Random Thoughts

Some points of thought:

While I'd hardly call myself a gym rat, I do try to get out and exercise at the gym more often these days. Joe the Peacock at Mentally Incontinent put up his "rules for the gym" and it makes for a good, amusing read.

I hate using computers without Mozilla Firefox. It just feels like going back to the stone age when I have to fire up Internet Explorer. IE's so bad that at a computer lab at FSU, I used ssh, cygwin, and remote X tunnelling to run Firefox off my computer at home just so I wouldn't have to use IE. Crazy, no? Oh, and every computer should have PuTTY too.

I'm sick and tired of my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. It weighs approximately 40,000 lbs and it has this amazing ability to corrupt an XP install in no time flat. I would love to get a new laptop (or a used one, whatever) but it's got to be tiny. A 12" 4.9 pound Apple iBook G4 would sure be nice. [Now anybody that knows me, please re-read that last sentence. One of the biggest PC zealots you'll ever meet just decided that he'd rather have an Apple laptop.] Truth be told, I would love to have an Apple laptop. Hell, then we'd just about have every OS you could think of on my network: Windows (XP, 2000, CE, XP Embedded/Xbox), Linux (Suse 9.1, Knoppix 3.7), Mac (Jaguar), and even PalmOS (Handspring Visor Edge). In reality I just need something tiny that can a) manipulate MS Office/PDF files, b) give me a solid gateway to my linux machine (ssh, sftp, x tunnelling), and c) run my engineering applications (MATLAB's the big one) - and an Apple could sure do that. But damn, they sure are expensive. You pay big bucks for a sexy machine. I also have no further interest in upgrading my desktops any time soon hardware-wise [thanks Linux, for making my old computers useful again!], save for maybe another IDE controller and new harddrives [we're up to 920 GB on the network...and we need a terabyte!]

One of the features I love most about my 40GB MP3 player [Creative Nomad Zen NX] is the "play any track" feature - which basically is just a random mode for every single song. Randomly picking the music off my player is like having a private radio station where you like every song - and if you don't want to hear it at that particular moment, you can always skip to the next song. And with a 40GB of tracks to cycle through, repeats are few and far between.

I'm now one week through grad school at Florida State, and things aren't going bad so far. The school definitely is behind the times technically [versus Georgia Tech - the computer labs are ancient in comparison] but the instructors I have both seem like pretty good professors. That pleases me. Stay tuned for the next year and a half or so and see how the whole "rebecoming a Seminole" turns out for me. One huge difference between FSU and GT: the number of women on-campus. It really is mind-blowing, coming from a school with a male population of nearly 75% to a school where the women dominate. Good times.

Finding Neverland was an excellent movie. I highly recommend that everybody get off their asses and see it. Other movies from the past year I recommend you see: Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Collateral, Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Incredibles, Kill Bill Vol. 2. Movies I still need to see: Closer, Sideways, Hotel Rwanda, Meet the Fockers, Ray, Kinsey, The Aviator.

In college sports, I was absolutely blown away by how good USC played in their 55-19 domination of Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl/BCS Title game. Matt Leinhart was flawless, and I can't remember seeing a team look as good as USC did for a long time - maybe back to either the 1996 UF or 2002 Miami teams.

On the hardwood, I don't know how people can say that Illinois is the #1 team in the land when clearly #4 North Carolina is playing the best ball in the country. They absolutely destroyed a good Maryland team last weekend. Wednesday's game between #9 GT and #4 UNC at the Dean Dome will be one hell of a game - I can't wait. Go Jackets.

Elise is coming this weekend and I'm stoked. She's always a blast to have around.

In other news, crushes suck. But this is universal fact - everybody knows it, everybody's been there, nothing new.

I'm on a Smashing Pumpkins kick recently. Damn, I love that band. I recently found my old VHS copy of "Vieuphoria" and converted it to DVD - only then later to realize that not only was it already released on DVD but also the sountrack "Earphoria" was released on CD back in 2002. So that bootleg of it I have is now worth NOTHING. Shit happens. Oh, and U2 still sucks. Get over yourselves already.

Best three sports games I've played in the last year: 1) NCAA College Football 2005, 2) ESPN College Hoops 2K5 [the default "quick game" is GT vs. UConn!], 3) ESPN Major League Baseball 2K4. I highly recommend all of them.

What's my 2004 game of the year? Burnout 3: Takedown. Hands down, most fun I've had in a game in a long, long time. NCAA Football's #2.