From January to June I was working at Citrix working on Provisioning Server. If you are too lazy to watch the demo, it’s a system that will let you boot an OS streamed from a server. This lets you have a bunch computers all boot off one hard drive image on a server with out needing a physical hard drive in the computer. Not really a product used by consumer, but it is really cool.

I also did a bunch of work for the lacrosse website. That’s now running pretty stable and won’t need much work to keep running. And since I’ve played my last season with the team, I’ve handed control of the everyday work off to others on the team.

From there we go to my latest creation. PlaceMint is a tool that will allow you to arrange windows into defined slots based on window title. Slot are configurable by the user to ensure the windows are position to each users specific needs. Allows for drag and drop swapping of windows between slots. It has turned out really well and I’m glad that I spent the time writing it. It forced me to learn a lot about programing in C# and utilizing the Windows API, which are two things that are good to be able to get your head around.

Now I’m keeping busy by fixing/adding things mentioned by people that are beta testing PlaceMint. I’m also starting to do the planing steps for my Capstone project. This is the major project that I have to do before I can graduate, where we make something and then show other people and try to convince them that our idea is better than everyone else.

Hands down best present is the complete Twilight Zone series on DVD. A total of 28 discs featuring 156 episodes that would take just over 3 1/2 days to watch without interruption.

In addition I got the following DVDs:
Futurama Season 3 (completing my set)
Bender’s Big Score
SNL Season 1
Simpsons Movie

The surprise out of the group was SNL Season 1. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a full SNL skit that was made before 1985. But it should be really fun to watch all the old classic comedians perform.

And since watching DVDs isn’t enough, I go some games for my Nintendo DS. Most notably Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Plays like a visually spruced up version of the first Zelda games. The touch-screen stylus interface works very well for clicking on items and moving around the map.

The strangest gift was two books featuring pictures of my hometown. At first glance this seems like a generic gift that would get flipped through once or twice before it is placed on a shelf. What makes it interesting is the fact that two other members of my family received the same books.

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A few years ago I noticed that my cousins had very limited access to good music. Since they live in a town that is somewhere between rural and suburban, they are essentially limited to what MTV decides to show. Based on this I decided to give them CDs as Christmas presents to “help” them on their way to good music.

This Christmas it became extremely apparent that one of my cousins has terrible taste in movies. The two movies he received this year were Deck the Halls and 1408. I unfortunately saw 1408 in theaters and watched Deck the Halls Christmas afternoon.

I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Go check it out. Northeastern Men’s Lacrosse

I’d say try everything out, but I don’t think the captains would appreciate the random emails they would get if the contact for was used without really being directed at the team.

In keeping with my habit of not actually posting about something when it happened, I waited about 2 weeks to get this up. I had a big splint on it over the weekend when it happened, which was pretty awkward. But now it now just keeping the last joint from bending (where the fracture is). Going back sometime next week to see how it is coming along. On the whole it could be worse. I can’t write, but I can do most other things with my right hand. Common task that is surprisingly hard with your weak hand: wiping your butt. Non-common task that I am surprisingly good at with my weak hand: Wii Sports.

Joshua Homme is an underrated guitarist. It’s ok, I didn’t know his name either until just before the show. Queens of the Stone Age works essentially on the same level as Nine Inch Nails. It’s Josh’s band and the people he plays with is in a semi-constant rotation. That fact makes the following comment even more amazing. The band as a whole was very tight and always in time with each other. You could see that they were always looking around to catch one another’s eyes to make sure they were in pace with each other.

I went in expecting it to be an Era Vulgaris (newest album) show. I was happily surprised that is was not that at all. They even played some songs that I had not heard before. One of the best songs was Better Living Through Chemistry. It’s one of my favorites of the band, so it was great to hear it live. The lights they used the most were yellow-green and blue strobes that pointed at the audience. The lights were all programed to switch right on the beat of the song, which added to the tightness of the music. While this is a minimal lighting set-up, the performance of Sick, Sick, Sick had one of the best lighting effects I’ve seen. For this song, they added two lights that were pointed at Josh as he played. These two lights would strobe in opposition of each other so it looked like he was turning back and forth every quickly, almost as if two people were standing there.

Other comments on the songs they played go as follows. I would have preferred they use the slot for Feel Good Hit of the Summer for one of their stronger songs. I would have played Suter Up Your Future instead of Make It Wit Chu, but that song went very well so I can’t complain.

On the whole, great show and a great way to celebrate a birthday. Hopefully I’ll be able to top it next year.

The reason why the website has not been published yet is because Northeastern Club sports is being slow in giving the team access to server space. Last Monday I sent an email asking for server space. Of the two people that received this email, one emailed me back saying that it was the other person’s responsibility, as he is our supervisor. The reply also stated that all our supervisor had to do was fill out a form online so that the request could be processed.

I did not have any other contact with the team supervisor until I went to talk to him last Friday. He clearly wouldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t gone to see him. He seemed to just vaguely remember that I had sent the earlier email. While I am in his office, he fills out the form and says “next business day, it should be ready”. Next business day means Monday, so I have to wait a few more days.

Monday comes and goes. Tuesday comes and goes. Still no response from our supervisor. On Wednesday I sent an email asking for an update on the status. Again there is no response, so I sent another email Friday morning saying I would be coming by his office to talk to him. He was not in his office at all on Friday.

There are a few ideas for posts that I’ve had, but pushed off. I’m going to force myself to go threw with the latest one, I just don’t have time now. But I think it will turn out well.

The lacrosse website is going through the process of being published. It will be nice to see it up and running after all the time I spent this summer putting it together.

That’s it for now. I promise to be back soon.

Thursday morning I was reading some blogs while I should have been getting ready for class. And then, black. The LCD of my laptop had become completely unusable. Faint outlines of where windows should have been could be seen, but even the simple task of following where the mouse was on the screen required much concentration.

Within a few minutes I had told my computer to restart. (Well, actually, I thought I had told it to shutdown. I ended up clicking the wrong button.) As Windows was booting up, the screen worked as it should. Within a minute, the screen had returned to it’s darkened state. Another minute passes as I try again to locate the shutdown option and this time succeed. I head to class considering the fact that I might be the owner of a new computer in a few days and the joys that would come with Vista. (Laptop screens cost around $400+, so it is often not worth it when that money could be used for a newer, better machine.)

The saving grace here is the fact that I have a second monitor attached to my laptop. This meant I could still use my computer, I just had less area to work with. Without the extra screen I would have been out of luck as working around the problem would have been much harder.

I get back from class and start searching for anything that could find that might let me resolve the issue of the broken screen. After scanning some “If you send us your machine and your first born son, we can fix it” websites and one “Ok, these are the steps you want to take to completely dissemble your laptop and do stuff to it” website, I went to Dell’s website.

Nosing around the My Account section I see those magical words listed above. My laptop is just a month away from the end of it’s three year warranty. I hopped on Dell’s instant messaging support service, had a relatively short conversation explaining my situation. They told me they would be shipping a replacement screen to their Boston office and to expect a call in 1-2 business days to schedule an in-house replacement. The call never came on Friday, which is fine, it came promptly Monday morning. We agreed that 3-4 on Tuesday would be a good time for both of us. Four o’clock that afternoon I get a call from the Dell service guy. “I’m sorry, I’m running a little late. I will be there in an hour.” I explained the misunderstanding and moved on as this was the worst thing done by Dell throughout the whole ordeal.

Tuesday comes and the technician arrives with my new screen in hand. I then watch, like a worried mother, as he begins to do surgery on my computer (which would be the one thing I’d grab from my room if the building was on fire). The procedure was fairly simply, lots of tiny screws and some cracking sounds as the plastic case popped apart as it was designed to.

The new screen has been working fine as I count down the next 23 days hoping that if something else is going to break, that it happen sometime before the 17th of August.

The show was at the Tweeter Center just outside of Boston. The seats were the last row before the roof ends, but were dead center. The stage setup was guitar front right, drums off center right back, the mike for Maynard off center left, bass front left. They pretty much never left those positions. The most interesting thing about the show was the fact that at no point was there ever a light on Maynard. All you saw was his profile, he didn’t face the audience, against the LCD screen behind him.

The set list was a great mix of their albums.
Jambi
Stinkfist
Forty-Six and 2
Schism (extended)
Rosetta Stoned
PUSHIT
FLOOD
Wings For Marie (Pt 1)
10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)
Lateralus (With Big Business Drummer)
Vicarious

I really can’t say enough about the double drum solo during Lateralus. These two guys just went off on their drum sets. They did some back and forth drumming, but in general just played, and played some more.

It’s hard to pick a favorite of all the concerts I’ve seen since they all have different flavors. This concerts flavor was straight up, bad-ass, hard rock. Very glad I finally got to see them and check off another band from my To See list.

Select Points of The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

• No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
• Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
• Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
• Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.
• The use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials.
• Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.
• In general passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element.
• White slavery shall not be treated.
• Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.
• Pointed profanity (this includes the words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ - unless used reverently - Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression however used, is forbidden.
• Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot.
• Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions are forbidden.
• Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains.
• The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.
• The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful.

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 was written to be “A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures. Formulated and formally adopted by The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. in March 1930.” Read the full text.

The big part of this upgrade is that it now uses the Audio Player to let users to listen to samples of each song I have mentioned. The samples can be listened to in each post directly, or using the music list to open a new small window that will play the selected sample. It will take some time to get through the backlog of the old posts, but you will see the samples popping up as time passes.

At some point I will make the Music Listing plug-in available for other WordPress users to download and use themselves. But for now, I will be keeping it to myself in case I find a few bugs or want to tweak some aspects of the code.

This also became much easier when I learned how to use Xampp to run a local server for Wordpress. This lets me test out all my code before I try and make it public for you to see. It’s better because it prevents me from bringing down my whole website because I had a bug in my code.

And since I’m never one to only have one project running at one time, I started kicking around some ideas of what I want to do with the website for my lacrosse team. I’m really excited about diving into this one because it will be my first website that has a real purpose and not just me adding things because I think the are neat. I also will get to design all these things that will make the webpage very dynamic and require very little input from which ever person on the team is in charge of updating the news items and such.

Things that Measure at (or about) 100 Feet

• One third of a football field.
• Length of Boeing 737-500.
• A 9 story building.
• 33 paces.
• The distance you are told to leave between your car and a fire truck or school bus.

Excerpts from a Two Page Ad in SkyMall for Gravity Defer Dress Shoes

• You will find a renewed enjoyment in walking places. You’ll park farther away at the grocery store, shopping mall, and the office just to get extra time walking in your Gravity Defer Shoes.
• It’s almost as if Aeolus, the Greek god of wind, himself has taken his powerful wind out of his bottles and put it into each of the Gravity Defer Shoes.
• The show is so much fun that the energy reciprocating shock of the Gravity Defer Shoes will actually give you the feeling of wanting to dance and be active. You might just find yourself joining a dance class soon!
• These ethereal shoes will transport you through life with such vigor that your friends and family will hardly recognize who you are.
• The shoes that world famous Secret Agents would wear the to black tie party where they end up doing reconnaissance before they are chased around a European city by evil henchmen … You will feel like you can keep up with the best of the World Famous Secrete Agents when you are wearing the Gravity Defer Shoes.

That was until I wanted to change something. Adding new things to the window was not hard, but it wasn’t clean and easy. I dealt with that fact for about a year. Then I said enough is enough.

I began work on The Opener. I set out to completely re-write PokerSelector so that it would be a dynamic window and fully customizable within the program itself. Two months of on again off again programing, sprinkled in during a great lacrosse season and a not so good run at poker, finally produced a result.

Today, I invite you to try out and use The Opener.

I decided that my Congressional Representative, Bill Pascrell Jr, should have this bill brought to his attention, as I felt that this bill is very important and deserves to be made law. Unfoutanately, I do not have the exact text of my email as it was sent via an internet form and not using one of my personal email accounts.

A few days later, I received a reply to my email. The following is what Bill Pascrell Jr had to say:

Dear Mr. Lannigan :

Thank you for contacting me regarding internet radio. I appreciate you r concerns and welcome this opportunity to respond.

H.R 2060, the ” Internet Radio Equality Act,” would provide royalty parity for Internet radio providers. It would vacate the Copyright Royalty Board’s (CRB) March 2 decision to raise music royalty rates by 300 to 1200 percent and apply the same royalty rate-setting standard to commercial Internet radio, as well as satellite radio, cable radio and jukeboxes. A transition rate of 7.5 percent of revenue would be set through 2010.

Internet radio has provided the public with a way to express their views publicly, and allow others to listen for little or no cost. I am concerned that many citizens’ freedom of speech will be infringed due to the CRB’s decision to raise the royalty rates. Currently, H.R 2060 is pending action in the House Committee on Judiciary. I will be sure to keep you views in mind as this bill makes its way through the legislative process.

Please count of me if ever I assist you in any federal matter. I would like to remind you that my website, www.pascrell.house.gov, is frequently updated and provides a good way to communicate with me.

Sincerely,
Bill Pascrell Jr.
Member of Congress

I have since sent another email explaining the misunderstanding. Updates to follow.

SB: $103.05
BB: $213.40
UTG: $261.20
MP: $201
CO: $238.90
Hero (BTN): $197

Preflop: Hero is dealt 6 5 (6 Players)
3 folds, Hero raises to $8, SB calls $7, BB calls $6

Flop: ($24) 9 8 7 (3 Players)
SB bets $24, BB folds, Hero raises all-in to $189, SB calls all-in for $71.05
Uncalled bet of $93.95 returned to Hero

Turn: ($214.10) T (2 Players - 2 All-In)

River: ($214.10) 6 (2 Players - 2 All-In)

Pot Size: $214.10 ($3 Rake)

SB had 7 7 (a straight flush, Ten high) and WON (+$2.50)
Hero had 6 5 (a straight flush, Ten high) and WON (+$2.50)

+$2.50 HOLLA!!!

For those that are lazy, here is what her car looks like now. It is a Toyota Corolla.

Here is the new and improved Elsa-mobile.
For those that are lazy, here is what her car looks like now.

The phenomena in question is not that the sketch existed, but the fact that there is close to no record of it’s existence.

Searching the internet using various combinations of snoop dogg, dave chappelle, america, and means to you, no transcripts or video footage has been found. In my most recent attempts to find the full text of Snoop Dogg’s essay, I found two page to do acknowledge it’s existence.

Within Opentopia’s encyclopedia, there is an article on Chappelle’s Show. In the article’s comments on the DVD Releases, it mentions that:

“Some material from the show, such as What America Means to You did not make either DVD set and is as of yet unreleased.”

The Wikimedia article on Chappelle’s Show makes no mention of the sketch, but does mention that Snoop Dogg was a “Frequent or notable guest stars.”

From there we move to the biggest find to date. On a personal webpage (listed as belonging to the user “gilgamesh”), we have an actual excerpt from the essay. I will leave you with the words of this great lyricist in hope that his words will inspire others to dig deeper in to this mystery and see what else can be uncovered.

“…Chuuch, tabanacle, titty 1, titty 2, the prophet Eli. My mental gymnastics will flip you like an Aunt Jemima flapjack. Now, how ’bout that?”

The episode I watched was called “Pole to Pole” and was basically very very awesome. Even though I’ve seen it before, it’s still sick to watch the slow motion shots of great whites jumping in the air to catch a seal. The most entertaining thing from the episode was either the polar bear sliding down the snow when she first came out of her den after hibernating or watching the elephants swim and play underwater.

The most interesting part of the episode was the fact that they had footage of a pack of African dogs that hunted as a group. Just seeing them start as one group, then fan out to flank the antelope before the one leader chased part of the herd into the trap that was set.

However the episode was not all fun and games. There was one extremely depressing shot of a baby elephant who was almost blinded by a dust storm. This caused him to loose sight of his mother, all he had was her tracks to follow. Then the camera pulls back and show that he is walking the wrong way. Heading back to the desert, away from his family and away from water.

Hopefully I have enough time to watch a bunch more before I head back to Boston.

He’s alive!

His visibility returned to “normal” the middle of last week. Justin talked to him about it. The reason why we didn’t see him was because he wasn’t there. He wasn’t even on the same continent. He had gone home to Korea to spend some time with his family.

I was hoping that there would be some huge Scooby-Doo mystery behind it, but you can’t win them all.

Sang was always a quite kid and kept to himself during the fall. Would always go straight for his room and close the door when coming back from class or where ever. But you would still see him entering, leaving, going to the bathroom, or on occasion getting food. All that has stopped.

The last time I can remember seeing him was before I left for spring break. When I came home from work Sang and one of his friends were working on something at the table. The friend said Hi, Sang did nothing. After I had put down my things, I went and talked to Justin about how this was such a big thing that he was in the suite, but outside of his room for an extended period of time.

Now down to the detective work. There is no foul smell coming from his room, so we can assume that he is not dead in there. His ethernet cable is still hooked up in the living room. His outlet didn’t work so he had to use the living room one and snake it into his room. Since he is a Computer Science major, it can be assumed that he would not move out and forget his ethernet cable.

Updates to follow if there are any breaks in the case.

California was amazing. I have know idea why I used to always say, “I don’t know if I could live with never seeing snow again” for all these years. If you are ever in San Diego, go to Mission Beach and find a place called Taco Surf. You will thank me later.

Another thing you might have noticed is I am not hiding my blog anymore. It’s now right up front on the main domain. It’s the way it was meant to be. It also allowed me to spurs up some of the other pages I had before I started the blog. There is some small back-end things that need to be ironed out, but you guys don’t care about that.

I have decided what I’ll be moving next. There are so many options and they are all equally important.