Ice Cavern Studios

So, I've got this internet connection right? And I have 78 gigs of data to restore from backup, right? Well, as it turns out, if restore from the backup server, I flood my connection so none of my data other machines can even connect to anything. Neeldess to say, I am currently writing this from, my roommate, Penn's computer. Kind of sucks. At the same time, I don't mind; mainly because I know that I will be doing my independent work tomorrow with very little distractions.

So anyway, today has been kind of blah. It started out well enough. I finished my printing for digital photo and went to Computer Architecture. I found out that I did pretty well on my midterm, which is a huge load off. I'm happy. Unfortnatly, things would be kind of blah after that.

My professor didn't like the subject matter of 9 of the ten pictures I printed for Digital Photo. That was kind of depressing. I thought he'd like some of the images; especially since he said he had liked one of them the previous day. Instead he got hooked on this one picture that was a composite that was thrown together quickly. So that was a bummer. What sucks is that I'm going to have to spend the rest of the semester figuring out what I can work on that my professor will like so I can keep him quiet, but yet let me feel that I like what I'm producing and allow me to be creative. Hopefully I'll find something.

After a bit of chilling at Campus, I had a rather lack-luster rehearsal. It wasn't god awful, but it wasn't anything spectacular. At least we got to take a quick look at a new song. Too bad we won't be ready while I'm conductor. Eh, oh well.

Eh, not much that was awesome happened. It did end on a happy note, though. I hung out with Nicole, Steph, Yeppie, Patrick and Mark this evening. That was good. Time with friends helps a lot during blah days.

Anyway, I'm feeling tired, so I'm heading to bed. Night all.

Life and Times

So, now that I’m not too tired to blog, so I had this weekend…

Well, the first thing is there was the football game. Saturday, we played Cornell, in a match up that pitted two 1-5 teams against each other in a contest of who was not going to suck the most. In terms of the band, I had a feeling it was going to be a long day. Mainly because most people were still pretty tired from the parade the previous night. So chops were not something people had a whole heck of a lot of. But, the band managed to surprise me by their resilient playing.

What was even cooler was the fact that we managed to win. We don’t do this normally. Especially not at home when there is an opportunity for us to play a fountain gig. See, whenever Princeton wins a football game at home, the band marches up to the Woodrow Wilson School to play in the fountain their. It’s quite crazy. Well, do to the fact that the fountain had been closed, and then reopened but with no water, it had been three years since we had been able to play a proper fountain gig. That was a lot of fun.

I had a blast because I got to be the first conductor in a long time to actually conduct a proper fountain gig. Let’s just say, I felt special. So that was awesome. Now, I will be the first to admit, I don’t like water. I generally prefer to stay dry, but even I love fountain gigs enough to thoroughly enjoy the gig.

After that, I got showered and spent the rest of the night with Nicole. We watched both Reality Bites and Shrek. It was fun, we talked, we ate, it was bitchin.’

So then came Sunday. Sunday was not as much fun as I would have liked it to be. Mainly because my computers were giving me fits. Or at least my Linux box. Stupid thing. I wanted to run IP over fire wire, but it wasn’t in my kernel. So I tried to recompile it. Little did I know, that by following the instructions provided by the Linux kernel, I would nearly kill my install. What’s better, my independent work is on this machine. Yeah, so I spent a few hours working to get that machine back up and running. Fortunately, I was able to make that happen, and life became good again. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get much work done after that due to the stress of having to fix the damn thing.

While I have been very impressed with the steps taken by Linux to be a better desktop OS, I am still glad that my main machine runs Windows, and not Linux. I’ve spent enough time rooting around trying to make simple installs (like the Java Development Kit) work. So yeah, that’s been fun. I’ll still use it as my other desktop machine, but my main workhorse is still going to be my Windows machine.

Along those lines, it would appear that my file server, Valhalla, is back up and running. No longer is it doing the Linux thing, though. Nope, we’ve moved on to the rocking the Windows Server 2003. Should be sweet. I can now develop for any platform (well, except for Apple, but no one cares about them anyway) and test on others. Plus, I can get the experience of learning how Windows Server 2003 works before I get to Seattle, which will be very very helpful. Hmmm…that reminds me. I need to hit up the Microsoft Student Rep for a windows 2003 server admin guide. Yeah…think I’ll do that.

Alright, time for the sleep. Yeah that sleep thing. Should be good.

Life and Times

My weekend was awesome. But i'm wiped. I'll tell you alll about it tomorrow.

Life and Times

DUDE!!! Today totally ruled. Why? Because I led the band in the Greenwich Villiage Halloween Parade. It was absolutely awesome. And by awesome, I mean, totally sweet.

So what happend? Well, to begin, the GVHP is a huge parade that is attended by around 2 million people in the Greenwich Villiage portion of Manhattan. Now this is not your typical parade, though. Because people from all over come to New York City to be in the parade in various costumes. There are all kinds of costumes, both traditional and risque. But it's great. The parade goes from Spring Street to 23rd street going along 6th Avenue.

So how did it go for us? Well, in one word, incredibly. We got to the parade spot early enough for us to play a fun pregame concert, which was fun. And during the parade, we played through our rotation a whole lot of times. So many in fact that the band was exhausted when we returned to the bus. Yet, even though everyone was tired, people were happy to be so because of all the playing. I actually had an alum who was with us tell me that we played the most ambitious playing schedules ever. The way things worked out, I had the band playing quite often, often to the point that we would play songs almost on top of each other, depending on the situation. It was great. So that made me feel good.

Plus it was just awesome to be so prominent at such a large scale event. It's always fun to lead the band, but it is at times like tonight, that it's just too cool to describe. I mean, there I was, walking down a parade in New York City, telling the band what to do and getting to perform for 2 million people. It's a bit hard to fathom, even after the parade is over. But yeah, it was awesome.

In other news…

I'm still doing the Linux day-to-day thing. So far, no real major complaints, although I am finding out that Linux is still not quite ready to be a consumer level OS. Little things like the work necessary to install a new theme fro my desktop was obnoxious. I was able to do it because I've been working with Unix for a long time, but as I read on the message boards for the site, the installation process was not easy for new people to pick up. I will say that it is pretty cool to be able to make it look like OS X but yet still have it behave like a serious Unix operating system. Hmmm…maybe I'll compile a new kernel for this after I install a few of the extra components I have lying around the room.

So, yeah, that's it. Cornell is in town. Hopefully the football team won't lose. I'm not hoping that hard though. Eh, at least the rest of the weekend wont' be depressing.

Life and Times