Today is the last day of the year, so it seems like a good time to share a few statistics about the past year with you. According to the -273 archives, there were 473 posts made to this site in the year 2001, including this entry. We averaged 39.41 posts per month, with a std. dev. of 14.99. Our high month was May, with 62 posts, and our low month was January, with only 20 posts. However, things get rather interesting when you break the posts down by individual. My high month, September, was michael's lowest month, but the month as a whole falls in the middle of the spectrum in terms of total posts.

There are also some interesting correlations between number of posts and the number of visits to this site. Roughly speaking, more posts equates to a greater number of visits, excluding other factors. However, it takes a few months to get visitors back when the number of posts (and, correspondingly, the number of visits) goes down. Which is bad news for us, since this month we have the fewest number of posts since last March.

Well, that's enough boring information for now.

I went bowling with Luke, Jared, and Brandon tonight, but Franklin Lanes was mobbed by a bunch of high school kids. This normally wouldn't bother me all that much, but there were six kids in the lane next to us bowling and they had about 20 friends milling about, getting in our way and preventing us from sitting anywhere near the lane. Plus, they were all high as kites. Now, I don't normally care if kids smoke a bit of ganja, but when they act like jackasses because of it, I get a bit peeved. Anyway, to make a long story short, I hate those Reitz (a high school here in EVV) kids.

No more posts from me untill 2002, I think.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 December 2001 at 12:43 AM

I was at Barnes & Noble a few days ago, browsing through the bargain section, when I found a book called Who Wants To Be Me? by Regis Philbin. Expecting the book to be some kind of directory to Regis Philbin-obsessed individuals, I picked it up, thinking I would see if I knew anyone listed on the pages, and then go beat some sense in to them. Imagine my surprise when I flipped through the pages and discovered that this was an autobiography of Philbin. I could have sworn Philbin's autobiography was called I'm Only One Man!

Regis: Who Wants To Be Me?

David: No one.

R: I'm Only One Man!

D: *sigh of relief*

[There are so many jokes to be made about this book.]

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 30 December 2001 at 2:03 AM

Inspired by seeing Lord of the Rings, I reread the story last night (not just the first volume, but all three). I stayed up all night reading them, so I was obviously rather caught up in them, but there were bits that rather bored me as well. Specifically, all the chapters that focused only on Frodo and Sam after they separated from the rest of the Fellowship bored me a bit. Nonetheless, if you liked the movie, I'd recommend reading the books. But then I always recommend that people read the books movies are based on; everyone can benefit from some recreational reading, and if you already know the plot, the books are often easier to read.

I think that I probably should have spent a bit more of my time last night reading though Nick's proposal for the Microsoft Web Services contest we're entering, but what can you do?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 28 December 2001 at 11:50 PM

The thing is, I'm getting a bit tired of posting here. But there seem to be a good number of people who visit here everyday, and I feel bad if there isn't new stuff for them. And michael's contributions seem to dwindling as of late. But regardless, as I said, this is getting a bit old.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 December 2001 at 12:03 AM

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Here at the Warner home, we opened all of our gifts tonight, mainly because we all want to sleep late tomorrow. I'm up four books, some underwear, a bit of cash, and an acoustic guitar; so from a purely material viewpoint, it was a very nice Christmas for me. Also this year, my grandmother did her annual "closet shopping," where she gets gifts by going through her closets. So from her I got a bag full of loose change, some mixed nuts, a Mercedes-Benz keychain, a bookstand, a couple of shirts (which I suspect did not come from her closets), and a Mercedes-Benz ML 55 model. This is the first time in about five or six years when my cousins and I didn't get any soap on a rope. I guess she ran out.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 December 2001 at 11:59 PM

Hmm. I didn't mean to keep that last post at the top of the page so long. So now I'm posting.

I took the GRE yesterday; it was pretty easy, even though I didn't sleep much the night before and had a pretty bad cold. Today I had lunch at Cracker Barrel with Luke, and then watched a bit of TV. Did you know that ESPN has a show called "Thrills and Spills," where they show -- for a full half-hour without any commentators -- car crash from car races. Why would you ever watch NASCAR or Indy races if you can just watch "Thrills and Spills?"

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 19 December 2001 at 6:04 PM

I got some spam today offering to sell me some

Kathmandu "2" Marijuana/Cannabis Alternative

The PERFECT Christmas Gift!

I am tempted by their offer*, but I wonder if it really is a good alternative to Marijuana/Cannabis.

* just kidding.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 17 December 2001 at 12:28 AM

It's early morning, at least for me, and I'm awake even though I suspect I would rather be asleep. So maybe I'll go back to bed for a bit. But I do need to search the apartment for all the little bits of Lego Chris and i were using for our robot, because I need to get them turned in today. I was hoping to turn them in around noon, so I guess I should do that before I go back to sleep.

In other very cool news, michael talked to Cindy yesterday about possibly getting credit for the big programming contest we're going to enter, and she thought that would be fine. Getting three credits for this essentially means I can drop a course, do this instead, and then the end of next semester will be a breeze, because the contest is over in mid-March. Now we just have to write a good proposal so that the Microsoft people let us enter the contest.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 14 December 2001 at 10:13 AM

The guest stars of the Scooby Doo episode I'm watching are Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward). What a weird show.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 14 December 2001 at 1:06 AM

The Personal Finance exam went pretty well, I think. Certainly a lot better than the first Personal Finance exam, which bore no resemblance to the what I expected it to be like, mainly because it bore no resemblance to anything he talked about in class. Anyway, yesterday I had graphics and probstats finals. The graphics went very well, the probstats not as well. When I got back after the exam James (who also took the exam) IMed me with "I want to cry" as the text of his message. I understood completely; it was not as easy as we had been led to believe it was going to be.

In about an hour, I have to go take my English final (a pass/fail class, thankfully) and then I have to immediately go the Lopata Gallery to give a presentation on the robot I've been working on for the past six weeks or so. Sadly, my lab partner has skipped town, so I have to do the talk all by myself.

Tonight, after I get back from the robot presentation, I have to write up my paper on the robot (eight pages are already done!) and send a bunch of important emails.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 December 2001 at 2:31 PM

When 8:30pm rolls around today, I will be very relieved.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 December 2001 at 9:39 AM

god today (yesterday) was such a long day. Ive been up and working since 10:00 ayem when I headed over to main campus to study for 441. then, of course, came the 441 exam (which was brutal). then straight to the media and machines lab to work on robotics. we managed to get a lot of our code compiled, run, and debugged. surprisingly, most of it worked just like it was supposed to with almost no debugging at all. well, I guess its not that surprising since I was only porting working code from one language to another, so technically I did all the debugging last summer. but still. I was pleasantly surprised.

anyway, scotts alarm clock is going off now, so I think that means its time for bed. sigh.. and tomorrow is going to be more of the same, with robotics all day until my 342 exam at 6 in the evening.

but first.. sleep.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 12 December 2001 at 6:08 AM

Can you have a rock band without guitars?

Inspired by a post on thirtyfour.org, this is the question I've been posing to a random sample of people who also happen to be on my instant messenger buddy list. So far I have equal amounts of people answering yes and no to this question. If you'd like to participate in my little survey, either IM me (screen name: HiddenInput) or email me (david@negative273.com).

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 December 2001 at 12:37 AM

It feels odd. After eighteen months as the CS101 head grader, and three years total as a grader, my association with the course is, I suspect, over. Part of me is very happy about this. I haven't really gotten the enjoyment out of 101 in the past few semesters that I did in my first semesters as a grader. I think it was last fall, my first semester as head grader, when being a grader stopped being fun and become more like a job. Managing 20 TAs and 176 students by myself was a bit much. Knowing what I know now, I would probably insist that someone be made a co-head TA. Twenty hours a week for a part-time job was a bit much, regardless of how much I was being paid.

So next semester I'm moving on to other things. I was thinking that I might go back to 101 next fall, but I'm not sure anymore. We'll see how this coming semester goes.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 11 December 2001 at 12:00 AM

so I thought Id check back in for a bit just to let our readers know Im alive. after losing the contest with ab9, I thought it would be nice to take a little vacation. and it was. but I didnt want to be away for too long or else Id start getting used to it.

so for those of you whove wondered what Ive been up to, most of my time has been spent on robotics the last few days. not only is it 30 percent of my grade but it is also cindy grimms research, and her opinion of me is pretty important if I want to do graduate work in the near future, so its kind of a high priority.

also, I know I dont link very often, but I wanted to throw this one out. dustgun is a good weblog. you should go check it out. Id actually put him in the page header if we had the room, but I only really get three links, and since two of them are my own websites and the other one is my girlfriends, theres not much I can do. of course, linking to someone you dont know is probably a little weird anyway, so I guess I wont worry about it.

all right, enough of this. now I sleep.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 10 December 2001 at 3:55 AM

I'm tired and I have a headache. So I'm going to bed. Soon. I think.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 December 2001 at 12:18 AM

I'm watching WUTV right now, and I can only assume whoever is playing with their VCR doesn't realize that what they are watching is being broadcast out to the whole campus. You see, they've just fast-forwarded through most of Swordfish, the hacker movie with John Travolta. I said they fast-forwarded through most of the movie. Whoever it is fast-forwarded all the way to the scene that featured Halle Berry nude, and then played a little 5-second clip over and over again, and then finally figured out how to pause the VCR just when Halle Berry lowered the book that was hiding her breasts.

I guess WUTV is just trying to make up for the fact that we no longer get Cinemax on the WashU cable system.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 December 2001 at 11:42 PM

My laptop arrived yesterday via FedEx yesterday, and I got it set up around 4 yesterday evening. It is really very, very cool. I bought a really cheap linksys router/wireless access point last week, so now I can sit in the common room and browse the net with no wires attached to my computer. Very Sweet. I'm in the process of burning all of my MP3s to CD right now on my desktop computer so that I can copy them over to here. At least the majority of them. I have a few MP3s from some artists that I don't really listen to that I won't be copying over (Aaron "That's How I beat Shaq" Carter, I'm looking at you).

Oh the new laptop came with winxp, which I wasn't sure I would like, but it is very cool. And the power toys pack for it is killer because it supports virtual desktops. (It's not the best implementation of virtual desktops, but it's still cool.)

I have one more CD of MP3s to copy over, and then I'll need to start installing some of the software I want to put on here. Microsoft gave ACM a bunch of development software that I'm going to install because I might be doing some development in the near future. Some development that could result in me getting a good amount of money. I don't want to give out too many details yet, but if this happens it would be very cool.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 December 2001 at 12:25 PM

It is often important to remember that prefacing a statement with the phrase "in my opinion" does not make the statement unarguable. Saying "in my opinion" does not mean that someone can't dispute what you are saying. The argument that you are entitled to hold any opinions you'd like is certainly valid, but I can still dispute factual inaccuracies in your statement regardless of whether you couched it in terms of an opinion. For example, one could certainly say "In my opinion, one plus one equals pi." However, when I try to correct what is clearly a factual error in your statement, your entire argument should not hinge on the phrase "in my opinion." If you can't make any arguments to support your opinion beyond the argument that everyone is entitled to an opinion, you probably shouldn't be making the statement in the first place.

And that's all I have to say on that. If none of it made sense to you, don't worry about it; it made sense to me and that's all that matters.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 December 2001 at 9:19 PM

This is kinda weird. Why on earth would anyone think something they saw in a movie was real?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 December 2001 at 11:00 AM

This rattle in my computer is really bothering me. I already tried to fix it once, to no avail. So now I'll pay anyone who can eliminate it without negatively effecting my computing experience $5. $10 if it takes a long time to fix.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 December 2001 at 5:00 PM

What's up with al these weblog people not posting to their websites anymore? nickd says he won't post anything until mid-December, Rachel stopped posting before thanksgiving break with no end date given, and now michael seems to have decided to stop posting as well. Remember michael's last post? This one here, the one where he said he was going to take six weeks off from posting? Well, he told me that he was only joking about that. And then he never posts.

About my English paper. I deleted more words than I actually wrote today, leaving me with less than I had last night. This was perhaps a rash decision on my part. So tomorrow I'm just going to finish it, quality be damned. I'm only taking the course pass/fail, after all.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 December 2001 at 12:24 AM

Two nights ago I took my computer apart and tightened down all the screws, hoping that doing so would eliminate the rattle that prevents me from concentrating on any work I do in my room. Unfortunately, the rattle still exists. I might try to work on it some more tonight, but I think a better use of my time would be to work on my English paper. Speaking of my English paper, I scrapped about half the stuff I wrote yesterday, so I still have a bit of work to do on it.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 December 2001 at 7:08 PM

Well, I got the first three items on my list more-or-less done, but I got distracted by Cowboy Bebop and didn't get around to the other three. Not and unproductive day though. And I feel like doing some more work, so I might write a bit more of my English paper. It would be ideal if I had at least a rough draft done this weekend, then I could spend the rest of the week polishing it before I turn it in on Friday. I still have one more graphics lab that I need to get done this week, and then I will be free of graphics forever. Except for the final, which is COLLABORATIVE. Which means I don't really need to study for it. Which is very, very good.

So what exactly do I need to finish up this week? Well, Chris and I need to finish working on our heat-seeking robot, and I need to write 10-15 pages on it by December 13. And the afore-mentioned graphics lab and English paper are due December 7. I have a final problem set for prob stats due on Wednesday. Then I have to study for finals. At least for the prob stats and personal finance finals. I'm not the slightest bit concerned about my other finals. There is no final in robotics, the graphics final is collaborative, and I'm not about to reread all the books for English, so there isn't much I can study for there (plus, I'm taking it pass/fail). So if I make it through this coming week, I'll be in the clear.

Odd. The calendar for graphics lists "Movies!" as the topic for Tuesday's class. I can only guess that it will be the most informative lecture of the semester. I was being sarcastic, but given the quality of the previous lectures, it isn't out of the realm of possibility.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 December 2001 at 11:27 PM

My to do list for today:

• Write a few pages of my English paper. Topic: Discuss how Hemingway uses money as a measure of value in The Sun Also Rises, both in a cash sense and a more representational sense; try to show the debasement of human life to a monetary or material equivalent.

• Write a few pages for my final report in robotics. Hopefully I'll be able to write a quick summary of everything we've done so far, which isn't all that much.

• If the Dell webpage has decided to stop acting stupid, order a computer.

• Do some grocery shopping.

• Do some Christmas shopping.

• Write a list of ACM lounge things that need to be fixed for Dr. Roman.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 December 2001 at 12:26 PM