Mom and Dad came up for the weekend to visit. We met at my apartment around 1 PM and went out for a nice lunch at Nuevo Laredo Cantina. After lunch we shopped for new eyeglasses for me and located the hotel my parents would be staying at. We decided to eat at longtime-favorite Chin Chin V. I had sesame chicken and fresh fried rice. It was excellent. It was fairly late in the evening when we parted for the night but I did get the chance to watch “Smallville” with the guys.
Classes went well. I took a short listening quiz in Japanese. It amounted to recognizing sounds and phrases and understanding what they mean. We grabbed Zaxby’s on the way home and watched more fansubs.
I have become an avid user of BitTorrent since it’s inception. It’s usage is demanding on both the upstream and downstream connections as downloaders must also partake in active distribution of files. As such, I have become well aware of the phenomenon documented here and here where the asymmetry of a Cable or DSL connection can cause the downstream connection to drop dramatically during upstream saturation. While I now understand the problem, I cannot find a fix, at least not for Windows. Both of the aforementioned pages document steps to configure a Linux system to use Quality of Service packet management to get around the problem. Recent versions of Windows also support QoS. So how does one configure QoS for a Windows system? Nobody knows; but, they are quick to tell you how to uninstall it. How useless.
I debated starting early to make sure I finished my ECE lab today but it turns out it wasn’t necessary. I finished within my scheduled time without great difficulty. Now I need to finish up my programming assignment and I’ll be set for the weekend. My parents will be paying a visit this weekend so it would probably be the courteous thing to do.
I finished the last volume of “X” after a week or so delay. I’m not sure how I feel about the series as a whole. The ending was good, but the series is horribly convoluted coming down that home stretch. I’m glad they managed to tie things up nicely in the last episode, but I had my doubts.
Classes went reasonably well and I found time between classes to get a couple more check-offs towards this week’s lab experiment. I’m planning to finish tomorrow during my regular lab period.
I had a brief discussion with Titus concerning garbage collection in C++. I’m learning C++ as part of my ECE 3090 course but I’m not an expert on the subject by any means. We watched “Stellvia” and “Battle Programmer Shirase”, a humorous little mini-series with a certain geek appeal.
There was no recitation for ECE 4000 this week, meaning only one late class for me today. Titus and I went grocery shopping and grabbed a bite to eat in the early afternoon.
I’ve finished “Hellsing,” Vol. 1. I’m a bit surprised with it because it was one of the most engaging mangas I’ve read to date. On the surface it doesn’t look like anything special but something just clicks. You’ve got your super-vampire anti-hero Alucard killing off lesser vampires as they step out of line. You’ve got Victoria or “police girl” who was turned by Alucard; is she a love interest or just comic relief? You’ve got squabbling between the Protestant Hellsing and Catholic Section XIII organizations. And, underneath all that, you’ve got a subtle undercurrent of comic mischief, like the author wasn’t taking himself all that seriously when he was writing “Hellsing.” It’s good stuff. I was quite surprised.
