Well, it’s that time of year again. Cake and birthday presents of clothing (Yay Linux shirts last year and Yay long sleeve goodness this year) and strangely a lot of reflecting.

Saturday was a ‘Big Day’ as Burnz, or rather Burnz’s father, would so awesomely say. From waking up at 7:10 to a CS lab to 5 miles of walking in philly and finally to watching the Matrix for the first time täällä, I would say that I was quite busy. My feet are sore but I can legitimately say that I’ve been ‘in philly’ now.

Tomorrow… well that’s really today after I sleep… I want to find time to:

a. Chill in my Hammock. It is sweet, that’s all i can say
b. Actually do my engin homework a little bit earlier.
c. Have some 16 feet A Cappella Awesomeness
d. Cake!
e. The cake is a lie, and of course there is no spoon. Anyways, that’s a throwback to portal. Sort of. Ok, more than sort of.
f. play guitar. It’s so fun
g. make some birthday resolutions… hrmmmm
e. Have fun and be myself

I think I can get to all of them =). Goodnight.

Spam can be quite interesting sometimes. Today’s specimen is pretending to be a Google adwords information email that wants you to download a ssl certificate. But the crazy part is the domain that they point you to. It’s not just a subdomain, but 9 subdomains for adwrss.com.

adwords.google.select.starter.signup.privatelogin.7grheizsgeog2pw.linkbrowse.comservlet.adwrss.com

And the moral of this post is that I love spamassassin and other spam filters… when they work.

When I got to Philadelphia a few weeks ago it was certainly still summer. The days were hot and sunny, and the nights were the kind where you would wake up sweaty. Even with three fans going non stop it was still more intense than any of the camp nights I spent in northern Minnesota.

Luckily, that’s finally changing.

We had two torrential rains in the past week (I’m pretty sure that one was a result of the hurricane) and after they were finished the weather was noticeably colder. Last night was even cool enough that I was able to sleep with my comforter on and not overheat.

Now it’s time to see who isn’t used to the cold =).

I’ve always wanted to add a handwriting component to some of the more interesting note-keeping apps in KDE, such as BasKet. I wonder if having a KPart (like marble does) that let you (as a developer) easily add annotation support would be useful. Not that I know much about creating a KPart yet, but I think that it would fit very nicely with the concept of KDE4

I finally got a new cellphone to replace my ageing Nokia 6682. Beforehand I had decided that I wanted to have a phone that worked on the super-duper 3g networks that now permiate Minneapolis and Philadelphia. With the N78 I also lucked out and got a 3.2MP camera, GPS, a headphone jack, 2gb of memory (MicroSD slot) and a really cool looking phone. I am a big fan, and I’ll be sure to post more about it later.

Honestly I think that Symbian S60 has vastly improved since the days of my 6682, and everything just seems more fluid now. Oh, and GPS + google maps + 3g is _the_ best thing since sliced bread.

I’m always a lot stronger (muscle-wise at least) at the end of the summer compared to any other time of year. This August has been no different, and I’m really pleased that I can actually windsurf in higher winds without letting myself get blown off course. Thursday and Friday had excellent wind and I was able to get out on the lake both days. The wind was from the southwest, which is great because it means that it gets funneled down a channel before being released into the wide part of the lake where I surf. I’m able to start in the shadow of the wind to the side of the channel (pulling your sail up and starting to move is in my opinion the most difficult part) and then sail past the opening where all of the amazing wind is.
The starboard tack is favored with a wind like this, meaning i take a long time going back west and then get the really sweet tacks when I’m on a reach or even a broad reach back east. I found out during the past two days that my semi-starter windsurf board can actually plane, and it can do it well. I had one phenomenal tack where I was going at least as fast as I waterski, which would mean 30 miles per hour!

Alright, I’m cutting this short for now because I have to go and do some work and errands, but I do want to continue with the windsurfing theme.

Just a quick note to say that I’m back from working up north where I had spotty internet access. I’m now in an interesting transition week before heading out to Pennsylvania to start school. I can resume blogging now that I’m ensured a connection and I (hopefully) have some free time.

I haven’t made a post now for a few weeks. It’s amazing how quickly my Akismet spam filter fills up. 135 spam messages in about a week. They are all posted as comments to this blog, even though I don’t actively advertise or link it anywhere. I just wonder how some of the larger bloggers can cope. I guess the nice thing is that I’ve never had a false positive – meaning I’ve never had Akismet falsely identify a comment as spam. That means that I an usually just delete the spam without looking at it. Additionally, the number of spam comments that leak through is extremely low, on the order of 1 or so per month. Easy to manage.

In just one short week here I’m going up north, meaning that I’ll have very intermittent internet access. I hope that I can continue to blog, even just a little bit. We’ll see about that one.

Wow, this makes my life easier…

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion

The above page details the steps needed to maintain a wordpress installation using subversion. This way any changed files between releases (i.e. 2.5.0 to 2.5.1) get updated accordingly, without me loosing any of my important data.

Well, to the best of my knowledge the source of all of my disk errors and random reboots is the MSI motherboard in my AMD X2 box. Great…. It can’t seem to read from one sata drive and write to another at the same time without crashing and burning. Well, not the burning part, that’s just figurative language.

Of course, the ASUS board powering my main machine has 8 (yes 8, I’m amazed as well) SATA ports that work flawlessly.