I Have Returned

I'm in Durham. Got here about 7:30 last night. The apartment is nice. You can see some photos here . Having a furnished apartment is incredibly convenient.

Josh and I went out for dinner at Big Bowl last night. It was really great to talk with Josh, especially after being home for three weeks. I can only spend a short amount of time at home before I start to go insane. Believe me, there's no one in Alliance that I could go to dinner with and have a conversation about Refactoring . :-)

Tonight I think we're going to hit Pepper's Pizza .

Photoblog

Thanks to some messing around with Flickr , I have a fairly functional photoblog, complete with RSS feed . You can see my most recent photos in the sidebar. Flickr accepts photos via email, so with my new Treo I can upload photos from just about anywhere.

Moving

The past few days have been devoted mainly to preparing to move and preparing for my summer internship. I'm moving down to North Carolina on Friday. It's about 9 hours of driving. Fortunately, IBM is providing a really nice furnished apartment, so I don't have to pack very much.

One question: does anyone know where to find good information on interstate highway construction projects? It seems like every state has their own page, and I don't want to sift through all that info. I just want to know if there's any construction on the I-77, I-74, or I-40 that I should worry about.

House of Sand and Fog

I rented House of Sand and Fog a few days ago. It had been on my list of movies to see because the trailer looked interesting and because I'm a fan of Jennifer Connelly. The film is a real Shakespearean-style tragedy, which you don't see much of these days. Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley both gave excellent performances. I really liked it, but it's not a movie to watch if you want to be put into a good mood.

Treo 600

For a variety of reasons, I needed a new cell phone before moving down to North Carolina for the summer. I tried to restrain myself, but ended up getting a Treo 600 from Sprint. Case has a deal with Sprint that gives me a discount on my monthly bill, so that's how I justified switching to Sprint (from AT&T Wireless) and paying more for a phone than a normally would have.

So far I'm very pleased with both the Treo and Sprint. I get a good signal at home, unlike AT&T Wireless, which was always on roaming. Sprint was able to port my old number quickly (only took 2-3 hours). The PCS Vision network (Sprint's data service) seems pretty fast. With the Treo, I can get email, chat on AIM, read RSS feeds, and browse the web easily. And the Treo is just like any other Palm, so I can sync it with Address Book and iCal using Palm HotSync and iSync.

The only major downside to the Treo is the low-res screen (160x160). It can be a bit hard on the eyes, but I'm not planning to spend hours looking at it each day, so I guess it's OK. The camera is also pretty crappy, but I don't really care about that. The lack of Bluetooth is mildly annoying, but since you can sync via USB, the only reason I would really want Bluetooth is to use my phone as a remote control during presentations. The Treo has a SD card slot, but unfortunately none of the Bluetooth SD cards are compatible with the Treo.

I've only had the phone and service for a few days, but so far I give the Treo 600 and Sprint big thumbs up.

New Case Homepage

The new case.edu homepage has been unveiled. At first glance, I like it better than the old site. It has a cleaner look, and more content is directly exposed, rather than making you navigate through menus. There's way too much stock photography in use. Hopefully that's just due to time constraints, and the stock photos will be replaced with actual photos of campus as time permits.

Liz Pund also has some comments .

Shrek 2

I went to see Shrek 2 this evening. It's opening day, but I (correctly) figured that a 10:00pm showing wouldn't be too crowded. It's on par with the original, but it took awhile to get going. My favorite segment was KNIGHTS (a parody of COPS ).

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

I picked up Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from the local library last week and finished it last night. It's a nice, taut sci-fi story. I initially heard about it because the book has been released online under a Creative Commons license and because the author, Cory Doctorow, runs Boing Boing . If you're looking for a quick but entertaining read (or just want to learn about whuffie) then I certainly recommend it.

I'll have to add Doctorow's new novel Eastern Standard Tribe to my list of things to read.

iTunes Movie Trailers

Why would I want to watch movie trailers in iTunes ? When I heard that movie trailers had been added to ITMS, I thought it was a pretty useless thing to do, but harmless. Now, in order to watch the fullscreen version of the trailer for The Incredibles, you have to go to ITMS. My main objection to movie trailers in ITMS is that they aren't listed in any meaningful manner. The trailer organization on the Apple movie trailers website is much more coherent.

Movable Type 3.0 Furor

There have been quite a few rants about Movable Type 3.0 today (just take a look at the trackbacks on the official announcement ). The new pricing scheme doesn't really affect me, since it's still free for 1 author and 3 or fewer blogs. However, I've been thinking about ditching Movable Type for some time, due to general frustrations with its architecture (i.e., needing to rebuild for all changes). Movable Type 3.0 doesn't look like a huge step forward, so I'm going to start investigating alternatives in earnest. An early contender is Textpattern , which I've installed and been playing around with. Another system I'd like to investigate is Wordpress .

IRC Client

I don't use IRC much. Usually, I just lurk in #geeks on irc.cwru.edu. Thus, I just need a simple IRC client that's free. I've tried 2 or 3 different clients for Mac OS X, but they've all either sucked or been non-free. Recently though, I've come across a really nice, free client called Colloquy . It's got an elegant, unobtrusive interface, a plugin architecture, and it's open source. It's also got support for AppleScript and DCC file transfers. It seems positioned to become the IRC client for Mac OS X. I'm glad to finally see an IRC client that's a free and worthy companion to Safari and Mail.

New Google Groups

Google has posted a beta of their new Google Groups service. It offers a mechanism for creating your own mailing lists (@googlegroups.com). Looks like there may finally be a way for non-technical users to create mailing lists that don't suck.

Colt 45

Colt 45
Originally uploaded by Dirtae .

This photo is about a month old, but I'm just now posting it. Phil and I decided to split the cost of a Colt 45 just so we could say that we've tried it. Mmm... smooth malted pleasure.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

From Off the Streets of Cleveland Comes...

American Splendor . I finished reading the American Splendor anthology I picked up over the weekend, and I thought it was excellent. When I saw the film, I thought that Harvey Pekar lived on the west side of Cleveland, but now I know that he actually lives on the east side, very near to Case. In one of his stories he even pops into Tommy's to see who's there. But American Splendor is great for reasons besides the obvious attraction of reading a comic book set in a locale that you've lived in. It's great because it's just about everyday life, and the mundane but critical trials that we face. Harvey doesn't try to shoehorn the stories into some mold, he just tells them like they happened, which is a rarity. Sometimes stories don't have a beginning, middle, and end, and sometimes there's no clear resolution or moral, and Harvey recognizes that. Some of my favorite stories in this anthology are "Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines", "Common Sense", "Ripoff Chick", "Free Ride", and "Hypothetical Quandary".

Now I've gotta get the second anthology ASAP.

The Last Samurai

David and I rented The Last Samurai last night. I'm a big fan of historical dramas, so I liked it. Costuming, staging, and the general historical arc of the plot seemed accurate. The film did go overboard in glorifying the samurai, though. Meiji-era samurai were essentially reactionaries that resisted anything foreign or new. The movie didn't really portray that, which made the conflict more one-sided than it really was. Still, there was some subtlety to it, and as long as you maintain an appropriate amount of skepticism while viewing it, it's an enjoyable film.

Exams Over

My last exams were on Wednesday, and on Thursday I moved out of the dorm. I'm now back home for a few weeks, until I leave for NC. I've been relaxing the past couple of days, but soon I'm going to start studying some of the technologies I'll need to use on my internship, as well as thinking about the direction the project should take.

Kill Bill Volume 2

David and I went to see Kill Bill Vol. 2 last night. I liked it, but it had a totally different mood than Vol. 1. I don't know if it's really fair to compare Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, since they were originally supposed to be all the same film. Sometime I'd like to watch Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 back to back, as I think the whole thing will go together very well, considering the contrasting styles in Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

Before the film, I stopped off at Borders and picked up the American Splendor anthology that was published in conjunction with the movie's release.