There’s a typo on my paper Eagle Planner for today. It thinks today (the 31st) is a Wednesday. It also thought yesterday was Wednesday. If there was a day of the week worth repeating, I think it should be a weekend day or a Friday. Wednesday isn’t that much more fun the second time.

I had an impropto meeting with CS Prof. Brian Bailey on 3/21. I asked him about his classes that cross-listed with LIS, and told him I was enrolled next semester, and asked for his feedback. Afterwards, I came back to my desk and scribbled down my notes on a postit until I figured out how I was going to store them. You know, somewhere where I could search for them later electronically. Maybe index them by date, or cateogry. Uhhh, like if I just blogged about it. So this post is for me, gentle readers, not you. I thought about making it private, or adding more categories, but that seems like too much work.

I bought up netflix browsing, sports scoreboards like popup videos, “i wonder what…” conversation monitoring, and museum pda touring.

He mentioned grad school is a lot of work, and working full time and one class might be hard enough. He warned that CS classes can be harder than LIS classes, but don’t let that scare me away from taking stuff that’s cross listed. He said watch as many movies as I can right now, because next fall I won’t have time. He, of course, encouraged me to look into interfaces (because that’s what he studies,) and I think we will cross paths at some point. He recommended professors Twidell and Heidorn.

Hide the kids, I’ve started evangelizing on the blog. Note the spiffy Firefox button in the right column. What’s next? TiVo? Bloglines? Amazon? Who knows.

It’s cool to wake up and find you got an email from the Fighting Illini men’s basketball head coach:

The team and I want to thank you for your fantastic support. Your enthusiasm has energized everyone connected with our program.

We’re going to go all out for you as this memorable season draws to a close and hope you continue to cheer us on through our remaining games.

The players and I are committed to representing our campus and our community with honor and pride. We know you are, too.

We ask your help in ensuring that whatever celebrations may take place at the end of the season be safe and enjoyable for everyone.

We’re in the national spotlight now, and this is a rare opportunity for all of us to show what an extraordinary campus and community we share.

Thank you,
Head Coach Bruce Weber
and the members of your Fighting Illini basketball team

In other words, don’t burn down campus.

Note to self: when you want to get out of the office, don’t start a restore from your laptop, because then you need to wait for it to finish before you can go.

So, I’m killing time looking at how I put data into Wordpress. When I imported my stuff from the old blog, I dumped everything in the General category – which doesn’t help to find or categorize anything. I see search requests in the logs all the time that brings up a huge page with hundreds of posts, and I think that’s wasteful. So I’ve been thinking about how to best break up the site (both for blog entries and static information – WP calls the first posts and the second pages,) and I decided on some new categories (they should look familar to board game players.) The categories will also be tied to static content areas of the site – Arts & Entertainment will list the live concerts I’ve been to; Education & Development will have the school links, Sports & Leisure will talk about the IFUND, tailgate group, etc.

I fixed the categories from posts from March and from a few low-post categories, but it was pretty cumbersome. I’ll probably write a tool to help re-categorize WP posts. I also don’t like the way the category list is sorted. I’ll have to look if that’s something I can configure in WP 1.5 when I make that plunge.

While looking through the website, I found that Yahoo is good and actually calls /robots.txt before polling an RSS feed. Somehow, the RSS/blog fad/phenomenon didn’t follow some of the hardfast, Internet friendly rules – like, if a program or script is going to scrape/crawl a website, they should requests /robots.txt first and follow its instructions. I applaud Yahoo for their adherance to things that are supposed to make the Internet a better place, and I’ll ask Bloglines about it (since I’m using them exclusively now for my aggregation.)

Whenever Flickr is down, they pop up a message stating they’re having a massage (for those that don’t speak geek,) and then qualify for those of us who grok webhosting. Their blog mentions how getting bought by Yahoo doesn’t save you from hard drive damage. I think that’s about right.

I also ran across funny video about tape failures, which I understood. I’m really coaxing a few more hours of life out of an old tape library at work, and I never know when it’s going to go up in flames. We don’t do off-site backups, but we have two honkin’ big fireproof safes in different rooms in the building, so things like leaky pipes or 3000 degree rooms doesn’t scare me … I just need to remember to close and lock them before I leave for the day.

These links are me practicing my philosophy that if I try to blog about everything I’m doing, and fall behind, I never will get caught up and I’ll miss posting about the good stuff that currently is happening. I think it’s enough right now to say it’s March, there’s championship basketball going on, the Illini are still playing, and life is good. I was at the first and second round games in Indianapolis last weekend. I’m going to the sweet sixteen and elite eight games in Chicago this weekend. I’m going to Saint Louis next weekend and am going to try to score tickets to the Final Four games. I have to admit it seems like a little over-the-edge fan-dom, but our team, this season, this schedule, these locations… all of them have the chance to be really good to the Illini-nation, and I’m going to enjoy the heck out of it while I can.

In other quicky news, this is the first post (I think) typed from my new computer. It sure is FAST! I’m still installing things, and soon I’ll move the data over from the old system (and make backups of it to DVDR or CDR.) The dnetc on this machine is screaming away. My only complaint/obstacle is the keyboard. I bought one of those split ergonomical keyboards and my wpm speed has dropped a little while I learn new finger positions for some keys. I’ll get better.

I officially accepted the grad school offer, so I’m on for fall. I register in about a month; I need to get assigned and meet with my advisor before then.

I’ve been on allergy medicine for about a month, and besides a nagging cold that hasn’t gone away (especially with the last few weekends I’ve had,) I’m feeling much better quality-of-life-wise than before the allergy meds.

The DVR box from my cable company died this week, and took all the shows I hadn’t watched on it with it. I’m not too worried, because Lost and ALIAS are going to be on DVD before too long anyway.

Ummmm, what else? Gas prices suck, and some of the doomsdays stuff I’ve been reading leads me to think it might never get cheaper. I guess the next car will be a hybrid. Speaking of cars, I’m trying to get everything wrong with it looked at before it rolls over 36,000 miles (probably before the end of the year.) Next week, the radio is getting replaced.

The blogspace has been buzzing about Terri Schiavo and who gets to determine if she can be euthanized or not. I’m really torn on this – everytime I hear something new I don’t know what to think, and I can understand why this is a hard decision for the family, courts, even legislators. I already feel I should have a will drawn up with the house and everything. When I have that done, I think I’ll get a living will and medical power of attorney as well. I’m not sure yet if I’d want to live or die in Schiavo’s state, but I certainly wouldn’t want this much attention, or cause that much strife for my family.

But that’s sad stuff. On to good, happy stuff, like Illinois basketball in Chicago. Wheeee!

From the word of the day:

Gourmand is from French gourmand, “greedy.”

Usage note: A gourmet is one who has discriminating taste in
food and wine. A gourmand is one who enjoys food of fine
quality, and also one who enjoys food in great quantities.
Glutton signifies one who simply eats to excess, without
reference to the quality of the fare consumed.

Good to know.

The most undelicious thing I’ve posted on del.icio.us: the Hamdog

The dish, a specialty of Mulligan’s, a suburban bar, is a hot dog wrapped by a beef patty that’s deep fried, covered with chili, cheese and onions and served on a hoagie bun. Oh yeah, it’s also topped with a fried egg and two fistfuls of fries.

Read the article from MyWayNews

More data mining….

Last week, I discovered Netflix can email you a history of all the movies you’ve rented, and when they were checked out and checked in. I thought, “Neat, I can use this to tell how many movies I’ve rented and what my average rental time for a movie is.” So I started writing a parser. Tonight, I’ve been working on adapting that parser to the web so other people can run stats on their Netflix histories.

You can see an example of what it does here. The sample is just a small subset of my history. I’ve run it on the full thing, and I know my average turnaround time is about 27 days and each movie over my entire history with Netflix has cost me just under $7. I know the shortest turnaround time from Champaign to St. Louis, even if I watch them as soon as I get them and put them in the mail the next day is 7 days. Pathetic, eh?

What I hope to accomplish by this parser is a better understanding of how I use Netflix, and hopefully increase my usage of it to make it more economical (the more movies I rent per month, the more value I get out of it.) I guess another fun thing to do would be to compare my rental ‘out’ times to what it would cost me to do the exact same thing with Blockbuster and see if Netflix, Blockbuster online, or Blockbuster traditional rentals (with or without late fees,) would be a better deal for me.

If you are a Netflix subscriber and want to help me test it, or think it should have new stats/features, please let me know. The only “bug” I’m aware of at this time is it assumes a 3-out plan. I should fix that to either figure out how many movies you have out by the history, or prompt the user. I’ll probably clean it up a bit and lure some of the Netflix bloggers to it and see what they think.

Geeky, but cool? Fun, and useful? I can live with that.

I used to get a new computer once a year. That was back when I was a self-employed and I needed the tax write-offs (and the newer technology was fun.) But that stopped in 1998, and I haven’t bought a new computer for my home use since. I used that 1998 computer up until the move this last summer; something with the motherboard/cpu didn’t POST right when I tried to bring it up in my new house. (I hope that it’s only a mobo issue, and my drives are still working okay. I don’t have good backups, and that’s one of the first things I want to address.) So, I fixed that today and bought a new PC.

Okay, technically, I bought the pieces to a new PC. New motherboard, CPU, memory and case (since all of those were required,) and a DVD burner and new keyboard/mouse. I could have bought a whole new cheap machine from Dell, but I got quality pieces (read: not Celeron/Sempron and the mobo has SATA.) I’ll upgrade the hard drive and video card later – what I bought was just enough to get me back up and running at home. I used the ARS Technica buying guides and basically spec’d the pieces from the Budget Box. Plus there’s something cool and fun about building a computer from pieces. (Although when I’m swearing because stuff isn’t playing nice together or I didn’t order the right stuff, you can laugh at me.)

The stuff should be here in a few days, and I’m sure I’ll post more when I get it up and running. I went cheap this run because I ultimately want to get a laptop for home use (daaaaamn you Kresl) but that’s going to wait until grad school.