Well, my birthday was this past weekend, so I went home for it, and to get off campus and recharge myself. It was a pretty fun weekend for the most part.

Being completely honest, any weekend where I’m not working Friday night starts at 11:00 since my only class on friday ends 10 minutes before that. Friday morning was horrible - I had to be up early to finish studying for a test, which I don’t think I did that great on. Left campus at 6:00 and went to the Quinnipiac v. St. Lawrence game (Men’s Hockey) with my dad. Unlike the majority of the students there though, I was at the University Club area, as guests of the university’s Vice President of Finance. It was nice to be there, and although we lost, I had a fun time at the game.

Saturday family was over for pizza and cake. As crazy as my family is, its nice to see them. Gifts were checks and cash, and that’s always helpful, especially right now since I want to build a computer and need to buy the parts for it. Kristen came over after she was done working at 6, and Bill vame over around 8. Bill, Sean, Kristen and I hung out for a few hours, and then Bill had to leave. So Kristen and I started to watch “Dawn of the Dead”. Sean went to hang out with one of his friends. The movie ended at 12ish, and Kristen had to leave since she has work in the morning

Sunday was an uneventful day. Went to Olive Garden with the family and then went shopping for a few hours. Got back the campus about two hours ago, and just want the next two weeks to fly by - spring break is then, and I want/need a week off

It’s just about 11:00 on Wednesday night. The next two days are going to be hell. I have a quiz and a test tomorrow, and then another test on Friday. I really don’t want to take any of them.

I just want it to be Friday afternoon so I can go home. I don’t even care that its my birthday and stuff…that stuff will be fun…but I just want to go home and be with a couple of friends, and away from school for a bit.

:tapfingers:

WordPress version 2.1.1 was released late last night, and since I was already up when I got the notification about it, I upgraded the site then. (WordPress 1.0.7 has also been upgraded to version 2.0.9).

We’ve got a new bugfix and security release for both of our actively maintained branches of WordPress. Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.
[...]
Version 2.0.9 only includes the security update, which was around the code we use to prevent XSS.[...]As a reminder, we’ve committed to proving security updates to 2.0 through 2010, but all new features and development are going into the newer branch, which is at this time 2.1.
[...]
This is a low-to-medium priority update recommended for all WordPress users.

View the full New Release announcement: 2.1.1 & 2.0.9 Announcement

Also, the RSS feeds weren’t working right (they were only showing the first 50 words of a post). This was due to an error I made late one night while modifying the theme. It works now, and all the feeds go through FeedBurner now. You can subscribe to the posts or comments to view in your RSS reader, and you can also have subscribe by email and have posts emailed to you. The syndication options can be found on every page.

Well, the laundry has 15 more minutes before its done, and I have an hour before I have to be into work, so I guess I’ll write about what’s been going on these past two weeks.

After hearing some friends talk about Vista, I decided I want to try the final product (I have the beta 2 release on a VM), but I don’t have a computer to put it on, other than my laptop. However, I need to keep XP on that, and since I’ve been wanting to build my own computer for a few years now, that’s what I’m going to do for Vista.

(The only bad things I’ve heard about Vista are from people that are using beta or release candidate builds. If you are using an unfinished product and expect it to work perfectly, you shouldn’t be using it)

However, I don’t have any money to use to buy parts. So I finally got a job at the smaller cafe on campus. Of course, I started working mid pay period, but I do get a paycheck this Friday. The first week was 20 hours in two days; I worked 12 hours my first day since someone called out. If you’ve never dont dishes for 12 hours, let me tell you, it sucks. But the second day was better, I worked the line, serving food and ringing people out, and only did dishes for about two hours. I work again today from 4 - 12, so that’ll be another $64 closer to my computer.

The deadline for RA applications was last Friday. I got mine in a few weeks prior to the deadline, and due to my GPA being 0.037 less than what the “minimum” required GPA was, I went to talk with the lady that the applications went to. Here’s basically what happened next:

1. She said that they (her and the other Residential Life staff) would talk about what the absolute cutoff GPA would be, and that she would email me at the end of the week to let me know.
2. Its the end of the week, I’m leaving campus to go home for the weekend to attend the memorial service of a friend’s mom. I don’t have an email yet, so I email the lady. Not only does she not remember me, but they haven’t talked about yet, let alone made a decision.
3. Its now the date the applications are due. I figure I’ll here about what my situation is within a week. I was scheduled to work 12-12, and I woke up at 10:30, so it was get ready and go to work.
4. Get back from work, and the first thing I did was check my email. Oh, not only had I gotten an email saying my application was recieved, but I had another about my GPA:
   

   Your GPA did not meet the minimum for the RA position. I would like to encourage you to some time this semester and next fall to concentrate on your grades and encourage you to reapply next year.
   Thank you for your interest in the position and please let me know through out the year if there is anything I can help you with

Well no kidding, I talked with you about it.

It’s nice to know that the ResLife staff can handle the big things like making sure that everyone is in the right room, but can’t handle the small stuff they say they will do that would only take 30 minutes tops. It also would have been nice if the lady I talked to could take 5 minutes out of her not busy day to write a email to me that wasn’t just some canned response.

I’m thinking about just commuting next year. The IT staff has too many restrictions that make having the hobbies I have to hard to do on campus. I also don’t know how/if I could get my Vista machine on the domain, and since you can’t get onto the wireless network unless you’re logged onto the domain…

I would love it if I could just fast-foward this week to about 12:00 on Friday. All I want right now is to just go home and spend some time with friends.

This post brought to you by: Box Car Racer - There Is [03:18m/128Kbps/44KHz]

A while back, I came across a site that show what was thought to be a bug in Notepad - that if you type Bush hid the facts, saved and closed it, and then opened it, all you would see were small rectangles. A picture is worth 1000 words, so look at the picture if you aren’t sure what I’m talking about.

Today I came across a site that explains how that happens - turns out that it isn’t a bug in Notepad, but an error in the way Windows tells Notepad if the file is Unicode or not. IsTextUnicode() is a function that is supposed to say if a file is Unicode, but instead of being definitive about it, it only looks at the first 256 bytes of a file, and bases it on that.

As the IsTextUnicode() function dates back to 1994, this isn’t any conspiracy theory…unless the programmer could predict the 2000 election, in which case, can you leave the winning lotto numbers as a comment

This error is very reproducible: just open Notepad, and enter four letters [SPACE] three letters [SPACE] another three letters [SPACE] five letters - nothing else - and save the file. Open it again, and you will see the error.

I had a bit of a laugh the other day when I read the latest Facebook blog. It was a list of four things that the facebook staff would love to see less of. Sadly, it was a list of four common sense things that you would expect people not to post.

Let’s take a look at the list, shall we?

1. Posting phone numbers on group and event Walls
2. Accepting Random Friend Requests
3. Sharing your password
4. Posting pictures of people doing illegal stuff

My thoughts on the list:

1. Why would you place your phone number in a place that you have no idea who can see it? It’s just like if I were to go print out a flyer that said “Hey, I lost my phone…if you knew the old number, here’s the new one 555-555-5555″ and go hang it in the student center, grocery store, etc. The fact that its posted online makes it even worse in this case, as servers can be hacked, and information stolen from them.
3. Since I am guilty of this, although I only accept it if their belong either the Quinnipiac network or my high school’s network. If you belong to any other network, including the geographical network for my area, and you send a friend request, if I don’t know you, it gets denied.
4. Under no circumstance is it acceptable to share your passwords with anyone ever, no matter who they claim to be. Facebook staff will never need your password for anything. While I’m talking about passwords,you should never use your name, birthdate, easibly guessable words, etc. as a password. A good password will be at least eight characters long, and will contain a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
5. Do I even need to say anything about posting pictures of illegal activities? If its illegal, don’t post it. It’s as simple as that. If you post about it anyways, don’t complain when you get in trouble for it, its your own fault.

So its 230 AM, and having nothing better to do, I checked out Facebook’s blog. As I read, I eventually found an entry made almost three months ago, announcing that they had made a toolbar for firefox.

Here are some features that the toolbar has:

• Popup notifications - the toolbar will tell you about almost everything you get an email for.
• Search button - allows you to search facebook from the instant you open firefox until you exit it.
• Share button - allows you to send cool webpages to your friends.

The blog entry about the toolbar can be found here.
The page with the installer for the toolbar can be found here.

So I wrote in the first entry for 2007, I wrote about how I wasn’t going to make any resolutions this year, because I don’t want to not follow through on a year long thing like a resolution. So instead, I’ve decided that I’ll just make monthly goals for myself, things I want to do, things I want to not do, etc. At the end of the month, I’ll take a look at them, see how I did, and set some new goals.

So here are my goals for February:

• Stay hydrated. I don’t know how I do it, but I cannot stay hydrated while at school. I drink the same amount of water, but I’m almost slightly dehydrated, not enough that it becomes a health concern, but just enough so that I can tell.
• Not skip any classes. not even the boring core curriculum classes.
• Post at least twice a week, with at least one “Ripped from the headlines” entry.
• Put 20% of the money I need for my computer in the bank (Help me reach this goal)

We’ll see in 22 days how I did with these.

The WyldRyde IRC Network is in a class of its own when it comes to IRC networks. A friendly staff that’s alway willing to help, features to protect the user (even though they may not know they’re being protected), and channels (rooms) in a wide variety of topics are just some of what makes WyldRyde home for so many. This site even has a channel, #hacktheplanet, on WyldRyde, and you can get to it through the #hacktheplanet link above.

In the past, WyldRyde has operated as a subsidiary of a private corporation. That corporation is now closing their doors, but that is not stopping the network! WyldRyde is currently in the process of becoming a 503(c) non-profit corporation. WyldRyde is completely funded by donors, so any amount donated will help serve the users.

For more information, please see this page.

And just when I didn’t think I’d be writing about the same state twice in a day, I read about another stupid move by a Texas politician.

AUSTIN ” Gov. Rick Perry signed an order today making Texas the first state to require that schoolgirls be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

Links: HTML·PDF

By issuing this as an executive order, Governor Perry sidestepped the legislature, and angered parents and parents’ rights groups. And they have a right to be angry: how can the government tell a woman, or in this case, sixth grade girls, what to do with their bodies? Perry says that this vaccine should be treated no differently than the one that prevents polio.

But he is wrong there. The vaccine he ordered is for an STD, but last time I checked, polio is transmited through the fecal-oral route. And whereas the polio vaccine has been around for decades, the HPV vaccine has been around, in testing only, for five years. The side effects at time spans of six years and longer an still unknown. Also unknown is how long patients are protected for after being vaccinated. And it doesn’t even protect against all the strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer.

So why has he done this? Perhaps it has to do with his ties to the company and Women in Government? Let’s take a look at this:

• Mike Toomey: Perry’s former Chief-of-Staff, currently one of Merck’s lobbyists in Texas.
• Rep. Dianne White Delisi: Mother-in-law of Perry’s current Chief-of-Staff, Delisi is a state director of Women in Government
• $6000: the amount of money donated to Perry’s reelection campiagn by Merck’s PAC

Even though parents can have their child opt-out by filling out a form and signing it, this executive order still interferes with the parents’ right to make medical decisions for their daughter. If I recall correctly, part of the Roe v Wade decision was that the government cannot tell somebody what they can and cannot do with their body. I expect that the ACLU will have no problem finding someone willing to let them fight this in federal district court if Perry doesn’t rescind the order. I also believe that the ACLU will have a very good chance of succeding.