Tim’s Blog

While wearing Amethyst colored glasses, John Neun gave George Burns the following riddle: “Look closely and you will see something between Pi, You and Me.”

Hmmm…

So much for the end of the world. Previously, asteroid 2004 MN4 had a 1 in 233 chance to hit earth, it was then recalculated to have a 1 in 45 chance, very recently NASA recalculated it again and now apparently there is a 1 in 56,000 chance. So now the asteroid is rated a 0 on the Torino scale. More information is available here. Oh well. It was kind of exciting when the world was going to end.

It’s the end of Christmas and I ended up with a pretty good pile of loot. Unfortunately, most of it is clothes. Oh well. That’s what I need the most. I am spending most of winter break here in Santa Barbara with relatives and the sun. We went boogie boarding this afternoon, it was kind of cold. We are planning on going again tomorrow, hopefully it will be warmer.

One of my presents was a new mouse. The mouse I have been using the last couple of years was one of the original Microsoft explorer mice. It had a comfortable shape with two big buttons on the left side and a very precise scroll wheel. However a couple of months ago I got mad at something or other and slammed my mouse on the table. From then on the scroll wheel didn’t work. I really liked that mouse so I asked for another of the same model for Christmas, Microsoft Explorer Mouse v3.0a. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not made those mice for some time and they are virtually impossible to get a hold of. So I now have a Microsoft Explorer Mouse v4.0a, with a fancy side scrolling mouse wheel. I had tried mice with the side scrolling wheels before and I didn’t like them very much. But now that I have one, I am starting to get used to it.

On a slightly more sad note, we are all going to die. Scientists have discovered the first asteroid to be categorized as a 2 or above on the Torino Scale. The MN4 2004 asteroid rates a 4 on the scale meaning that it will be “a close encounter, with 1% or greater chance of a collision capable of causing regional devastation.” The asteroid has been calculated to have a 1 in 45 chance of hitting the earth.

It currently costs a grand total of $572.49 to buy a complete set of computer components from Newegg. That includes a 17″ LCD monitor, 80GB hard drive, 64MB Geforce MX4000 graphics card, 256MB RAM, Asus motherboard, Athlon XP 2500+ processor as well as a case, power supply, keyboard and mouse. That’s not very much money for a complete computer. Granted it does not come with an operating system, but for some that is not a big deal, linux is free.

I have been fairly busy lately. Actually I haven’t, that was just an excuse for not having updated my website for a while. In reality, I have just been to lazy to write an update. Oh well. Here goes.

The weekend after Thanksgiving, I decided to put my camping gear to use. Over Thanksgiving, my room mate rode his bike to Mt. Blackmore and attempted to climb it. I could not be outdone by him so I decided to attempt the same feat. I won’t write the whole thing out here, instead go here.

Since then I continued to do the normal school thing until last weekend. Last Friday, classes ended and finals started. For some horrible reason, the powers that be decided to schedule my Computer Science 160 final for 8:00 in the morning on Saturday. So I studied for quite a while on Friday, got a few hours of sleep and took my final. Then I spent the remainder of the day sleeping. I felt really confident during the test so hopefully I will get a reasonable grade.

On Sunday I went with my friend Alex and his room mate Gabe to Big Sky and went snowboarding. Both Alex and I have season passes for Bridger Bowl, another ski resort, but currently there is very little snow there. We had planned to leave at 8:00 so that we could be there at 9:00 when the lifts opened. But Gabe was still drunk from Saturday night so we delayed the departure time and finally left around 9:30. All I can say about Big Sky is big. It is huge. There are a total of 19 lifts, some of them were not open but it was still far better than Summit Central with a grand total of 5 lifts. Despite the pre-season conditions, there was better snow quality than the best day at Snoqualmie. I can’t wait until there is more snow and I can go to Bridger Bowl. Soon enough…

I decided that my 3 gmail accounts were going to waste so I downloaded File Bunker which allows files to be backed up on a gmail account. I uploaded my entire My Documents folder just for the heck of it. If I was running linux on my main computer I could even use GmailFS which would let me use my gmail account like another drive on my computer. But I don’t have any need for a gmail drive on my linux box.

I was surfing around on the internet trying not to do my English paper when I decided that I needed random quotes on my website. So I downloaded a short txt file with several hundred quotes and wrote a bit of php which randomized which one would show up. So now the index page of my website has a random quote at the bottom.

I had an outlab due today in computer science. I had to make a screen saver type of java applet with random colored rectangles. If you are bored, feel free to take a look at my masterpiece here. The code is here and the lab requirements are here.