the last day of my last year at Cornell….

I’m really busy trying to wrap up classes so that I can enjoy the last few weeks before graduating and being thrust into the “real world” so today’s post is just a minor observation. Of course, any of my long-time readers will know that as soon as I say that I’m too busy to post, I explode with a bunch of posts. Well, not for now, but who knows what tomorrow holds.

You may or may not know this, depending upon how technologically inclined you are, but you can buy ROMs of the old classic arcade games like Ms Pacman, Arkanoid, Spaced Invader, and much more. (You can also download them off of limewire or kazaa, but that’s illegal if you don’t own the arcade machines) Then there is a group which has developed a program known as the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) which you can use to play these old games. “So?” you may be thinking, “I can find shareware versions of all of those games.” Yes, but this is the actual original version of the game pulled right off the arcade machine without any changes to it whatsoever! What could you do with this? You could do what thousands (or at least hundreds) have already done: build your own arcade machine! There are a few webpages and books on the subject, I know there is one really good book on the subject available at Borders, I can’t remember the title, but it’s fairly obvious. Something like, “Build Your Own Arcade Machine.”

Friday I went to go see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as you may recall. I was quite excited about seeing it as I had read one of the five books and watched the old BBC adaptation. The movie certainly started off very well with an entertaining opening sequence, but I was left quite dissapointed. Why? At first I couldn’t really articulate what it was about the movie that was lacking. There wasn’t anything specifically wrong with it, but then more and more things came to mind and I realized why I didn’t like it.

For the past few days I have been wondering why there is still a Newsweek or Time magazine. Whereas newspapers come out once a day, these magazines come out once a week. I have already complained that I find newspapers woefully out of date when compared to news on the Internet. Why then do people still buy magazines containing news a week old? At today’s pace this is practically ancient history by the time one read’s it. Yet, today my fiancee’s actions changed the focus of my post.

Fanservice (or fan service) is a vaguely defined term used in visual media, particularly in the anime fandom (in Japanese, it is simply spoken as “service (saabisu)”), to refer to elements in a story that while potentially superfluous to a storyline, are designed to amuse or excite the audience. It is sometimes used in a derogatory manner when presented in a clumsy, pandering fashion or is the only thing notable about a series. Since it is extremely subjective, the most common uses are listed.

Just one more day until two key things occur:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes out and Daniel’s girlfriend comes up to Ithaca.

I’m really excited about the movie because it’s been getting some awesome reviews and I think that it is a wonderful and smartly funny story. Douglas Adams is awesome.

I’m happy that Ash is coming up because that makes my brother so happy. Anything that makes my family happy is awesome. I know he misses her a lot so I hope she arrives on time and they have have a good week together.

Today I finished up yet another class. The first one I finished up was a project where I was conducted a study for the School of Electrical Engineering to switch over to Linux and open source alternatives. I also published my study as my first publication at Lulu.com. It was great to have one class out of the way, especially one which was such a joy to participate in.

Today I wrapped up another favorite class, microcontroller design. As my faithful readers know, I’ve been providing the source code to each of the labs we completed during the semester. Well, today my group demoed our final project to our professor and TA. They were quite impressed with the progress we had made on the code, despite its limitations. Our final project, a web server on a microcontroller, was a lot of fun to work on. There were a lot of frustrating times, but it’s the good kind of frustration that motivates one to try as hard as they can to get around the problem. One of my favorite taks is to participate in design and debugging, trying to get my design to work because I know it *should* be working, so what did I forget? Was it simply a semi-colon? Was it something more significant, some kind of oversight? It was hard sticking to the project and keeping Rich from rewriting it from scratch, but I think we had a much better product because we sat through all of our problems and figured out what the original author of the source code we were basing it off of had done. After all, in a real work environment you have to figure what the previous guy did. There is no time to rewrite the code, no matter how awesome you are at coding. I will be posting the code and my report soon, probably over the next few days. I invite and challenge anyone out there to work on the code and make it more robust and reliable, there is PLENTY of room for that. You just need an Atmel Mega32 and STK500 development board. (As well as the computer on which one does the programming)

life is still infinite. That may change today.

I’m free flowing my writing tonight. We’ll see how much sense it makes. My dad has encouraged me to listen to Deepak Chopra. He is a western medicine educated Indian who beecame disillusioned with the poor success rates of western medicne. Determined to fuse the best of the West and East he went back to his native country to study the medical practices there. The final result is a fondue of Western Medicine, Quantum Mechanics, ancient Indian teachings, and Eastern Medicine. His books are part motivational and part practical. Sometimes they just offer plain and simple advice - eating such and such a food with such and such a quantity is shown to reduce the chance of disease X. Other times they are more metaphysical in nature.