Thankfully it’s once again the weekend, giving me the opportunity to finally sit down, collect my thoughts, and post another journal entry. This past week has just been brutal; an exam in Financial Market Theory on the capital asset line and it’s derivatives had me stressed throughout the week and on top of the normal reading and work, I had a paper for my Vietnamese course and an outline on my survey paper for my thesis due. Nonetheless, the week passed (not without being abruptly paged at 02:30 for an EMT call), I was able to learn more about the ASL 501 Eye Tracker that Hamilton owns, watched the snow melt, and help out in a closed-beta of the next iteration of the My Hamilton portal.
This past Friday we once again hosted a ’smash’ at 4002A. Inviting our professors and fellow computer science majors, we had a chance to sample a brown ale that we brewed a few weeks ago. In addition, it was a wonderful opportunity to just get to know the professors a bit better and gain some advice for the upcoming semester and future. I am definitely looking forward to the next smash and next week’s ‘Bring your Faculty to the Pub’ event. Later in the evening, I joined Greg for a movie night trivia contest held in the barn and once again was amazed by Greg’s uncanny ability to answer almost every movie trivia question. As an added bonus, he even won a Star Wars trilogy set!
Today was spent mostly doing odd-jobs and laundry. I’ve also been following the success of photo Drop quite closely as it’s truly interesting to see what others think about it. I’ll write more on the initial release shortly but I do want to just mention that I’m truly grateful for the two donations that came in over the past 24 hours. I also had the opportunity to take out my camera and take some photos as the day was truly a perfect autumn one. I’ll close my entry with my favorite two photos of the day, only slightly edited in Photoshop to convert between RAW and JPEG and to de-saturate and crop the photos. Clicking on either one will provide you with a larger 1280 x 960 version. Enjoy!
Skyline Drive
I’m happy to announce that photo Drop has made it out of testing stages, has been slightly reworked, and is ready for download. If you’re looking for an application that will allow you to change attributes on multiple images quickly, painlessly, and in an intuitive manner, you’ll definitely want to read more on the utilitity. Best of all, it’s free!
October 25, 2005 at 16:40 was the official start, at least in my mind, of winter here at Hamilton: it snowed. For a good twelve hours or so, a light snow shower happened, covering the wet campus with a layer of white, which while pretty, simply means that winter has begun and that for the next five months, we’ll have to deal with upstate New York weather. Oh well, we did watch a screening of the 1956 Godzilla movie for my Japanese class last night…
On the iPod video front, you guessed it - it’s heading straight back to Apple for replacement because of a malfunction. The hold switch on the top of the iPod no longer locks the iPod’s controls, rendering the switch entirely useless. I phoned up AppleCare and after spending fourty minutes with three different tech support representitives, they declared it a DOA and will be replacing it much like they did with my G5. Oh well, we shall see what happens.
On a more positive note, I’ve gone ahead and updated my radio show playlists with yesterday’s show.
On Friday, I received the new iPod with video directly from Apple. After having sold my 4th generation iPod just weeks before the announcement, I had a hard time keeping myself from ordering the iPod and after a few days of contemplating the new features, I went ahead and used my educational discount, the money from the sale of my old iPod, and a few extra $20 bills to purchase the 60 GB White iPod. There’s no real way to describe this new iPod except as fantastic. It’s simply better than the previous versions and even if you’re not interested in watching video on the screen or looking at photos, it makes an excellent music player. I’m not going to recreate reviews such as those found at iLounge or ArsTechnica but I will post a couple of thoughts.
iPod with Video
First, the iPod, contrary to the pictures featured on Apple’s site is no larger than previous versions. It is simply an illusion from the larger screen and slightly smaller click wheel. It is though slimmer and it’s hard to imagine how they were able to accomplish such a task. The 60 GB version I have is a bit larger than the 30 GB version but still slimmer than the previous 20 GB one. They also made the front face flat, removing the curved sides on the top. This makes the iPod look much more like the iPod nano and is generally an improvement. It fits just as well in your hand as before and looks a bit more classy.
It’s true, I haven’t update my journal for some time now and while I could rattle off a whole bunch of excuses from school work, to commitments, to pure apathy, I’ll simply rectify the situation with a couple of posts over the next few days summarizing the highlights of the past month. I’m going to split the entries up into different posts so that crawlers or the few readers I have can easily identify what’s interesting to them.
This past weekend was family weekend on campus and for perhaps the last time before graduation in May, my parents visited campus to see my current apartment, help me out with a bit of shopping, and generally just see what’s new. We had a good dinner at a local Indian restaurant Friday night and since the weather was good, had a pleasant walk looking at the various buildings (including the new science center which is truly an awesome building) and the current foliage. It’s somewhat sad to reminisce about the first family weekend some three years ago but I guess that’s simply how things are. By the time May comes, while I’ll be somewhat sad to leave upstate New York and Hamilton, I’ll be ready to go. Whether that means getting a job for a few years or heading to graduate school remains to be seen.
Last weekend I was actually down in New York City. For some reason, Hamilton scheduled our fall break of two days only a weekend before family weekend. It was a good visit to the city and well needed. I’d been up, away from civilization, for over two months and it was a nice change to be able to go shopping, walk around the city, and meet up with friends. Now, only five more weeks to go before Thanksgiving…
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