As part of getting the songs I was listening to up here, this afternoon I wrote a fun little song info editor in GTK-Perl. I called it gsonginfo, and stuck it over at eScripting. Check out the screenshot and then marvel at how the gsonginfo script is only 266 lines (and a good number of those are comments and GPL).

So for today I have to write a "rough plan" for my next paper. Not a rough draft, a "rough plan." Basically, I have to write the most nebulus outline you can imagine, and turn it in. Woo hoo. Do they really expect me to think about a paper before I write it?

I actually heard of Joseph Arthur because I have a copy of Howie Day covering In the Sun. However, after getting around to checking him out and listening to a set he did on Morning Becomes Eclectic, I decided he needed a post here. Hopefully I'll get to see him sometime if he ever gets back from his European tour.

I've put another little dynamic element on the front page. Continuing this music theme, this one is "playing right now". It's just a little glimpse of what I'm playing at the moment. Eventually I'll write a little more of an interface to this and you'll be able to see a bigger view. Also, for a while expect to see some cryptic names like dispatch2001-12-15d2t02.shn until I can get artists and titles into the db.

A lot of my professors feel the need to assume that everyone in the world has Word and distribute files accordingly. I really don't like that. That's why when I get a professor who puts up a document in a nice clean PDF file, I really appreciate it. I use PDFs all the time. I output all my papers into them, and then have no problem printing them elsewhere. Why can't everyone understand that there are more platforms in the world than just Microsoft? We have cross-platform document standards, people, use them.

I devoted a good chunk of yesterday to getting myself back into feeling like I'm on the cutting edge. A large part of that was getting devel code for Enlightenment 0.17 installed and configured. I've put up a screenshot in the linux section. Once a few more things get ironed out, I'll be ready to move to that for day to day use.

I also finally got Aleph One compiled and working. Early on at Gospelcom we used to play Marathon every night. I've always liked it better than any of the games that came after (Quake, etc).

Tonight I get to write a 4-5 page critical analysis of Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1971 paper 'A Defense of Abortion.' Woo hoo. I know basically how I want to argue, so I don't think it'll be too much of a deal. I plan to be done within 3 hours. Knowing me, though, that won't happen. I waste too much time when I'm supposed to be writing... Like now, for instance.

So today I made my first little thing with XSLT. Basically my concept was to be able to dump out eThreads post meta info in XML and then format it via XSLT. So this demo (which may well only work in Mozilla) demonstrates how that might work. I don't really know that this is too useful, though.

I really need to narrow myself down and actually focus on something instead of letting my projects go with my interests. In the last couple weeks I've messed around with many things, and mastered none of them. Projects I've been playing around with lately: mysql over ssh port forwarding, restricting an ssh user to scp into certain directories, communicating with smart cards, learning C, learning XSLT, and writing WAP applications. I'm sure there's more than I'm just forgetting.

It's 75 degrees outside and perfectly sunny. A little while ago I spent 45 minutes sitting in a boat in the middle of campus. Tonight I'm going to see Howie Day and OAR at House of Blues on Sunset. Classes? What classes?

This afternoon Chris and I headed down to Sunset and bought tickets for Howie Day and OAR at House of Blues on Monday night. Howie's opening, and other shows he's gotten around 40 minutes. Hopefully that'll be the case again, since I'm definitely not going for OAR. That said, we'll probably stay for them.

My new hard drive came in today... 60GB for audio. Mmmmm... Finally I can actually start grabbing stuff off Furthur. Right now I'm listening to a Tenacious D show and downloading a Howie Day compilation set.

In the course of doing some eThreads works I discovered that one post, fighting the medium, had a messed up status code that caused it not to be displayed. I've remedied the problem, and thought it was a decent enough post to link to it.

Heh... Yeah... So I have four pages... They're not good pages, though. Oh well. I didn't really expect them to be.

So it's now what -- 5:05am? -- and I've got about a page and a half of very jumbled ramblings. Only a rough draft is due tomorrow, and oh boy will this one be rough. Heh... An example of me at the top of my writing game this most definitely is not. Granted, taking 45 minutes off to talk on the phone didn't positively affect my productivity.

Ok, so tonight I need to write four pages on a topic that I really have no strong opinion on, and that I haven't really even thought about until tonight. And yet I'm not starting writing until after Elimidate. Gotta have priorities, eh?

Writing prompt: How do Mill's ideas of liberty apply to the design and/or implementation of Megan's Law?

I feel kind of cheesy pointing to a title track, but it's also the first song on the cd, and the song where I knew I liked them. A friend lent me The Strokes first album, Is This It, and thirty seconds in I was locked in for the duration. Instead of recommending other songs, I'm going to recommend the entire album be listened to in one sitting. That's really just the way it's meant to be.

Furthur is a P2P network dedicated to sharing only shn files from taper-friendly bands. For people used to chasing files around an ever-changing network of up and down ftp sites, a dedicated P2P system is very cool.

In other, but related, news, I ordered a 60gig hard drive tonight. I've been running dangerously low on space lately.

So a couple of my domains are still registered at Network Solutions because I'm too scared of paperwork to change them. One of them, escripting.com, currently shows up in whois with an expiration date of 10-Nov-2001. Hmmm... Yet the record updated date is 2002-01-09, and the domain definitely still works, so I don't know if I forgot to pay renewal or if NetSol is just screwing up as usual.

Tonight I decided that my next WAP project will be a WAP interface for MTA's Trip Planner. I guess the thinking is that most people with WAP don't ride the bus in LA, but I can think of many times when this would be really useful to me. Hacking a script that'll access the web interface won't be pretty, but I think it's definitely doable.

I'm becoming addicted to downloading live shows instead of mp3s. Granted, going shn-only limits my choice of downloads to bands that allow tapers, but really that's all I'm listening to anyway, so I don't mind. Right now I'm desperately in need of another hard drive, though, as I'm currently at the point of deleting mp3s to make room for shows.

Taper-friendly bands I'm listening to right now: Howie Day, Radiohead, Blues Traveler, and John Mayer.

I just downloaded a new mozilla nightly in approximately 7 seconds. I don't know exactly, as by the time I realized what was going on, it was done. ncftp tells me I was going at 1.11MB/sec. That's 8.88Mb/sec. Wow.

The odd thing? I'm at least 15 hops from ftp.mozilla.org. Granted, it is a direct USC connect to MAE LA, then Above bandwidth to AOL's network, but still... That's just fast.