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 I have already complained that I find newspapers woefully out of date when compared to news on the Internet.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.

A while back I posted that Mandrakesoft had bought Conectiva and changed its name to Mandriva. What I didn’t both researching at the time was the reason for this move. Apparently, Conectiva made the most popular commercial distribution of Linux in Latin America. In fact, it had contracts with the Brazilian army and navy, as well as others. Looks like they actually made a really good purchase!

I was left wondering about these OS-Tans. Here’s some extra information I picked up: To see some of the comics translated go to: http://www.otakubell.com/os-girls/ to see a little movie that parodies the beginning of an anime go to: http://ironfrost.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/.

Decriptions from Answers.com, This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “List of OS-tans”. Go there to see pictures, but here are the descriptions they had:

…unless you have a LOT of time on your hands. Wikipedia, by being internet-based takes advantage of cross-referencing in a way that was NEVER possible with traditional encyclopedias. Even new multimedia encyclopedias like Encarta don’t take advantage of it like Wikipedia does. Almost every word in an article is a reference to something else. For example, I was curious if there was an article on Five Iron Frenzy, easily one of my favorite groups of all time. To both my dismy and delight there WAS a Five Iron Frenzy article. I was only dismayed because I would have liked to have written the article! However, the author(s) did an amazing job and there was no need to add much to what they had written. In that article they mentioned Third Wave Ska. I knew that ska had come out in a few waves and often talked about it based on what I had heard people say, but I wasn’t sure on the definition. I wanted to read more so that I would have a clear understand when I spoke of it, so I clicked on the link and found out about third wave ska. I knew that ska came from Jamaica, but I had no idea what its origins are. I especially wanted to find out about it since some groups (such as No Doubt) have recently gone to a more reggae sounding ska. Unlike other encyclopedias, I did not have to type a search for ska, it was already referenced in the article! I click on it and read about ska.

I am now officially a published author. Of course, my first published work wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, but I’m still excited about it! I decided my first book would not be a photography or fictional book. Instead, my first book is a report I wrote about migrating from a MS Windows environment to a GNU/Linux environment. Since I really want people to be able to read this, I am offering my first book for FREE on Lulu.com. It’s a PDF download that will cost you nothing! Go check it out and see how you can stop paying for software.