As I drove to work today I came to a realization: my college life was like a type of poem I remember learning about in high school. It may not be 100% exact, but do you remember those poems where the first and last line rhymed while the inside lines rhymed? That’s exactly what’s happened to me. As I wait for some stuff to clear up on my permanent job I’m doing a temporary job at Baxter Healthcare, where I had my first summer internship. Thus, my jobs in my Cornell Years have been:

Recently I had ocassion to require wireless access on my Linux box. This is notoriously difficult in Linux as of now, although most other hardware devices are found and work right out of the box. I’d gotten it working on my laptop before, but this time it was necessary to get it working on my desktop. At first I tried a USB wireless device, but those are almost no support in Linux so I ditched that effort and bought a D-Link DWL-G510 Wifi G pci card. I hoped it would work out of the box, but it didn’t.

What does “Deep Throat” mean to you? Well, if you were born in the 80s and happen to have a “dirty mind” then the term is a reference to a type of oral sex. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d rather not be the one to take away your innocence so go google it. If you are a history buff or were born in the 60s (or earlier), “Deep Throat” was the name given to an informant to the Washington Post who helped to leak key information about Richard Nixon which ended up in his resignation. In my opinion, it was a very weird name to give to this person considering the fact that it was a reference to a cult pornography movie in which a woman who was unable to orgasm, called upon a doctor who found out that the problem was that her clitorus was located in her throat. I think you can guess where the porno went from there. (I’ve never seen it, but saw some clips on VH1 - I think it’s the grandfather of cheesy 70s music-style pornography - the kind which is always parodied)

Got FIVE As this final semester of my four years at Cornell, so I just had to thank God for that.

I now have a newly minted Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Phillips School of Electrical Engineering. So that’s it, I’m official now. I now have my first degree. How do I feel? I feel like I’m on summer vacation. Doesn’t feel any different than any other summer. It DOES feel really good when I tell someone that I’ve graduated. It has the accomplishment feeling to it. Also, I get to tell people that I graduated from Cornell and that usually gets another round of congrats. It’s funny because for the past two days I’ve been really busy helping out around the house, unpacking my computers, and doing wedding preperations, but at the same time it feels like an eternity until my marriage.

We’re back! The server should continue up uninterrupted until I finally move to my permanent home (sometime between Oct and Dec this year)

It has been a wonderful journey with this server. I have been able to be liberated and have my very own server. I am limited only in the space and hardware constraints of the machine. I can have SQL databases, php, and whatever else I wish to support. I have been able to have my own blog, fully customizable in the way that no other is. I have provided space for my friends; Andrew Laine used it to the fullest. That’s why I’m so sad to have to shut it down. But don’t worry! It’s just temporary! I plan to have it back up as soon as I can when I get back to my parent’s house. Then it will run until I move to my job location. After that it should be running for another long period of time.

One of the best things about Linux is the ability to write shell scripts. These are most often used as utility programs to do repetitive tasks for you. I just wrote my first one on Sunday and here it is followed by commentary.

#!/bin/bash echo "starting xchat..." xchat& echo "starting Gaim..." gaim& echo "starting Thunderbird..." thunderbird& echo "starting Gkrellm (docked)..." gkrellm -w& echo "starting 2 instances of Eterm (transparent, no buttonbar, no scrollbar)" Eterm -x --scrollbar=0 --buttonbar=0 --trans& Eterm -x --scrollbar=0 --buttonbar=0 --trans&

Two panoramas I’m really proud of. They’re being hosted on flickr and you can click on them to go to the photo’s page.

Here I have decided to run the “top” command in the top transparent Eterm window. This is a great command to have running on the desktop. Basically it’s equivalent to hitting control-alt-delete in Windows and then clicking on “processes”. It tells you what you are running on your system, how much RAM/CPU cycles it’s taking up, and a bunch of other information. It dynamically updates so as you run programs you can see what’s holding up the computer. It doesn’t normally have that line running down the middle. That’s a consequence of some glitch when I was taking the screenshot.