encoded notions

I finished reading William Gibson’s Idoru a few days ago. I’ve got the seeds of a longish blog entry stewing in the back of my head, but I have to sort some things out before I can start composition.

In other news, I’ve begun to read Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Cameron Marlow refers to his list of daily web-wanderings as oddments: low threshold links. I looked at my Firebird bookmarks, and saw that adding an oddments page to my own site would be very beneficial.

In the course of a few hours, the code had sprung from my fingers. As Emeril Lagasse always says, “Bam!”

My birthday is the 14th of August. Imagine my surprise when Entropy decides to give me a great birthday gift: a frelling blackout. Not just any blackout, but one that essentially took the entire Northeast sector of North America offline. Talk about 404 errors. As a bonus feature of the blackout surprise gift, my air conditioning unit in the dorm room terminated its cooling ability that afternoon and did not resume functionality by Saturday.

So, any plans to have some sort of birthday dinner at a nearby restaurant were promptly destroyed. Normally, that would be alright, except I had yet to consume a dinner of sorts, and the only food products I had in my room—aside from the peanut butter & jelly sandwich materials—required heat of some sort to eat. Jamil and I hopped in my car and travelled 4.5 miles down the road to his friend Kyle’s house under the impression that we could use their charcoal grill. (Driving with zero functional traffic lights is an experience unto itself, especially on the return trip later that night.) Apparently they still had power!

[insert trivial events here]

Since I really had nothing else to do, I decided to stick around and listen to Jamil’s band rehearse. Not exactly what I would have imagined doing on a birthday, but it was enjoyable (the band is quite good).

Afterwards, with the power restored, Jamil and I watched Death to Smoochy. Definitely an August 14th that I will not forget.

Last Friday felt like the longest day I’ve experienced in a long time. This entry deals mainly with the time interval between 8am and 4pm.

To finance my summer housing @ RIT I’ve been working two jobs for the physics department. The first is merely a continuation of my stockroom attendant position that I work throughout the Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters. The second is a position working in the Nanopower Research Labs. Over the course of the summer, this research position has changed in nature from being Brad Conrad’s assistant in his solar cell research to actually measuring and recording data for the carbon nanotube enhanced PEM fuel cell research project. I really didn’t care what I was doing, as long as I was receiving a paycheck every second week.

About halfway through the course of July, Dr. Raffaelle informed me that I would be presenting my research to an audience on the 8th of August. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I do not—in any way, shape, or form—enjoy giving presentations to groups of people. Add to this the fact that I had no solid understanding of what it was that I was doing in that lab for 10 hours per week.

It took me a couple of hours (i.e. 4-6) to both look up the pertinent information about PEM fuel cells and concoct some vague structure for the powerpoint presentation that would allow me to fill a 15 minute window of time.

Friday was the day when every undergrad in the College of Science and College of Engineering that has been working on a summer research project presents their findings to family, faculty, friends, and random people. I skipped my morning job to better absorb presentation style from 10 of the presenters preceding myself.

There was a wonderful free breakfast and lunch (during which the fishtank move was planned for later in the day). Rob Heslin, Brad Conrad, Melanie Day, Nick Guggemos, and Gary Kapral were some of the presenters that I know personally. Despite the fact that I absolutely detested my own presentation @ 3:05pm, I enjoyed the rest of the day.

Last Friday felt like the longest day I’ve experienced in a long time. This entry deals mainly with the time interval between 4pm and midnight.

Since Nick has done a bang-up job of giving both a humorous and accurate description of the process of moving the HOGS fishtank, I’ll just cite some of the more interesting sections and link to the rest: part 1 and part 2

The statement “we moved the fishtank” is a greatly simplified version of what actually happened.

“Moving” means taking a 300lb object and relocating it from the 4th floor of Gleason to Rob Heslin’s house (a fellow physics major who lives 10 minutes away from campus) in a timespan of 7 hours.

Next, we had to catch the fish. Fish do not like to be caught. We did not have a net. Rob, RB, Mel and I are all brilliant physics majors, and it did not take long for someone to hit upon the idea of using a tupperware container as a net (the disposable kind). Contrary to what one might believe, it is not easy to catch semi-tropical fish, even when they (the fish) are relegated to a (relatively) two-dimensional environment.

Tupperware does not make an efficient replacement for a real fish net. The only way that I was able to catch my one fish was by scooping him and a half-container of gravel and pinning the sucker against the side of the tank; since the tupperware does not move through the water, but rather displaces water as it moves, it greatly increases the ability of the little swimming chunks of sushi to use their “fishy-senses” to detect the approach of the container.

I think that a good freshman project this year will be to move the tank back from Rob’s to HOGS.

I heartliy second this notion. It would get the new piglets working together as a team to reboot the fishiness of the lounge. Plus, I’ll have to do less work (my car/yacht is already dedicated to the task of delivery). :+)

It appears as though the fishtank has come back to haunt us (and by “us” I mean HOGS folk) yet once again. The first time occurred directly at the end of spring quarter. Toby, Toby’s father, and Jamil had to coerce it out of the lounge, down the stairs, across the quad, into the elevator, and down the hall to his summer room.

Now it seems that getting it back to the floor may prove to be interesting, to say the least. Nick is leaving this Saturday. I’m leaving on the following Saturday. Jamil is temporarily moving a few miles away from campus. Toby (i.e. the only other person who has access to the room with the fishtank) works from ~3pm to ~7am Saturday through Wednesday each week.

The Housing Operations people will kick us out on the Monday after I leave. (and “us” includes the fishtank, I think)

I have this bad feeling like too few people will help in the move (mainly because no one is here to help) and I’ll be one of the few fishtank helpers who spend 3 hours finessing it back into Colby B.

I think I’ve finally finished tweaking the URI functionality present with Orchid. Permalinks will actually be permanent now. I tried to follow the guidelines for the ultimate Weblogging system when repairing the structural reference system.

Slackware Linux is my favorite distribution, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel quite annoyed at it sometimes.

This is especially true whenever the time comes around where I must reinstall it on a wiped hard drive. Let me emphasize that the Slackware installer does hardly any configuration beyond things like a network connection, partitioning/formatting, and setting a root password. This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because there are very few configuration and dot files that are under the control of sketchy “control panel”-ish applications; the user has full control of the configuration. It’s bad because the user must dig through man pages, web pages, /etc, and $PATH to locate things from the program that can add users to the system, to the option that controls how many failed login attempts are allowed at the console.

In my limited Slackware installation history (Slack8.1 on a desktop and a laptop), it seems that it takes 2-4 weeks before locating and fiddling with all necessary settings and locating, downloading, compiling, and installing programs absent from the single installation disc.

Why do I do this? Because it’s fun!

I’d like to say a fond farewell to the website title that I’ve used for several years now. The Realm of Naelyn was something I came up with during chemistry class in high school. It was the time of synthesis for my language: Nekanaa, and I had wanted to use my new handle “Naelyn” in conjunction with the lettering of the language somewhere in the header of the page. I think the phrase I used was kolaya narayeroo—my home. I’m kinda sad to see it go, but change isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In its place stands a new title Chaotic Cognizance. That would be the result of roughly three hours of searching through the visual thesaurus branching off of keywords like pattern, entropy, think, complex, idea, etc.

In addition, I’d like to note that after I finish fixing any more bugs in my URI-handling code, Orchid is almost near an official 1.0, rather than its current floating 1.0 mark (that’s just laziness in action).

How long will it be before I can say that this frickin’ project will be near a true 1.0 status? I discovered what Movable Type users swear by for entry formatting: Textile; so what did I do? I chucked all of the poorly-implemented formatting code and opted to adapt the Text::Textile perl module for Orchid. I also discovered Text::Template over at CPAN and found it to be better than the interpolation system of blosxom—so I rewrote the style files and the blog_mode plugins to take advantage of this superior templating system.

Like I asked before, when am I going to be happy with this?