That was fast. The switch to moveable type was rather painless, although a few of our past posts seem to have become rather oddly formated. But I don't really care about that right now.

Mom and Dad are getting a new car tomorrow morning, so I'm going to hang out here for a bit to get a look at then new car, then I'm off to Saint Louis for the weekend. No real reason for the trip; it just seems like a good idea.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 May 2002 at 11:09 PM

We're in the process of converting our CMS from greymatter to moveabletype. Aside from a temporary lack of old posts, things should be working just fine. However, if you come across a broken link or a style error, please send an email to david@negative273.com.

With a bit of luck, everything should be working by later tonight, so hold on tight, and we'll be there in a bit.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 May 2002 at 10:23 PM

Google's programing contest is over and the winners are listed here. Does anyone know if the Dan Blandford listed under the honorable mentions is the Dan Blandford that graduated from WashU a few years ago?

I was reading today on Slate about the stadiums Japan built for the World Cup. Here's a little excerpt:

Sapporo is . . . a domed stadium with artificial turf, but a grass soccer field sits just outside the east wall. On soccer game days, the wall slides open, a bank of seats retracts, and the turf field—floating on an air cushion—is rolled indoors. Then the wall closes, the turf field is rotated 90 degrees, and—voilà—an indoor, grass soccer stadium. This insanity cost $400 million, plus $15,000 every time they move the field.

Remember that Japan is in the depths of a ten year old recession. And they spent at least $4.5 billion on half the World Cup. (South Korea is co-hosting.) By comparison, France spent $1.5b when they hosted the World's Cup four years ago. The Japanese are depending on the World's Cup to revive their economy. I suspect they'll be sorely disappointed.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 May 2002 at 12:49 PM

after a day of consideration, aaron has accepted my terms, and so the battle begins. I have to admit, though, I hadnt considered the time zone differential. aarons west coastern ways give him a distinct 2 hour advantage. now, Im sure there are those of you out there who would argue that because aaron wakes up two hours after me and goes to bed two hours later every night, that this somehow all evens out. but I dont want to hear your "rational" or "clearly thought-out" arguments. youre wrong. and if aaron thinks he can so easily take advantage of my time zone, hes wrong, too.

thats right, Im moving to hawaii.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 31 May 2002 at 12:46 PM

I am not a happy camper. I had (note the past tense) some rather nice headphones that I kept here at work so I could listen without disturbing the people who sit in the cubicles near me. Last night I bought a new CD, and I was anxious to listen to it here at work. But when I went looking for my headphones, they were no where to be found. I guess I forgot to lock up the cabinet last night and someone walked off with them. This is not the kind of thing I want to discover at 7:30 in the morning, and it has left me in a rather bad mood. I'll wait a bit to see if one of my co-workers was just borrowing them, and then I'll have to think about taking further action.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 May 2002 at 7:37 AM

overheard:

c:  Name a type of dog.

m: kitty cat.

c:  No, I mean a breed of dog. Or cat.

m: chow mein.

c:  ...That's a noodle.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 30 May 2002 at 11:02 PM

and after a long and thoughtful silence, he spoke:

over the past few weeks I have received a fair amount of criticism about my lack of recent contribution to negative273. honestly, I was surprised at the number of people who actually cared. but apparently there are people out there who would like to see me resume posting, perhaps even on a regular basis. but you might be asking yourself, is such a thing even possible? is there any force in the world that could bring michael to post at least once a day?

there is one. one among you with the power to motivate even me. one whose skill is nearly unrivaled and whose weblogging style rouses in me the spirit of competition once more.

you see, for six months I have carried the burden of shame. yes, it was exactly six months ago today that I lost that fateful battle. but I can carry this weight no further. I must reclaim my honor.

aaron beckerman, I challenge you once again. Im sure you remember the rules:

there will be 2 (two) Contestants: michaeldixon and Aaron Beckerman.

each Contestant must post to their respective websites at least once a day.

the first Contestant who fails to post will be the Loser; the other will be the Winner.

the Loser must pay the Winner 2 (two) Dollars.

as you can see, the stakes have been doubled. yet so has my resolve. for it is only through battle that I might erase the shame that I have brought upon myself and my family. and I must not fail.

so mr. beckerman, if my weblogging prowess does not frighten you, accept my challenge on your website, and the contest will begin. I look forward to meeting you in the glory of combat once again.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 29 May 2002 at 11:32 PM

I was at a Memorial Day Barbeque yesterday at Jared's apartment. Over the course of three or four hours I consumed three or four (maybe five) Hard Lemonades. Now, from what I've observed of my friends, it seems rather common to grow tired after consuming a bit of alcohol (i.e., pass-out). I, on the other hand, am just the opposite. I drink alcohol and I'm wired for the next fortnight or so. Last night I got in around 11, but couldn't fall asleep until almost 2am. And then I woke up at 5am. Oddly enough, I'm feeling more refreshed than I have this entire summer. I'm thinking about only getting three hours of sleep again tonight. If it worked once, why not try it again?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 28 May 2002 at 9:22 PM

Did I mention yesterday that one of the guys from my high school that I met at the riverboat was out on bail awaiting allocution after he reached a plea bargain in a drug sale case? He's going to be doing 18 months in a federal penitentiary as part of his deal. I'm torn on this: if I were about to spend the next 18 months behind bars, I'm not sure that I would be spending my time at the riverboat.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 May 2002 at 11:51 PM

Those of you who know me in "real life" already know this, but I don't use bookmarks. Instead, I have a rather elaborate homepage with links to all the sites I like and some forms with a bunch of hidden tags so that I can log into a bunch of websites without having to type in a username or password. This whole homepage idea came from michael, so if you like the idea, give him all the props. Anyway, it has recently come to my attention that a number of the links on my page are out-of-date, and there are a number of sites that I visit that I don't have links to. The reason things are so messed up is because it takes a bit of work to modify this page (I edit it by hand), and I am too lazy to work on it very often. So now that I am faced with reworking this page, I've begun to wonder if I should rework it's appearance, making it a bit easier to update in the future.

But who cares about that. I saw Star Wars this afternoon. I wasn't impressed when I saw the bootleg of it, and I think even less of it now. I have a theory about special effects that I had earlier only applied to things like the Final Fantasy movie: the better we get at special effects, the worse things look. For example, we can watch cartoons without really thinking about the accuracy of the images we're seeing, because the people and object we're seeing are all very clearly unrealistic. But when we watch something like Final Fantasy, where they were striving for reality, the inaccuracies seem, at least to me, almost like they're being highlighted. Anyway, if that makes any sense to, that's kind of what I feel about the special effects in Episode II. They're very good, but not good enough to disappear into the background, which is where they belong.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 May 2002 at 3:38 PM

The thing that I like so much about my job this summer is that every project they've given me is different from anything else I've done before. The db search page I made? I've done it a hundred times, but never in ASP. The PDF generation and db storing? Never done anything quite like that, especially since it's all being done from inside an Excel macro. Next week, in addition to finishing up a couple of other projects, I need to investigate why one of their big IBM servers is generating tons of out of memory errors. If I do decide that it needs more memory, I've been asked to have Whirlpool's IT guy order some for it. The weird thing about this error is that it's occuring on RTS2, which usually has a lot less activity than RTS1 (on a good day RTS1 only has 50% processor utilization, on most days it's quite a bit more). So this error is rather mysterious, and I need to figure out what's causing it. A task made slightly more difficult because I have no idea what all the programs RTS2 is running are supposed to do, and what their memory usage is supposed to be.

I found some more pictures to scan yesterday, but I don't want to scan anything else in until I find or write a better photo displaying system. So that's what I'll be working on this morning.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 May 2002 at 9:26 AM

I've been thinking about switching -273 to a new content management system. I've been pretty happy with greymatter, but development on it has stopped, and that has me a bit worried. Especially since there have been a couple of security issues involving gm. I'm currently leaning toward moveabletype, mainly because it's supposed to be an easy migration from gm to moveabletype, but I'm open to other suggestions. Does anyone have recommendations? (I'm only looking at solutions that will run on our server space, so things like Blogger and Pitas are out.) I've noticed that Ben uses b2, which I think stores entries to a db rather than files, which would be nice. Anyway, let me know if you have any ideas about this.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 May 2002 at 12:00 AM

Tonight: dinner at the Two Brothers Chinese Buffet, killing time at Josh and Misty's apartment, going to the riverboat casino and leaving with $6.25 more than I started with.

Tomorrow: Matinee showing of Attack of the Clones, sand volleyball.

I ran into about ten people I went to high school with at the casino tonight. They hadn't changed much, which is too bad. But it was interesting to hear what everyone was up to. Some were married, some probably hadn't had a date since high school. Seeing all these people from high school just reminded me that there is very little reason for me to go to a high school reunion; I already see all the people I care to associate with from high school.

On Monday I'm going to a Memorial Day Barbeque at Jared's apartment. Jared just bought a grill and he wants to try it out. I was hoping to get to Saint Louis this weekend, but I didn't get any of the things I needed to do done today, so that's that I guess.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 May 2002 at 11:05 PM

After an hour of struggling with my new cable modem, I finally have the wireless router up and running. Why do ISPs feel the need to rearrange all of the settings on my computer? I had to dig through the registry to remove the "provided by Insightbb.com" tag that Insight added to IE and Outlook Express.

Work has been going well. I've been working on some code to add PDF files into our sql database. It's more challenging than you'd think, as SQL's commands for adding large binary files to databases can only handle files smaller than 120kb, and our files are usually bigger than 300kb. After a bit of work, I've found a library that does what I want, and the evaluation version seems to work just fine, so we'll probably buy the full version next week. My only real complaint about the job is that I sometimes find it hard to drop what I'm working on at four and go home and not really think about my work until 7:30 the next morning (or three days later, in the case of this weekend).

The d-link cable/dsl router and wireless access point that I brought is pretty nice. The wireless works all over the house, even though the access point is hidden away in one of the upper corners of the house. It has a built-in a print server as well, although I don't think we'll use it. Now I just need to get a wireless card for my parent's computer, so that they can use the access point as well.

I found some more pictures to scan, so perhaps I'll scan those in tomorrow. But first I need to find a more permanent place to set up my scanner, because I don't really like having it on my bed.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 May 2002 at 10:17 PM

I scanned a few photos and put them in here. Take a look if you'd like; the afore-mentioned Robe Boy plane banner is in there somewhere. I've also begun work on a new about page, but that might not make it up for a while.

I was at Wal-Mart tonight, and while I was wandering through the aisles, I started putting together a list of all the things I want to buy this summer. It's a rather short list: tennis racket, television, digital camera. I was wavering between having my 27" TV with the loud rattle fixed or just going out and getting a new one, and I think I've decided to get a new one. Here's a question for all of you out there: is there any advantage to getting one of those TVs with a flat screen (not the tihn ones, but the ones that don't have curved glass)? I saw a pretty nice 27" Sanyo with picture-in-picture at Wal-Mart for about $250, but it didn't have the flat screen that seems to be all the rage these days (although it did have S-Video input). Let me know if you can shed some light on this.

Work is rocking. My first little project is almost done. I could probably get it finished up tomorrow or Wednesday, but I have to prepare a presentation on ASP and web programming for a few of the people in my department tomorrow, so that's going to push things back a bit. I've also been given another small project to work on*. I think I've got the solution to it figured out, but it's been on the back burner for the past few days.

Sometime this week I'm going to get my desk here at home cleaned off, and then I might start working on a few projects that I've been wanting to do for quite a while. We'll see though. Things don't often turn out as I expect them to during the summer.

* the project involves printing out Excel files to PDF, a job that should be rather easy. The issue is that for some strange reason, Excel breaks the file up into multiple print jobs, so we end up with one file that contains all the data and another that contains all the graphs. I have to figure out a way to either merge the files or get them to print as one file.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 May 2002 at 8:52 PM

Have you seen the ouranophobe redesign? It's pretty sweet. (Good job, Rachel and michael.) Anyway, while I was exploring its newness I came across a huge selection of new photos that Rachel's posted. Inspired by this, I might actually hook up my scanner and scan in a few of the pictures that I haven't yet gotten around to scanning. I have some pretty nice ones from graduation, including a shot of the plane towing a banner that flew over during commencement. I believe the banner read "Congratulations Robe Boy and the Class of 2002." Those of you who know Robe Boy will find this amusing. Anyway, be sure to remind me this week to scan those pictures. For those of you who want an early peek at some graduation pics, take a look at Dr. Loui's pictures. I'm pretty sure there's one of me in there, and there's a cute picture of michael and his sister, too.

On a different subject, work has been going well. My little database searching web application is essentially done. I just need to give it a more attractive layout. And on Wednesday I have to give a presentation on what I've been working on. It needs to walk through everything I've done, explaining how I connected to the database, what processing I did, everything really.

Today I saw the Cardinals lose another game. This is the second of three games of seen them lose in person this year. The one year I see them play a bunch of games, and they play horribly. I'm pretty disappointed.

Last night I went out with Luke, John Back, and Jon Polk. Polk is leaving for his job at a summer camp this weekend, so it was my one chance to see him this summer. We ate dinner at the westside Shylers, picked up Jared, and spent most of the evening playing pool (and having a few drinks) at Breakers. Of course, Luke and Jon don't drink, and Jared and John abandoned us to hit on the chicks from Channel 14 (where Jared works), so I guess I was the only one drinking, but details like this don't really matter. I had a good time, and that's all that matters.

Anyway, I somehow got roped into going to church tomorrow at the crack of dawn (also known as 10:30), so I need to get some sleep. I haven't slept too much the past few nights, so getting sleep now is doubly improtant.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 18 May 2002 at 11:45 PM

Day three is almost complete here at Whirlpool. Things are still looking good. The project is fun, and I'm making good progress on it. There's a chance my boss might upgrade to Visual Studio.NET, which would be cool, but I suspect he might be put off by the $549 (at the least) price tag on VS.NET. Anyway, my only real complaint about about work is the clunky Compaq I have to work with. It's some kind of Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM running Windows 98. Every time I try to play audio CDs in the computer I get a Blue Screen, and at other times it will crash for no apparent reason. I wonder if I can persuade them to upgrade me to Win2k or at least WinNT? Anyway, it's time for me to get my desk cleaned up a bit before I go home. Later.

PS - Does anyone know why michael has stopped posting?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 15 May 2002 at 3:41 PM

Day two here at Whirlpool. So far, so good. My current assignment is to write a web application that will allow engineers here to sort through some data that is currently stored in a SQL server. I'm working with Visual Studio 6, so the obvious solution is to use ASP. Anyway, this morning I figured out how to connect to a SQL server in ASP. Now I just need to implement some more complicated queries, think up a good interface, and then do a bit of web design to make an attractive page. So far things are much more interesting than they were last summer, which is very cool.

Last night Jared, Luke, John, Kate, and I went to Breakers. We played pool for a couple of hours and had a few drinks. I need to play pool more often, as my skills in that regard are definitely lacking. Today, Jared and I are supposed to go to lunch at Two Brothers (a Chinese buffet).

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 14 May 2002 at 9:21 AM

Tomorrow I start my summer job. For the second year in a row, I'll be interning at Whirlpool Corp. here in Evansville. Long-time readers may recall the amazing little amount of work I was given last summer, and how I consequently spent most of my work hours browsing the web, talking on AIM, and making abstract art. I can only hope that this summer is slightly more productive. If not, I'll have to take comfort int he fact that I will be among the most highly paid web-surfers in Evansville.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 May 2002 at 10:29 PM

I saw the new Star Wars movie tonight. I'm not really sure what to make of it. It was entertaining, but it also seemed rather cheesy. It's almost like George Lucas asked all the rabid Star Wars fans what they most wanted to see in the movie, and then added all those elements. I'd elaborate on this point, but I'm afraid I'd give away too much of the plot.

Speaking of the plot, I found it to be rather formulaic and predictable. Again, a detailed discussion will have to wait until after the release, as I don't want to spoil anything. But something I can discuss is the acting. I know I might be treading on thin ice here, as some of our readers (see the entry for 12/3) are rumored to be fans of Mr. Hayden Christensen, but I think I could have done a better job of playing Anakin Skywalker. I certainly have more emotional range than he managed to display; every emotion was the same pouty teenager act he'd done in the previous scene. After two hours I was getting a bit tired of it. But the plot didn't help much here. It needed to do a better job of explaining why Anakin was upset with Obe-Wan, but of course they couldn't do that without portraying Obe-Wan in a bad light (a big no-no since he's a hero of Episode IV). So Anakin ends up looking like a stupid angsty high schooler. Not a very sympathetic role for any actor, and one that Mr. Christensen didn't do very well. Ah well, I'm still going to pay 7 bucks to see it in the theatre, so I should probably stop trashing it now.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 May 2002 at 12:02 AM

I forgot to mention in my last post that I'm heading back to Evansville tomorrow. I start my summer job at Whirlpool on Monday, so I need to be back sometime this weekend. I was supposed to get my stuff packed up for my return tonight, but I struggled with the stupid access point all night, so I'll just have to get up early tomorrow and throw all my clothes into a suitcase (or three). I also need to remember to turn in my (and michael's) Millbrook keys tomorrow before I leave.

But all of that is for tomorrow. I've been up since before 7 o'clock this morning, so I'm going to get my room cleaned up a bit, and then head to bed.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 May 2002 at 9:46 PM

I think my wireless access point is toast. We got the DSL stuff for our apartment a week early, and I set it up and hooked the wireless access point/router to it, but the router won't generate a wireless signal. I've tried all kinds of things: reseting the wap, disabling and then re-enabling the access point, etc., but I've had no luck. The workaround until we get a new access point for the apartment is to use acm's WAP. I didn't want to leave it in the office all summer anyway. But now Chris, michael, and I will have to decide what to do about getting our computers hooked up. Time to get the other access point set up so that I don't have to be tethered to the wall...

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 May 2002 at 9:02 PM

Commencement starts in a little more than an hour, at 8:30 am. I am very tired, as I haven't really needed to be up this early in years. WashU doesn't even have classes (at least that I've ever taken) that start before 9. I'm not really sure why I'm going through all of this, since I'm not really graduating, but I guess my parents like it.

Anyway, I need to go tie my tie now. If I manage to stay awake after I get back, perhaps I'll finish this.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 May 2002 at 7:13 AM

I'm torn between stayting here in Millbrook tonight or staying in the new apartment. I need to make up my mind regarding this soon, because if I decide to stay in the new apartment, I need to get some stuff moved. Oh, and it turns out that we do have phone service in the apartment, just not to the jack in my room. I called maintenance, so hopefully this'll be fixed soon.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 May 2002 at 2:25 PM

Well I didn't get everything moved today. It started raining and I decided I wasn't too keen on getting wet. So I'll finish my moving tomorrow. I don't think it'll take too long. Of course then have to unpack everything, and that could take quite a while.

Chris tells me that the phone service in our new apartment, which was supposed to be turned on last Friday, still isn't working. I wonder if they're charging us for service right now? Well, michael signed us up for this, so he'll probably need to call them and get this figured out. Anyway, at some point the phone service will be live, and when that day comes you can reach me at (314) 367-0326. Unless I'm in Evansville, in which case you can't reach me at that number.

(The Cardinals are playing horrible, horrible baseball these days. Losing 8-0 to the Cubs? That's unacceptable.)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 May 2002 at 10:50 PM

Well, a week after everyone else finished all their classwork, I'm finally through with mine. Joe and I spent about three hours this afternoon installing and using cfengine, a configuration agent for Unix systems. When we finished, Allen filled out the grade change forms to switch our grades from I to P (or incomplete to pass, if you prefer). Once this grade change goes through, I'll have all of my grades for the past semester. 3 As -- in Software Engineering, Advanced Mobile Robotics, and the independant study class (WUgrade) -- and 2 Bs -- in Machine Learning and Formal Automata -- as well as a Pass in my Pass/Fail SysAdmin class. All things considered, one of my better semesters here at WashU.

Tonight I'm going to try to get almost all of my stuff moved from the apartment here in Millbrook over to the new apartment on Clara. I think it'll take about two trips in my car. Tomorrow, assuming I get everything moved tonight, I'll be moving some furniture from one office to another in the ACM Lounge and writing a proposal for getting new furniture, carpet, and paint in the lounge.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 May 2002 at 3:12 PM

A busy weekend for me. On Saturday Chris and I saw the Cardinals play the Braves as part of a senior week event. Then on Sunday michael's family took me to a Cardinals game with them. Both games were good, but I enjoyed the first one a bit more than the second one, primarily because I now look like a boiled lobster after sitting in the sun on Sunday. Tonight I need to do some laundry, and I'll probably take a load of stuff over to the new apartment. Tomorrow I have a bit of work to finish up for my sysadmin course. Joe and I are starting work on it at noon; hopefully, it won't take too long.

As I've been watching this, the Cardinals have been falling apart against the Cubs. Jim Edmonds and Kerry Robinson just let a fly ball drop between the two of them as they looked at each other wondering who would catch it. The Redbirds need to get their act together if they want to do well this year.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 May 2002 at 7:52 PM