Lots of things going on, nothing of much substance, so I won’t pretend this is that interesting.

• I have a few days left to finish my Neural Network for Intro AI. It is mostly done, aside from some obnoxious behavior in the learning, but I think I have tracked down the cause.
• My AI Final Will start 12am Thursday and end at 7pm on Friday. Fun stuff.
• I think that while mildly interesting when used in conjunction to game playing and puzzle solving; I generally find AI boring and tedious most of the time, and will not be pursuing it. Just my opinion.
• This coming weekend Tim will be coming down for video games and other chicanery. I’m looking forward to a weekend of drunken relaxing and amusing gaming.
• Joe finished his last paper today, and barring some insane twist, he should be a bona fide graduate now. What a sellout.
• I will have my D80 in a week or two. It will be good times.
• I dove in to Rails and Ruby hardcore for a few days, much to the detriment of my neural network’s progress, but that’s not important. I like Ruby/Rails so far and hope to continue my learning once this stupid week is done.

In more somber news, I’ll be staying here this Christmas season because Jenn’s oldest (13+ years) cat Cleo has an overactive thyroid. This means she has to undergo a procedure in Indy next week where she’ll be injected in Radio-Iodine, and isolated for about a week in Indy. Jenn’s taking it pretty hard, but we found out today that the cancer (overactive thyroid = cancer in cats I guess?) hasn’t spread at all, so the treatment should save her. If you have any interest in this stuff you can read about what’s going on at http://radiocat.com Needless to say we aren’t going to leave while the cats in recovery, but Jenn’s mother is planning on coming to visit, so that will be cool.

My holiday plans are pretty much completely up in the air right now, as I really haven’t had the mental energy to figure out where and how available I’ll be… but I’ll figure it out next week.

I went to class today and camped out by the door, since I was a way early. I noticed the other guy camping out waiting for the class before ours to get out had an iPod Touch. So I talked him up about it and poked at it, and I decided that it’s a pretty good choice. I’m also less worried that apple will randomly decide to brick my ipod that I am worried that they would randomly brick my phone. Especially since I will no doubt be fucking with it till I get a SSH client working on the thing.

So I ordered it despite the loving words of my fellow FSF hippy friends.

< paulv> you shouldn’t buy a touch.
< weirdo> why not?
< bcs> Defective by Design, bitches!
< xentrac> closed proprietary DRM etc.?
< xentrac> but it’s so pretty
< weirdo> I’m not buying any DRMed music
< paulv> because it’s shit
< paulv> it’s going to break and suck and yu’re going to hate it
< weirdo> paulv: it’s going to be like crystallized sex and I’m going to love it
< paulv> crystallized sex hurts and you know it
< bcs> Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun at all.
< weirdo> prudes
< bcs> In sex some kinds of stiffness are good and other kinds are bad and that’s definitely the bad kind.
< paulv> it’ll be as much fun as being punched in the cock!
< paulv> buy the new Apple iCockPunch, available at your friendly neighborhood BestBuy
< weirdo> I read that as iCookPunch
< xentrac> with an included involuntary ISP signup!
< weirdo> xentrac: yay!

I worked at Joe’s house today, he helped me work through some infinite loops I had lurking in my scheme search function. I still need to figure out a heuristic and some search queue manipulation functions for best-first search and A*-Search. I hope to get it done this weekend, and not have to worry about it on Mon/Tues.

Think I’m gonna watch some office and hit the hay soonish.

Portable Computing Returns!

So, I think a month and a half without a real laptop was just about enough for me. I was forced to use my old Dell CPx (600mhz 128mb ram) for a few weeks. I think I was going through some serious withdrawal without my trusty portable link to the internets. I may require professional help, or at least more vespene gas.

However, I won’t have to worry about that anymore! My Dell XPS M1330 came today, and I’ve been playing with it a lot. I’ll probably post a review at some point, but no time for that right now.

With the reintroduction of a laptop into my life I suspect my blogging activity, and general association with all things social, will increase a bit. I tend to use my main computer for all things fluffy and video game related and save my laptop for all things social and programming related. Clear delineation of workspaces helps my mind maintain the sorely lacking focus needed to function.

Since I play a lot of WoW (which is full screen) there’s no real estate left for things like IRC, AIM, RSS feeds and the like. So, they get relegated to obscurity until I emerge from my gaming stupor, usually after everyone’s gone to bed. But no longer! I hope to be back in a big way. I’m even going to take a few days here and there and maybe work from friends houses (shocking) or places downtown… you know… outside! Good times will indeed be had by all.

My bank account is crying as we speak.

In the realm of technology; I saw the Apple announcement, and I plan on getting one of them thar new fangled iPod touch gadgets. But first I must get Jenn her new iPod classic that was her big birthday/christmas gift. Nothing says love like 160gb of storage with a Futurama quote etched on the back.

When the iPhone came out, I fell in love with the design of the device, but I didn’t want to get locked into a phone. “I want an iPhone, that’s less than 400, with no phone, and a bigger flash disk.” I remarked to a friend. Little did I know that that friend of mine was a secret Apple spy sent to tap my mind for the future of portable audio. Well played Apple…. well played.

My love for multi touch interfaces has been abundant ever since I saw Jeff Han’s famous multi touch panel demonstration video last year:

Jeff Han is just amazingly neat. I just saw that he spun off from the university and formed a company. (Perceptive Pixel) Where he’s continuing to work on large and amazing multi touch interfaces. Hit up the website and check out the video, I love this kind of stuff. Almost makes me want to get into HCI… but not quite.

Today is the car of the cdr of your life.

Taking classes again this semester. This semester I’m taking CSCI-B351, Intro to AI. So far it’s not been too bad. The hardest part has been brushing up on my scheme skills that have lain dormant for 6 years. I finished the first programming assignment with only a minor amount of head scratching, so here’s hoping that the rest of the class will go swimmingly. If not, I will go forth and bug Boco and Joe, for they both took this class already.

By my count I should only have about 10 classes left for my degree. I hope to be done in aprox 2 years. If events occur in such a way that I have to take a 20 credit hour semester in order to graduate in a proper time-frame to make IU happy, then I’ll just have to do that. After talking with my academic adviser it seems that that is a non issue assuming I don’t drag it out too much longer, so here’s hoping.

I still need the following to graduate:

• CSCI-B351 - Intro to AI, taking this right now.
• INFO I320 - Distributed Systems and Collaborative Computing.
• Two 300-400 INFO Classes that don’t count for major. I haven’t found the two I’ll be selecting quite yet.
• INFO I450 - Senior Thesis.
• ENGL W231 - Intensive writing.
• 5 Credits of Nat Sci (one class must have a lab)
• (122 - (ending credit total)) credits of electives. (I think I’m at like 80 credits right now)

So, here’s hoping those last few classes move by swiftly. Having a degree would be a nice feather in my cap. It’s only taken me eight years. Stupid career.