An unordered list of short items

[macmaxbh]

So here are random news snippets and thoughts I've had over the past few weeks. It's getting quite long! I am majorly neglecting this place.

• It snowed a bit today! As someone who has not seen snow in a while (who lives in the South), it was very exciting. Sadly, the ground is too warm and it melted away.
• I went to a Wizard Rock concert last night at Camelot Treasures. It was a lot of fun and we got to hear The Remus Lupins (aka the Wizard Rock Heart-Throb Alex Carpenter) who came from California! He had some good music, and seemed surprised at how excited we were and how we knew every single one of the Blibbering Humdingers and Hawthorn and Holly's songs (the local wizard rock bands). I was the only male in the audience (besides Bryson) for the majority of the performance, which is a bit bizarre (I do things like French + wizard rock which are 'female-heavy' but also things like CS + Dutch which are 'male-heavy.) I still want The Ministry of Magic to come down (they're my favorite wizard rock band), but they probably won't.
• Had a midterm today in my COMP 411 class which I probably didn't study "enough" for. I think I still did well, but probably not as good as my first midterm (which I actually got a perfect score (!!) on). The first question (which asked about whether the given addition of twos complement numbers would cause an overflow) threw me for a loop because I kept thinking about the numbers as floating-point and not twos-complement numbers. For example: 0x8000000 is the most negative number you can represent in twos complement (-2^31), which if you add negative numbers to it will definitely overflow, while 0x80000000 in floating-point is actually "negative zero", which you can obviously add negative numbers to it without it overflowing. My brain took a couple of tries to sort that all out but I think I did. I really like that class and am sad it's ending soon.
• I got my hair cut! It is now shorter (a standard male haircut location wise, with the hair itself longer than a standard male haircut). To compare, here is a photo of me before the haircut and here is a photo I just took. I realized after getting my hair cut that my inner self-image of myself I think always has hair of more this length. One of my classmates said "You don't have mad scientist hair anymore!" and I think that describes my old hair pretty accurately. :)
• The Gridlock Economy is a very good book, the best non-fiction book I've read in a very long time. It's basically about the "tragedy of the anticommons". For those who do not know economics, the "tragedy of the commons" is basically that if nobody owns a given resource then there's a tendency for that resource to be overused--e.g. overgrazed land (the town commons where everyone would let their sheep graze), overfished water (if nobody owns the water, everyone'll try to fish as much as they can). The classic econ answer to a "tragedy of the commons" problem is "privatize the resource or institute government control", but this book points out that you can go too far with private ownership. If a resource has too many owners, then it will be underused, to take an example, medical patents. If a drug you want to create would involve several patented structures / would need to be tested using patented structures, you have to reach agreements with EVERY SINGLE ONE of the patent holders to bring the drug to market, which is prohibitively expensive, even if all the patent holders are agreeable, easily known, and easily accessible. One of my favorite stories in the book was how Congress solved the problem of passenger air traffic.
• I have now full administrator privileges on the (Executive Branch of) Student Government website. Basically, I offered to fix some broken links for him, and Mac, the current webmaster (a senior CS major and a fellow ACMer), wants me to take up the mantle of webmaster (or "Chief Information Officer") when he graduates. I've been tinkering around with the site, fixing the aforementioned links, changing a few minor features, updating pages, cleaning up some rather disgusting HTML (Microsoft Word-generated HTML should be shot, by the way), getting the pages to XHTML and CSS validate. For an example of the horrible HTML, look here. Note not just the HORRIBLE word HTML, but the fact that the "first" list is actually a SERIES of ONE ITEM BULLETED LISTS, instead of one list with multiple bullets, and how worse of all the second list is NOT ACTUALLY A LIST AT ALL, but a UNICODE BULLET SYMBOL and then the bullet text. The fixed (and condensed page) is here--note the bulleted list, just like the one being used in this blog post! This has been fun and has been taking up some of my spare time but I don't mind.
• Thanksgiving is coming up! I am making arrangements with friends now to make sure I see them over break, especially if they are just visiting for Thanksgiving.
• AAAH EXAMS ARE ALMOST HERE?!!?! Also, all my exams are on the last two days and need to be moved.
• ARG I HAVE FINAL ASSIGNMENTS! I have (as of now): a comp 416 assignment (worth 3x all our other assignments. Doesn't look too tough, fortantely), a Dutch paper (which I can do, just need to set aside the time), and a final paper for my English class (five to seven pages! I know that's short in the realm of REAL HUMANITIES classes, but it'll be the longest paper I've ever written. I need to start on it so I can write it gradually and revise it!). Guess what I'll be doing over Thanksgiving when not seeing family + friends?
• I like my classes and am sad to see most of them end! Maybe not MATH 381, but I find the material somewhat interesting, it's the class itself I don't like. I really like my computer hardware / organization class (COMP 411), my sci-fi class (ENGL 146), the web programming class (COMP 416) is interesting and useful with a very good teacher (we learned AJAX yesterday! I was waiting all semester for that...), and Dutch is a fun class, just not such a fun experience when trying to read books in Dutch or assemble coherent and grammatically correct sentences.
• Next semester's classes are also very cool, as you can see on my schedule. I'm excited about internet services and protocols (learn how the INTERNET actually works in detail!), more web programming (Java servlets! Server side stuff! Crazy!), and to a lesser extent honors differential equations (should be interesting, giving the math department here another shot, and I need it to take Numerical Analysis which I want to take again!), honors macroecon (the teacher is apparently REALLY good and everything happening now should be great fodder for class discussion), and Dutch (last semester, which is a little sad! perhaps I will be able to assemble coherent sentences? We will be doing a one-semester overview of Dutch literature, which seems very neat).
• I really like being on the Student Technology Advisory Board and on the Technology and Web Services committee of Student Government--besides that I like talking about tech stuff, I can talk about tech stuff that actually directly will affect me and other students at UNC! In STAB, I can ask ITS (our IT services) 'why are things done like this?' and I'll get an answer, and they ask us what students would think of their new ideas. In both committees, we get to find out about what's coming to UNC tech-wise in the future and help influence its development. In Tech and Web, we support students (for example, with their new Joomla! websites for their student organizations) while also attempting to lobby for changes we'd like to see (better email, more use of SLICE, etc). This stuff is way cool, and I love it!
• Related to that, this is basically why I am reluctant to study abroad. Frankly, there are so many cool things to do at UNC and so many cool things to be involved with that I'm not going to get them all done anyway, and if I left I'd have to give up some of them and I'd lose some opportunities to do things like be on these committees, be in ResNET, etc. etc. I know it'd be an awesome experience for me, but still, I'd have to give up a lot.
• I Geek-A-Thonned this weekend (well, it was a mini-geek-a-thon). It was fun, I was able to take the bus there (Triangle Transit goes from UNC / South Road to 2/3 a mile from Kramden) and meet some new people and see some old ones. Mainly, though, there were new people who I didn't know and I was doing final testing, which (despite being new to me) wasn't exactly what I wanted. It was still neat. Got my thumb gashed by accident (oddly enough!)
• I hope I am not an arrogant person, especially / including academically. This was going to become a whole other LJ post, but it gets condensed into this little list item.
• I've been doing quite a bit of personal computer consulting at Carolina Meadows (my grandparent's retirement community), which is fun and actually surprisingly lucrative (since I get paid actual money!) on Fridays. This is mainly fun, and hopefully I am useful to people and not overcharging etc. etc. (I think I am, and I am not, respectively, I'm just not used to semi-constant demand and actually being paid). I probably should start recording all the money I get so I can pay taxes on it, make it a bit more official.
• I upgraded the old iBook of the Carolina Meadows Mac Club (which is basically on permanent loan on me, since the club doesn't need it as their new presenter brings her own laptop and the person who primarily bought and used it is actually dead now) by maxing out the RAM (from 128mb to 1.128 GB), adding an AirPort card, and upgrading the OS (from OS X 10.3 to 10.4, which is the newest it can handle). I'm considering using it as my more 'portable' laptop, since it's lighter, more expendable, and decently powered for my uses with the upgrades. I used it to study for my COMP 411 test (above) on the way to the wizard rock concert (also above).
• I'm considering buying a netbook (or more specifically, an OLPC XO-1 through the buy one get one program) that I can carry around with me, take notes on, surf the web, etc. A person I know through STAB (see above) has an OLPC laptop which I am borrowing to try it out.

That's all I can think of right now. That's a lot of typing. :)

Oh, and I have one other item which is under friends-lock. If you are NOT MY LIVEJOURNAL FRIEND then you should comment and I can add you.