Ok, so I sit down at my parent’s new computer, that I setup last time I was home, and fired up Mozilla Firefox to begin my browsing ritual. It came up to a critical warning that I needed to update Firefox due to security vulnerabilites. I think, ok, no problem, let’s update. Then I start to download the 1.0 Release. Look at this frickin’ screenshot!

That’s over 4Mbits per second! I wish that I got that at my apt… Let’s hope that Cox get’s their rollout sooner more than later in College Station.

Anyway, since I burned all of those Dave Matthews Band cds before I left, I was curious if I could get any takers on betting how many hours I could listen to DMB. Well, whomever was closest to picking 7.5 hours gets the prize. Talk to me to claim your prize.

Went to the store today. First time in months, it seems. Forgot to get new razor blades, tho. Got up late. Didn’t wind up going to C-time leaders retreat. Ate some grub from the store. Watched “Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels”. Yes, Ben, I know that you have it, but as we found out earlier, I apparently can’t watch your movies… But I can watch Netflix… Don’t ask me why. Started watching “Varsity Blues”, but haven’t gotten to finish it, yet. I’ll probably finish it tomorrow afternoon, and then watch “Just Married” then, too. Then went over to T.J.’s apt for dinner. Turkey and the works. It was good. Watched “Monsters, Inc.”. It was good as well, but I’ve seen it a bunch, so no show stopper there. Now, I should go to bed, because there supposedly is Sunday School in the morning, and every week I get up later and later.

“Newsweek technology columnist Brad Stone is looking forward to the Thanksgiving dinner with his family next week, spending time in candle-lit rooms, preparing holiday shopping lists and… let’s admit it – fixing the folks’ computer. ‘We are the Tech-Support Generation. Our job is to troubleshoot the complex but imperfect technology that befuddle mom and dad, veterans of the rotary phone, the record player and the black-and-white cabinet television set. Next week, on our annual pilgrimage home, we?ll turn our Web-trained minds and joystick-conditioned fingers to the task of rescuing our parents from bleeding-edge technology on the blink’, Brad Stone writes.”

Taken from Slashdot.

Well, it would appear that it has been a couple of days since I last posted. Hmm… what have I done since then? Well, I have been getting up later and later, it seems. I’m not staying up that much later than normal. I almost feel like I’m getting too much sleep, if that’s possible. And, on top of that, I feel more tired anyway. I think that it’s due to my general lack of activity. I guess that I should do something about that, but honestly I don’t want to. A job would probably help that, if I had to get up early and got into a semi-normal routine. I guess that I have been looking for jobs, still, and even applied for a couple this week. Still nothing, yet.

I did, though, work on my Christmas List. I figure that eventually Google will rule the world. Just the other day, I was thinking, “I wish that I could put stuff on my Amazon wish list that isn’t sold by Amazon”. And, then, low and behold, this week I finally clickecd on the “Add to list” link found next to results found by Froogle. The answer to my query! So, I’ve spent a couple of days working on finding the bargains of the stuff that I wish that I had, so that I could pass it out to my peeps (’cause they’ve been hounding me about it for months now… and I’ve been putting it off). So, here it is, my wish list for Christmas 2004. Now, I do mean that this is really a wish list, because it has a bunch of expensive stuff in it. The cheap stuff, like the tools and the CD are really on my list, but the other stuff is just stuff that I wish that I had, and have no expectation that I will get it, nor do I think that I deserve to get that stuff… Maybe when I get some income I can splurge.

I’m looking forward to getting to go home for a while. Hopefully I’ll get to run into some snow along the way. That would make me happy to see snow. I guess tonight we’ve got Movie and Game Night at Wesley starting sometime soon, 7ish, I think, and then I guess that we’ve got a Crunchtime leaders retreat tomorrow (Saturday) from 8:30am (ohh, that’s early) until 4:00pm. I think that it’s in Caldwell. And, for whatever reason, we can’t be in the building after the retreat, so I have no idea what I’ll be doing then. Ok, enough for now, I’ve got to grab some grub.

Laters.

Found this tech support story… great read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jclingan/20041117#getting_past_front_line_support

Nick Thorn, on November 17, 2004, decrees that yes, the desert really does miss the rain.

If you trust CNet (which I do), then their top multifunction laser is the HP LaserJet 3380 (7.7) and their top multifunction inkjet is the Epson Stylus CX6600 (8.1). Froogle would say that the HP starts at about $637, plus shipping, whereas the Epson starts at about $139, plus shipping. If you again trust CNet, then the HP costs 2.3 cents per page and that the Epson costs 2.7 cents per page. I then figure that, since the HP is cheaper by $0.04 per page, after about 12,500 pages (or 25 reams), you break even on your total investment. So, if you think that you’ll use the thing that much before the thing dies, then go with the HP, else go with the Epson. Also, the Epson has cool features like color printing (if you like color printing stuff) and multiple card readers for removable media.

Since Ben would like the links to work in my rss, I’ll work on it… by posting some more
Edit
Edit
It should work now.
Er, maybe now. And, if you buy now, you’ll get a new DOMAIN NAME! YAY!
http://thomas536.blogsite.org/blog

Ok, so apparently fixing the KINE’s wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I guess that the code to get around the encryption was a lot of what I was going to have to write to get the KINE’s to work. You can tell from the posting of this entry to the posting of the last entry how long it took me. You can let the high-fives and cookies commence!

I finally finished fixing the scheduler. SHAMELESS PLUG! Apparently, in their infinite wisdom, whomever maintains courses.tamu.edu decided to encode (read 3DES encrypt) their urls. I can only assume that they are trying to cut down on automatic screen scraping. I hacked together a bunch of code, and finally came up with a working solution. It’s not pretty, but it works. I hope that they weren’t trying to reduce traffic to their site, because they have only increased it, as far as I’m concerned. Instead of me only looking up one page during data lookup, I get four! They’ve increased the page views by a factor of 3. Oh well. I should make it do some caching so that I don’t piss them off, but that will have to wait until sometime later.

Also, the kine’s don’t work anymore, I don’t think. That would appear to be a much bigger problem, that I’m not nearly as apt to try and tackle. If you really, really want me to look into it, then I might just, else, I don’t really care to spend the time.

It would appear to me that they used this guy’s code. Maybe they’re just paranoid about their data. But, if anybody wants to crack their encryption scheme and send me what they figure out, I’d apprectiate it. Thanks and gig em.

I finally cleaned our bathroom today, as well as hanging my A&M diploma, and finally fixing the post-it “art” that I took apart after we moved. Since there were a few more post-it’s found after I put it up, I figured that I should put them in as well. I re-started the project not too long after we moved, but became quickly bored, and only today finished it. I did laundry, too. Exciting stuff.

I saw “The Incredibles” tonight with Cole, Rachel, and Chad Hopson. It was better than I was expecting. I thought that it was pretty funny, even if Rachel didn’t think quite as much so. Definitely some good one-liners, and, as usual, lots of adult humor that I’m sure went over the kids’ heads. Overall a good movie, though. I highly recommend seeing it.

It’s been a while since I posted, so I apologize. I woke up at noon, after telling myself that I was going to try and get up earlier than that today. I ate some good brisket cooked by the meat men this year, from the wesley tailgate party. I then pretty much proceeded to watch us get beat by OU (I just watched on TV from the comfort of Wesley). It was a good game anyway, and we gave them a run for their money. Then I went to a Shane and Shane concert in College Station, at Central Baptist. They were awesome. I bought a couple of CDs, so I guess that pulls a couple out of the pool of possible CDs for Christmas presents.

Well, today felt a little more productive, even though I’m having a hard time remembering what all that I did today. Got up at 11:50am, after hitting snooze every 10 or so minutes since 9:30am (since I set my alarm for then…). Went to lunch Bible study a little late and did dishes afterwards. I worked on the scheduler sometime in there, even getting a little progress done, mostly conceptual, which I had been having some problems with. I also called Skier’s Edge in Santa Fe to check on their prices. Theirs were higher than at the base, so we’ll probably just buy tickets and rent skis directly from Ski Santa Fe. Hopefully I’m not missing some cheaper alternatives. This also unfortunately means that the total isn’t going down much. The room cost for 3 nights is like $120, plus 3-day lift tix at $111, plus ski rental at $46 adds up to about $280. Which seems expensive to me, but maybe I’m just ignorant of how much it really costs. That doesn’t include the cost of the bus, if there is any in the end, and also assumes that there are 20 of us to get the group rate for the lift tickets. We wound up with 19 deposits, essentially, today. Oh, and that doesn’t absorb the cost of Max’s stuff either… which increases the cost by another roughtly $15. So it probably will be right at the (high) cost of $300.

What else did I do today… Old Army Bible Study essentially didn’t meet because Nick had Century Singers rehearsal. He forgot about us and didn’t tell anybody that he couldn’t make it… oh well… I didn’t care too much. Eric Brown cut up his leg pretty bad today, too, playing ping pong. Apparently his second ping pong related injury of the year.

I also tried to compress the “Day in the Life of Thomas” video so that people could download/stream it… but I failed. I talked to Adan about it, but he couldn’t offer much advice on what to do. So, I’m stumped on it for a while.

Yeah, I don’t think that anybody except Laurie and KB reads this, and even then I’m not so sure how much/often they do… If anybody else reads this, then you should tell/email/comment me about it. Thanks, I’d appreciate it.

Plus, this evening stupid Marcus got that song “Complicated” song in my head, as sung by the younger Simpson sister.

Since I didn’t have much to say on Friday, I just skipped blogging about nothing.

Saturday was better, though. Unfortunately, though, I still got up at noon, but was pleased to find out that they didn’t really notice that I wasn’t around to help with the work project on Saturday. I just didn’t feel like getting up early. I figure that they need more indians than chiefs on stuff like that, and I am definitely a chief. I think that it worked out well that I didn’t get up and go. I was at Wesley for a while, and then around 6pm we headed over to Susan and Jaimie’s for a Halloween/Game Listening party. They fed us some cool ghoustly food and we watched “Saved!”, which turned out to be a better movie than I had first anticipated. Then we watched “Dawn of the Dead” which was also a quality movie, except that I didn’t quite like then ending. I’m not usually one for horror movies, but this one was good. I won’t ruin anything for you guys, but if you want to watch a scary movie, then you might check it out.

The best part of the night was probably the ride home. Ben Mason had a couple of masks that he brought, because it was actually a mask/costume party… So I put on this ugly, red devil mask, complete with horns and everything. I was wearing this, at like 3:30/2:30am, depending on how you counted the time, sticking my head out of the window. For several blocks we weren’t next to anybody, but finally I got to scare the crap out of this girl in the next lane. IT WAS AWESOME! Then there were a couple of guys, but they weren’t scared, and mostly they just played along.

Today did the Sunday School thing, setting up the laptop/projector and running sound for the little band that plays for Sunday School. Went to A&M UMC for church, then went to Fuddruckers for lunch, which was good as always. I just went home after that, taking care of some laundry and bills. Got to talk to Chad Suhr for a bit, since he needed some info for an application that he’s filling out for a pregnancy center or something. He misses Wesley alot and is super busy grading papers and stuff. He hasn’t been able to really find a church, nor a good small group to plug into. He’s involved with Intervarsity, but it’s not quite the same as Wesley was. Different types of people and a different type of organization. I guess that he’s considering Catholocism, but the priest that he talked to he really didn’t like and wasn’t too helpful. Anyway, paid some bills, made a deposit, then went to Wesley. Ate dinner there, and setup stuff for worship. Then pretty much since after worship, I’ve been working on writing new code for the scheduler.

Blah blah blah. Somehow I doubt that the details of my life would seem that interesting…