This month is going to be extra crazy, but I am going to make a sincere effort for the National Novel Writing Month this year. Nevermind that I have two class projects to work on, a conference to attend, a midterm, homework, Thanksgiving, and research to work on. I mean, you know what they say: “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” Or workshop. Or playground. Or playthings. They cannot always keep it straight.

On an unrelated note, I really wish I had noticed this Mobilware conference a little sooner. It seems like a really good fit for my research stuff, but the deadline is way too close. MobiSys is probably too soon, too. Oh well.

I suppose it might be a good idea to provide some updates about what has been going on.

First of all, I’ve moved into a much nicer apartment, about half a mile from where I lived before. It’s a little one bedroom place with a tiny balcony, a real kitchen, and room enough to actually walk around. It’s also closer to the bus stop, which (with the increased cost of parking at school) ought to encourage me to take it a lot more often.

I spent the first half of the summer doing experiments and finishing up the paper for WiCon. Originally the notification date was the 15th, but it looks like it was pushed back to tomorrow. I’m a little nervous about it, because if it is accepted it’s a very nice step forward. If it isn’t, I have to look at it again and resubmit it somewhere else.

The second half of the summer was spent looking for a new apartment and moving into it. I didn’t travel anywhere except to Fremont to see Debbie’s family for the fourth of July.

As for school, I am hoping to finish my required courses this quarter. One day I will fill out my paperwork so I can officially have my master’s, too. I just hate getting stuff signed.

For more frequent updates, check out my other blog thing. I’ve been updating it pretty much daily.

Yeah. I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to put up another blog thing right here for things I feel like sharing, but not with…everyone. Or something.

Just so you know.

If you are a college student, like me, then you probably move around a lot. New year, new dorm room, new apartment, those kinds of things. Well, if your current address is not the address you had when you registered to vote, there is a good chance that you may have your registration disqualified.

As this post explains, a letter which is marked “Return to Sender” is enough to get you removed from the registration lists. So, a group or a company can send out mass mailings to registered voters and then simply go through the returned envelopes and disqualify those voters.

This causes all kinds of problems for people who move often, including college students and those in the military, especially those who are serving overseas. As outlined in the post above, this has had some pretty major effects in past elections and primaries. Can you imagine serving in the US military and not having your vote count? That sucks.

Anyways, if you have moved recently (like I did), be sure to re-register to vote. If you are in California, this is super easy. You can go here and request a registration card. They will send you a card in the mail with all your information filled out. All you have to do is sign and return it. I suspect other states have similar websites.

Also, if you are super lazy (again, like me), you may want to permanently register for vote-by-mail or absentee ballots. This means you don’t have to remember to go to the polls or miss school/work/sleep to do so. You’ll get a ballot in the mail and you just have to send it in soon enough to beat the closing of the polls. If you are forgetful, though, you can also take the mail-in ballot to a polling location and turn it in there (yes, I know this from experience).

If you would like to verify your registration, you can check out this site or, if you don’t trust giving out your information like that, you can check with your state or county.

If you are planning on voting (and you probably should), then I would really recommend doing the above.

A while ago I started adding some of my books to this LibraryThing after deciding the Facebook application I was using was lame.

Anyway, you can see a part of my pile of books right here, though you should be aware that it is heavily biased towards recent purchases and science fiction. I haven’t really gotten to any of my non-fiction books (they tend to be heavier and harder to throw around for some reason.)

LibraryThing allows you to catalog up to 200 books for free, so if I am to add all of my books I will need to pay the (relatively small) fee for a lifetime membership. But I am waiting to see if it is really all that useful for me.

Yesterday I bought the turtles a bunch of fish to snack on. Last time I bought them fish, the turtles ate a couple and then very, very slowly worked their way through the rest of them, except for one. This time, I had asked the PetCo guy for six fish, but he gave me around twelve because several were really, really tiny.

The turtles have eaten them all, the only fish surviving is the one that was left from the last bunch.

Little killing machines.

You know have the ability to share your thoughtful insights on my clever and informative blog posts. Of course, if you were reading them through Facebook that probably wasn’t really a huge concern in the first place…

I wasn’t really planning on adding comments any time soon, but I happened across this Disqus thing which manages comment systems for you. You can add it to any webpage (which is good, because how many people have heard of Ozimodo, much less attempt to support it?) and it takes care of pretty much everything. Kind of neat.

Well, the conference paper that has been delayed again and again since the beginning of this year has finally been submitted to WICON so I feel a sudden sense of relief and release.

A meeting with my advisor today set out a fairly ambitious (I think) schedule for my next projects, but I am excited to get started on it, though that may just be because it is something new.

In celebration, Kingdoms of Ahln now has its own little server, meaning it is actually accessible to people other than myself. I plan to be putting a lot of time into it in the remaining summertime. I’ve had a lot of ideas bouncing around in my little head, but they are pretty worthless if they stay there!

It’s also time to finally start working on my mom’s website for her new independent practice, which I am sure she will appreciate.

And what about Pi, No Forks and Black Orange? Believe it or not, I do have some song things kicking around, but I have not had the time nor energy to record them. But maybe I will now. My instruments and recording stuff look sad and lonely.

I’m pretty much done with Sqwee for now, I think. I still use it, but haven’t had any burning desire to improve it or add any new features. Of course, maybe if other people used it and made suggestions…

One other thing I’m planning is maybe adding some way of leaving comments on this blogatron…though probably nobody would. Hrm…

Why do people think that being located right next to an interstate is a "great location"?

Three years after buying The Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Sockets for my networking class, I have realized the title of this book is a little misleading.

No, it’s not the “pocket” part. It will actually fit into the back pocket of my pants. It’s the “TCP” part. Why in the world would you specify that it is about TCP/IP sockets and then brazenly have an entire chapter on “Using UDP Sockets”?? That makes NO SENSE!

I just realized I have no idea why I am writing this.

Story

I just upgraded my lab desktop to Mandriva 2008.1. As usual, my first action was to install Xfce. That all worked well until I hit my usual Alt+F2 to launch a program. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. So I checked out the keyboard shortcuts, thinking they might be messed up. After actually finding where Alt+F2 gets set (there are a few different places in Xfce where keybindings are created), I saw it was indeed set up to run xfrun4, Xfce’s little run dialog.

I headed to the console (another aggravation: I am used to using gnome-terminal for my console, because I like its tabs and general feel. But it is way too slow for some reason and, even more importantly, I cannot figure out how to make the cursor stop blinking. It drives me nuts) and ran xfrun4 from there. Result: segfault

After poking around to see if there are any other little things like xfrun4 (something I have done before, actually), I gave up and wrote my own.

Requirements

• Zerenity
  • GTK2
  • Ruby/GTK2

Thrilling Conclusion

I dropped this in a file in /usr/bin/ and changed the keybinding…and that’s it. Works well enough, though it would be nice to have autocomplete/history stuff. But Zerenity does not have that (yet).

Seriously, am I the only one who wonders who decided to put the ‘SEAS Cafe’ (basically a tiny little convenience store in Boelter Hall right next to a bunch of chemistry labs? I’ve been thinking about this for a while, especially those days when the odor coming from those labs is really foul.

So today I paid a little bit closer attention. One of the labs a few doors down from the Cafe has a lovely “radioactive materials” sign on it, but – even better – two labs directly adjacent to the Cafe have “biohazard” signs!

Now, the likelihood of something going wrong is probably pretty low, nothing to worry too much about. However, the likelihood of something going very wrong if something does go wrong…well, I would guess it is quite high.

But…who cares, I guess? It’s convenient :)