[Insert title here]

The Human Factor and the Internet, or Why My Roommate Isn't Known on Last.FM

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:37:40 GMT

Computers are wonderful, but they're still susceptible to the Human Factor. We humans aren't so good at coming up with common categories that are spelled exactly the same. I've heard horror stories of database records with free form 'name' fields and the myriad of different spellings and wordings that end up in there for the same or similar things. Combine this with the tendency of "the internet" (as if it were a single entity with a mind of its own) to archive things in a rather permanent fashion, and you get interesting results.

Today I started poking around my Last.FM profile, and I noticed in my Library that I had over 450 plays attributed to John Thomas, but the picture was not what I expected to see. My roommate is a musician who goes by John Mark Thomas (click! listen!). I've been listening to his older stuff for years, however when I ripped the CDs (I had permission, honest!) I entered "John Thomas" as the Artist name in the meta tags. Sadly, all this time I've been attributing plays to another artist whom I know nothing about. Consequently the last time I typed "John Mark Thomas" into Last.FM, it claimed not to have enough information to play similar artist. I have corrected the meta tags, however years of data have been lost forever. *sniffle* Oh well, further research indicates that his latest album is available.

I find it amazing the massive amounts of data that are floating around out there on the internet. The results are fascinating and lead to all sorts of interesting electronic wizardry. I remember listening to whatever I could record on cassette tapes, now I can type an artist into the magic box and good music I often don't know of comes out. Go internets.

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:15:27 GMT

Update.

Poor Santa

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:10:37 GMT

Santa just rode around the apartment complex on a fire truck covered in Christmas lights. I think I was the only person to go out and wave to him. Poor Santa.

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 02:33:43 GMT

I completly forgot to post to my journal after I moved. So here's how things are now:

I have an apartment in Gainesville, VA (45 minutes from DC) with my good friend John. I currently have a 2-month contract with the Fairfax County Police Department for their PC replacement project. Basically I go out to each station or other location, inventory all of the computers, and replace the oldest ones. I'm really hoping they will extend the contract, I enjoy working there and they seem to like having me around to help out.

My birthday was this weekend, so my parents came up from North Carolina and my grandparents came down from New Jersey. Saturday we took the train into DC and visited the International Spy Museum and the National Building Museum. Lots of fascinating stuff at both. If you're in the area, go check out David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture at the National Building Museum, fascinating stuff.

And now I think I'm going to go pass out, its past my bedtime.

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 03:31:35 GMT

Today's moving update:

John got me exact measurements on the room and door/window positions and figured out what will fit well in there and which furniture stays here. I have sanded all of the pieces of my desk and we made the rest of the cuts today. The top needs to be glued together, cut to finish and sanded. The legs also needed a finishing sanding and then everything will be stained and assembled. Yay! Tomorrow I go to Lowes and get a 4x8 sheet of 3/4 plywood (ouch in the wallet) and two more 2x4s. The work bench is going to grow significantly and become the living room computing/workbench area. I will have to leave one piece of furniture, and that is the writing desk. It doesn't do much beyond hold my PCs right now anyway, and my mom will make use of it as this becomes the guest bedroom.

I have all of my stuff out of the attic (goodness how did I get so much?). I've packed up all the books and all of the kitchen stuffs that I've been collecting. I'm hoping to put a sizeable dent in all of the loose stuff in the room this week so I can do the serious packing next week. Anyone know how to pack a filing cabinet? I wont be able to stand it up in the van (four drawers), so I need to do something else with the files to avoid insane messes. I might look for filing boxes at Office Max this week.

Only three more days of work left! I'm going to go eat lunch with my mom and her class at school tomorrow, and my boss is taking me to lunch on Thursday. I think I'll have one last meal at The Cookout on Friday :). Just a week and a half left before I move, eep.

Things that need loving homes

KayPro 2x, with daisy wheel printer and CP/M and Wordstar disks
8088 IBM PC Clone, includes the keyboard and your choice of amber or green monochrome monitor, I also have a LOT of 5.25" floppy disks
286 (also a clone), includes everything the 8088 does except maybe the disks, I have no problems throwing this one out though
Possibly my Apple //c, includes the color monitor (hook it to a VCR and instant TV) and joystick as pictured here: http://www.ekriirke.com/images/Apple2c.jpg
Wyse WY-150 dumb terminal, amber screen with two DB-25 RS232 ports, keyboard included
Large stuffed tiger in lying down position, 3 feet long from paws to rear (not including flexible tail) wearing a custom made graduation cap (easily removable)
Green student pillow
Toshiba SD-V291 DVD/VCR combo, has been known to lock up and refuse to play/eject DVDs on occasion, includes remote

That is about it, there are some smaller things but nothing worth shipping. All items come from a home with dogs, if you are allergic you may want to avoid the tiger and the student pillow. If anyone is interested in anything, just leave a comment or email me at qbfreak+lj@qbfreak.net

Got any empty boxes?

Wed, 30 May 2007 02:27:55 GMT

I have been quietly thinking and planning for a while, and I have decided to move up to Gainesville, VA with my friend John. It may appear sudden, but plenty of thought, prayer, and advice of those I respect has gone into it. I gave my two week notice at work today, and will finish up working on June 8th. I'll spend a week packing and on the 16th my car, my parents nice big van, and likely a trailer will make the seven and a half hour trip north. Whee. I'm looking forward to having John around again, silly friends moving away on me...

It will be a new experience for me, being out on my own away from family. A little scary, but mostly exciting. Now all I have to do is make sure that Mandy doesn't lock me in her closet again. *eyes Mandy with suspicion*

The icecream monster will get you!

Tue, 29 May 2007 03:44:11 GMT

The new wafflecone iron where my sister works doesn't always make them properly, on occasion a mutant is born. Run for your lives, the icecream monster is coming!

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:13:42 GMT

*Rattles closet door*

Hello? Mandy? Can I come out now?

Anybody?

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:17:36 GMT

I just thought I'd post again so everyone knows that soaringdragon42 and the_fool76 did not manage to kidnap me. I am not posting this under duress of a crazed draggy who has locked me in her wi-fi enabled closet, nope, not at all.

HELP!a;lkja;kjld
kjajsafkj

[End of post]

I'm not dead yet!

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 03:12:04 GMT

I thought I should let everyone know that I am still alive.

I saw Meet the Robinsons this weekend, it was pretty funny. I even got some nifty 3D glasses from it. Too bad they wont work on the PC without an external alternating polarization filter.

Anyway, I am alive.

Cool engineering

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 04:33:30 GMT

Ahg, make the puns stop! :)

The problem

Ah fall, that wonderful time of year when the weather cools off and I can no longer use my room as an oven. I've been keeping my window open with a few small fans for several weeks now. The fans help cool down the room temperature a little bit, but even with two fans the computers keep it pretty warm in here.

The idea

I've come up with this idea several times before; if the computers are making the room hot, why not pipe all the hot air outside? Sadly I never went through with it for various reasons. I figured that anything I could build wouldn't work very well and would cost a bit of money. Besides, how would I get the air from the rear of the computers across the bed to the window?

The solution

Stage 1

Last week I finally got fed up with the heat and bought 8' of drier hose. Initially it ran across the upper level of my desk to the back of the computers, with a fan pushing cooler air through it to the rear of the computers. This helped a bit, the hot air coming out of the back of the cases wasn't sitting around anymore. Unfortunately this made it warmer around my bed.

Stage 2

After sitting and staring at the walls for a while, I realized I could suspend the hose from string over the bed and get cooler air from outside to the computers. This helped a bit more, and cooled the room off a little too, however there wasn't enough hose to reach the front of the computers (where the air is taken in) and I tended to bump my head on it when sitting up watching TV. Another problem was the fan design, it moved air well like it should, but it wasn't good at drawing air from more than an inch or so away, even with the fan sitting on the window sill it didn't pull in much of the cooler air outside.

temperatures

Incoming air:	70.7 degrees
Room:	77.8 degrees
Inside Dauntless (PC):	80.8 degrees

Stage 3

I had two problems to solve:

The air hose needs to avoid my head completely when sitting on the bed, while doing this it also needs to reach the front of the computers
The fan needs to draw in air from outside of the screen, not just the air inside the room around the window sill

In the spirit of mixing things up, I plotted to solve the second problem first. While digging through a box of parts, I found two computer fans, each almost five inches across:

Next I located a cardboard box, with dimensions slightly larger than the fan:

I cut two holes in the box, one for the fan and one for the air duct. The fan is in the end of the box and the air duct hole on the top, this way I can place it in the window and feed the duct straight up away from the bed. Once done, the box was wrapped in duct tape for looks:

Now I needed to get the duct from the fan box over to the PCs on the desk next to the bed. I briefly considered using string again, but I had no way to attach it to the ceiling without holes and it would look tacky. After a bit of crawling around the attic, I located my K'Nex construction set. K'Nex are pretty cool for building large structures. In the past I've used them for suspending a variety of items from door frames, and even once as a leg on my train table. It took several hours, but I got a fairly sturdy bridge built. One end sits on the curtain rod over the window, the other on a tower that sits on the upper level of my desk. Unfortunately the first 8 feet of drier hose wasn't quite long enough.

The following day I bought more hose and hooked up the fan. It surprised me the amount of airflow it produced.

As of this post, it has cooled the PCs and the room significantly, although it appears that Dauntless still has some heat issues to work out. More than likely something overheated one too many times and is now on the way out.

Post-time temperatures:

Incoming air:	64.1 degrees
Room:	79.0 degrees
Inside Dauntless (PC):	76.3 degrees

The room and PC temperatures will drop even more when I got to bed, turning off the lights and monitors.

NEW: Action Figure Mulder with Extreme Klepto Action!

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:59:09 GMT

Somewhere amidst Season 4 of the X-Files my friend John and I started really noticing Fox Mulder's kleptomaniacal tendancies. He pockets at least one thing in nearly every episode, at one point he even stole his own car.

Oh right, you wanted to know about me, not Mulder. In the spirit of 'A picture is worth a thousand words', I present 3000 words on my new car:

1995 Chevy Lumina

And that is all I have for now, work is calling me and I've been late enough times this week already.

Tue, 02 May 2006 07:46:04 GMT

I almost forgot...Windows tastes funny.

A "real" update?

Tue, 02 May 2006 07:33:15 GMT

Hmm. Looking through my past entries I haven't said anything real about life since January 5th, so much for thinking everyone was up to date... Stuff happened today anyways, so it's update time.

As you may or may not know, my nice temporary job at Kodak managed to stretch for 14 months. Sadly that came to an end on December 30th. I did the whole job looking thing without much success for over a month. By February I gave in and went back to Tony's, so I'd have some sort of income while I keep looking. I'm still there, still making $6/hr + tips. Some days that pays better than the $13/hr I got a Kodak, some days it's worse.

I've been keeping my eye on Careerbuilder and Monster.com for anything in the area that I'm qualified for. So far I haven't really found anything. I was given a name and e-mail address of the CEO of a support company in Matthews. I emailed him and he replied saying he was just back from vacation and needed some time to get on top of things at work before he could discuss any potential job opportunities with me. He told me to e-mail him again if I hadn't heard back by thursday. It has now been a week and a half and I've e-mailed him several times with no response.

I've had a couple of different ideas for things to do as a part-time home business. I talked to my neighbor who runs his own electrical business to find out what all I needed to do to be 'legit'. Today I went down to the court house to register the business name. I have verified that the name I want is available, I just need to get the form notarized. Not knowing where the nearest notary was I tried to call my dad, he didn't answer so I headed over to Kodak. If he wasn't available I figured someone there would know.

When I got to Kodak, someone else had just come in and was talking to my dad, wanting to get a small data-conversion program written. My dad suggested he talk to me, since I've done a few things like that for Kodak and I'm looking for work. So now I've got a little bit of work, $200 for something that wasn't too difficult to do. Tomorrow I'll take it over and see if they have any more sample data. I think it's done but I'd really like to test it on more than 10 or so records. I also need to get down to the bank some time this week and get that form notarized and back to the courthouse. And do laundry. Clean laundry would be nice.

It's time for sleep now, I managed to get up "early" (9 am) today, and being that it's past 3am it has caught up with me. I intended to be in bed two and a half hours ago...

sniffle

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:36:42 GMT

Apparently I'm not a friend if I don't update at least once a week

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 02:41:52 GMT

*post*

Avatar

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 02:01:08 GMT

Swingerzetta is the awesome. Look at the shiny new avatar he made me! This is actually the second one I've gotten from him.


Old	New

So cool

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 08:11:07 GMT

The evil sleep, it is caaaalling me.

I went to visit my friends in Cullowhee again (Western Carolina University). Drove up friday and came back tuesday. I stayed with Micah, Levi, and Andy in the house they're renting. The couch was quite comfortable but I must say, when the temperture drops to 17 degrees, its nice to have more than just a space heater. The central heat burns oil (or was it kerosene?) but costs a small fortune to fill the tank up.

It snowed Friday night and most of Saturday and Sunday, much yayness there. Drove around a bit on Sunday afternoon and took a few pictures. The mountains (or hills as wants to call them :p ) always look so pretty in the snow. I also got a few pictures of Levi's snowman, more specifically what Micah and Andy did to it...

I got to stick around for another Campus Rock large group meeting, always good stuffs. Afterwards as we were cleaning up Aron and I decided that lamps can make good art:

Before I left tuesday I scavenged through all the old junk Andy was getting rid of. I managed to dig up a few decent PCs to gut for parts, as well as one for my sister. I also got a 133Mhz Thinkpad and some sort of Sharp tablet PC that doesn't exactly work.

All in all it was a really good trip. And making it better I found out that Aron will be back (to Charlotte) for the weekend in two weeks and Micah will be home for the weekend in three weeks.

Shocking and amazing!

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 08:36:14 GMT

I had a bowl of cereal tonight. I havn't had cereal in years.

I'm weird :)

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 04:08:12 GMT

Its 82 degrees in here. I wish my sisters weren't so perpetually cold... The worst part is that its not the heater, its the wood stove, so I can't just turn it down.

I think I shall escape to walmart, I need to get out anyway :)

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 10:56:54 GMT

That CD that was back-ordered...somehow the order never went through. And then I found out that my grandmother may have ordered it for me. Except that she never answered my mom's e-mail when she tried to clarify... I'd ask her but I really don't want to get drug into things. Its sad to see most of your mom's family treat her differently than they do each other.

The neighbor's rooster is crowing. I think I'm gonna crack my window open a little and crawl into bed for a nap. If I can keep myself to a long nap and actually get up in the morning, I might be able to fix this schedule. Really I'd like to be waking up at this time but I've rarely been able to do it, never without a schedule forcing me to.

Sleeeepytime!

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 10:22:50 GMT

I should be in bed asleep. Unfortunately I had caffeine around 5:30 or 6 this evening. Its still affecting me somewhat. Surprisingly my brain is ready for sleep, but my body wont let it. I close my eyes and they wont hold still. I suspect its because I havn't eaten since dinner, but right now I really don't feel like moving at all...

Its one of those times when you from being really happy, somewhat wound up, to really calm, almost sad. Not really sad, but thoughtful, but not happy either. Like somewhere under it all something sad thats been hidden for a while is trying to come back out. No use asking, I have no idea what. The oddest thing is I enjoy these times when they come.

I hope this made sense, I'm on the verge of falling asleep in my chair (if only I could).

As if it can't get weird, I smell rain. And it feels like the temp just dropped in here.

I should go wash the chickens water containers before someone wakes up...

*wanders off*

Update! Yay!

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 10:21:12 GMT

My CD is back ordered, This makes me sad. To make up for it they'll give me 5% off of a few select items, however the biggest savings there is something like $0.60.

In brighter news Micah and I blew up a muffin yesterday. Micah also beat me at stratego. Again. I'll have to rig the game so all his pieces are scouts or something...

In an experiment to see if coca-cola powered rockets were feasible, John and I played with mentos and diet coke. The Arabic Gum in mentos breaks the surface tension of the water in the coke so quickly that the carbonation erupts violently as it escapes. We figured the more surface area of the mentos, the more of the soda we could set off at once. Cutting up mentios is an excellent way to increase overall surface area. Four diced mentos were dropped into a 2lt of diet coke which promptly shot a geyser a good four feet high. Sadly the second attempt of ten diced mentos was a mild failure, the mentos had sat out so long after being diced that they became sticky and very few actually fell into the bottle. Next time. I think John plans to design a mentos injection system for a coke powered rocket now...

In other news, once again I stayed up way too late working on MARE related stuffs. It's so late in the early morning that my bot is no longer paging me to remind me to go to bed. Sad times. The past few days I've been designing systems so I can build a fully functional starship. I wish UniverseMARE was still around, I'd love to build it there. I've also been working on the bot, and some on the wiki. Hooked on the MARE again, tsk tsk :)

So far I'm enjoying my week off, but not really looking forward to job hunting again. Finding something in my field that I'm qualified for is not all that easy. I've got one possible lead to follow up on, really hoping that one works out. Worst case I call up adecco (the temp agency I went through for this last job) and tell them I need work, they'll find something temporary I can do. I really want to see if I hear something definite about this other position opening before I do that, trying to keep my options open time-wise. We shall see.

My ability to give anything any amount of attention is fading fast, if you're not already there you should come harass me on the MARE one day.

QB out.

Twas the night before the night before christmas...

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 08:41:51 GMT

Whee.

I had to pick up something for my mom at walmart, and despite it being midnight I still had to stand in line for 45 minutes. All in all I didn't get home until 1:30 or so. Once I got home I decided to play some Need for Speed. I did pretty good, still having trouble learning to keep off the accelerator on the faster cars :)

A few minutes after two I heard a loud thump, like someone taking a bat to a mailbox or maybe a large tree branch falling (it's been known to happen here). It got the dogs going, I turned on the front light but I didn't see anything. All good, went back to my game. A half hour later or so the dogs started barking again once or twice. Quieted them down and went back to the game.

Shortly before three they started really carrying on, and as I stood up from my desk I noticed light in the street, like a car was stopped. Looking out the window I saw it was a highway patrol car and a county sheriff car. Something else caught my eye, on closer look I noticed a car in the next-door neighbor's front yard that had hit a tree. Realizing what I had heard I went out and talked to the officers to see if they needed to know what time it happened.

Judging by the car and something one of the officers said, it looks to have been a boy down the street a few years younger than I. I don't know if he was driving drunk or what happened, but he hit a tree in a yard on the opposite side of the road for the direction he was facing. Around five or ten after three a small pickup drove up and stopped to talk to the officers. After a few minutes the driver walked back to the truck and turned the hazard lights on. I suspect it may either be the driver of the car or his older brother. I don't recognize the truck but I don't really know that family at all.

3:25ish: Just looked out the window, the deputy just drove off. It looks like the boy, Matt (just remembered the name), is sitting in the passenger seat of the highway patrol car, the officer is talking to someone else next to the pickup truck.

3:35ish: The officer cuffed him and drove him off, the pickup left. The car is still in the middle of the neighbor's yard.

Crazy night. We shall see what happens tomorrow, I suspect I'll a good bit about it between two of my other neighbors :) (one of which heard the noise too, don't know if he called it in or not but I saw him turn the light on and back off).

As I said, Whee.

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:00:00 GMT

Mmm, weather.

The good news is the roads are great, the bad news is the power lines are not so great. Power is out at home, but things are good at work. All I can say is thank goodness for UPSes, my PC would have been toasted by the brownout flickering mess right before it went for good. I hope the monitor survived. I shut off all my power strips as soon as I could, so everything that's still good will be ok.

Work time now.