Tim’s Blog

My mom just called me and mentioned that I had not updated my website in a while, so here it goes. I love my new website counter, although you can’t see it. I log the IP address of every viewer. I then do an IP Info search to tell who is actually reading my website. For example, I know that my webpage has been viewed by readers from Western Washington University, Microvision, San Jose State University, Smith College and other places.

I am going backpacking with some friends this weekend. One of them, Erik, decided that he wants to hike home to western Washington after school gets out for summer. The pacific northwest trail goes directly from Glacier National Park in Montana to Cape Alava in Olympic National Park. It is 1,200 miles long. I agreed that it would be a really neat hike and would be willing to try it with him. The only problem that I see is that he wants to complete the hike in a no more than a month. He figures we can go 25-30 miles a day. I highly doubt that, but I am willing to give it a shot. First we are going to do some proof of concept hikes to see the limit that we can hike. So this Friday, we are going to head out after our classes and go for a backpack. We will return on Saturday. I will take pictures and post them after the trip.

I got my first math exam back on Friday. I got every question right. But those picky teachers decided that I didn’t show my work well enough on 2 problems, so I only got 93 out of 100. Even so, I completely broke the curve. The average score in my class was 68%. Thank you Mr. Beishline.

I saw Hero today with a couple of friends. It was a very good movie. The cinematography was amazing. Despite what I was hoping for, the movie consisted of very few fight scenes; it was mainly a movie to think about. After the movie, we sat around and talked about the different symbols in the movie. It is definitely a movie that should be bought on dvd.

Out of curiosity, I looked to see when the FIRST robotics Pacific Northwest Regional was going to happen this year. It turns out that it occurs during my spring break. That means that I can go to possibly the best event of the year! I also found out that the FIRST kickoff event is on Jan, 8th and classes start for me on Jan. 12 meaning I can go to the kickoff and the first couple of robotics meetings. The Titan Robotics Club looks like they will have another successful season under some excellent leadership.

I should be writing an essay right now for english 121. I have a rough draft of a 4 page essay due tomorrow. I started to write it, but then my roommate came and I helped him with some math. Then Alex came over to my room and persuaded me to play some Dungeon Siege with him. We both started with new characters and played the multiplayer level. Then it was time for dinner. Then more Dungeon Siege. I just stopped playing a couple of minutes ago. Then of course I decided that I needed to update my website. So here I am.

I need fingerless gloves. When I sit at my computer, my right hand always get cold when it is on the mouse. The problem would be solved if I shut the window, but then the room gets stuffy. Someone should invent and sell a mouse with a built in heater. People have heated floors, why not mice?

I am getting worried about my website. If I add a couple more entries, I will have to add some code to split the front page into 2 parts so that it does not get too long. Currently, the website is not scalable. I will worry about that when the time comes. Back to work on the essay…

I spent a couple of hours working today on the website. I wanted to see how often my webpage was being viewed so I made a counter. Now everytime that my index page is loaded, an entry is added to a sqlite database table which includes the date, ip address and browser. I have a page that I can go to which then prints out the data in table form.

This may or may not have been a good idea. If it turns out that no one actually visits my website, I may stop updating it and lose interest. On the other hand, it may inspire me to further expand it.

In other news, it snowed. When I woke up yesterday, there was about .5 inches of snow on the ground and it was coming down pretty fast. However it quickly warmed up and it was gone by noon.

All my classes are going very well. I had a math exam today and I feel confident that I did pretty good. So far in math I have a 98% in that class, much better that I ever had in high school. All of my other classes are a breeze. I do about 1 hour of homework every night and am completely caught up.

I got bored again today so I decided to update my RSS feed. I was bothered by the fact that it was dynamic, I wanted it to be static. So I now have a php script I run when I update my blog that writes a new RSS file. Now, firefox will actually show a livemark of the feed. I deleted the original feed, the new one is located here.

I decided to try out making a RSS feed for my blog. According to xml.com, “RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites.” I am not really sure of the applications for a RSS feed on my site, but I decided it would be neat. One of the reasons, RSS is used is to reduce server load because people aren’t loading the whole website when the view the feed, only part of it. However since my RSS page is dynamic, it actually requires more processing power on the server than simply visiting the website. So if you have a RSS feed viewer or Firefox 1.0PR, you can theoretically view the new posts on my website. I was able to view the feed using a free java viewer, but I could not get Firefox to see it using the new livemark feature. It may be because the RSS page is dynamic and firefox keeps on loading it, over and over again. The RSS feed is in the RSS 2.0 format and is located here.

Yesterday I did nothing. I was completely unproductive. I woke up around 1:30, and had breakfast. Then I watched Alex own at Warcraft 3 for about an hour. Then we played a 3 hour game of Age of Empires 2 on moderate against 2 computers. Then I ate dinner. Then Alex, my roommate and I watched Mission Impossible. I concluded the day by watching Alex play more Warcraft 3 until 2:30 in the morning.

Early this morning some idiot on the second floor overloaded a washer. It started smoking which set off the fire alarm. At first I thought that it was a car alarm so I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Eventually I realized what the alarm was and decided it was a good time to get out of the building and go have breakfast. So today started rather early at 11:30.

I got bored and decided to play with photoshop. I made a larger picture out of some pictures that my dad took on our last Mt. Rainier climb. Now as opposed to 6 pictures showing our summit route, there is only one big picture. It is located here (caution, it is 1.17 MB).

I am so bogged down with school work. I had a 2-3 minute speech today, I have to read 10 pages and write a one page paper for English tomorrow, and I have to read 20 pages and write a one page paper for my freshman seminar class on Thursday.

I finally changed the date on my server so that it is in the US Mountain time zone. For everyone in Washington, the time on the posts will now be one hour later. But they are correct for me, which is all that matters.

It got cold today. It started to sleet outside and the heaters in the dorms turned on. I have my cables from my keyboard, mouse, speakers and monitor routed through a vent in the top of the desk. The cables go right next to the pipe which goes to the radiator. When the heater comes on, the pipe gets really hot, too hot to touch. So my dorm room smelled kind of funny until I realized that it was the cables getting hot. I pulled the cables out to make sure that they were not melted, then routed them back down, this time I used duct tape to tape them to the wall so that they are not touching the pipe. Hopefully they won’t melt now. That would be an expensive mistake.