Steven S. Holland

The last couple days have been full of some nasty, although short-lived storms.  It has been very hot and humid, and so these mid-afternoon/early-evening storms build up.  On friday I was walking home from campus and got caught in the middle of a really, really bad storm.  Tons of lightning nearby, which isn’t good when walking past huge open farm fields, and torrential rainfall, making it hard to see maybe a quarter of a mile down the road.  I was left with thes two options: take the meager shelter offered by the bus stop I came to, and maybe hop on a bus that may be here any minute, or could be up to an hour away from making this stop, or start running.  Noting the amount of lightning and the tiny bus enclosure next to some huge trees, I decided it was unwise to stay at the bus stop.  So I started sprinting the 3/4 mile back to my apartment in the pouring rain, with sandels on, and my macbook in my non-water resistant messenger bag.  I made it back to my apartment, soaking wet, but thankfully my macbook and the contents of my bag were relatively dry.  Also, as soon as I got in the front door of the house my apartment is in, the storm picked up tremendously - both in rain and amount of lightning.  Then the power went out, I actually heard the transformer down the street pop from a lightning hit.  The top half of a huge evergreen tree in my backyard fell over, not sure if it was from the wind or lightning.  Lots of big branches down up and down the block.  Power was out for about 5 hours, and campus lost power over that time too.  This is where my problems actually started.

When the power came on at my apartment, I tried logging into my work comp, which couldn’t because the network was down, and I later found out was off due to the power going out.  So on saturday I ride my bike over to campus to do a little work, which I could have done from home if my computer wasn’t off.  I took the long route to campus beause that route is makes for an interesting ride, and I was in no hurry to get to campus, but when I was halfway there near a farm (which allowed me to see, instead of the tree lined roads), off to the west I can see really dark clouds forming.  “Oh crap”, I thought, I am gonna get caught in another storm.  So I picked up the pace and made it over to campus in time for it to start pouring — even harder than on friday.  And wind like I have never seen here — huge gusts blowing the rain straight sidways.  And while storming pretty bad, the lights dimmed a few times, the emergency lights flickered on for a split second — I then decided it wan’t worth running my computer given the possibility of losing power again or, worse, a surge.  So I unplugged my computers, including the ethernet, and got a ride home from a friend in lab.

So today (sunday), I head over on the bus and intend to restart my computers, and ride my bike back to my apartment.  No storm was on the verge of exploding when I got to lab, so I figured my luck was changing.  Instead, in complete sunshine, the power goes out in our building.  The building next to us had power, but we did not.

So for three days in a row my computer has been down for the count, and I won’t have the simulations I was hoping to have tomorrow, monday.  My luck stinks right now, it turns out!

Sox won 5-4 tonight over the Rockies.  Good rally in the 7th won the game for them.

I always like this view from the ramps at New Comiskey (Us Cellular Field):

Let’s say you have three light switches, one of which controls a single  light bulb hanging in the middle of a room.  The light switches are outside of the room, and with the door shut there is no way to see that the light is on — no light under the door, through a keyhole, nothing.

How can you tell which switch controls the light bulb if you can only enter the room once?

EDIT:

Solution: You turn on the first switch for a long time, say 10 minutes, then turn the switch off and turn on the second switch and immediately enter the room.

1.) if the light is on, the second switch is connected to the light.

2.) if the light is off, but the bulb is hot, it is the first switch.

3.) if the light is off, but the bulb is cold, the third switch is connected to the light.

This is just really cool. It’s a water balloon colliding with a guy’s head in slow motion (1000FPS = 1000 frames per second). Played back at 30FPS (normal video) that is a slowdown rate of 3% of normal speed.

I am always fascinated by things like this in slow motion. There was a great Dave Chapelle skit where he talked about how anything in slow motion is instantly much cooler/funnier. It’s true. Movies always exploit this effect.

Take anything, the simplest thing, and slow it down like this, and it becomes this amazing, beautiful sequence. I still remember being in grammar school and watching this video where they slow down a bunch of normal, everyday actions — and one, of course, was a simple drop of water incident on standing water. The coolest thing ever. That image sticks with me to this day.

So I have been using the Ubuntu linux distribution on my work desktop for a few weeks now, and have acclimated pretty well. There are still some things that I need from Windows here and there, and I was looking for ways to run a virtual version of windows inside my Ubuntu OS. After asking around to a few people who are way more knowledgable in Linux (Aaron, and Justin, mainly) I was looking into VMware. VMware costs money, though, and so I decided I would give VirtualBox a shot, since it is free (it’s also open source), and from what I have read online it’s a good alternative to VMware. Instead of potentially killing my Ubuntu installation at work (which has required an awful lot of tweaking and extra libraries for the code I am running), I gave it a test run on my laptop, starting with the inverse problem of running a virtual machine of Ubuntu OS inside WinXP.

I must say that it was extremely easy, and fast to install the virtual box. I ran into a few issues with the screen resolution inside the virtual box, but that was fixed by installing some extra files that virtualbox default loads onto the desktop of the ubuntu installation. So far I have not noticed a lag in opperation (I alloted 256MB of memory to the virtual machine, and gave the system an 8GB partition of the hard drive), and it solved one of my huge complaints about Ubuntu a year ago, last spring, when I had installed it and played with it — the network settings for the wireless card are by default accesible to the Ubuntu virtual machine, so I should be able to connect readily to different wireless networks without so much hassle with the wireless networking settings (which, unless I missed something, only allowed one network setting to be stored at a time). So far I am liking it a lot. Now the real test will be on Monday when I attempt to install WinXP on top of Ubuntu…

Turns out that Creative was sued for basing the listed size of its hard drives in base 10 instead of base 2, leading to lower actual capacity than the drive’s advertised size. Link!

I bought 2 creative hard disc MP3 players between 2005 and 2006, so apparently I am entitled to either 50% off a 1GB player or a 20% discount from their website. This may mean some purchases are in order from Creative!

I have been getting a lot of comments and trackbacks that are spam, so I reluctantly are changing it so that i have to approve all first comments for them to appear.  After that, if you have had a comment approved, you should be able to post as normal.

I passed my oral thesis defense today, so I currently have a masters!

In celebration, watch this:

Today! 10AM. I have put a lot of work over the past few months into putting together my thesis, and I am hoping that will pay off.

I found this xkcd comic strangely appropriate — hopefully I am not subconsciously doing something like this during my presentation:

I guess there aren’t imaginary antennas…

My brother Tom sent me an email today, letting me know he will be on the Johnny B radio show tomorrow morning (April 4th, Friday) with Mud Morganfield ( son of Mickinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters…) as a promo for a show they are playing at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago, IL tomorrow night.  He will be on 97.9FM or on the web at http://www.wlup.com/Airstaff/johnnyb.aspx - scroll down to the “listen now” tab

The show is on tomorrow between 6AM and 10AM, but word on the street is they will be on sometime between 9-10AM Central Time (10-11AM for those of us on the East Coast).

Anyway, tune in!