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In September of 1997 — long before I can really remember — Vivian and Margaret adopted two then-very-young kittens, Peanut, and Punkin. Over the course of the last 13 years, we've visited them more times than I can possibly count, quickly becoming good friends.
Punkin was always the more friendly of the two. Peanut was often skittish, hiding from deluges of affection which his brother would take rather in stride and return tenfold, every single time.
While we all certainly love Punkin, Peanut, and their adopted sister Troi immensely, it's not — by any means — a stretch to say that Punkin was first in most people's hearts, if only because of his ridiculous capacity for affection.
Unfortunately, he was also first to get sick. A few years back, he developed diabetes; Vivian and Margaret have since given him insulin twice a day and continued to provide a wonderful home and all the love he — or anyone — could possibly want.
Punkin had to be put to sleep yesterday, due to various complications from his diabetes. It was a sad day for everyone — this has been very hard to write — but as he leaves us we can keep in mind all of the incredibly adorable and fun times we all shared with him during the last decade. He was certainly my closest animal friend by far, and may always be. He will be missed by all, and never forgotten.
Goodbye.
If you visit this site occasionally, you've probably noticed that it's all white now! I'd gotten a bit tired of the black, and wanted something a bit softer. The buttons are heavily Clearlooks-inspired, and on the whole I'm happy with the redesign. I'm still a little bit sad that I'm completely incapable of designing anything with color, but that's ok... there's a lot of stuff to be had by sticking to greyscale, too!
There's also a new projects section, which I will eventually fill (it's very bare-bones right now) with details of stuff that I've been working on. I haven't — in the past — had a static place to put updatable information on projects; I usually write stuff in a blog post, and then another a bit later, and so on; this doesn't really make any sense!
I've made the old "Stuff" page disappear for the time being, but I'll probably bring it back in some form someday... it doesn't matter much now, though, with the move to GitHub and the projects page.
The whole site should be much smaller and load much faster now — I've removed a lot of stuff that was hanging around for no reason, like jQuery, a random unused CSS file, and various other things. I also upped the cache expiration duration on a lot of images to a month instead of an hour, so that should help some (though it seems Safari is having a hard time respecting this, for some reason, but Firefox seems to).
Also, by the next post here, I should have — at the very least — the images and large-file content of this site moved over to Amazon S3. My crazy 10$-for-a-year Dreamhost deal is coming to a close, and between their pricing (way too high for a static site, it'll be something like 2.50$/month at Amazon, a quarter the price) and their bandwidth (50KB/s down?! I get ~1MB/s down with S3!), it's time to say goodbye. I have until March to move myself, Matt, and Carol out of there.
Two and a half years ago, on my way out of CHS and on to RPI, my parents (thank you!) replaced my aging PowerBook G4, Trillian, which had just turned 4. Kaylee, my then-brand-new MacBook Pro, came on the 18th of June, 2007, two days after graduation. Since then, it's been through a lot; five semesters of RPI, a trip to Spain, two GSoCs, three different companion desktops (Trinity, then Jayne mk. I and II), countless trips to Boston and New York, my entire time with Gnome, and over 8000 photographs.
Anyone who knows me surely knows that it's a hard job to be my computer — you'll always be busy doing something, fans spinning at a ridiculous rate more often than not. And while I'm generally very gentle and careful, it's likely you'll fall at least once in your lifetime — Kaylee did, off of the top bunk, no less. But that's ancient history now...
Anyway, Nehalem is coming — if not at the media event in two weeks then within the next month or two. Between that, the fact that this machine is falling apart, and the super-long battery life of the unibody machines, it's time for an upgrade (though I will be somewhat annoyed if the 15" display doesn't get a resolution bump; so much so that I might even consider breaking my allegiance to the fairest size and going for a 17" instead... 1440x900 is so 2007...)
So, tonight I took apart Kaylee for (probably) the last time, to fix as many of the various annoying things that have broken down over the years as I could, and decided to take a few pictures along the way. I'll write a little bit about each one below...
Also, I should note what broke, for future reference:
- the LCD bezel cracked near the bottom on both sides, threatening to completely sever the display from the computer (thankfully, Dad constructed metal clamps matching the shape of the lid in order to temporarily remedy this)
- the camera hasn't worked since The Great Fall of 2008 (which happened to be in Fall '08) — luckily, I don't care in the slightest
- the right fan started intermittently (weeks between occurrences) making strange noises, culminating in an incident yesterday where it nearly stopped altogether (<500RPM, and pulsing) and I had to shut the machine off to prevent overheating (>98°C)
- the keycaps are totally wearing off; I replaced some of them with ones from my PowerBook, which were still in good shape, but they continued to degrade
- no feet remain
- the optical drive won't burn any media nor read DVDs (it will, however, read CDs — I think it's dirty) — this is one of the only things on this list that actually makes me angry
- the motherboard ("logic board", in Apple parlance) had to be replaced as a part of the whole NVIDIA debacle, and I have no guarantee that they didn't replace it with another timebomb, as at the time, Apple (at least officially) had no idea why they were failing
 Mismatched pair of memory; 3GB, in total. When I sent Kaylee in to Apple to have the motherboard replaced, they returned it with the original 1GB stick in it, and the extra 2GB in a baggie...  One of Dad's wonderful clamps, currently the only thing holding this machine in one piece!  The hard drive I installed a few days before The Great Fall. Still working like a charm, and much faster than the original. Also, the original 160GB disk, completely devoid of all other data, would still not have sufficient storage for the combined monstrosity of my Aperture and iTunes libraries.  When I installed the hard drive, I accidentally broke a Chinese-mystery-metal support structure, so one corner of the drive had to stay unsupported. Hasn't been a problem, though, luckily!  A nonfunctional camera. Oh, well. It actually came back to life — completely uncoerced — one day, but only for a few hours.  The right fan — the victim of yesterday's screeching and overheating mess.  My best guess says this (whatever it is) was the culprit in said screeching, overheating mess. It was sitting right in the fan hole when I opened Kaylee up today.  Look at all the dust, clogging the vents! I cleaned as much of it out as I can; I probably should have done this months ago...  The aforementioned dust, in a much more disgusting-looking but much less computer-endangering location.  I'm not totally sure what this is. I found a number of very similar small grey pieces of plastic, all looking like they broke off of something, floating around in the machine. Not even going to ask — I completely failed to find a source.  Unidentifiable sensors on the back of the keyboard slab. I really can't imagine what they might be, as I'm relatively aware of the location of all of the sensors that I know how to get data from... I'm thinking that at least one of them might be the lid-close sensor, but I'm not sure!  Dying keyboard, as I mentioned...  A healthy fan. Yay! And gigantic pixels. Nay!
I took thousands of pictures this year (not including well over 20,000 timelapse stills for my final video project). I've pulled a few out of that batch which represent particular moments (unfortunately there are no pictures of Kaitlyn and I, something I'll have to remedy for next year!). A lot of these have already been posted here; this is to collect them together to make myself realize that these are all moments from the last year. Also, you'll have to differentiate between the two Amys yourself (it should be obvious in most cases); every time I add initials like we do in real life, the words look funny on the screen! They're in almost-chronological order (the vertical pictures mix this up a bit):
rms came and stayed with Matt (right down the hall from us) while at the RPI stop on his lecture circuit. It was quite an enlightening evening, to say the least. I've also been told there's a semi-significant possibility it's going to happen again this year! The picture is of Matt's signed ThinkPad lid. bigger
I finally gave up on Jayne mk. I (because of heat and expandability issues) and built a monster mk. II to replace it. Currently has a total of 6TB of storage, 8GB of RAM, and a nice 4890. Good, solid machine! bigger
RPI's administration had their share of issues this year, with the student body protesting over transparency within the 'tute's decision-making process. I'm afraid the issue is far from resolved at the moment, and I don't expect to see anything change during my stay in Troy. Luckily, I'm in the group of people affected the least by all of the decisions (I don't want to take foreign language classes, I don't eat at Commons, I live off campus, I don't want to be an RA, etc.), but I feel bad for those who are! bigger
Dad and I made a spur of the moment trip down to Cape Canaveral in hopes of seeing one of the last few shuttle launches. Unfortunately, some sort of leak caused a delay, and we weren't able to see the launch. There are still a few left, but I'm afraid we're going to have to settle for a Constellation/Orion/Ares launch instead. bigger
On the left, Matt sits depressed (not really, I promise!) in the hall in Davison as his Welcome Wagon and plastic flowers fail to lure Amy away from Nate. Not that that was his intent, or anything! bigger
On the right is the Girellis' dog, Bongo, who we all became good friends with while he stayed with his grandparents, across the street from us. He's grown to a slightly-less adorable size at this point, but we have lots of pictures of him from the good old days — and he's still very friendly! bigger
This remains one of my favorite pictures from my big lens — a happy, adorable Carol waving to us on a gloomy Troy day. She's the only one besides Matt who'll ever pose for pictures, so I take every opportunity! Hi, Carol! bigger
Some manner of hat epidemic broke out late in the spring semester; Matt, Nate, and Robb together purchased enough hats for a few small families! (this might be a slight exaggeration, depending on your definition of a family, but there was more than one hat per person) Matt, of course, acquired a red fedora. bigger
Carol, Connor, Ben, Andrew, and I (along with dozens of classmates) spent a good chunk of the semester toying with 8051s in hopes of stabilizing one of the LITEC blimps; this is a shot of some of the blimps resting on their moorings. We all eventually succeeded (some *ahem*Carol*ahem* with only moments to spare) — yay! bigger
Matt went to visit Mary at Amherst; he decided that he didn't know the way to the bus station, so I accompanied him to Albany. Unfortunately, we were very, very short on time, so we ended up running down the hill from Empire State Plaza (to shouts of "run, Forrest, run!" from bystanders) to the Greyhound station. Ended up succeeding, and Matt (I hear) had a nice weekend with Mary. I had to climb back up the hill to get to my bus home, so I took some more pictures around the Plaza while catching my breath and waiting for said bus. bigger
ISS became the third brightest object in the sky (after the Sun and Moon) this year; shortly afterwards, I made it my mission to capture it on its way overhead. This is my best shot of many as it streaked across the Colchester sky. bigger
In June, I traveled further from home than I'd ever been — and alone! I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Karmic Koala release, in Barcelona. I had a lot of fun, and (unlike some people who were there with me...) toured around the city in my free time. Sitting at my desk right now I have a hard time believing that I actually made it there and back and was outgoing enough when I needed to be and didn't die on any of my solo treks into the city... certainly a learning experience! bigger
For whatever reason, I took Amy's senior picture this year. I think it came out quite well; there are a bunch of alternatives, too, but this is the one she used. At the time, Mom was trying to pose Amy on various rocks and things around Airport Park; we saw this post and just had to run off and take some shots there; and they stuck! bigger
On the left is some of Amy's beading, which she's been spending a good bit of time on this year, as she makes all sorts of awesome little things for various people. It's also fun to grab the macro lens and take pictures of tiny little beads and intricate wire patterns! bigger
Another example of Amy's increasing craftiness; she made a beautiful rendition of the BSG logo out of chocolate on my birthday cake; she has since made many, many more awesome chocolate-based cake designs for various occasions. bigger
Over the summer, the four of us visited Boston to tour various colleges for Amy (and to hang out in Boston!). She got totally sold on MCPHS while we were there, and has since been accepted! So hopefully (the only roadblock being Mom, worried about her being so far away) by the next time I'm writing a wrapping-up-the-year blog post, Amy will have had a whole semester cozily settled into a dorm on The Fenway. bigger
Matt, Mike, Nate, Robb, and I all moved out of RPI's dorms and into an apartment; we've been there for a whole semester now, and it's been great! We've got a lot of space now, and best of all, a kitchen! The lack of dining halls is a little strange, sometimes, but I can't say that I miss Commons' food. bigger
A very significant part of my time during the fall semester was spent working on projects for Intermediate Video (1, 2, 3); it was well worth it, for sure — I had a lot of fun, got an A, and only irritated Matt a little bit with the constant (every 30 seconds) shutter clattering for two or three weeks on end. bigger
Matt acquired ants to fill an ant farm he'd had sitting around from a few Christmases ago; someone (Mike, I believe) got the great idea to set up a webcam on the ants and post it to reddit. Nate then plopped his laptop on its side behind the webcam and the ants, blaring Cascada and running the iTunes visualizer as a backdrop for the dancing ants (unfortunately, this part is not pictured). Amy was visiting at the time, so she might have gotten a slightly skewed idea of college life. Two or three weeks, a few thousand justin.tv viewers, and hours of — quite literally — laughing out loud later, we ended up shutting off the webcam. Some clips appear to remain on the site, and we have a nice reddit thread, too. bigger
"Get up, get out of bed, and get in the car." "O...K...?". Carol and Hana dragged me to Larkfest, Albany's (apparently) annual street fair. I wasn't sure what was up at first, but ended up having a great (if slightly shy, at times) day out with the girls, wandering the street (and hiding, while they shopped for jewelry) and consuming gigantic burritos. More pictures on Flickr, and there's a picture of the three of us on the Times Union website, too! bigger
Matt had a particularly unhappy day, so Nate and Mike went out and bought him a tiny orange betta fish, named Wanda (after the Gnome mascot, not the movie, though I'm sure there's a relation there!). Wanda's still happily swimming (though she took quite a long car ride home to Boston for both Thanksgiving and Christmas break, she survived somehow!) and providing Matt with dozens of hours of entertainment. bigger
Every year, Gnome holds a developer summit at MIT in Boston; this was the second year that Matt and I were in attendance. We spent a significant part of this conference hanging out (and discussing the finer points of the future of Gnome) with Jason, who I worked with over the summer on gnome-games. The picture is of after the conference (I'm too shy to take lots of pictures of people I only know from the internet!), when we went to visit Amy in Davis Square. It's got a little of everything; a classic Matt pose, Amy ignoring Matt, random strange bystanders, etc. bigger
Awwwwwwwwww. 'nuff said. All things grow with love! bigger
And that's it! The end of the year; a Christmas Poinsettia! bigger
What a great year :-)
If you're actually *crazy*, you might have noticed that the design of this page changed a bit about a week ago. This isn't because I've been tweaking my WordPress theme — I got sick of that a long time ago. No, instead, I replaced this all with a solution much more amenable to my own mindset; a completely-statically-generated, git-backed, python-based blog. It's not an interesting project in and of itself; every programmer writes blog software at least once in their early life (and this is poorly-written, just like most of them!).
It's really only interesting in that I'll note that only the RSS2 feeds will work from now on; no more Atom/RSS 0.9, because I don't care enough. RSS feeds are the archive page url (for the main archive or any category) + "/feed", just like before.
With that said, this is my first post entirely with the new system, so hopefully everything will go smoothly! I get to test it locally, then 'git push' and whoosh! magic jumps to Jayne and then off to Dreamhost.
Amy made me a wonderful peanut butter and chocolate BSG cake. Also, this is post #100 here!
As I'm sure everyone knows already, it's the 40th anniversary of Armstrong & Aldrin's landing on the moon. I really wish I'd been alive to see that — indeed, nobody's set foot on the moon or elsewhere in my entire lifetime so far! Hopefully we'll remedy that soon... I'd really like to visit, even if just for a short while. Someday!
It's also my 20th birthday! The 20th anniversary of the landing is pretty much one of the best possible birthdays for a geek, in my opinion...
Other things of note... the four of us are going to Boston (to visit schools with Amy) from Wednesday through Saturday; Amy's show (Romance/Romance) was excellent (one of the CTC's best...); Kaitlyn's home!; I started playing around with getting Mines going; etc.
At jclinton's request, I merged gsoc-seed-games into gnome-games master this week, so if you were tracking that, it's gone. Which, of course, means I managed to confuse some translators with unfinished strings and stuff (oops!). Hopefully that's mostly sorted out now (though I did notice that "Same GNOME (Clutter)" and "Same GNOME (Clutter, C)" are still getting translated unnecessarily, and I'm not sure what to do about that/what to call it/etc. Or, if we should just build one or the other depending on if you have Clutter or not... probably.
Some random pictures for your amusement (mostly all what people have seen before):
P.S. I apologize for shoving JavaScript and Clutter down your throats :-) (I really don't want to get in the middle of this...)
There are lots of pictures at Flickr. There are some below, interspersed throughout the words, too...
Say what?!
On Saturday, just after 10PM, Delta flight 6372 from JFK to BTV landed on the tarmac in Burlington, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief! I was finally home, after my first solo trip, my first trip across the Atlantic, and my first UDS.
I was in Barcelona attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next release, Karmic Koala (that's 9.10, for those of you counting)... talking (mostly listening, actually) about GNOME, fast boot, X, mobile stuff (Android and Moblin), NM, prettiness, and who knows what else! I met lots of awesome people, saw lots of awesome sights and ate lots of awesome food (sometimes). I don't think it's possible to properly describe the last week, so I'm just going to write bulleted bits to the best of my ability, separated into UDS-things and Barcelona-things.
UDS
- Scott/Mark want boot in 10/12/15 seconds on a Mini 9.
- It's not clear if all of gnome-games is going to be in main (partially my fault; oops).
- Ekiga isn't going to be in main anymore, but WebKit will!
- GDM Face Browser? Maybe! (just like every year) That would mean Clutter in main, too.
- Non-KMS systems and wake-from-hibernate lose bootsplash.
- "OS switcher" during boot and GDM.
- Running a demo (Moblin) on alpha hardware is not a good idea, but it looked shiny anyway.
- KMS by default on Intel and ATI. Damn NVidia. (nouveau KMS maybe someday)
- Canonical has a design team; they all seemed very cool!
- Someone (design team?) wants to have a theme that has both dark and light bits which applications can request.
- Ryan wants windows to be able to display whether they have escalated privileges or not (PolicyKit).
- Client-side window decorations!! Also, discussions about what happens if you draw to (0, 0) now, and how to solve that...
- Some talk about putting Wayland between X and the video card, mostly for fast-user-switching and the like. Probably not Karmic? I really just want a system where Wayland is easy to install...
- 10.04 or 10.10 is going to be LTS, so we can't expect to change anything drastically after Karmic and before then... so this release is probably going to be very experimental..
- Compiz, gnome-panel, and nautilus (was it nautilus?) are the big problems with GNOME startup. Has anyone tried anything more intelligent and useful than printf? DTrace? If not, I'll do it, later this week...
- gobject-introspection is going to be packaged; I don't remember exactly what we decided on but it was mostly "make upstream get typelib generation out of gir-repository and into projects themselves".
- I started a Seed+Clutter+Cairo+DBus nm-applet mockup based off of a blog post about NM 0.8 which I can't find right now... just for fun!
- Got lots of work done on LO3 in the airports and stuff.
Barcelona
- The region around the airport is slightly frightening compared to the rest of the city; I was a little uneasy until I got off the metro at Zona Universitària. The fact that I'd just been dumped somewhere where it was really hard to understand everyone (even with 4 useless years of Spanish) certainly didn't help any either.
- The power is a lie. You need the grounded plug or it doesn't work, unless you're in the rooms (not the lobby) of the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos. The Palau and my hotel both require the big plug, somehow. This is a problem; a brand new 15" MBP battery only lasts 3-4 hours in a fresh install of Karmic.
- There's a train to Valencia about 2 minutes before the train to the airport, from the same platform. Far too tempting...
- Universitat de Barcelona students are significantly more kind and helpful than the average RPI student.
- It's a poor choice to schedule a conference during what is practically a national holiday (the Barça vs. Manchester United soccer game). The city was insane that night and the night after...
- Parc Güell is beautiful and crazy; Gaudi must have been insane, but that makes it all the more worth a trip.
- Apparently carrying around a DSLR suggests to people that you're qualified to use their strange point-'n-shoots; I took quite a few pictures for other people while wandering around the Parc.
- Sagrada Família is actually still under active construction (I didn't believe it until I got there)... going to finish in 2026!? But it's one of the most ridiculously complex and beautiful buildings I've ever seen...
- It's really hard to find Casa Batlló (I failed).
- The Mediterranean is pretty much the same as any other harbor-bearing sea, at least from the Paral•lel region. The sunset from down there is really nice, though!
- There are lots of street musicians, especially around the touristy parts, like Parc Güell. A good number of them were pretty good; then there were these subset who make the strangest noises with their mouths... they sound like irritating birds or something :-)
- The whole philosophy of tapas seems like a much better way to do dinner than what we do here in the States. I much enjoyed the various tapas bars, especially the night of the game, out with the GNOMEites.
I probably have a lot more things to say, but I can't keep writing in this post! Too many words! I'll probably tell more stories as the days go on or something...
Transportation
I walked a lot more than I usually do during the trip; I also rode the metro to many different places around the city. I totaled the distances of the walking and public-transit parts of my trip with Google Earth last night (approximations, of course), and discovered that I'd walked about 41 km (26 miles), and ridden (on the ubiquitous trams and metro) somewhere in the vicinity of 101 km (63 miles). I took notes while I was measuring, too, detailing the trips of each day to the best of my ability.
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