Getting things
Some people get some stuff easily. Other people get other stuff easily. Look at my silly journal… my life is mostly defined by one thing… COMPUTERS. Isn’t that so SAD? I only get computers. I am not human. No… definitely not. There is a set of rules in my head that tell me what society is supposed to be like. Like what to expect. In some ways I feel more like Data in Star Trek (you don’t like Star Trek? Well, then you suck). It’s not like I’m aspiring to be human (like Data)… no it’s more like I can’t understand some humans. But then again, I probably appear equally illogical. So I guess what I know is that I’ll never know.
You know what’s fun for me? Sitting down in front my TV with Star Trek MPEGs being siphoned through the RCA cables that are hooked up to my computer in my bedroom. Sitting there with hot chocolate and then some of that Lemon Grass Chicken dish from Nhat Vietnamese Cuisine. Yes… that’s fun. I like that.
What else is fun? Running down Camelback with Josh and Michael. That was fun. Wind whipping through your hair. A fine sheen of sweat on your body. Hopping from rock to rock – a split second decision that is the difference between a well placed step and a nasty spill. Red rock blurring by and fragments of people’s coversations. Dogtags jingling.
Then there’s more that’s fun. Walking back home drunk with Michael after an evening at Casy Moor’s. Talking about such profound issues as can humanity ever acheive the utopia shown in Star Trek? Or other stuff… like when we yelled Hindi swearwords at a bunch of Indian Graduate students while speeding down University drive at three in the morning. I forget who was driving, but Michael and I were in the back of his jeep.
Fun times… I get that. It’s not too bad afterall. 
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httptunnel
I’m finally able to ssh to my machine at home from work! We have a proxy that doesn’t let me ssh to anything outside the corporate network. So I found out about this thing called httptunnel that let’s you forward connections from your local machine, to the proxy, and from the proxy to a specific port on your server. I set up a server running on one of the ports on my FreeBSD machine and then ran the client program from here to forward all connections from port 22 on the localhost to the proxy. The proxy then takes the information from the client and connects to the port on the FreeBSD machine where the daemon is listening. Pretty sweet!
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Crazy Semester
My last semester and SO much to do. It looks like I will be writing code 24-7… not too bad. I need to get a job… a REAL one… citizenship… a house… AAARRGHH SOO MUCH TO DO! And then there’s CSE521 – I am sooo tempted to drop it…
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School Starts Tomorrow
A new semester… new possibilities. Also the last one I’ll ever have. This is my last semester at ASU. It’s been quite a ride. I’ll miss it for sure.
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Upgraded System
I just upgraded my WinXP machine. She’s a 2.4Ghz HyperThread Enabled Pentium IV with 1 Gb RAM. I have about 230 Gb that spans across two disks (one 160 Gb and one 75 Gb). I had to get a RAID controller. All of the other hardware is the same. It took me about three freaking days to get it all working. It was a bitch. The last day was the worst. It wouldn’t POST and there was no video. I must have taken apart everything and put it back together about 10 or 15 times. Finally I took it all out – including the motherboard. There was a dust bunny beneath it. Maybe it was shorting the board. I dunno… the no video problem was pretty intermittent. Anyway… it’s all working now. I just have to back up my old stuff… it’s kinda late now though… I’ll do it tomorrow… I need some SLEEP now.
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Cat
There is a cat in our armory. It’s fluffy and orange and very friendly. I’m calling it “Howitzer”.
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Productive
Today was pretty productive. I helped Greg set up the webserver at IPO. Migrated the old website over to the new machine without any problems. I rule… woohoo…
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Solutions
I hate not being able to come to a solution. Does life have an equation?! Of course not. If it does, it is unsolvable. Or how about a chaotic system?
Frequently I find myself rewinding to some point in the past and going “What if I had done that?”. Regret? Sometimes. It depends on my frame of mind.
I have realized that Physics and Math… anything scientific and (mostly) deterministic is a safe haven for me – a retreat – a defense mechanism even. Life is not deterministic… and sometimes you know nothing about something.
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Mandelbrot Sets
I’ve generated a couple of Mandelbrot sets.
f(z) = f(z – 1)2 + c; f(0) = c and c is complex number (x + iy).
They’re pretty sweet looking! I used Perl and GD to generate PNG images. The images are rather huge so please be patient. If you have a dialup connection, be prepared to wait a very long time for some of the images.
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