Top ten of 2002

In a very non-surprising move, I’ve come up with my top ten albums and movies of 2002. The music list was actually pretty easy to build — I know I’ll be listening to most of these for years to come. In fact, the Coldplay album could, over time, squeeze its way into my top ten of all time. I’m in love with it. So tragic and beautiful, so good.

The movie list was a bit more difficult to create. There just wasn’t too much “great” stuff this year. Keep in mind that I haven’t seen Gangs of New York, Pinocchio, The Hours, About Schmidt, Adaptation, or The Pianist yet. I’m sure some of those would have probably made their way onto the list.

Old

It was brought to my attention that Lake County, the county I moved to in fourth grade and where I ‘grew up,’ is the THIRD OLDEST county in the nation! That’s right, as far as old people go, the average age of this county’s citizens is the third oldest in the country. Unbelievable.

Like a sponge

Though I’m currently on a short break from school, I can’t help but to read/watch all that I can. I’m currently reading Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power by Alexandra Robbins, herself a Yale secret society member. So far, the book has been quite engaging, spending the first ~50 pages to give sufficient background on the history, traditions, and customs of Yale so as to be able to understand the secret societies’ purposes and roles.

There are a couple of DVD sets I’m watching as well. The first of these is a 7 DVD behemoth, simply titled, New York: A Documentary Film. It’s a 14-hour PBS documentary that exhaustively runs the gamut from New York’s initial founding by the Dutch in 1609 all the way up to present day. I actually started watching this last xmas break, but only got about four hours into it. I plan to finish it this year.

Another DVD I plan to watch before heading back to school is Napoleon, another PBS documentary. I can’t wait to start this one. Time permitting, I’ll get all of this done, but something tells me that friends will keep me from it! :)

Be sure to check out the video I just got of my brother’s truck bouncing on its bags. There are also a few new pics of the truck up there.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Couple of things going on today. I’ve obviously redesigned the site somewhat. Mostly just CSS changes (and of course, everything still validates). It all works how it should in all of the 6.x/7.x browsers. I’m not quite sure about 5.x browsers as I can’t test them here. Let me know what you think and keep me aware of any problems encountered.

Been playing around with the Tivo quite a bit today. We just set it up this morning at my dad’s place. Pretty awesome little device. Hope he doesn’t miss it too much when I bring it up to Gainesville with me after the break. Perhaps if it was mine I could get away with that but seeing as it is his, he’ll probably notice. ;(.

He bought a 512MB DIMM of 168-pin PC-133 SDRAM which doesn’t fit his computer (surprise surprise) — I’ll give it to the first person who lets me know that they want it (make sure you know what type of RAM your computer uses) as long as I don’t have to ship it somewhere.

Well, tomorrow’s xmas and I’ll be heading up to Lake City for the day to see the rest of my family that I seldom have time to see. Hope everyone has a great holiday.

Nokia 7210

Well… as I noted a few days ago, my new mobile phone has arrived. Great phone. Period. I can’t help but to compare it to my *dead* Sony Ericsson T68i. The phones offer many of the same features; in fact, the only real difference is that the T68i had Bluetooth, but that is really a nonissue as I don’t have Bluetooth on the notebook (I sync using IR).

A small list of some of the best features:

This phone is the first Nokia phone to use the new Series 40 operating system instead of the well-known and quite ubiquitous Simplex UI found in all of their other phones. In all honesty, I can’t say that I’ve found anything glaringly ‘wrong’ with the phone in the last few days. The response time on the menus is incredible. This was especially noticeable when sending SMS messages (*much* better than the T68i in this area).

The loudspeaker is one of my favorite features. I’ve become quite accustomed to not having to hold the phone up to my ear as my land line phone has a speakerphone built into it as well.

The shared memory feature is really awesome, especially for someone like me. For those not familiar with this concept, it is just the idea that all of the programs within the phone share the same memory pool. If one program gives up some memory, then that memory is available for other programs. So, for instance, since I *never* use non-vibrating rings, I have NO use for all of the new-fangled polyphonic ring tones. I just delete them and automagically open up more space for images, java games, e-mails, etc.

The thing that really won me over was the initial sync that I did with my notebook through IR. To make the point here, with the T68i, the initial sync took close to 30 minutes. I moved over 6 months of future schedule entries and ~200 contacts. All subsequent syncs moved as slow but since there wasn’t as much information to move over, it wasn’t as bad. Regardless, it was simply unacceptable to sit there and literally have to watch each entry go by like it was racing the ketchup out of the bottle. The worst part is when it would just ‘die’ mid-sync and you’d have to start over again (which sometimes required a reboot of the phone). Anyways, enough of that. On to the EXCELLENT sync time with the 7210. The initial sync took, I kid you not, no more than 1 minute. It was insane. Actually, I thought it screwed up and so I checked it out. It moved everything over just fine. All syncs since the first one have taken ~10 seconds. Amazing and how it SHOULD be.

I could go on talking forever about all kinds of other small little features that make my day but I don’t have the time. I’m VERY impressed with the phone and plan to have it for quite a while (Don’t laugh! I had the T68i for ~6 months, I can do it again).

In other news today… LORD OF THE FRIGGIN’ RINGS tonight!

New Topten

Today, between grueling study sessions, I put together a list of my top ten ‘best-of’ albums. You can find the list on the lists page.

One more final on Thursday and I’m done for the semester. One more semester and I’m done with computer engineering.

New mobile phone *should* arrive tomorrow, else I’m bustin’ some heads. I’ll obviously elaborate on the phone once I’ve had a few days to play with it. Back to studying I go…

You can’t hit me on the hip

Well, my beloved Sony Ericsson T68i mobile phone was murdered yesterday. It was a tragic drowning for which I am to blame. I was in in a rush and it was put into the wash (along with my wallet). Not sure what path I’m going to take. I’m kind of in a conundrum because, as most of you know, I have to have a phone on me at all times, but, as it is the middle of the month (and December no less), I’m hurting for money. As I noted in a previous post, I’ve kept the T68i longer than any other phone I’ve had (and I’ve owned them all, well, almost), and I think I might go back to it. The problem with that is that I ordered it from overseas (unlocked) as it wasn’t yet available in the US. It is now available here, but not through T-Mobile, which means I’d have to order from some other place (again). This is expensive. We’ll see — obviously gonna do that research thing that I do so well and see if I can come up with anything. The fact is, there’s just nothing else out there that has all of the things that I want, but that has always been the case and probably won’t change anytime soon, if ever.

If only I was born later

If only my parents could have had me later than they did. I have to think that every generation thinks the same thing at some point — “if only I was born a little later.” I’ve always thought about this, but for changing reasons. I used to wish that I would have been born later so that I could have had all of these ‘computerized’ toys that are rife with kids these days. I remember when mobile phones first started to become commonplace and wishing I had one when I was like eight. Forget walkie-talkies.

The latest thing causing me to second-guess the timing of my birth is the slew of articles that keep popping up concerning the ‘cataloging’ of one’s entire life. There is a major research project under way to make this a reality. The idea posed by the MyLifeBits project (mentioned in this Wired article) is that everything you say, do, read, write, and experience is saved in some indexed and searchable manner. The reason this idea and wanting to have been born later coincide is because I could have started ‘archiving’ things earlier. I have all of my e-mail going back to mid-1998 (I didn’t get this obsessive, digital-packrat mentality until around that time, else I would have e-mail all the way back to ~93) and take digital pictures (and some video) of just about everything. Anything I’ve ever created or worked on is saved and dated. The MyLifeBits project extends this idea to cover much more — in fact, there isn’t too much that it wouldn’t save. Gordon Bell, the leader of the project, says, “I like to think of it as an accurate surrogate brain.” I realize this idea won’t sit well with those less-eccentric types, but as it happens, I’m all about it. I think it is neat, if for no other reason, than to be able to show your kids your entire life and how you’ve developed into the person they’re now familiar with. I don’t know, the whole idea really excites me. There are obviously a lot of pieces missing from the puzzle. Most notably, we need a way to centralize the saving of ‘everything’ we do and to do it within some database that supports a self-descriptive data format (XML comes to mind) so as to be able to keep up with the technological advancements that will always dictate how we interact with the data (i.e., always being able to convert the data to the ‘now’ format so that it will be accessible).

I don’t think we are too far off from being able to mess around with this. In fact, to a much lesser extent, I feel I’ve been doing this for years. Currently, I have ~800 CDs of digital information. As far as searchability is concerned, most everything (what’s on each cd) is cataloged in a database, but the data itself obviously isn’t. I’m certainly not going to attempt this until I have to move all of my cds to some other media (I think I’ll wait for the successor of recordable DVD). Even then, you will have to span databases across multiple media, unless, of course, you just wait for multi-TB hard drives to come out as the MyLifeBits project suggests. But this approach is flawed in my opinion as 1.) it doesn’t easily lend itself to backups and 2.) you are storing EVERYTHING on one piece of equipment (not too safe). OK, before I get carried away with this, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that this concept, in and of itself, is not necessarily new, but the ability to do what the MyLifeBits project is attempting is certainly new, and in my humble opinion, very exciting. I plan to follow this thing pretty closely. Happy archiving.

The transition is complete!

I have switched CMS’s and have been hacking the new one up for the past couple of days. After moving my blog entries over from the other CMS, I began dissecting this current one until I was satisfied. As it stands now, the site contains no font or table tags. The positioning of everything is done through the CSS file and what are called ‘boxes’. Because I wanted to keep the same layout as my previous design, I knew what I wanted before I began and so it was slightly easier when I started writing the stylesheet. In a nutshell, it’s a 640px box which encloses two smaller boxes, one for the menu and one for the ‘content.’ Each of these smaller boxes is defined as ‘absolute,’ meaning absolute with respect to their container (the 640px box I spoke of earlier).

The only real snag I had, aside from the initial confusion over being table-less, was that for some browsers it was changing the position of the content block relative to the menu block. I narrowed this down to happening only when the content block was shorter than the menu block (ie, on my photo and contact pages). This occurred in Netscape 7, Phoenix 0.4, Mozilla 1.2, and Opera 7.0 beta. Not surprisingly, all of those but Opera run the same rendering engine — Gecko. Also, Opera 7.0 is brand-new and is surely more standards-conforming than the old Opera 6.05 or IE 6.0, neither of which broke the layout. I did some research and have found that others are having the same problem (it’s essentially shifting one of the boxes 1px to the left/right). I currently work around the problem by simply inserting break tags to make the content area on the broken pages as long as the menu. This resolved the problem in all of the problematic browsers. If I weren’t using the same stylesheet across all of the pages, then I guess I could just define the content box to be as long as the longest static page, but I am, and so I can’t do that as the main index page grows/shrinks dynamically.

All of the XHTML and CSS validate (check links at the bottom of the menu).

This should be it for a while as far as complete, under-the-hood renovations are concerned. Finals are right around the corner. When I get a chance, I’m going to add an archive section and link to it from the menu.

No more tables

In further accord with my latest obsession with web standards and accessibility, I’m looking to completely remove the table tag from the site. Instead, the entire site will use relative and absolute CSS positioning. The CMS I’m currently using would make this very difficult, especially with the ‘plug-in’ it uses for static pages, and so I’m forced to try out another CMS. I’m in the process of setting this up and if/when I finish it, the site should look fairly similar to how it looks now. In fact, it is my intention that the change is transparent to the visitor.