someone has a case of the mondays!!!

hello.

Lets see... today was fantabulous!! No, honestly, today was a good day. Ill try to avoid the _except_ and the _but _by saying that my only regret was that I had chosen a more intelligent ICS professor. I mean, really, this guy, although a brilliant theorist and mathematician, is a _horrible_ teacher and programmer. He does try to explain things but he defaults to his math knowlege before trying the common sense routeb. I often find myself writing "Is this guy out to get me?" or "Why me? What have I done to deserve this?" in margin notes (after Jon) during lectures because his explanations so thoroughly involve *evil* math-- a concept which makes my eyes glaze over and my brain imagine ten-thousand kiwis dancing the macarena in the sky. i miss givargis. ahem... I _mean_, I miss givargis' teaching style... mmkay? Other than that, I went into lab and Kevin helped me tremendously. Sheesh... i went from knowlege = 0.05% to knowlege = 99%. Amazing. Thank gawd that Lueker extended the deadline... or else we all would have been dead.

Oh, by the way, I finished Carter Beats the Devil... such a good book... and Carter David Gold (the author) is a UCI Alum!! Zot, Zot, Zot...etc... blah.

Now, time for sleepyland....:)

hump day... lets get frisky!!

Aaah... today is wednesday. midterms, projects, everything piles up today. (for more information, you can check out my calendar) Only an hour to go before math-related freedom--why am I so apprehensive? anyway... i've been working on the new site (OMG!!!) and it should be up within the week. I'm hoping to unfiy the genome apperance... most pages _won't_ be redesigned, but we will have a new spiffy main site and no more annoying splash page. If you want to see the new look... too bad! You'll have to see it when its released!! ;) heh heh.

I've been looking for new music lately... if you dont know, my music craving hits around Friday (when I make the long trip back to Walnut) and I *must* have a new cd for that lonely adventure. So, if you find some good, new band that I've never heard of, let me know!

Alright... its time for me to get frisky with this midterm... hopefully I will dominate this one like I did with P9.

president's day blog-a-thon

hrm... well its president's day today, so... I guess I'll blog!!

So much has happened since my last blog.. so I guess I'll attempt to catch up.

Math went okay... even though I failed the test like everyone else. In my opinion, our midterm was graded totally unfairly... thankfully, our professor will drop it if our final turns out better-- go study session! after the midterm, I had to finish my ICS project (union-find) which turned out okay and was finished at 12:00 pm (it was due at 3:00 pm). it ended up being a _stupid_ mistake that made me lag behind... must not make the same mistake again.

last week was pretty rockin'-- it was Jasmine's birthday on monday then I had a sociology midterm on thursday, which, I hope, I kicked ass on. aaron came by on friday... and we hung around with Jon (left, and don't ask) and Ben. Jon bought a TV for Kathy at Frys (a nice one to add) and Aaron and I went to BajaFresh, where Aaron got his name misspelled as "Eren"... LMAO

FYI, I'm starting the "Cup of Name-misspelling fame" and possible site for these wonderful abominations of our given names... keep your eyes open!

I'm sure theres more to write, but I'm getting tired... so I shall continue later.

-Brad

the end of a long week...

... and the beginning of another.

So much has happened lately-- the all nighter for Lab C, the infamous Fan Club (2 Members and growing strong :D), my new logitech mx 700, valentines day, etc. Essentially, college life is really hard, yet strangely rewarding... hopefully, no more all nighters this quarter. I think tonight, I'm gonna make this short as I would really LOVE to get a nice long night of sleep.

I'll leave you with this-- an awesome song by one of the greats...

Please don't turn your eyes my way
They're unnerving and undeniable underneath the work that you do
I can feel the real you
I can feel the real you

You're a jewel to sparkle around my neck
The fragrance in a morning I can not forget
You're a jewel to sparkle around my neck
The fragrance in a morning I can not forget

You're smiling wide with slender frame
You're immoveable in recollection
underneath that real thing that you do
I can feel the real you
I can see inside you

You're a jewel to sparkle around my neck
The fragrance in a morning I can not forget
You're a jewel to sparkle around my neck
The fragrance in a morning I can not forget

You're a jewel to sparkle
You're a jewel to sparkle
Through my mind you wonder
Spelled to blind forever
Pain and ease together
Love can pull us under

You're a jewel to sparkle around my neck
The fragrance in a morning I can not forget
You're a jewel to sparkle around my neck
The fragrance in a morning I can not forget

Juliana Theory- Jewel to Sparkle

Rain

"College is just hard enough to be really annoying" -Jon Tai

*Sigh* Unfortunately, this is beginning to be true. To explain to the high schoolers, In college, there is always something to be done and, moreover, your fun comes at the expense of your grades. College has this marginal quality-- if you worked really hard, you could get straight As. However, if you would like to keep your sanity, you will need to work marginally hard but unfornately, you can only expect a few scattered As and mainly Bs/Cs.

Lately I have been really busy with labs and midterms, etc, yet this week, I am in a lull. Nothing is due this week, allowing me lots of personal time, yet I have plenty of things due in next week or in two weeks. Also, finals are a matter of weeks away (omg). So, do I enjoy this week while I can or get all of it done now, hoping that next week will be light?

But as the old saying goes, why do today what you can put off till tomorrow? :-D

So in the persuit of ephemeral happiness, I've been working on tweaking my linux installation. Last night after Jon and I finished ICS hw, we were surfing the internet, looking for an iTunes type application for linux and found one. I guess we both were getting tired of XMMS (a Winamp 2.x clone for linux) with its hackish interface and lackluster features so a better application was in order. Rhythmbox is an iTunes like application that operates without the need for playlists (although it does support them). You can sort by genre, album or artist and Rhythmbox will shuffle in that category, i.e.: Lets say I was in a punk-ish mood. All I have to do is click on genre and go down to punk and Rhythm box will shuffle in the punk genre, serving up punk and only punk. Spiffy. Also, It supports a song rating system, i.e.: Since I like Sugarcult more than Simple Plan, I will rate Sugarcult higher than Simple Plan, allowing for more playtime of Sugarcult and less-- but still some-- playtime for Simple Plan. Even more spiffy. So for the last three hours, I have been trying to get Rhythmbox to work in RH 8.0. Unforunately, gstreamer, Rhythmbox's parent libraries, are fully integrated with RH 8.1 (phoebe) and not RH 8.0 (psyche). So, my hackish attempts were in vain. Thankfully, when I do get RH 8.1, Matthew Hall has all the packages ready :).

I can't wait till phoebe. I'm starting to get bored with my system as is... essentially, I'm waay too content as it is.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. I had been having problems with my mp3s skipping when I try to install packages. Jon figured it was that I didn't have DMA enabled on my first hard drive and this was confirmed with hdparm. We couldnt figure out why DMA was disabled for one hard drive (my main /dev/hda) but enabled for my secondary hard drive (/dev/hdb). This problem was really aggrivating me so I turned to google and found a description of what to do. First, before editing config files, I ran a test to make sure that dma wasnt enabled. I did a

cat /proc/ide/hda/settings

and saw that using_dma was 0. No surprise here. Next, I wanted to make sure that the hard drive could support dma (I knew it could, but just double checking) so I did a

hdparm -i /dev/hda

Heres what it outputed.

/dev/hda:

 Model=MAXTOR 6L040J2, FwRev=AR1.0400, SerialNo=662202003621

 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }

 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=32256, SectSize=21298, ECCbytes=4

 BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=1818kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16

 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=78177792

 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}

 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4

 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2

 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6

 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled

 Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-5 T13 1321D revision 1:  1 2 3 4 5

So since it has quite a few DMA modes (even udma 100), I figured that I'd go ahead and force-enable it. Supposedly, if your hd doesnt support DMA, the drivers will be able to tell and will disable it for you before you break something. Also, I guess RH disables a kernel setting that allows IDE DMA to be enabled by default... go figure. So, to force-enable it, I first tested the setting (as root) by typing

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

Here goes the benchmarking... it works! So, if this is true, you can add this command to startup by editing (as root) /etc/rc.local and sticking

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

and the bottom of the file. Bingo! Everything works!

Okay, I think thats enough for now.
:)

friday... time to celebrate!

wow... today was amazing! :D

More on this later!