this blog, but I've seen Sex in the City. I never saw it while it was on HBO, but I've seen it in syndication once or twice. I noticed one thing about it - this show is Seinfeld with 3 women and sexual content. Of course, Seinfeld talked about about sex every now and then, but, as the name implies, Sex in the City is about sex. However, if you've ever seen both this series and Seinfeld you will notice the comparisons.

First of all, they are always talking about "nothing". For example, what does it mean that so and so put his hand on my hand? What does it mean that they kissed me but called me fat? etc etc

They all have their neurosis about the men they date. They break up for inane reasons not much more valid than Seinfeld breaking up with a girl because of the way she ate her peas.

Both of these shows were so popular because they exposed the shallow thoughts everyone thinks inside. Sure, I get annoyed every time she does this or that, but I won't break up with her over it. The characters on both of the shows act out on the thoughts we don't act out because we consider them to be irrational. Sometimes, the decisions turn out to be very irrational and we laugh at what happens to the characters. We don't laugh beacuse we're mean, but because we feel they are paying for acting out on their thoughts when they shouldn't have. When they turn out to be good ideas we cheer them on for having the guts to do what we couldn't.

I hope there are more shows like this in the future. It'll be hard, of course, to emulate the good parts of the shows without being an outright blatant copy, which no one would enjoy. In a world inundated with these so-called reality Tv shows, I can't wait for real tv again. Of course, I probably won't have to worry about that anymore because if my life is anywhere near as busy as my parents because they never have time to watch tv.

Frankly, when it comes down to it, I'd rather work on my site, play Final Fantasy, work on my photography, be with my fiancee or do one of a million things other than watch crappy tv.

The Hypocrisy of the death penalty - yet another look
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
I have already blogged about how sillly I find it that someone receiving a lethal injection must have the injection site cleaned with alcohol. After all, what's the difference if they get an infection or not if they'll be dead in five minutes.

Enter Scott Peterson. He's been convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child, as you know unless you haven't turned a television set on in the past 3 weeks. The jury decided he should receive the death penalty after a few days of deliberation. He will now wait until his time comes, which could be anywhere from a few months to a few years from now. I am completely for a long waiting period if there must be a death penalty. After all, there have been quite a few publiczed cases where the convicted person was found innocent moments before he was scheduled to be fried. So let him stay there for a year or two before killing him.

However, they had him psychologically evaluated to make sure he was not suicidal; this I do not understand. I mean, if you're going to kill him anyway, why would you care if he killed himself? Frankly he'd be saving the taxpayers a load of money. It has to do with the fact that we are playing God and decided who gets to live and who must die. Only in such a situation would we be ticked off if someone killed himself, robbing us of the pleasure of seeing him suffer for his sins. That's a basic human instinct - wanting to make sure people get punished for their deeds.

Although it doesn't port perfectly to this situation, think of the parable Jesus told in which a man who needed labor went out to the market to hire some men. An hour later he went out and hired some more. He kept doing this every hour, always offering them the same amount of money for the work they would do. At the end of the day when those who had only worked an hour received the same amount of money as those who worked all day - the daily laborers were quite annoyed. Yet, they had agreed to work for that amount of money so they had no reason to feel grieved. It plays to this sense of fairness we feel, above God's view of what is fair. To Him it is fair for each person to get the same amount of money if that is what they were offered. To us, it is unfair because those who worked all day didn't get more money in compensation.

However, I agree with the foreman's pronouncement - you agreed to work for one talent so that is a fair amount for you to get.

Back to Scott Peterson, if he wishes to kill himself, he should be allowed to. It will save us all a lot of grief and money.

British Parliament
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: Parliament on CSPAN
Topic: TV
Watching British Parliament on Tv is like watching a game taking place. I'm watching Tony Blair debate with Michael Howard, the Conservative Party Leader. As they make good points the entire parliament responds with "oohs, aahs, and laughter." It's great! I wish that American congress debates were like this, a lot more people bwould watch. Just now there was so much heckling that the Chair had to say, "Please let the Prime Minister respond."

You can even see the people behind Blair and Howard laughing as they make their points. This is awesome - and they are facing each other directly. I wish I had a way to tape this right now. I think I've blogged about this in the past, but, if you have a change, be sure to watch this on CSPAN. Well, I'm going to enjoy some more of this while working on some important stuff. More posts to come soon...

It's finally over!! (halfway done!)
Mood:  chatty
Topic: School Stuff
My last final was today and I finished it in 30 minutes. (Bet you thought you were the only one who could do that dan q:op )

But I'm so happy and excited to be through and only one semester away from graduation.

I really enjoyed my classes a lot - they were really, really interesting. I think that's the best thing about being a Senior. They are done teaching you the basics, so the classes rock! The downside, however, is that the classes were brutal. There were weeks where I went on very little sleep.

I know that others go without sleep, but it's usually their own fault. They spend all day goofing around or participating in clubs and therefore need to work late into the night. With only a few exceptions, I'd never had to do that until this year.

And I had to work on things until the last minute, not due to procrastination, but because there was only so much time in a day.

But now I'm free for 30 days. It's the last time I'll have a winter break for the rest of my life, so I'm going to try and enjoy it as much as I possibly can.

Well, I've got to each lunch and then get ready to fly home. Hopefully I'll finally have time to write again.

Have a good break everyone! No more snow or Cornell until January....mwahaha!!