Jon Stewart, Colony Strikes Back, Cheezy Bread and More!

Last night was highly entertaining. So much to say, such a little textarea to fit it inside. At about 6:00pm I wandered over to Matt's room and hung out for a while looking at pictures of SGI boxes and fighting with a junky Compaq box that refuses to boot because it doesn't see the keyboard. My guess is that it's a bad keyboard controller or the fuse of the PS/2 port is blown. Either way, it needs to be taken apart and because it's a Compaq box, taking it apart is akin to rocket science. They never understood the concept of user servicable parts.

Around 6:30 I headed over to the Field House to see Jon Stewart. I figured that being there 30 minutes before the doors were supposed to open would give me a relatively good spot in line. Apparently, I was kidding myself. By the time I got there, the line was already about a quarter mile long, winding back and forth across the various sidewalks and lawns usually reserved for off-roading the golf carts (you know who you are). To set the scene, the sun had just set on an overcast fall day, still leaving enough light to see around in a world saturated in gray. The temparature was in the upper 30s to low 40s, sending a chill of the winter to come across my face. The ever-present RIT breeze didn't help.

So I stood in line waiting for the doors to open with a couple of guys that were into Macs and Gaming so there was plenty of conversation to be had. Most of it centered around the Xbox360 and which launch titles will be most visible. Once the doors opened, we shuffled about a hundred feet down the line before chaos took it's rightful place and among the frosty crowd. A large group of people cut fairly far into the line, leading the people behind them to believe that the line had moved or changed direction or something, completely leaving my part of the line standing out in the cold, literally.

At that point, all semblance of a line disappeared and it just turned into a mostly non-violent shoving competition to get to the door first. I did what I could and managed to get through just about the time that the auditorium reached 50% capacity so I had a fairly good choice of seats. I went with one of the bleachers near the back, about halfway up. From my experience during the last comedian's act, I knew that this wasn't such a bad vantage point.

Another forty minutes later, Jon Stewart took the stage and started in asking "America's Youth" if we were hopeful. A resounding NO, answered that question and seemed to throw him off a bit. As with any entertainer, he was enjoying the closed captioning too much, and used the audience's laughs to determine when the captioning was screwed up. Apparently the person typing the captioning didn't know how to spell "Escher" as Jon was referring to the camera catching a glimpse of the screen behind him, creating a tunnel effect.

Lots of Jewish jokes, lots of Christian jokes, a fanatically religious guard, and some cheap shots later, the show was over. Rather disappointing that he only went for an hour, but a good show nonetheless. He mentioned a video that they pass around the office about a guy screwing a pinata in a back room caught on security tape. The image of Jon Stewart motioning as if fucking a pinata is an image that is going to stick with me for a while.

After the show was over, another mad rush for the doors ensued and I somehow managed to run into Larp outside. Given a few more seconds of looking around, I found the rest of the group and managed to discern that they were going to be heading back to Colony. I joined up with them and we began the "walk of shame" from the dorms/campus to Colony Manor that freshman use to go to the widely acclaimed "college parties". As this was not far from the truth, I didn't mind it too much. The temparature had dropped another five degrees or so by then, so I put on my sweatshirt and warmed up pretty quickly. I'm not sure why I've had a higher tolerance to the cold than other people, but I think it might be because I'm just a bit more used to it being from Corning. It's certainly a lot closer to Rochester's climate than say, Florida.

So we got to Colony and I just hung out as I had a few weeks ago. I still abstained from drinking. I'm not really sure why I don't drink. It's not because it's illegal, that doesn't really bother me that much. Maybe I don't drink just because it doesn't smell good to me. I never really liked the smell of beer or wine, and straight alcohol never smells nice. I'm sure I'll go drinking eventually, but at this point, it's plenty entertaining to just watch everybody else when they're drunk. Most of the group is still coherent at that point, but not quite "all there". Hilarity ensues.

Around 1:30am I decided that I was ready to go home and get some sleep but I ended up walking over to building 70 with Sean and Matt to work on the ITSO server because it didn't come back up after Sean had rebooted it from Colony. Apparently it had come back up, but didn't receive an IP address for one reason or another. The remaining work to be done on the server is to figure out why gettext isn't working right. I got a little cocky at Colony and said that I could have the box up in under an hour. I probably shouldn't have said that because I think it offended Sean a bit with the amount of work he had put into getting that box up and running again. I didn't realize that they were trying to do so much custom stuff.

While we were hanging out there, I shared the list of ANAC numbers to that we could find the new phone number in the ITSO office, which led to a discussion about one of the many illegitimate boxes sitting there that had a bunch of phone cards in it. The plans are to get Asterisk running on it so that we can play with some VoIP stuff. I'd love to have access to something like that so that I can use my PocketPC as a phone if I'm in range of wifi. That's a project that I might like to get involved in if it ever goes anywhere... Have to remember that this is ITSO we're talking about. Nothing gets done unless Jackie does it.

Speaking of Jackie, yesterday was her birthday! She turned 17 (I think). Happy birthday Jackie. And here I am thinking I'm young to be in college... She's got me beat by a little more than a year.

Ok, so I slept until noon today, and came over to building 70 to maybe meet up with Sean and the others to do something later. Apparently Sunday is more of a work day than play and Jym isn't going bowling. Oh well. I'm perfectly happy getting my CS2 homework done and blogging my fingers off! As I write this, I am sitting in one of the many lounges on the IT floor of building 70 listening to some music and semi-eavesdropping on the conversations around me. Nothing too interesting.

The music I'm listening to is from last.fm. I've played with their services for a while but never really used their software for fear of spyware. I decided to give it a shot because I'm getting a little tired of the iPod and have found that it's awesome. Their OSX player is nice and simple, looks good, and has free music. You can configure it lots of different ways, but I've got it setup so that it's just playing music similar to Enigma. I felt that that was the right type of music for the mood I'm in. It works great! I just typed in Enigma and I've got a nearly infinite variety of similar music. I'd imagine that it's based on their MusicBrainz/AudioScrobbler stuff where they keep track of what you listen to and calculate your "Neighbors" that listen to the same music you do. I'll definitely keep using this thing, it's nice when you want to get out of your library for a while, but don't want to just listen to a random internet radio station.

Well... That brings me to now. I've done my CS2 homework, still have to do last week's lab, and need to write a paper for Writing class. Not to mention the six arguments for Ethics class that need to appear out of nowhere in the next few weeks. Needless to say, blogging is a good excuse to avoid these things. It's really amazing me just how fast these quarters are, and how much I've learned in the space of the five weeks I've been here. The best part is that the work is just challenging enough to keep me interested, but not to the point where I feel incredibly overworked. I just hope that when I take a full 17 credits next quarter, I'll feel the same.

My only worry at this point is that the math is going to kill me. I'm already starting two classes behind where I should be, and have four Calculus classes to to after I get up to speed. For this reason, I'm considering switching to an IT major. My worry is that an IT degree won't go nearly as far as a CS degree and I'll regret it later. On the other hand, just about all of my friends are IT majors, and it seems like IT people are generally more upbeat, relaxed, and social than CS people. I'm not going to begin to try to understand why this is, but am seriously considering the consequences of the various actions I could take at this point. I'm pretty sure I can deal with the content of the CS courses, but really don't want to be here for too many years.

Bedlam and the rest keep telling me to stick with it, because everybody goes into IT because "CS is too hard". I haven't been here long enough to observe this specific phoenomenon, but still have mixed feelings as to how I want to deal with this situation. I've been told that switching from CS to IT is not easy because the courses are very different, but I figure that I can either test out of the trivial stuff, like Intro to Multimedia, or just load it up with the classes that follow it because it doesn't really matter too much as a prerequisite to me. I think that before I can decide anything, I need to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. Do I want to write games? Do I want to admin clusters? Do I want to throw it all away and go into an Art major? The thought has crossed my mind. Film/Video/Animation sounds like a lot of fun, though I think they want you to have some existing talent before you start with that sort of thing. I'm hoping that taking a trip home next weekend will help me clear my head and figure some of these things out before it's too late to change my major.

Well, I think I've done my share of story-telling, ranting, and contemplation for one day. Peace.