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#define alcoholiday
An occasion like Hallowe’en, April Fool’s, or Father’s/Mother’s Day. Though not categorized as an official holiday, is often used as a good occasion to get a good drunk on with friends. “Shit dude! It’s Hallowe’en, my favorite alcoholiday! Let’s get done up as Zombies and get druuuuunk!!!” [Source] We were in CU this past weekend to close on the sale of our old house (yay!). Seems we hadn’t realized it was “Unofficial” St.
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As you may have noticed...
Amanda and I are buying a new house. In a land far far from CU… Huntsville, AL to be exact… or technically Madison, AL to be even more exact (suburb to the west of Huntsville). No, Derek didn’t graduate. While one could ask “why is he leaving sans-degree”, a better question might be “why is he referring to himself in the third person?” To put it simply, I just got fed up with how things have been going (or not going to be more precise) and decided it was time for a change.
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Hell hath frozen over, Part III
Apparently the UofI hasn’t called a snow day since ‘79. That’s close to 30 years of no snow days. They had some silly spokesperson on the news last night that tried to claim we were such a hardy campus and liked to walk everywhere so it took an awful lot to shut us down. Apparently they decided that severe blizzard conditions with 45mph gusts and snow falling way faster than the plows could ever hope to keep up with might actually warrant a snow day.
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Hell hath frozen over
All classes have been canceled for Tuesday (Feb. 13) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More than 5 inches of snow fell overnight, up to another foot of snow is possible by Tuesday night and a blizzard warning is in effect. U. of I. employees who have been designated as essential personnel are expected to report to work. This mailing approved by: The Office of the Chancellor The U of I never cancels class.
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Hell hath frozen over, Continued
All Wednesday (Feb. 14) classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been cancelled. Continuing high winds and snow have made it impossible to keep streets and sidewalks clear and safe. Only personnel providing critical services should continue to report for each work shift until further notice. Employees uncertain about their status should direct any questions to their supervisors. Classes at the U. of I. Child Development Lab also are cancelled for Wednesday.
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Life and ASPLOS
So life has been pretty… something recently. Too much going on and not quite enough sanity to go around. Fortunately, I get to head out to San Jose this Sunday to visit with Rich and Carrie… oh yeah and go to ASPLOS (Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems). Looks like it should be an interesting conference and the best part is I don’t have to foot the bill. :)
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Google's at it again
Looks like their calendar solution has gone “live”. Looks like it has most of the stuff I’d like… add events via web, multiple calendars, publish all info or free/busy info (or nothing), subscribing to other published calendars (such as the UIUC Academic calendar courtesy of ACM’s Macwarriors), import CSV/iCal, export XML/iCal, assorted notification options, some sort of ability to auto-add event invites, manage who you share a given calendar with (including giving them the ability to manage events).
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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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You eeediot!
What’s the deal with stupid people getting union secretary gigs in Universities? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great and helpful secretaries in my time. But so many of them are just so useless! I’ve been dealing a bit with one in the business office for our department trying to place orders for my students in senior design. Here are my two experiences so far: Took a couple of days to get my first order placed.
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Stupid people suck!
I hate stupid people. I can accept that the population at large is generally clueless about all things tech, and so I have a fairly high tolerance level when they do annoying newb things. The people that really tick me off are the ones who are clearly in a technical field (say, a whole bunch of people in academia on a FPGA research/education mailing list), and are clearly clueless about very basic concepts such as email…
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