Well, it’s another new year. I’m not much on New Year’s resolutions so I don’t make any. Mom and I went to a few places around town, which wasn’t terribly lively today. I picked up more volumes of manga from Waldenbooks and the January Newtype from Books-a-Million because the former didn’t have it on the shelves yet. The January Newtype came with a promo episode of Happy Lesson, which I watched after we got home. Grammy and Granddaddy treated us to a nice lunch at the newer La Bamba location. I watched The Transporter based on recommendations from both my parents. It’s basically a kung fu film in Western clothing, but that’s not necessarily bad. It’s an enjoyable film overall. I read Jing: King of Bandits, Vol. #2 cover to cover before the end of the day.
The D-Link router and Linksys card are finally communicating. I found a couple of issues at the heart of the problem. First, the newest drivers (v1.3) from Linksys weren’t working at all. Things started working as soon as I reverted to an older driver version (v1.2). The other things I noticed is that D-Link’s web configuration may not display pages correctly in non-IE browsers–a very annoying oversight on their part.
I went to see Paycheck with Mom and Dad at the local cinema this evening. While this theatre is one of the newest in Dothan, it is still an archaic design by today’s standards. I felt like I was watching the movie through a telescope. I’m exaggerating, of course, but the sooner we get some new theatres, the better. The movie was enjoyable, if unremarkable.
Most of my coworkers started taking vacation today so the department felt a little empty. I started deploying some of the PCs from the batch that we have been working on for the last few days.
I went to see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with Mom and Dad after I got off work. It was another excellent interpretation of one of the greatest literary works of the past century. I have a special appreciation for the Lord of the Rings films because I took a special elective course on it in high school. We read all three books and analyzed them at length over the course of a semester at ASMS.
Between all work I’ve put in over the week and recent revelations that the requirements for this phase were much less stringent than I was thinking, I managed to put together a complete bitslice that would both DRC and LVS and a top-level 4-bit layout that would at least DRC. It will not LVS at this point because I haven’t wired it together and even one of the TAs admitted that the wiring would probably be too difficult (read: tedious) to accomplish. Regardless, my work for this phase is complete to my satisfaction. All that remains is some hand calculations and floorplanning before I turn it in.
I watched an episode of “Smallville” with the guys in the evening. I think that makes three episodes total that I’ve seen. The whole thing played like a season finale by means of major developments with little resolution at episode’s end. I was informed that my interpretation was incorrect.
I stumbled upon the official site for Boa—not to be confused with BoA of K-Pop fame—and noticed that they had a handful of their songs freely available for download in full. This includes the awesome single “Duvet” that doubles as the opening song for Serial Experiments Lain. It has also been sitting at the top of my Most Played playlist in iTunes for a while now.
While I’m at it I’ll include my other favorite independent bands with some free goodies. I’ll add these to the links sections as well.
- Minibosses is a four piece rock band with an unusual, but very cool, specialization in video game theme songs.
- Sonic Mayhem is best known for their work on the Quake II and Quake III soundtracks.
