sitzmar! do what now?

the end is near…

I finally applied for graduation last friday, and I got a letter back from the registrar's office confirming that everything is in order for me to graduate. Yikes! Now i just need to make sure I pass all my classes and I'll be scott free.

bubble bobble

I really enjoyed this comic over at vgcats. So much in fact, that I grabbed part of it to use as a background image on my cellphone.

The phone wants the images to be 275px by 175px in order to make them fill the screen, but clearly it cuts most of that 275 down to somewhere around 100. Seems like they just should have used the actual lcd size.

harvey danger concert

Harvey Danger with opening acts by Jetlag Palm, Tennis Pro, and Smoosh @ Western Washington University.

Here's the rundown:

Jetlag Palm - I wasn't too interested in what they brought to the table. I felt that they were making noises with their guitars just for the sake of making noise. Also, one of the guys was looking down at his guitar the whole time, like he wasn't sure how to play it. Maybe a closer listen would change my opinion, but as a first taste, it was sour.

Tennis Pro - These guys are darn good and put up a great set. Concerts are definetly not the place to pick up on the finer lyrical qualities of a song. But thankfully their tunes were acoustically interesting, and quite catchy. I am definetly going to look into them a bit further.

Smoosh - For a duo of such a young age, these girls are fantastic. I was quite impressed at the quality and diversity of the songs they performed, but their show as a whole package could use some work. The lead singer's routine was almost mechanical. Name the song, play the song, say thanks, repeat. The whole performance felt rushed and I really didn't get into it. Who knows what we'll be hearing from them in 5-7 years...

Harvey Danger - They opened up with "flagpole sitta", and had the crowd instantly rocking out. The energy was awesome. They had a good mix of old and new material, and finished up their 'official' set list with my personal favorite, "Sad sweetheart of the rodeo". Then they did a couple chill out songs with a chello accompanist, and called it a night.

Fantastic show. Great night.

omg hawt

cool artwork

I was digging around for some new desktop wallpapers, and stumbled across the the website of David Lanham. Dude does nice work. It's vibrant, delightfully creative, and fun. In a word, awesome.

Oh Yeah, Happy Halloween!

quick question

magic dns phone trickery

I got a new cell a few weeks back, a lg vx5200 to be precise. Very nice phone, but those buggers over at verizon have gone and locked down all the neat features so that you have to use their 'get it now' service for pictures/ringtones/games/etc, which of course costs $$.

I quickly located the wap proxy settings and set it to an open proxy server, thereby avoiding verizons $5/mo fee. However there doesn't seem to be any way to download and save pictures or files of any type. Booo!

I read about Humpa's Picserver which supposedly allows you to upload and email pictures for free, but you have to be able to change the submit url on the phone, which as you may have guessed, verizon locked down. Nutbunnies!

Not one to give up so easily, I decided to pull a little switcheroo on the phone. I knew that the phone would still be using the defined proxy, so I setup squid as a proxy on my bsd box, and added a few choice entries in my hosts file to basically hijack any requests for verizon services to the webserver running on my box.

The hijack actually worked, and instead of going to http://mw2.vzwwap.com/pixplace it was sent right to my webserver where Humpa's Picserver was running. But, I still couldn't upload or download pictures. Seems that all the uploads are handled via sms/mms. Arg! Foiled again! (if I'm wrong about this, someone let me know)

I'm getting a data cable soon, so once I get that I'm going to look into changing some of the other defaults locked into the phone. The dns servers are my first target.

Fight!

Having two virus scanner installed at the same time is not a good thing. And despite numerous warnings, some people still manage to do it. I sigh and laugh when I overhear a consultant on the phone with someone who has gotten themselves into this predicament. The best part of the conversation is when they have to explain why having two scanners is bad. One explanation is that the virus scanners fight with eachother and thats what makes the computer slow.

This conjured up a mental picture of the virus scanners as professional wrestlers:

Norton: Hey, I was here first buddy! I'm gonna scan that file! *flex*
McAfee: Hey Norton! Your mother's a whore! OH YEAH!

fight fight fight

Broken chair over the head

fight fight fight

repeat forever

my new toy

After an waiting almost 3 weeks since I orderd it, my Rio ce2100 finally arrived. I am greatly pleased with it so far. Some of the UI choices annoy me, and the player is completely useless inside the included case. But, it is a solid device and at $100 it was a hard offer to pass up.

standardized testing is lame

After reading this article, http://www.komotv.com/news/story.asp?ID=38876 I just can't believe how damn rediculous this whole thing is.

Let's take a look at what the WASL is all about. Taken from http://www.sbe.wa.gov/faq_pages/WASL.htm

Q: What is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning?
A: The Washington Assessment of Student Learning(WASL) is a means of measuring student achievement of the state's rigorous new academic standards in reading, writing, mathematics, and other core subjects. The WASL is administered at the elementary, middle and high school levels. It is designed to help teachers refine instructional strategies, increase student achievement and provide data on the performance of schools and districts over time.

Get that? It's a measurement for comparing SCHOOLS and evaulating teaching methods. It was never meant to rank individual students. I remember taking the WASL's back when they were first introduced, and now to see that they plan on making their craked out test a graduation requirement is just nuts.

"I think it's going make employers look at the Class of 2008 and beyond as more qualified"

Trust me, if you've just graduated highschool and are looking for a job where they would actually give a second glance at your WASL scores, then you my friend are already overqualified.