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Holy crap! Do you think he failed?
From WICD15 News: Champaign Drivers Test Goes Wrong 2 people are rushed to the hospital after a driver crashes through a window at the Department of Motor Vehicles In Champaign. The 27-year-old man taking his driving test. One person inside was hit. And the instructor, riding in that car, was also hurt. Apparently the guy drove all the way into the waiting area. Like ALL the way. I thought this stuff was reserved for South Floridians… And is it just me, or is that a really strange, terse blurb the news people put on their website?
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Damn Dolphins!... or hanging out with Rachel and Tammy
Rachel and her roommate Tammy (who’s a hoot btw) came down Friday night to catch the show at the Canopy Club featuring The Living Blue, Tractor Kings, Dark Country, and The Dolphin. We showed up some time during the Dolphin’s set and all I have to say is weird. I couldn’t really tell whether they were playing something or just getting setup and making random noises on-stage. We elected to wait out at the bar until after their set was over.
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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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This is Grand
Lee and I trekked up to Chicago to catch The New Pornographers / Belle & Sebastian play at the Riviera Friday night. I handled travel plans (directions to the Park&Ride; station where we parked and caught the “L”, trains to take, transfers to make, how to get to the theater, last train we’d have to catch). Pretty uneventful trip for the most part. The most interesting part was how the bike lane to the side of the road in Chicago was used as a thug passing lane by many.
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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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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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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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OTR architect joins the ECE department!
I should really pay closer attention to who joins our department. Nikita Borisov apparently just started here this semester and is currently doing work on anonymous peer-to-peer networks. Nick introduced him to Jeff and I today with the intention of giving him some of our spare computers to get his group started. Afterwards I took a look at his past work and realized he was one of the primary architects for Off-the-Record Messaging that I use in Gaim (Linux/Windows) and AdiumX (OSX).
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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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