What a nice day...

Today was a very nice day, the sun was shining, clear sky, it wasn't too hot nor too cold. It was a nice day.

So, was it an omen of how the courts in America are turning when a piece of the marble adorning the Supreme Court Building fell off and busted? While I now consider myself a Republican by and large, I do feel that a somewhat balanced court is needed. Alito and the previous nominee both scare me somewhat. While I do not condone killing, I do believe that abortion is a choice best left to the woman going through the situation, not a judge in a court room. What that person decides is between her and God and she will have to deal with that in due time. But moving beyond that issue, there are other issues which are important. What seems like the ever widening provisions for the PATRIOT act, the seemingly bottomless pockets that the *AA have pushing their own agendas. Like the MPAA and others pusing the broadcast flag passage. Many of these things will most likely end up in the Supreme Court at some time or another. Maybe the judicial system is falling apart. Maybe this country is skating on a razors edge, teetering on falling one way or the other. We do have a voice in the battle. Thats why I signed up for emails from EFF to notify me of things that I can do to help. Hopefully soon I will have a job and start making decent money myself and I can donate to the EFF for the good work they do. But we cannot depend on them to do everything, we have to contact our senators and representatives. We have to vote, while it may seem like a 'lesser of two evils' thing, we must make our voices heard.

Thats what I have to say today...
~Kisea

Condolences

I received word that cbot's father passed away, this comes after some very strenuous times for her and her family. Its never easy to say goodbye to a loved one, especially one as dear as a father. She has always spoken very highly of her father to me. I met him once coincidentally when we were fleeing from hurricane Ivan, he had came down to help Lee get the house ready for the storm. I followed them from Mobile to Meridian then I went on to Cullman from there. He was a very kind and gentle man, I saw many similarities between her and her father.

The Bible says to mourn the birth of a child and celebrate the death of a loved one. While that is easy to say, its extremely hard to take to heart and do. Christy, you and your family will be in my prayers. I hope everyone who reads this blog will do the same.

There is nothing we can say or do which will make the pain go away, but we can help to ease your pain. We will be in touch with you to make sure your doing ok. If there is anything any one of us can do you for, if you need someone to talk to, someone to cheer you up, or someone just to keep you company we are nearby.

Brian

The day of thanks....we call it thanksgiving...

Well, I hope everyone had a good thanksgiving. I know I had plenty of Turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and Apple Pie. It was the first time I had been home since August. It kinda feels good to come home to see my family, but in a weird way Mobile is starting to feel more homely (if you remove the family factor).

The drive up on Wednesday was pretty good until around mile marker 234 where I ran into a huge traffic jam. I estimate I went about 5 miles in an estimated 1.5hrs at a snails pace. About 3.5-4 miles into it I saw an 18-wheeler with a police car behind it, so I thought this was the problem. It wasn't but it appeared in the stop-and-go traffic someone jumped over in front of him and caused him to abruptly put his brakes on which caused his cargo to slam into the front of the trailer, however the front of the trailer did not stop it. It took the back of the cab to finally stop it, thus the explaination to the disabled truck. So, about a 1-1.5 miles from the disabled truck I finally come upon the actual wreck. An 8 car pile-up against the concrete guard rail that seperates north bound and south bound lanes. Once we get past this obstacle it was a clean shot through Birmingham except for a slight slow down for malfunction junction (aka I65/I59-20 interchange). Poor people on the southbound lanes were really jacked up though, but not due to an accident. As the people passed the 8 car pile-up they were rubber-necking and caused them to back up a long way. Traffic was heavily congested 20 miles up the road due to the rubber-neckers.

Well, yet another black friday is upon us. I want to get one of the 19" Mag LCD monitors for $169 (after rebate) for mom, but I refuse to drive up the Huntsville in order to be there around like 3 or 4 AM to get in line for when they open the doors at 5AM. I'm going to try to get one online maybe. Mom has a little 15" Mag CRT, so I thought that would be good for her.

I would probably go to Staples to get one of the Maxtor 200gig hdd's for $29.95 (after rebate) but my hometown sucks, I think we still have THE largest wal-mart in Alabama and I think when it was built it was at least in the top 10 largest in the US. As you can see, Cullman lives at Wal-mart. But beyond that we do have an Office Max, they have Western Digital 200gig hdd's for $59.95 which isn't too bad, but not really worthy of bothering with it. Last year for black friday I went to Office Max to get the same thing, 200gig hdd for about double the price, I thought that maybe I should get there a little bit early to get in line. So I did, when I got in there and was looking around the people were going crazy, so I went to get my hdd and NO ONE was going after them. Eveyone was going for other stuff. I found it quite funny, I got the first hdd. So, I decided to see how long it took for the next person to get one would be. After looking around and getting bored, I left around 20 minutes or more later. Apparently, no one was interested in them, just everything else. I seem to think that is a sign that this may not be a town for me. I mean, when I hear that a local computer shop, which does work for the DA and stuff downtown, had a hdd crash and was about to loose ALL of this records because HE DIDN'T HAVE A BACKUP!!!! This makes me question, how did I get so nerdy in this town?

On a sidebar, when I say he was about to loose all of his data, my cousin actually had a part in saving the data. Apparently he troubleshot enough to determine it was the controller card on the hdd that went bad and not anything to do with the platters. So they found another hdd (don't know for certain if it was the same brand or even same model, but I assume so) removed the controler board from it and was going to use it on the old hdd but there was a hole which was needed but absent from the board. My cousin drilled the hole so it would fit and apparently they saved the data from certain doom.

Thats my story and i'm sticking to it....

~Kisea

So frustrating...

The season was going so well, offense and defense was in sync and playing great. Then the injury bug comes back and bites us square in the ass. On a long pass into the end zone, Tyrone Prothro breaks both bones in his leg, very grusomely I have to add. It actually made me sick to see it happen. That itself caused many problems with the offense, the opposing defense didn't have to respect the receivers as well and could rush the quarterback more.

So, the next few games went well, games were won but not nearly as easily as before. Then the injury bug hits us again, but this time square in the nuts. The only senior on the offensive line, J.B. Closner broke his leg. Now, we have another senior on the offensive line but he has never started a game before. Thus, no experience other than on the practice squad.

Then we lose to LSU, which we were leading at halftime 10-0, in overtime. Okay, sometimes luck runs against you. The defense was doing what they were supposed to, they had flushed the QB out of the pocket and made him scramble. But, the secondary didn't stay tightly covering their receivers and thus we get beat. Thats how the game goes. Well, we then travel to Auburn. Expecting a good game, but the offense was never there in the first quarter. The offensive line was horrible. Dave Radar you seriously have problems if you cannot adjust to situations like that. We could have replaced him at offensive coordinator with my 16 year old cousin, Brittany, and had just as good of chance to move the ball and score. Also, the receivers kept dropping passes. We could have put away LSU in the third quarter except for the dropped passes. Again against Auburn, we dropped a lot of passes, granted Brodie didn't get to throw too many considering the offensive line allowed him to be put on his ass all game.

I think 10 of the 11 sacks they had on us was in 3rd and long situations. Well, one thing you learn when you hang around the SEC and football in general is that on obvious passing downs, expect a blitz most likely from the outside. What does a good offensive coordinator do to slow the rush down? Throw screen passes and run draw plays. What did we do? Not a damn thing. I have been critical of Dave Radar before, however those days were previous to this blog. In addition, 'bama is in need of a good punter, if you find one please send him towards Tuscaloosa. Its so frustrating to know that your team is the better of the two, but they didn't execute to their potential nor did the play calling reflect the team.

Well, once again ole Jack Thomson is yelling about something. This time he is irate about the bad reviews he is receiving on Amazon.com. Mr. Thompson, if you weren't such a dooshe, maybe you wouldn't an entire genre of people pointing out how stupid you are. I dislike lawyers enough as it is, he just makes it much easier to hate them.

~Kisea

Is winter here for a few days?

They are giving a freeze warning for tomorrow morning with a projected low of 34 degrees and a low of 31 on Friday morning. But, alas don't worry, no snow is forcast so we won't be able to frolick in it unlike the espenator. But, i'm glad some cooler weather is here but I don't want to go straight from summer to winter with maybe one day of fall in between but I guess thats par for the course in Mobile. Its that time of year when, if you don't have much to do you can curl up in bed or on the couch or wearing your beach attire next to your computer and read a book or work on a fun personal project.

For those who don't know, kc's computer caught something which rendered its networking almost useless. Its quite weird, she can receive an address and DNS information. But when you loads firefox to go to any website, the progress bar jumps up to about half way then hangs and eventually says it cannot find the website. But Kenny and I stood there while we pinged an outside IP and received a response. Then to complicate things, it would only do that on cable, when we connected it to the dsl it worked fine. At least it worked fine for a bit. Now neither one works, but she can see my machine on the network.

I say, it should be open season on malware authors year round. Plus, the people who fund these malware authors who have full knowledge of what they are doing are just as liable to be shot on sight as the authors themselves (I'm sure that BJD will agree). I have had my share of problems, thank goodness nothing which caused a loss of data, only a mere reinstall of my OS.

Now we have the whole fiasco of Sony/BMG and their rootkit exploit. These guys really need to be severely punished. In order to protect their product from us, the consumer, and our right to fair use, they exposed our machines and personal data to possible exploits. Everyone knows the last couple years that malware has been aweful, everywhere you turn is some form of problem. IE, aka swiss cheese, has been an prime target but even firefox has suffered from some possible exploitation. So, whats the difference you may ask? On every occasion that a 'possible' exploit was found in firefox, the patch was out in 24hrs or less. I never see that happening from M$ for anything. California has filed a class action suit against Sony/BMG and I have heard that NY was supposed to do the same if they haven't already. But it shouldn't stop there. The artists themselves should sue as well, because there is no timetable for when the cd's without this exploit of trust will be released. This unwanted and uninvited software was included on about 20 of the latest cd's released from Sony/BMG. These artists are going to suffer as a direct result of Sony/BMG's boneheadedness. I would imagine that its part of their contract that they are unable to sue the record label over this, but I believe that this would an occasion where the court would strike this down. I hope this will strike fear into the record labels and *AA thugs that you just can't get away with anything. Lets hope this isn't just swept under the rug and the *AA's pour tons of money to help do just that.

Anyway, a reminder that tomorrow is the Python workshop from 3-5pm in FCW 19. I hope most everyone will come, I would love to see standing room only. If you have a notebook, bring it. There will be copies of Python available for installation.

~Kisea

What a disappointment...

The game was good in the first half, the offense was moving the ball well, the defense was playing well...then half time came. Whatever LSU changed at the half bumfuzzled both the offense and the defense for a while. Their defense was all over the quarterback and their offense was picking the defense apart. I'm glad the defense finally adjusted and started playing well but the offense was completely non-existent. I lost count of the number of dropped ball by the receivers when they hit 7, you just cannot win a game like that. I was very upset, I feel as though the offensive coordinator almost gave the game away with a too conservative play calling in the second half in particular.

Moving on, I finally get to work on my term paper since I finished the other papers for Langan over the weekend and the take home exam for the stupid cla...i mean AI class. I can't believe that last week flew by like it did and I haven't posted since last monday. Oh well.

Mr. Whitston is conducting the first part of a multi-part seminar on Python this Thursday from 3-5pm. Bring your notebook if your interested in attending, copies of Python will be available and a 'homework' assignment will be give as an exercise between this seminar and the next (some time in the spring semester). Food and drinks will be available. I hope there are many people in attendence to demonstrate the interest in new technologies. Maybe this will benefit Doug so he can give his eagerly anticipated Ruby on rails presentation rather than yet another eclipse presentation (which should be memorized by some of the faculty if you ask me). Hope to see many of you there.

Let the trash talking begin...this saturday is the annual Alabama-Auburn game, which is widely dubbed 'the iron bowl'. This will be the first time in quite a while that both teams come in ranked in the top 15 that I can remember. I was hoping both teams would be in the top 10 but that was slightly marred. I think the offense will find a way to win this big game. These seniors have stuck it out through thick and thin...if only the receivers can find a can of stick'em between now and then. Anyway, everyone knows who's going to win right....

Roll Tide
~Kisea

PS: that would mean Alabama is going to win.

9 down, 3 (or 4) to go...

Alabama (#4 AP and Harris, #3 BCS and Coaches Polls) rolled up another win to run their record to 9-0 this season. Two big games stand in our way between the SEC Championship game in Atlanta. LSU (#5 the AP, coaches, and Harris polls and #7 in the BCS) travels to Tuscaloosa this saturday to take on the Tide. This game has SEC West title hopes written all over it, LSU needs a win to stay in the chase and Bama needs a win to stay in the drivers seat. Since the loss of Tyrone Prothro in the Florida game, the offense has been pretty thin. With only 1 TD in the last 3 SEC games, the production has faultered. The defense is really showing how good it is shutting down teams like Florida, Tennessee, and Miss. State. But how can they fare against LSU and Auburn? What they have on their side are relatively unexperienced quarterbacks. Leak of Florida is pretty experienced in the SEC but would get flustered under heavy pressure and you can see how that went. LSU has not completed a game strong all season, will that continue or will they decide to do that against Bama? Auburn's quarterback has not played well either, they have been living by their back field and Bama is known for shutting down running backs forcing the offense into a one-dimensional play call (passing).

So, if Alabama wins these next two weeks, will that be enough to push them into the top 2 of the BSC to play for the National Championship? Is Alabama good enough to play for the National Championship? Will Alabama be on the outside looking in like Auburn did last year? If Alabama can beat LSU, that will go a long way in helping them close the gap in the BCS, same with Auburn. Also, if Alabama plays a highly ranked Georgia in the SEC Championship that will also boost their ranking in the BCS. Will it be enough? I don't know right now. I sure hope so. In order to be certain, I would like to see either USC or Texas falter. I think Bama would have the national presence to go farther than Auburn did, considering they have 12 national championships (to auburn's 1 shared national championship). Alabama has proven through several injuries that they can find a way to win. Emotional wins over Ole miss (last second field goal) and Tennessee (thorn in their back for several years) have shown that they can get it done. Wins over LSU and Auburn would shout to the nation "We are here, and we want to play". Auburn was considered "the lady in waiting" last season. They just weren't that good! Face it all you Aubie's out there, they were OVERRATED! They struggled several times last year, LSU was a lucky break. They didn't hold a candle to the talent of USC or OU last year and would have been embarrassed (hopefully like they will be when they face Bama).

I'm worried. I'll admit it. I'm always worried coming into a big game. Can our offense get it done? Will the Defense hold? Will the special teams go in our favor or theirs? Lets hope all of the bounces go our way, that Brodie will be on target, the receivers have sticky fingers, the running backs find all the holes, the offensive line creates some holes for those backs, and the defense can stun the LSU offense.

Roll Tide
~Kisea

My room....

I liken my room to a frequency ordered list...the more I use stuff, the easier it is to find. But this doesn't help with the stuff that I don't use quite as often yet need urgently. Oh well, life goes on. Can you tell that i've been studying for Hain's exam coming up this next week? Maybe the next time (if) I move, I will have to make sure to take some time out and amortize while I pack (for those who don't know what amortize means, it can be basically sumed up as doing extra work up front in order to do less work later IE organize rather than blindly put stuff in boxes).

I had Langan's exam on Thursday, it well fairly ok. I hope I did well. Thursday night's Picklefish wasn't too bad....but it wasn't too good either. It was the first time I had been to the Dauphin Street Picklefish, which was cool but the atmosphere was....lacking to say the least. I guess the old Picklefish will become the new Picklefish which was the old Picklefish to begin with....i'm confusing myself....in other words, I guess Picklefish will continue to be the hangout for the peeps (DISCLAIMER: with the occasional visit to Los Arcos for hugely large margaritas).

Kc is flying with her mother to San Diego or San Fransico...some San city in California on Monday through Friday, so I will be charged with house protection, cleanliness, and pet duties. She is supposed to be carrying a camera and Kenny's notebook, I am hoping to get some insightful remote bloggage while she is out there.

I was a bit disappointed by the sparse amount of comments on my previous post about 'what is your favorite programming language'. Only BJD and Jarred commented. So I shall challenge you again....what is your programming language of choice and why? Are you a Lisp fan? How about Prolog? Or maybe Orca or Occam? Or are you just a plain ole C or C++ person? PL/1 anyone? We know Larry Wall likes Perl, if you get a chance read ANYTHING he writes he is a nut. His state of the onion post (the current state of perl) had a spy theme, his interviews in Sebesta's textbooks for Language Theory are just as zany.

Anyway, I installed another new 300gig hdd friday which brings my total storage capacity in beast (primary desktop) to 1,280 gigs (*Note: 1gig = 1,000,000,000 bytes according to hdd manufacturers, so my 300gig hdd is actually 279gigs of formatted space). Yippie...

~kisea

A case of the blah's...

I'm sitting here trying to study for my exam tomorrow evening and I just don't feel too motivated. Yes, we are moved but as anyone know it takes time to get settled. I haven't been sleeping too well, i'm not able to find many things i'm looking for from time to time. But i'll get settled in eventually.

It has been nominated by cbot to go to Picklefish downtown, any objections or agreements? Picklefish (downtown), Picklefish (USA) or Los Arcos again. Lets hear something.

I'm taking Langan's Programming Language Concepts class (csc 524) and I was just wondering, what is your language of choice and why. More importantly the why part of the question. So leave some comments about this. Me, I have really enjoyed C#. Some would say its too slow, like Java but not so. I think the latest study has Java on average only 2.5 times slower than C++. So, if your C++ code takes 1ms to run then on average the Java equivalent would take 2.5ms. You think about C# being only Windows, yeah thats true right now but it has promise in the future of having the .NET framework implemention on other platforms. If C# is to ever grow large like M$ wants it to be then yes it WILL have to be implemented on other platforms. So, unless I really NEED to get every little bit of efficiency out of my application then I would prefer C#. Event the best programmer still has problems with memory leaks in C++, it can be frustrating to track them down and fix it. You don't have to worry about this in either C# or Java, you have a safety net at minimal cost. There's my two cents, lets hear what you have to say.

~Kisea