Oh Happy Day

Today was move out day at the Dorms. Every May, each and every student must file out of their respective dorms and go find somewhere else to live while the building licks its wounds gets cleaned. Actually, the students are required to clean their rooms like big boys and girls and ask your local RA if it's ok to leave yet. I was there from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM just trying to leave the dang place. I was also helping a friend move out of her place! Poor girl has so much stuff left to move.

Anyway, where do I live now??

I've officially moved out of my dorms, cleaned up, and checked out with the Resident Advisor. I'm all on my own now! My roommate and I have moved into a nice apartment complex on the first floor of the building. Living in dorms really teaches you how to appreciate the little things in life. At first I was living in a house, under my parents' wing. That's probably a grade B living scale. Nothing too extravagant, but I was living comfortably. Then, I moved into college dorms. Granted it could have been worse, It's still a significant downgrade. I'd rate dorm life as a D on the living scale, with F being homeless. It's not that dorms are bad, per se, it's just that I have none of the common appliances that everyone is used to.

Now that I live in apartments, my living environment has increased substantially. Probably back up to level B. An A, by the way, would be like celebrity living in a mansion in Beverly Hills, or North Dallas. So I get my own Laundry facilities, a bathroom of my own, my own room, pets are allowed, a nice big refrigerator, disposal in the sink, fast internet (that's a biggie). Dorms really teach you to appreciate things in life!!

Good Luck

"Luck favors the prepared mind." Whoever came up with that quote has obviously never taken final exams at UNT. I mean, to know when your exam is, where it is, what questions are going to be on it, and what grade you need to get on it to get an A in the class requires at least SOME luck... right?... right.?..

It's exam week. I took 2 exams last week as a matter of fact, and this week I have another 2 exams. The fun never stops at UNT! This summer I've got a couple of summer courses I'm taking as well. Summer courses operate in a flexible fashion. You can take a Summer I, Summer II, or Long Summer course. Summer I and the Long Summer courses start June 7, and registration is already ongoing. Summer II starts in mid July, I believe, after Summer I courses end..

I myself am signed up for 2 Long Summer session courses in Information Technology, with Mr. Keathly! Anyway good luck with exams!

Denton Arts and Jazz Festival

Recently I paid a visit to the Denton Arts and Jazz Festival:


The arts and jazz festival is chock full of all sorts of people, art, and jazz as you might imagine. It was interesting to walk around town and see what Denton has to offer beyond engineering. I mean I'm not saying engineering is all I care about... but it makes up for a healthy portion of it.

This is one of the stands. It's a lovely display of trinkets and things

If you've ever been to an art festival, you'll know that there are plenty of these things scattered around. It's a healthy mix of different types of artsy fartsy things that I can't really understand or appreciate very much, but I can pretend to as I 'ooh' and 'ahh' at people's work. I love it when people 'ooh' and 'ahh' at my work, so it's only fair to give a little take a little. Even if the other party doesn't fully understand all the work that goes into a project, it's nice to give credit where it's deserved. I think we need a city-wide Denton Engineering Festival, where everyone can show off the trinkets and toys they make over the years.

Unfortunately I lost my iPod that weekend. A sad weekend indeed. I put hours of work into getting my own app onto that thing, and I lose it... :(

In other news, it's dead week. I guess I've posted about Dead week before. This time, Dead week came back much quicker. It depends on who you ask I guess.. But at first this semester crawled by... then all of the sudden it was gone! First exam is this Thursday!!

Oh the Drama

You know, there's just as much drama in the Tech world as there is in the 'other' world. Who cares about Miley Syrus, Britteny what's-her-face, and what the latest fashion stores are selling. Look at what is happening to the Flash platform! First off, Virgin America ditches Flash for its website and adopts HTML5. No biggie, it's just one site. Well next, I find out that video juggernaut sites Vimeo and Youtube are eyeballing HTML5. Not to mention that Apple ditched Adobe Flash back in 2007 with its iPhone platform. Apple continues to deal blows as they still do not support flash on their newest "magical" expensive brick ipad (Mark my words they will release an ipad with MAC OSX on it, while cranking up the prices to the 3k+ mark. Perhaps called iPad X. or iPad OSX. or just iOSX...). Finally, Jobs outlines a few reasons why he continues to show the cold shoulder to Adobe. Adobe won't take this sitting down as its CTO Lynch defends his platform, saying that HTML has had a history of inconsistently rendering on different platforms and browsers, and that Flash's relevance and standard output across all platforms that it is implemented on is part of what will keep flash alive. He has a point, but recent criticism of Adobe's Flash platform causing battery life drainage and overall performance hit on less powerful devices has not been disproved and even succumbs to some of this criticism. Nevertheless, Flash 10.1 has been well under development and is soon to be every mobile device's savior as it will bring performance increases and a better user experience!!

Anyway, moral of the story being that you have to make conscious and smart decisions when designing software. If you're sure you don't want to develop for an up coming mobile platform, be sure you're ready to face the music when your users or investors question you. If you want to cut support for X product or limit your users to only Y protocol, you better be sure you know what you're doing. I for one would love to see some Flash apps on the Android now that iPhone is out of the picture ;)

In other news, HP buys Palm. Now we're going for a web-OS powered HP netbook!? I think it would have been neat if Adobe bought Palm.. As Palm recently faced its own music as it was forced to sell its assets in its ailing Web-OS.

But think about it.. A Flash powered phone? That may be the prettiest phone ever.. or perhaps the slowest phone ever. We'll never know now. I myself am fairly versed in Flash.. at least I used to be back in the Flash MX and even Flash 8 days.

UNT Robotics Society

Recently I paid a visit to the UNT Robotics society. A Jolly group of engineering students and graduates who like robots. They showed me a bunch of things they were working on and even invited me to join!

Not the prettiest thing I've ever seen, but definitely shows off the guts of the project

This is the Self-aware Coke-Mobile, as I've just now decided to dub it that. It's a work-in-progress autonomous remote control car. What it does is navigate through hallways and avoid objects by itself. Given the correct programming in a language called Spin - a multitasking high level computer programming language, it uses something called a Parallax Propeller Chip to interpret sensor data and Spin commands. At least, I think that's a pretty accurate description.

Today in particular was a pretty exciting day for the Robotics Society, as they've just received a golf cart:
It's so that new members can use it to run errands around Discovery Park for them...

Nah it's actually their newest guinea pig of sorts. They plan on hacking this thing apart and installing some new toys onto it. What they plan on doing with it is akin to DARPA's autonomous vehicle challenge. They're going to attempt to upgrade this thing to be totally autonomous, and be able to navigate Discovery Park, while avoiding obstacles, pedestrians, walls, polls, and what have you. It takes quite a bit of knowledge in computer science, but the feat is definitely worth bragging about.

Stop the Presses!

It seems that today, some of the computer systems around campus are acting up. Namely, any computer running Windows XP and UNT's standard suite of software (*coughantivirusandadministrativetoolscough*). That means most the computers in the computer labs, general classrooms, and regular desktop computers that run Windows XP are going through some down time. I happened to noticed today in Math, the PC at the front of the classroom shut off, as the distinct Windows XP shutdown noise went off. Within a second, the classroom next door emitted the same sound. It just so happens that most PCs on campus are running Windows XP with McAfee Anti Virus "Protection". Seems to be causing quite the stir across campus.

That must mean whoever manages these computers must not have graduated from UNT, otherwise we'd be fine right now!!! Actually that's not the case. In fact, here's a quote from the CSE Systems Administrator:

"It should now be safe to turn Windows computers on again. It appears to
have been a false positive of sorts, related to the latest McAfee DAT
file."

I think we all know who the next Criticism of the Week goes to. *CoughMCAFEEcough*

We're Home to More than Just Engineers

Look what I found:
What is this exactly? Is it.. a Vulture? A turkey or something? There's a legend about UNT and its strange animals. One of them includes the tale of an albino squirrel. There's an entire organization about it

But this thing is strange. This is the second time I've walked by this window at Research Park and spotted this thing. This time I stopped to take a picture. Although as soon as I whipped out my Hero, it started getting mad..

It tried to attack me! What did I do? =[

Indeed when I went to get a closer look it lunged at me. What is this thing? I'm obviously no Zooligist if I can't even name this bird, but I'll describe it. It's black, about 1'4" tall, did not make any audible noises, and it's extremely pissed. Perhaps there's an engineer here who keeps a pet vulture? Or maybe this guy feeds on helpless engineers... :(

And to my knowledge, Discovery Park does not house wild animals or Zoos of any sort!