Here's a song-related meme from katinthehat...

The rules:

1. Open your iTunes (or other music program -- in my case, Rhythmbox).
2. Turn the shuffle mode on.
3. Post a picture of the first 12 artists.
[If the same artist comes on again, skip to a new one.]
4. You guys guess who is who. Put a name to the faces you recognize.

For those who don't know, my music collection has gotten rather eclectic over the years, so I ended up with a random mix of people you've probably never heard of... I had to have two do-overs because I couldn't find pictures for the Les Misérables Original French Concept Album or my Bolognese production of The Barber of Seville. For some artists shown, the pictures aren't so great because there simply aren't that many pictures of them online.

Anyway... ( here they are )

Not sure why I finally felt like updating this, but...

From willcchang:

Your brain: 20% interpersonal, 60% visual, 100% verbal, and 220% mathematical!

Congratulations on being 400% smart! Actually, on my test, everyone is. The above score breaks down what kind of thinking you most enjoy doing. A score above 100% means you use that kind of thinking more than average, and a score below 100% means you use it less. It says nothing about how good you are at any one, just how interested you are in each, relatively. A substantial difference in scores between two people means, conclusively, that they are different kinds of thinkers. Matching Summary: Each of us has different tastes. Still, I offer the following advice, which I think is obvious: Don't date someone if your interpersonal percentages differ by more than 80%. Don't be friends with someone if your verbal percentages differ by more than 100%. Don't have sex with someone if their math percentage is over 200%.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 22% on interpersonal You scored higher than 56% on visual You scored higher than 80% on verbal You scored higher than 95% on mathematical

Link: The 4-Variable IQ Test written by chriscoyne on Ok Cupid

I don't know about the "obvious" advice, though... I have a few good friends who are a lot more talkative and sociable than I am. I can't really comment on the other two points, though.

Date:	2004-11-14 22:46
Subject:	Too busy to write content
Security:	Public
Mood:	stressed

From willcchang:

You Are From Neptune

You are dreamy and mystical, with a natural psychic ability. You love music, poetry, dance, and (most of all) the open sea. Your soul is filled with possibilities, and your heart overflows with compassion. You can be in a room full of friendly people and feel all alone. If you don't get carried away with one idea, your spiritual nature will see you through anything.

Date:	2004-11-10 21:17
Subject:	The last two weeks in review...
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah (Is this a trend?)

I've been mismanaging my time a lot lately, so I haven't really had time to post anything... And not much of interest has been going on, anyway...

On computer issues, I got the replacement hard drive, and boxed up the old one in preparation to send it back to the manufacturer. At the final count, I had stored all the stuff I intended to back up onto 15 cds, and I had already burned 5 cds of music a few months ago... Not bad considering how large I've seen some of my friends video collections grow over the past few years... Then again, since my school started charging by the megabyte for monthly bandwidth over 2 GB, my general download rates have gone down. Plus, my collection was largely of music videos, commercials, and some vintage old films — I don't download TV shows, movies, animé, pornography, etc. so there's only so much stuff I can have...

Microsoft hasn't gotten back to me yet, so that interview thing is still in the air... Oddly, they're the only company that I've managed to interview with so far. Oh well... At least I have MEng to fall back on if I can't get a job this year.

Like many of my friends, I'm rather annoyed about the results of the presidential election. I think these photos collectively sum up how I feel about the situation. (credit to willcchang for the link) Like many others, I've joked a bit about leaving the country in response, but stopped short of making any plans — let's see what happens if things get considerably worse. I still think that it would be cool to spend some time living in another part of the world, or at least another part of the country (preferably another blue state), but unless things change, I'll be stuck in my current state indefinitely. But just out of curiosity, any suggestions of where to go, anyone?

Date:	2004-10-28 13:16
Subject:	Partying like it's 1998...
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah

The hard drive seems to be deteriorating more by the day, so I've been forced into a massive backup mode... Archiving my videos onto CD turns out to be more of a hassle than I thought -- There is no way to fit everything into nice 700 MB groups, but I'm trying to keep things roughly organized by artist, or at least language, with a little miscellanea thrown in to fill in for remaining space. All in all, I expect to have about 16 CDs on videos alone. Then, it's on to music, which I mostly backed up over the summer when I bought the drive.

The CD writer gets a little antsy after burning several discs in a row, reminding me once again that frequent and small backups now and then are the way to go. Also, a word to the wise: while naming files in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Hebrew, etc. may seem cool, don't expect to burn them to CD, transfer them on AIM, or compress them with any common archiving software without a fight... I'm learning this the hard way now. Fortunately, Linux should let me do this... Now if only Linux were working...

Unlike I had assumed earlier, the Linux partition isn't OK... With damaged sectors galore, thousands of files -- many belonging to important software packages -- are now unreadable. So, now I'm transferring whatever I can salvage from it onto the old drive... With all that's missing, I'll probably end up largely rebuilding the system -- a process that can take 2-3 days of constant processing. As it is, copying the files over is taking ~ 12 hours and counting... All the I/O errors are really bogging it down.

In the meantime, I'm getting reacquainted my alternate computer -- a 6-year-old Dell Dimension XPS R400 (a speed demon of its day) with a 400Mhz Pentium II and 128MB RAM. Of course, it crawls when running Windows 2000, but right now I'm in Linux, and it's being very accommodating. Hats off to the open-source developers for making code that scales back so well.

And on the bright side, the drive's manufacturer has a really nice exchange policy. As long as it's still covered under the 3-year warranty, they'll mail you a new drive on condition that you'll return the defective one within 30 days of the shipment. (If you don't you get charged.)

Date:	2004-10-27 03:38
Subject:	This can't be good...
Security:	Public
Mood:	frustrated

Bleh... Random unexpected computer problems... Technobabble follows:

I was just using Linux as usual, when all of a sudden it tells me that my main Linux partition is read-only -- weird, since it's been up and running for the past few days... Then I try loading a couple programs, and of course they don't run properly, since it's having trouble reading/writing to the disk. So, I try to reboot (which generates a few more lovely errors), and upon restarting, it tells me that the filesystem contains errors, and has to be checked manually.

So, I let it scan the drive... It finds a few blocks that it can't write to (that's definitely not good), and hundreds of "inodes" that don't point anywhere, or have been "orphaned" for whatever reason (A little corruption can happen from time to time, but not normally on this scale.). In the end, it tells me that a couple hundred files had been corrupted (which isn't too bad, since they're all just cached files that I don't need, and some system stuff that I can easily download to replace). Then, I have to reboot.

And when I boot this time, I'm greeted with two emergency beeps, followed by this:

Initializing Intel(R) Boot Agent Version 4.1.04 PXE 2.1 Build 003 (WFM 2.0), RPL V2.74 WARNING: Dell's Disk Monitoring System has detected that drive 1 on the primary EIDE controller is operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately back up your data and replace your hard- disk drive by calling your support desk or Dell Computer Corporation. Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility  _

Yuck... and this is a new hard drive that I got this summer. What exactly is going out of specs, anyway?

"The message is linked to SMART (self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology), a technology that continuously monitors the health of a hard drive in search of symptoms that may indicate a major problem looming in the distance. Such symptoms include a sudden fluctuation in the distance between the drive head and the platter (suggests an impending head crash) and a gradual increase in the length of time it takes for the drive to spin up (a sign of a malfunctioning motor)." - http://www.smartcomputing.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=22226

Tentative schedule:

Course Name	Dep't	No.	Credits
Applied Logic	COM S	486	4.00
Software Engineering	COM S	501	4.00
Icelandic Family Sagas	ENGL	308	4.00
Intro to Scientific Computing	ENGRD	322	3.00
			15.00

I'm taking ENGL 308 because a combination of weird engineering requirements requires me to take an English class if I intend to start my masters program next semester.

I feel kinda lazy taking only fifteen credits, though -- Maybe I can swap CS 486 for two three credit classes?

First, a flurry of quiz results... (all quizzes coming from willcchang)


Which OS are You?
(Actually, when I took the quiz a couple days ago, I came out as Windows 95... Maybe those Microsoft interviews had a bad influence on me... Anyway, this is my result from two years ago, and I'm sticking to it.)


Which Nigerian spammer are You?
No comment.


Which File Extension are You?
Hmph...

You preferred Kerry's statements 89% of the time You preferred Bush's statements 11% of the time Voting purely on the issues you should vote Kerry Who would you vote for if you voted on the issues? Find out now! </div>

Just as well that I voted for him on Saturday...


You Are "Dizzy and Giddy"

What Japanese Smiley Are You?
_._


You are So and So. You're smart. And boys like you.
This makes your friends jealous. You look soooo
good.
Which Teen Girls Squad Member are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

"Which Depeche Mode album are you?"

Construction Time Again
You are Depeche Mode's third album, Everything Counts really put you on the map
(Heard of the group, but I can't name any of their songs.)

From today's email:

OK... Disregarding the last post, maybe I can throw something together for a real entry...

I normally don't like writing these things, since I just hate talking about myself, especially in someplace that might surface up later to haunt me (via browser caches, Google caches, or otherwise). I used to loathe writing paper journals in elementary school, and I've never really been tempted to keep my own personal one later on... On the other hand, after looking through other people's journals, I guess I've picked up enough random clues on how to throw together something of my own, while borrowing/stealing their styles...

Not much new today -- the most interesting thing to happen was that I found a dead caterpillar at brunch when I bit into a strawberry... You gotta love the quality food at the Alice Cook House... Luckily, I noticed it in time that I didn't actually eat it... But I also saw a lot of specks of nasty stuff in there... eww...

In other news, I have a Microsoft interview tomorrow morning; I hope I don't blow it again... This time, I actually read up on how M&Ms are made, so I'll nail that, even if I mess up on the on-the-spot programming. I don't really see a contradiction between using Linux and applying to Microsoft anymore -- an interviewer at a career fair actually asked me if I use other OSes... But, just in case, I should probably just go on record now saying that I don't plan to abandon Linux if they hire me; I like using both.

Lots of homework ahead... I'll probably pay for taking time off for this, but whatever... If I weren't writing this, I'd probably reading something online that was random and unproductive anyway...

Not much else of interest off the top of my head... I'm not sure what sort of content I'll put in here in the future... probably just quizzes, and random blurbs like this... Don't expect me to say anything too exciting -- after all, I'm still single, I'm not looking for anyone, and even if I were... let's not forget the engineer's pledge.

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