This Roper song is my second favorite song on the album Brace Yourself for the Mediocre. Although I was quite young at the time, I still identify with a lot of the aspects from “my decade”.

“1985” By Roper

On the back of the schoolbus singing, “I Love Rock and Roll” put another dime in the jukebox, Let the Good Times Roll Grab the back of a Buick Skylark just like Michael J. Fox Grind the trucks on your brand new skateboard just like Tony Hawk Delorean those days are gone We could breakdance, Pop-lock our wrists kid before your grunge rock ever existed

I have posted the latest code from the work Rich and I have done for our microcontroller class at Cornell. We are releasing all of our code under the GPL license so feel free to use it, modify it, and have fun with it. The code is modified C code and assembly language for the Atmel Mega32 chip running on an STK500 board. It should be easily available from Atmel or perhaps your local electronic hobbyist shop.

I recently began listening to an unabridged version of The Lexus and The Olive Tree and I must say that after about ten minutes of listening to the book, I’m quite disconcerted over the increasing connectedness of countries and their ability to affect each other. Allow me to illustrate this by paraphrasing the book’s opening story.

In 1998 the Thai government had been keeping the currency, Boht, valued at one US dollar. Banks and investment first in Thailand therefore were borrowing money from US banks for their ventures since US banks were much more stable. In August of 1998 the Thai government, for whatever reason, decided to no longer tie the values of the two currencies and the Boht fell to 30 Boht for 1 US dollar. The Thai banks now had to come up with a lot more money to pay back their loans to the US banks. A short time later, 56 of Thailand’s 58 major banks closed down. Over 20 thousand white collar workers in Thailand lost their jobs. Foreign investors began removing their money from developing Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and others. This would have only caused an asian recession except for the ties to Russia.

You may have noticed that almost everything in life is organized into catch-22 situations. The video game situation in Linux also follows this law. We’ve got the following dilema: we can’t play regular, consumer PC video games on a Linux box, but if they were made available we would lose a bunch of freeware game developers. Like others, I often wish developers like Maxis would make a Sims 2 port for Linux, allowing me to play the game without having to go through programs like Cedega by Transgaming, which charge a monthly fee for usage. It would make life a heckova lot easier for those of us who wish to legally purchase video games and be able to play then without being locked to the Windows desktop.

This week my grandmother will probably be diagnosed with lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes. This is one of the worse types of cancer for two reasons. First of all, it is attacking the very part of your body responsible for keeping the body healthy. So this cancer leaves the person extra debilitated as they not only have cancer, but lose the ability to fight off infections. Second, because the lymph nodes can’t be removed like bone or even lung can, there are no surgical procedures which can be performed. The patient can participate in chemotherapy or some of the newer drug therapies.

Just when you thought the world was in huge trouble, you see an act that give you faith in humanity. I truly love those moments because so often we see these negative things on Tv: rape, murder, suicide, and hatred.

Yesterday I was with a friend of mine, talking his recent slip into some rather unfortunate circumstances. He told me I could blog about yesterday’s events, but I’ll protect his identity for now. If he wants to out himself, he can do that through commenting on this post. He cast some pretty bad lots and was lamenting not having been hugged in a long time. I suggested, in a tone of mirth, that he walk through Ho Plaza (where each student passes at least once a day according to the campus tours) with his arms outstretched in a hug shape and see if some random person hugged him. He responded that he would find that unsatisfactory because he wouldn’t know the person. He may as well just walk up to some random person and ask for a hug. At least one person, he claimed, would comply. While I disagreed people would hug on command (I certainly wouldn’t!), I didn’t say anything because there are always bozos out there that will act irrationally when compared to normal social protocol.

This song is one of my newest favorite songs and so I thought I’d share the lyrics with you. Part of what I love about this song is the fact that I was acting this way for a while at Cornell and I could have used a song to point out how ridiculous I was being. It’s about trying just hard enough to not be the worst. For a while I just wanted to get the curve. Then I realized how bad that was. I needed to strive for the absolute best and never settle with being on the curve. The lyrics are great and Reese proves once again why he has a legion of fans.

Dina Mehta’s post about the current state of Blogging in India resonates so well across cultural and state boundaries because she touches on topics which transcend the human race. One of the best things about the article, in addition to the great writing, is the fact that, by reading it, one realized that in most ways all of humanity shares the same traits.

For example, this paragraph of her article pertained to me in every aspect:

Hey, I finally got the MyMooMus plugin for WordPress working after taking a look at the code and clarifying the way to use the tags. I had originally misunderstood the way it worked and was a little frustrated when it appeared not to be working right. You’ll notice on the rest of my posts that I will be having my mood and the song I’m listening to posted. This was the last feature I was missing from my Tripod blog. Now I am 100% fully content with this software.

Every year we have a celebration on the final day of the school year on Cornell’s Libe Slope. It used to be a drunken orgy but it has morphed, in recent years into a concert with over-priced food and an ugly orange fence which makes getting to classes very hard. A couple of years ago Fat Joe was the lead act. Last year Kanye West was the headliner, although I didn’t get to see him because they weren’t allowing video cameras in and it was too much of a hassle to get back to the apartment. This year we’re getting Snoop Dogg along with some no name rapper. What’s interesting to me is the fact that a school as white as Cornell has had rap acts for the past three years. I’m not being naive or racist, saying that white people can’t listen to rap. I know they listen to rap.