Kristina and I purchase a fair amount of DVDs in the second market (used). Usually we get pretty good deals on them, for example, last weekend we bought 8 DVDs from Hollywood video for about $50. One consequence of our DVD buying habit is that our friends like to borrow DVDs from us. Then I usually forget who we’ve loaned the DVDs to, and next thing you know they go missing like my copy of Enemy of the State.
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Pittsburgh has seen some absolutely amazing weather this weekend, which all things considered, is quite rare. On Saturday, Kristina and I, along with a couple of friends decided to ride the inclines on Mount Washington. The Monongahela and Duquesne inclines both provide excellent views of the city and if you’re a student at Pitt or CMU you get to ride for free. At the top of the Duquesne incline I took a couple of pictures and then pieced together a panorama of the city.
This week I managed to unpack the T2000 server. It’s a pretty large box, but not overly huge. The hard disks are nice little 73GB SAS drives that pull right out of the box. The CD/DVD drive is a sleek slot loading drive. I do have to say, Sun did a good job making this box look really nice and sleek. A datacenter of these things would be quite cool (literally and figuratively).
After a long series of delays and communication problems, the T2000 server from Sun has finally arrived. Apparently there was an issue with my original submission back in February. Once I resubmitted my request I was approved in fairly short order and received some pretty good responses from folks at Sun. Kudos to them for making the most out of an annoying situation.
I do have a few critiques about the process.
I admit, I’m a CNN.com news junky. In the past I used a combination of Firefox, AdBlock, and Privoxy to keep their annoyances to a minimum. Then yesterday they dropped the bomb. Ack, their new site is just annoying. I don’t care about the videos or gratuitous crap they put about podcasts and what not. I visit it in my browser for the news. So what’s a guy to do?
Ubuntu 06.06 (note the delay from the original 06.04), aka Dapper Drake, is well into development, and being as I have a shiny new laptop, I decided to give it a shot. So, here’s a list of five things that I like about Dapper and five things that could use some work. Many of these aren’t necessary Dapper specific, but they’re things that I didn’t do with Breezy (or Hoary, or Warty…).
Last most graduate students I’m enjoying my spring break doing work. But hey, at least I don’t have many meetings this week. Most of my work has been on trying to get a paper out the door and finished up for a CSCW 2006 this fall. It’s a little weird trying to explain to my non-CS type friends that most CS conferences you submit a full paper, and it’s a lot like a journal publication process.
Yesterday was a sad day for baseball with the surprise death of Twins legend Kirby Puckett. If something happens to Cal Ripken in the next few days, I’m just going to curl up in a ball and give up on baseball. However, today something good also happened, unfortunately, it taints the sports of baseball.
That’s right, Barry Bonds used drugs. I talked about this over a year ago. If the allegations are true, which lets face it, look at the pictures of him and tell me they’re not true, then he deserves to be banned from baseball and have EVERY award stripped from him.
Baseball lost a hero today. It’s sad that there is so few of them left.
Kirby Puckett after his home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series
Last week I submitted a try and buy request to Sun for some equipment to us on some research projects at school. In particular, I’m excited about using it to scan the network for spyware. I was a little worried that my information was not processed properly as I got a brief error message upon submission of the request. No problem, email my personal Sun representive (aka my brother), and see what’s going on.