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#define moxie
1 : ENERGY, PEP 2 : COURAGE, DETERMINATION 3 : KNOW-HOW, EXPERTISE [Source] Pronunciation: ‘mak-sE Function: noun Etymology: from _Moxie, _a trademark for a soft drink
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Cubic Cyclonium
So early last week, I received the coolest thing from a guy at Altera. It’s called the Cubic Cyclonium, and it makes one heck of a paperweight. In essence, it’s a small system designed around an Altera Cyclone FPGA and includes a bunch of cool stuff (168 LED array, 1MB of SRAM, VGA out), all embedded in a block of clear Lexan plastic. It draws power over a USB cable, includes software to program it to do a variety of neat demos (defaults to displaying time and date, can display a scrolling marquee text message, stock quotes, and several games/screensavers including tetris, pong, life, etc).
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Machine Names
So I don’t think I’ve explicitly mentioned it, but I ended up renaming most of my machines a while back. I decided to switch to a theme as opposed to the random naming scheme I was using before (ie Malaise, Elysium, Nicosia, Sulaco, Aragorn, etc). At this point, most of my stuff is named after characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. My aging Athlon box (Elysium) has been named after Polonius, the doddering old fool.
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malkier.com
Well, I finally did it. I signed myself for an actual, bonafide web hosting service. No more being limited to what will fit on my University server (and having to move that every so often) or running off my Linux box over really slow uplink. I’m still in the process of moving in (which will involve a rework of my website to some extent), but have managed to relocate my blog and start transferring some of the pictures in my gallery.
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Evanescence
So I saw Evanescence in concert this past Tuesday at the Assembly Hall. Great show. First opening act, Atomship, was kinda eh. They weren’t awful, but they certainly weren’t very good either. Lead singer was pretty weird. Had something vaguely resembling a British accent until he mentioned they were from Mississippi when he suddenly reverted to a good ol' boy accent. And he had this weird twitchy, seizurey sort of “dance” thing.
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Liz Phair followup
Just wanted to post a quick followup to my previous Liz Phair post. Found this pretty cool shot of her performing at Foellinger (courtesy of the Daily Illini). I lost count, but I believe she rotated between 3 Fender electrics and some sort of acoustic during the course of the show with her roadie retuning between swaps. She claimed she had to swap out guitars a lot because he would have to retune depending on the song.
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Liz Phair
Yeah, so things have been pretty busy the past several months, and I haven’t made any posts here since the fall semester started. Anyway, just wanted to pop on here to say I went to the Liz Phair concert last night and it rocked. Quite outstanding. If you haven’t heard her stuff, and like “chick rock”, I’d suggest checking her out. Her most recent album is more pop than her older stuff.
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A Jane Story: Tupperware
So State Farm, or at least the actuarial department, has a policy that co-workers do not bring in food to help you celebrate your birthday (or any other celebration-worthy event). That would be dumb since you end up having to bring in food frequently in a large department. State Farm’s solution: the person celebrating is expected to bring in food for the department in order to celebrate. That way, you only need to bring in food once a year (ie your own birthday).
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A Jane Story: Jane vs. UPS
Well, since I’ve introduced Amanda’s co-worker Jane, I suppose I should actually start posting some of the more absurd stories about her. The first one that comes to mind I will entitle “Jane vs. UPS.” One day, Jane got it into her head to send a marinated steak to a priest friend of hers in New Jersey. So she packaged up this piece of raw, marinated steak in a bowl surrounded by ice, and put this bowl in a box and taped it shut.
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Tales of the Weird
So I’ve decided to add a new category. I think I’ll title it “Tales of the Weird”, but for some reason I suspect simply “Jane Stories” would be more accurate. As such, I’ll start this category off with a brief introduction to Jane. For those not in the know, Jane is one of Amanda’s co-workers over at State Farm corporate in Bloomington. Anyway, Jane is a weird little critter that should have been fired long ago, but somehow due to the ineptitude present in corporate America, continues to be paid to occupy space.
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