So I, with my infinite capacity for continued procrastination, have recently added some new features to the site.

If you direct your attention over to the left, you'll notice some new items in the sidebar. Under the "Status" heading, you'll see that there are two sections: The first (very nerdily I might add) displays my current standings on the world-wide ladder for the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath. Wow.

More interestingly (maybe) is the next section, which displays my updates from the site Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, it's basically the same thing as the "Current Status" feature from Facebook... and that's it. Pretty lame if you ask me, but I guess the appeal is in the simplicity of posting short messages from your cell phone, etc. They also make it easy to post updates like that on blogs and websites.

However, there is practically nobody in my age group on Twitter, so it would be completely pointless except that I found a Facebook application that posts Facebook status updates to Twitter. So... in a very round-about fashion, my Facebook updates are now posted to my site.

The coolest new feature is found under the "Now Playing" heading. A small plugin for Winamp (Brandon Fuller's Now Playing app) pings my website with a basic POST HTTP request containing information about the current song every time I play something. On my end, some basic PHP scripting updates a database with the song info, current date, and play count. The songs under "Now Playing" currently just reflect the most recently played songs.

Eventually I will expand this feature, to display maybe the top songs played this week or something. I also will have a dedicated page that will show more info about what I'm listening to on Winamp.

Last but not least, I now am officially using the AMAZING Flickr API to interact with my photo site. The front page now uses this to display the first 60 or so recent photos instead of bastardizing multiple copies the frail Javascript Flickr provides to show random pictures.

Now that I'm using the real API, the photo page will eventually come back online in a MUCH crunker form that shows my favorite pictures and SHOULD integrate everything into my site.

Fun stuff... and more to come! A real update should follow in the next few days I'm sure, but with my last (3) projects of Junior year due this week and finals approaching... the outlook seems grim.

Of course, whenever there's a shit ton of stuff to do... procrastination becomes even more alluring...

I recently fixed my roomate's old laptop. It's a hefty Compaq Presario 2200, with a 1.3 GHz Celeron M and 480 MB RAM. It's underwhelming power in no way justifies the 5.2 lbs of flimsy plastic, but for working on my C and VHDL programs anywhere, it does the job.

The thing is, it would overheat within minutes after turning it on, so I replaced the fan because it would never spin up.. and it worked! When I first got it from him, however, I was messing around with it and re-installing the OS, and the only way for me to get that to work without it turning off due to the processor overheating was with a very creative use of my floor fan.

Everything was significantly easier once the new fan arrived, obviously.

In a completely unrelated event, I randomly starting bleeding from my forearm the other day. I was talking to my roomate when I felt my arm was really wet, and when I looked down I saw that it was soaked in blood. I ran over to the bathroom and washed it off, while trying to find where it was all coming from.

There was no cut or gash or anything, just a small pin-prick sized hole from which blood was gushing out. And it wouldn't stop for about thirty minutes. It wouldn't bleed if I kept preasure on it, but even after leaving preasure on it for about five minutes, it would continue to bleed. A LOT. Eventually it stopped, and the only reason for it that my roomates and I could come up with was that a bee had stung me (we were around a lot of bees earlier... this isn't entirely random), and the stinger had just come out, and that maybe it hit a large vein.

I am completely aware that that sounds extremely impropable, but there really aren't any other good reasons as to why I would just start gushing blood out of my arm.

In parting I leave you with a YouTube video that'll make you laugh, about buhLOOD! (it's funny, not gross you wimps).

I'm working on creating a more robust layout; one that will resize gracefully on small 4:3 browsers (like 1024 x 768) all the way up to larger wide screens.

I'm trying to use a more liquid design that expands to use screen real estate when available, but avoids a cramped feeling when running in smaller windows. CSS has some awesome ways for doing this, I just need to find them.

So in the process, the site will undergo quite a few incremental changes, feel free to give me feedback regarding any of it along the way, or drop me a line if you just have some ideas.

The photo section is also being redone as I try to make use of the Flickr API instead of abusing the "photo badge" Javascript that currently makes the photo mosaic on the home page.

So bear with me as the site will be in a continual state of flux for a while!

It's inevitable:

Put more than two engineers in the same room for a short amount of time, and without fail, the conversation will eventually turn into the classic engineering equivalent of a penis length contest.

By that I mean, the untold competition that is having the most amount of shit to do in the next week or so. Example:

"Dude, I'm so fucked. I have a lab on Tuesday and then a test and program on Wednesday."

"Dude, whatever man. I have three tests on Monday, a lab due Wednesday that I haven't started, a project due Thursday that my partner won't do shit on, and then a homework assignment due Friday."

"You guys have it easy. I broke both of my wrists and have to type with my  toes now, my computer HD crashed, my apartment burned down, and I have 4 tests next week and 3 programming assignments."

Of course, at some point a business major might chime in about how he has "work" to do that is "hard".

However, everyone will eventually stop laughing at him and continue with their discussion as normal.

As I'm trying to finish up one of my programming projects, I was scanning through some of the code I had written and found something that was rather... interesting.

Normally, I consider myself a good programmer, but sometimes I have to take shortcuts and cut corners.

Here is a snippet from one of my recent projects in my CS 375 Compilers class:

/* Increment the index and return the next entry 
   we can use as a label. New entry should be 
   validated as well and safe for whomever wants 
   to peek at it. */

int GetNextLabel ()
{
    return 3;
}

The amount of code like this seems to be proportional to the margin of time between the due date and the time I actually finish the assignment.

Hmm...