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The violin's never been so cool...
Caught Andrew Bird last night with Lee at the Canopy Club. Impressive live show. I was really amazed how much can come out of so few people. If you’ve never heard Andrew Bird, his music has lots going on. Very melodic. The show (and presumably his album too) was performed by two people using slick audio equipment. They’d play several measures on one instrument, loop it, then play along to it with other stuff.
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I love indie music!
Finally got to see The Reputation live… and they rocked! Went to see them last night with Lee at Cowboy Monkey here in CU and they were fantastic. Great show. Can’t beat the price either. $8 cover for 3 bands playing a 45 minute set each. And Lee and I were right up there by the stage. Couldn’t get much closer without completely losing my hearing. :) A good time was definitely had by all.
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Exult - open-source Ultima 7 engine
So recently I’d been thinking a fair bit about how good some old DOS games were back in the day. The ones that really came to mind were the Ultima series (particularly U6: The False Prophet, U7: The Black Gate, and U7: Serpent Isle). Those were outstanding games. I’d done a bit of research and found DOSBox, which allows you to play a wide range of old DOS games on an assortment of platforms (ie it performs x86/DOS emulation).
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Bummer... Missing The Reputation Again
Was just poking around online last night and realized The Reputation is playing in town again next week at the Canopy Club. And unfortunately I’ve also realized Amanda and I are going to a Madrigal dinner at ISU in Bloomington that same night. Oh well. I’ll get to see them some day I hope. :(
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Movies, Music, and Birthdays Oh My!
Took a vacation of sorts down to SoFlo (hey, SoCal’s accepted, why not SoFlo for the sunshine state?) with Amanda to visit the folk this past week for Thanksgiving and Birthdays and so forth. Really spent a fair portion of my time going through the crap in my room from my childhood. Not so fun and I’m surprised Amanda didn’t kill me for wasting her limited vacation time in this manner, but at least we got to go to Monkey Jungle.
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Bad Computer Mojo
I’ve been suffering from some bad computer mojo as of recent. First our group fileserver tanked. Not that I really came into physical contact with it, but I talked to it over the network all the time. Then my brand spankin’ new NAS drive (got a Buffalo LinkStation, basically an external hard drive enclosure with ethernet instead of USB/Firewire) had some sort of catastrophic firmware failure while I was using it and I was forced to RMA it.
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That time of year again... Ethics Training!
What an unbelievable waste of time. Some state law passed last year (at least I assume last year… I started having to do this last year anyway) requires that all state employees must go through ethics training every year. Interesting how grad students are considered employees when it means additional requirements/constraints be placed on us and students when they’re talking about salary/benefits/parking/etc. Fortunately it’s done through the web instead of requiring us to attend an actual class.
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Great quote at IBM day
Heard this great quote from the late/great Seymour Cray: “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?” Apparently he said this in response to a question about the growing use of large clusters of commodity PCs for supercomputing applications. Traditional wisdom would suggest it’s much better to design the heck out of two very powerful processors and ease the parallel programming burden to achieve high performance.
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Apple Updates... higher res PowerBooks
Looks like Apple has finally realized that there are a lot of people who would like a high res notebook. Previously, their “pro” line of notebooks (aka PowerBooks) topped out at a piddly 1440x900 on a 17" LCD. Just think about that a moment. My Thinkbrick (that’s a couple years old at this point) does 1400x1050 on a 14" display. Their 15" was equally pathetic at 1280x854. They’ve just bumped up the 15" model to 1440x960 and the 17" to 1680x1050.
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Verizon support
So far everyone in our bunch (Amanda, yours truly, Katie and Amanda’s Mom) seems pretty pleased with Verizon. My phone actually tanked this morning… Picked it up to head off to work when I noticed it wasn’t on. Tried to turn it and and it wouldn’t. Figured battery’s just dead. So I plug it in real quick and it powers up. Starts the charging procedure and quickly says the battery’s fully charged?
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