It's snowing today: dry flakes swirling down through the cones of light from the street lamps. -17 degrees celsius wind chill, says the observatory's weather station. Walking to work at this hour of the night is an exercise in self-control, moving from step to step with care to avoid slipping on the icy walks, squinting to keep the flurries of snow from smacking into the eyes, and keeping hands tightly within pockets to keep the frigid air at bay.
Really, though, the snow and the cold make me happy. The vortices of air swirling around buildings whips the flakes into an intricately fractal frenzy, and the biting cold is a reminder of how crisp the world can be, absent of warmth. Tomorrow morning, I look forward to opening the door onto a landscape transformed into smooth forms of black asphalt, white snow, and grey stone and sky. Black and white has a certain, quiet, eloquence.
W00t w00t! Looks like it was just the bios that got screwed up. A quick reflash did the trick. There were a few loose inodes on fsck ("/ has not been checked in 46091 days, check forced"), but I can attribute those to the power failure.
Now, on to the paper of doooom!
This week hasn't been especially good for me, but I'm somewhat amused at the fortuitous timing of last night's storm. The power got knocked out briefly last night, and when I came home I found my computer shut down with a note from my roommate:
"Your computer was making beeping noises so I turned it off."
Sure enough, it's making an awful siren noise on boot, the kind of sound I associate (after years in the IT industry) with sheer terror, expensive purchasing orders, and CPUs melting in some kind of perverse recreation of a Salvador Dali painting. The whole thing is rather suprising, considering the surge protector and decent power supply. I'm running it down to the SCIC as soon as I can get a cart, but I don't really know what broke, or where I can get replacement parts from in time. Did I mention this is the start of finals week? >_<
I'd always suspected that those books everyone keeps raving about, The DaVinci Code, and its sequel Angels and Demons were, shall we say, perhaps less than factual, but this really cinches it for me.
Q: Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?
A: No.
Someone caused an interesting bug this morning: the input validation function doesn't check for weird character encodings (Hello, Korea...), which can be parsed and stored correctly but gunk up the XSLT processor. I've modified the node addition system to perform rigorous sanity checks on all incoming data. This has the added benefit of ensuring that your content is valid XML, so mistakes like tags which are closed out of order will be detected.
My introduction to Cara Chomski went something like this:
"Cara? She's frighteningly competent."
"At what? Classwork, sports, discussion..."
After sneaking through a temporally claustrophobic schedule punctuated by moments of enjoyment vis. retroactive Russel recovery and crowbar defense 101, I managed to assemble a costume and enjoy a happy Halloween. In keeping with Nick, Max, Russell, and the two Rachels's theme of Fight Club, I was an evil minion. It's somewhat anticlimactic when your everyday clothing is suitable for bringing about the downfall of civilization, but it fit the part well.
Visited the haunted Evans and Nourse, which was amazing. The volunteers put an incredible amount of work (and ketchup) into converting the dorms, and it really paid off well. The image that sticks in my head afterwards isn't the zombies, knives, or blood stains, but the old tunnels covered in graffiti. Poems, drawings, satanic inscriptions and promises to loved ones, marks of furtive exploration and drunken success, logos of sports teams emblazoned in white and blue spray paint, paintings from "Where the Wild Things Are", lyrics of songs and fragments of descriptive prose, all carefully preserved within a musty corridor, unobserved beneath the feet of passers-by. One could spend hours simply reading and exploring these endlessly annotated passageways. It's something no photograph can capture, though I wish it were possible to do so.
Maybe some day I'll have the opportunity to return.
Yarr, Halloween is here. Pechous shaved and dyed his hair, which makes him a completely different person bearing an uncanny resemblance to himself. There are gorillas walking into the dining hall and sitting down with trays full of bananas--whether for Halloween or sociology, I can't tell. As for myself, well, it's my goal to find materials to become a Mr. Hand. This may or may not be feasible.
Also: SLEEP NOW!
I run Fluxbox as my primary window manager, and use gnome-settings-daemon to keep gnome apps happy and GTK-informed. Thus far, all has gone well. However, OpenOffice.org does something very funky to determine whether one is using KDE or GTK, finds neither on my system, and drops back to the horribly ugly interface of 1997.
I haven't figured out how to fix this yet, but running gnome-session sets up something which convinces OpenOffice to use the GTK theme. It doesn't appear to be an environment variable, because I can set my environment identically under gnome and fluxbox, with no difference in OO behavior. My guess is there's some sort of socket or temporary file set by gnome-session, but it's all a mystery and the source is obfuscated. If anyone knows of a way to force OpenOffice 2.0 to use GTK, I'd be interested to hear about it.
It's a crisp autumn morning, the trees are alight with midwestern color, and cool sunlight defines sharp shadows on the pavement, grass, and leaves. I'm making my way down to the dining hall for lunch, and observing the trajectories of warmly bundled students flowing towards the chapel for convocation. Suddenly I realize that the half-familiar melody chiming across campus is not the bell tower's usual sonorous intonation, but the Hogwarts theme from Harry Potter.
I love this place.
After a harrowing day of homework and Assassins, Pechous and I stopped by the mailboxes. I'm used to not getting much mail, but I was expecting a book for my physics class. To my astonishment and suprise, my mailbox door was ajar--and a bouquet of colorful flowers were sprouting from its brass frame! I took them home, converted a CD spindle into an impromptu vase, and placed this unexpectedly joyful gift on my desk. It brings some much appreciated color to my space.
Thank you so much, mysterious giver of floral festivity. This makes me very happy. :-)
I just realized that aside from simple copies, the ALSA route_policy duplicate will mix to arbitrary numbers of output channels AND that such a device can use a Dmix PCM device as its slave. This means that it's possible to take 2 channel CD audio and have it mixed to 5.1 channel surround, and still let other applications use the sound card. This makes XMMS very happy.
On the other hand, my onboard i810 sound card reverses the surround and center channels, and it does some funky mixing on the center channel for the subwoofer, which sounds really messed up when played on the rear speakers. I haven't figured out how to compensate for this yet.
A useful ALSA FAQ can be found here: http://alsa.opensrc.org/faq/.