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I have started to use my iPhone for reading at school with the Amazon Kindle app, and I read my Kindle at home. This way I don’t have to bring another piece of electronic equipment that might get lost or stolen to school each day. I must say the page syncing and ability to read my current book on either device is amazing. I have just completed my second book and plowing right along in my third. Amazon has defintely got this e-reading thing down to perfection. Any of those out there that enjoy reading, this combo of iPhone and Kindle is the most amazing thing ever to happen to books. I think we will begin to see many more ebooks emerging far more quickly than print books in the future. This is already starting to happen with limited edition or multipart book releases where the parts are released for the Kindle every month or few weeks while the whole book might not be published for several months. So bravo to Amazon for creating something so amazing.

Having used my Core2Duo machine now for watching several films I can safely say this is a much better way to go. I haven’t gotten everything dialed in in terms of the install yet, but viewing wise it is simply amazing. No more dropped frames using only a 2.2GHz Core2Duo and integrated Intel graphics. I have the system running off of a compact flash card for heat and power reasons and that is working well also short of a small journaling issue that causes the system to keep pinging the compact flash card rather intensely. I will have to figure out what the exact problem is, probably will switch to a non-journaled filesystem with a fresh install. I also started thinking about possibly trying to get some Windows games running on that system, maybe a big race car game of some kind. I think I’d like to see that on a big TV.

School work is coming in quite quickly so far. I have several large things due in the next week. I will have to keep up on that to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. Overall I think I could learn a lot this quarter in terms of more about how things work in the computer. There are still a lot of things I want to learn that were never touched upon at school that really kinda disappoints me seeing how this is my last quarter and all. Everything that is taught relates so specifically to logic and basic algorithms. I feel like I could write you some advanced logic at a command line interface and that about sums up my college education. We never addressed GUI design or implementation, graphics using OpenGL or Direct3D, and no wireless communications. I look through for code examples on how to do these things and am dumbstruck at all these crazy objects and constants that go into setting up these lines of communications and really wish someone had a clear explanation of what is going on. We also never discussed media storage, retrieval, or usage. I don’t even know how to setup a Java app for playing an MP3. It seems quite strange that school would focus so much on the basics and leave us coming out into a media centric world with no knowledge on how those things work.

Well that’s enough ranting for one night. Still lots of things I want to do, but don’t know how. Quite the frustrating position to be in.

So, I survived my Computer Vision presentation. As it turned out many kids had taken on larger than they expected projects and were only partially done. I ended up presenting on all that I had learned about epipolar geometry, and showing off my epipolar lines I was able to recover from the  stereo images. I still want to try and get some more of the script working before the report is due Friday night. Today I have my last final which is in Artificial Intelligence. Hopefully this will go well. I’m just happy to be done after this, I’m exhausted and quiver to think that if I don’t pass one of my classes, I will be under the same workload next quarter as I was this quarter. So far I have one passing grade out of 5 classes, just 4 more grades to wait on. Having been through a quarter with 20 units now, I can safely say that 20 units at UCI is nothing like 20 units at Saddleback. The amount of work I received in homework, projects, tests, and quizzes was immense. I just hope that this quarter works out so that I only have one more before graduation.

On a more depressing note, our timeshare is completely booked because of Spring Break, so I won’t be able to escape as I had planned. I’ll have to try and come up with something else :(. There appears to be plenty of stuff for me to work on over spring break, so I might just end up working for most of it which is good and bad, I need to get some money in to help pay for taxes as well as get my bank account replenished for after taxes. I saw one or two cool toys I might like to have, but ultimately I’m pretty content with everything I have at the moment. Shuttle is getting closer to releasing the X50 which I have been watching carefully in hopes that they might release it. I could see some very exciting uses for that machine, and with the knowledge I have gained over this past quarter in computer vision I have a renewed vigor with which I want to pursue learning OpenGL again. I really want to program some stuff in 3D. We’ll see if I can keep my focus long enough to make something of that. The shuttle machine would be a great platform for testing out some of my ideas, a 3D interface on a touch screen I think would be a very cool thing.

Well, I survived my first week of classes. This quarter will definitely force me to work on my time management skills. I’ve been quite productive this weekend so far. I got lots of chores done. I still have a good bit of school and consulting work to complete. I’ve made a start on all the projects I have been assigned so far. The first project for one of my classes is due on Monday, along with a quiz in another class. This next week will really show me what I’m in for since most of my teachers were kind enough to hold off homework until the second week. I’ll post an update as I finish some of those school projects, I’m hoping I can turn blogging into a way of organizing my thoughts for the quarter. That will not only force me to write posts, but hopefully help with the great challenge that lies before me. I have a fellow student who was originally enrolled in 4 classes all of which he had with me. He told me had attempted 4 classes the prior quarter and had struggled horribly with it. So, he decided to drop one of the classes for this quarter. When I told him I had 5 classes and a full 20 units he went quiet and wished me luck. Only time will tell what will happen.

Monday will mark the beginning of the Winter 2009 school year at UCI. I have signed up to take 20 units across 5 different classes. 2 project courses, and 3 upper division major courses. I’m looking forward to the new quarter which hasn’t happened since my first quarter at UCI. I really enjoyed my Computer Vision and Imaging course last quarter and hence am taking the first time offered project course in the same area. I will also be taking a project course in computer networking. I’ve been told I’m insane for attempting two project courses at the same time, perhaps I am since I don’t even know what one entails. I’m sure I will find out rather quickly how managable this will be. The other three courses are: Digital Log Design, Intro to Databases, and Artificial Intelligence. I’m not sure what Digital Log Design entails, but I’m definitely looking forward to the other two courses, both of which I have been waiting to take since I started at UCI.

Lots of things and nothing have all happened since I last wrote up here. I’ve just continued working on a consulting basis. I survived all of my finals at the end of last quarter. Christmas brought a few neat toys to me, including a WD Velociraptor HDD which will be the first of 4 I hope to procure over the next year to build my VM array in my new server. I decided on the WD Velociraptor for many reasons, I was originally planning on running 146GB 15k RPM SAS drives. The drives would make a phenominal VM server, but after doing some research online I discovered that the ammount of power consumed by the drives vs. the performance gain over the Velociraptors was minimal. The SAS drives consumed almost 3x the amount of power at peak usage as the Velociraptor did with decent gains. The Velociraptors are also cheaper and easier to obtain brand new. I did run into one issue that will be resolved shortly while mounting the Velociraptors in my chassis. The Velociraptors sit on a giant heat sink dubbed the “IcePak” by WD. The actual drive itself is only a 2.5″ hard drive mounted on this giant heatsink. WD center mounted the 2.5″ drive to evenly dicipate heat which makes sense. The issue you run into is that hot swap chassis and bays place the SATA power and data connectors in the bottom right corner where SAS and standard SATA drives have them. So, to make my setup work I will have to do some small case modding. I was lucky enough in that I have a 4U rackmount chassis, with 20 hot swap bays, 4 across and 5 rows. So, I simply removed the circuit board from the back of the hotswap bays for the top row, and will pass through standard cables to these drives. I won’t get the pretty lights for power and activity, but I will get to use these energy efficient and fast drives. I also started experimenting with a USB TV tuner that I would like to use on my MythBackend VM. Unfortunately I ran into compatibility problems while trying to configure it. Hopefully the Linux community will have something out soon to remedy the issue.

The other day I started working more with the sound card and VMs on my server. I discovered something rather important with Server 2008. You can rather easily install a sound card on the server, the trick here is not to do it while remoted in :). I learned this the hard way after several hours of frustrating restarts. Turns out that when you RDP to Server 2008 the sound devices are disabled and appear as though they are not functioning. So, you have to install a sound card while on the physical machine and not remotely connected. Lesson learned. At the moment I’m setting up a mic to pass through to one of my VMs to experiment with voice commands. My goal is to be able to turn off my lights for the night without having to touch anything. Presently my bluetooth proximity script is working flawlessly. I leave my room and my lights go out, I enter and my lights come on. I still need to add some code to handle day light conditions, most likely using a sunset time calculation. That way if it is after sunset the script will run, otherwise it won’t. We’ll see how that works soon. I’m having trouble getting that data easily using a bash script. I may attempt to port my little scripts into Perl which I’m growing rather fond of after several WWW::Mechanize scripts to pull down various pieces of information from the net. More to come soon I hope :).

So, today I figured out what the storm of work is largely composed of, and that is school work. Unpaid, un-exciting, school work. I don’t think this is all of the work, but based on what I see I will be doing homework non-stop for the next 56 hours or so. Then, I get to start working again next week when another large project is due, along with midterms. As a nice cherry on top of all that, I found out today that I will have 3 of my 4 finals on the same day, the last day before Christmas break. At this point I’m so drained I have nowhere to go but forward. We’ll see what happens, will I end up in a mental institution, will I pass all my classes, will I be broke and living on the streets? Stay tuned for the next exciting update of my life.

I’m feeling myself ramp up. I’m getting more stuff done in a day, getting projects moving. I noticed today that things have been too quiet during my down time over the last few weeks. I fear that the work was waiting for me to come back. I had several jobs come into me today, nothing set in stone, but what appears and feels like the calm before the storm kind of thing. With several large projects due in the next couple of weeks, and midterms next week this could be a very interesting time. Things are moving on all fronts and new fronts. Still no word as to whether or not I might procure a part time job, but I’m still hopeful. Several coding things are coming in as well as some new ideas. I think I might be out of my rut and way beyond where I had hoped to stop. Only time will tell.

So, looking back I was considerably less productive this weekend than I had hoped. Nothing I had hoped to accomplish was done, I ended up working on both Saturday and Sunday. I had planned on working today (Sunday), but only for around 3hrs. This seemingly small job turned into a 6hr computer marathon. Like an idiot on Saturday night I started to play around with the idea of putting Linux on my primary computer which runs off of a RAID 0 array. I had never been able to get it to work, but decided to mess with it. I ended up blowing out my array, thankfully I had made a backup in case this happened, which killed my Windows install. I decided to split the array and run Linux on one drive and Windows on the other. I had to wrestle with Linux for several hours to get my three monitors working. In the end, I got everything working, but at the expense of my compiz effects that I love so much. Perhaps with Intrepid Ibex I will be able to make this work. The only high note I can leave this weekend with is that I made some good money today towards purchasing my new server. On the downside I have lost two days of work on my projects as well as valuable homework time. I may see if I can get something accomplished on this front tonight before I hit the sack tonight. Monday is going to have to be extra productive to put me back on schedule.

So, yesterday was not as productive as I would have liked in terms of my projects. However, on the brightside I did work a 5hr job which will help financially at the moment, and may even help me start to procure parts for my new server. This weekend I have a good amount of homework I need to complete, as well as a single job on Sunday which will take around 3hrs. So, I should have some time to get a lot of work done on my projects. As an update for you TF2 fans, I realized I hadn’t posted any screenshots in a while, so here is what I found in my screenshot folder.

I felt the sudden compulsion to write a quick post, whether it is to distract me from my task at hand or an actual heartfelt plea for a break I can’t be certain. My second day of school was roughly equivalent to the first. I hated stats as I always have. My teacher is very quiet and this will make it even harder to understand him once we move onto real material. My second class like on my first day was quite enjoyable. I had computer networking. The teacher has been at the school for quite some time and I’m glad to see he hasn’t lost his passion as so many teachers I’ve come across have. He has a few strict rules that I don’t completely agree with, but I’m willing to make some exceptions to the norm for a good teacher. 

On another note, I had hoped to be more productive this weekend. I seem to find myself in a rut. The one good bit of news is that I started to stop drinking caffeinated beverages again. I don’t know if this is a blessing or a curse. I do feel that I accomplish more while I drink them, but I can’t ignore the terrible headaches that I get when I stop. I think moderation will be the key. I wasted my whole day on Saturday just lounging around the house. I definitely see looking back that this was a terrible mistake. I was much more productive today. I played tennis in the morning, grabbed lunch with my brother and a friend, and returned a clients laptop. I’ve done a bit of light coding which I hope to accomplish more of in the next half hour to hour before bed. I have found it quite difficult to will myself to do the things I need to do recently and this not only bothers me, but also bodes unwell for the start of the new quarter. I have to figure out what is preventing me from just being like I used to. I think there are several factors that maybe playing parts in this behavior including my current drop in income from starting school along with a slippery economic climate, and a recent desire to be social. Those that know me well, know that I am not a social person, but recently I enjoy interacting with other people. I can’t explain why this desire is there, but everytime I’m around someone that I don’t know very well I have had a compulsion to know more about them or just to talk with them for the sake of talking. I hope this isn’t a sign of my nerdiness getting the best of me.

As a side note, to keep myself stable during these strange economic times, I have decided to revert to something I did while working at Starbucks. I found that by eating lunch from a grocery store I was able to cut the cost to only $3-4 a day. I think it is time again to turn to this practice as I do not like my current situation. As well as my desire to acquire a new server since I ran out of storage space this weekend also adds a new bit of pressure on me. We’ll see if I can make a serious difference in my spending habits this week. It’s strange to have so much that you want to do, and yet to be completely unmotivated to do any of it. Something has to change.

Today was the first day of classes at UCI. I had two classes, my Programming Languages course and my Digital Image class. Based on what I saw today, the Programming Languages course is going to be the hardest to stay awake in. The room was 90 some odd degrees with no air conditioning and the teacher was going over these seemining unimportant, and basic concepts that were taught in ICS 51. That class went from a glimmer of hope while reading the syllabus to down right boring in a very short period of time. On the other hand, I am very much looking forward to my digital image processing course. We will be writing algorithms for facial recognition, smoothing, and many other neat programs. This course will definitely take a good amount of work to complete successfully. There will be a lot of statistics, probability, linear algebra, and calculus involved which are all not my areas of strength, but I feel very excited about the material and course, so I hope that I might finally be able to learn these concepts that seemed so pointless in a math class room and put them to good use. Only time will tell.