atrus

I actually woke up in time to take my 8am final this morning. It was absurdly easy; I breezed through it in under an hour, drawing stick figures and leaving silly notes along the way. I made a point of labeling all pages that can be safely eaten by the grader (without destroying any of my answers) with comments like "Yum! It's new! and thread-safe!" and "Mmmm, paper. It's high in fiber!" I even drew a stick figure version of this 'screenplay' by the prof:
(This was posted while we waited for a project to be posted over a week late around Thanksgiving. Dr. Porter is the instructor. Mujtaba is the TA)
Scene: darkened lecture hall, Big State University (BSU).
[Beating of unseen drums heard in the background]
Dr: Porter: "Mujtaba, listen. The drums have started again. I say, sounds like the natives are getting restless."
Mujtaba: "Yes. Drums say, Academic devils ruin sacred holiday. Drums say, 'Academic devils must die.' Drums say, "TA's gonna die, too, Dr. Porter".
Dr. Porter: "Stop that nonsense, Mujtaba. They're just drums, drat it all! Carry on, you lot!"
[Gradually drum volume increases, getting louder and louder.]
Mujtaba: "Dr. Porter the drums! Those beastly, beastly drums! Pounding in my brain, pounding, pounding! I think I shall go insane before I can write the necessary files.
Dr. Porter: "There, there, Mujtaba. They're only drums. They can't hurt you. Just try to concentrate on finishing those files.
[Suddenly, *the drums stop*! Dead silence, not even the chirping on the newsgroup.]
Dr. Porter: "Now, that's damnably peculiar,"
[Dr. Porter is suddenly clobbered by a hurled laptop as dozens of screaming students burst from behind their desks.]
Dr: Porter (with last dying breath): Mujtaba.... The files....

The PVR (think TiVo) is just about ready! The only tricky part was registering for Zap2It's DataDirect channel listing service. It turns out you need to go to Zap2It Labs and sign up (for free) there. You need a "Certificate Code," which is given out on a per-program basis. XMLTV's code can be found in the mailing list archives.

From there it's just been tedious configuration stuff, but it's pretty much done. Tomorrow I get to drag it out into the the common room, connect, and test it.

taeyn plugged Date to Save. I'm tempted to get a poster for my own amusement.

You should totally check out the Hypno Toad page. It's the greatest thing ever!! All glory to the Hypno Toad ...

I think I'm too geeky to enjoy this :p Mostly because if <i>I</i> wanted something that ran everywhere I'd use NetBSD. OpenBSD lives on my firewalls and other front-line systems. Finally, we all know that OS X has to be good for making friends :p

Speaking of which, I'm happy a book on iCult was written. You know Apple is going to come out with an iHealth plan and iRetire, for your retirement savings needs.