My parents were in town this Saturday searching for home improvement ideas from the local speciality shops that only a sizeable city like Atlanta can provide (or so you’d think). From what I understand, they didn’t have much luck finding anything. Regardless, I got to enjoy some fine meals from Chin Chin V and Ray’s on the River. A made a point of taking them to our Fry’s; I don’t think they were impressed. I also wanted to take them to Jillian’s since it was in the same area, but the place was just packed.
Mom and Dad left on Sunday and I turned to web design and personal development. I reworked the integration between blog entries and gallery images such that the inlined thumbnails have been replaced with a simple image count (similar to how comments are handled) that will link to a full thumbnail gallery. The reasoning behind this is to save people page load times an generally improve the look of the site. Later on, I plan to make a full gallery where you can just browse pictures.
Along these same lines, I’ve started remastering pictures from my trip to China and I’ll eventually be removing all the old images and replacing them with the new. The new images benefit from common tweaks like auto-leveling that I never used when I originally posted the images last summer.
Finally, I’ve decided to pursue learning .NET. My initial project will be to create a Windows application that will set different wallpapers on each screen in a multi-monitor display. It’s a need of mine and I haven’t found any good applications for it yet. It should be a good learning experience. In the spirit of things, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta and made console and GUI "Hello World" applications. It’s ridiculously easy to do.
The fact that Cerulean Studios released an alpha of the upcoming Trillian 3 revision had slipped under my radar for some time, but I did finally hear about it and started playing around with the new version this week. One interesting thing I did notice is that the Basic and Pro versions now appear to be synched under a common codebase. Upon installation, I was presented with an option to choose either version and the interface is now more or less the same. The free version was previously more or less frozen at version 0.74 following the first commercial release of Trillian Pro. All in all, this test release brings interesting new features like serverless messaging over Rendezvous and more interface polish all around. At the time of this writing, the Trillian 3 alpha is only being distributed to registered users.
New Wallpapers
Classes
I knocked out another milestone this week when I handed in my computing ethics term paper on the regulation of RFID devices. Hopefully, I won’t need to do the optional second revision. I also received the results from the second thermodynamics exam and I’m happy to report that I aced it; I guess my efforts paid off. Now all I need is a solid performance on the final to salvage a decent grade for that class.
The Firefox browser turned 1.0 this Tuesday. There’s a lot to like about Firefox. I’ve been a fan ever since about the 0.5 days when the browser was still called Phoenix–0see my earliest desktop posted on this site for proof. Many recent adopters are concerned about security, but usability features like tabbed browsing and popup blocking are the real reasons I made Mozilla (the suite) my default browser when it hit 1.0 years ago. I later adopted Firefox because it focused on the features I really wanted.
New Wallpapers
Cold
Hotlanta is finally starting to cool down and I’m starting to feel it too. By the end of the week, I was well on my way into my first cold of the new season.
On College
Just over one month left; the end of the semester—and possibly my college experience—is closing in at alarming speed. I handled various Japanese tests and my second make-or-break thermodynamics exam as best I could. I’m cautiously optimistic about thermodynamics as I feel like I understand things better now than I have all semester. On the other hand, I thought I had done pretty well on my first exam until I got it back.
As I alluded to above, I’m feeling a bit unsettled as I realize that is the home stretch of my final semester. Suzuki-sensei recently polled our Japanese class to see who would be continuing on to the intermediate level; nearly everyone raised their hands. I would like to count myself among that group too, but I’m out of time; they won’t let me take any more classes once I’ve graduated. Looking back, I would have preferred to split this final semester over a couple semesters and possibly take some more Japanese and other electives. Looking further still, I would have liked to have persued a minor or a certificate in one of these areas. Maybe some of these options will show up on the table again if do go down the graduate school path at some point.
I just started playing with Miranda IM this Saturday. It is (another) multi-protocol IM client for Windows and it is released under the GPL license. The key features that the web site pushes are low resource overhead and customization through modularity. I have been happily using Gaim for a while now, but I thought I would give Miranda a shot; I’m always looking for the next thing.
New Wallpapers
Cowboy Mouth
I took Titus with me to see Cowboy Mouth perform live at the Roxy Theatre here in Atlanta on Halloween Eve. I was first introduced to the Mouth at ASMS as the band was somewhat of a local band–they’re from New Orleans, as Fred LeBlanc is quick to let you know. Cowboy Mouth has a unique brand of upbeat Southern rock and the live experience is all about raw energy; I’ve only been to a couple other concerts, but nothing I’ve experienced quite compares. By the end of the show I was thoroughly exhausted, but I was quite glad I decided to come.
Electronic Voting
We began discussing electronic voting and electronic democracy in my Computing & Society class this Thursday. Each member of the class was asked to find an article on one of the topics and share it with the class. I found an interesting article by Jason Kitcat that appeared in Communications of the ACM in this month’s issue. Kitcat formerly developed GNU.FREE, an open source electronic voting system. In his article “Source Availability and E-Voting” he explores both sides of the source availability debate surrounding electronic voting systems while adding reflections on his own personal experience with GNU.FREE.
Neat New Software
Wallpaper Master
This neat utility allows you to rate and categorize wallpapers and switch between them at specified intervals; and it does it better than any similar utility I’ve found.
Free Launch Bar
I found this gem through the gfxOasis customization community. This utility builds on the convenience of the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows by adding submenus, titles, separators, and a host of other customization options that greatly enhance the toolbar’s utility.
New Wallpapers
