On my birthday, the third largest solar flare ever recorded occured and today the the 2 tons of "coronal mass ejection" will hit the earth. Fun! Apparently the effects will include satellite and cellular disruption and aurora borealis type events in the Southern hemisphere.

View from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope which shows light from a specific type of iron ion formed at 1.5 million degrees Kelvin. Taken at 11:12 UTC. Given the size of the sun, that white spot is pretty big. Image courtesy of the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory

On a possibly related note, my CS370 exam sucked ass.

Last weekend was very good. It was my official birthday weekend so I did lots of fun stuff.

On Friday I kinda just sat around after getting home, hung out with Kim and talked to my mom a bit, nothing special.

On Saturday I got up bright and early for no reason at all. Then I studied CS370 for a bit and then Matt and Chris came over to install RedHat 9 on Chris's laptop. And they brought me presents! Matt brought me a Jones Soda and Chris brought me an adaptor which allows me to use a Playstation controller on my computer! Sweet on both things! Then Kim got home from work and we all went with my Mom and my brother to Jack Astor's for some supper (we wanted to go to East Side Mario's but they were too busy). Kim gave me the Indiana Jones trilogy DVD boxed set which rocks soooo much. She didn't think it was good because it was what I asked for and that meant there was no surprise, but I am still happy. After supper we went to Silvercity and saw the move Kill Bill Vol. 1 and it was really good, but brutally violent. I am looking forward to Volume 2. Apparently the movie is rated Canadian R, which means that no one under 18 is allowed in even if they are with a parent. This is funny because Kim and I were asked for ID when we bought our tickets. When we got back to my house we ate some really good cake and then everyone went home.

On Sunday I would have slept in but Kim came and woke me up at 9:30. Grrrr. :) So I went to Walmart and bought a Playstation controller to go with my shiny new adaptor and I also ate some more of my cake. When I got back to Waterloo I found out that the controller+adaptor works better and easier than any other PC controller I have tried before, in both Linux and Windows. Yay!

Today is my actual birthday, but unfortunately I have my CS370 midterm tonight from 7-9. I had a midterm last year on my birthday too. It's not fair. So I am staying at the school after work today and when I get home I think I will eat some more of my cake and play some Chrono Cross with my new controller.

This weekend was pretty fun, Matt came down to look for an apartment for the Winter, and so I stayed in Waterloo and attempted to help.

On Friday Jen, Rob, Chris, Sean and I went to Kelsey's for supper and I had the four-cheese spinach dip which was very good. It took so long to get our food though, we had to wait 30 minutes to get a table and once we were seated we had to wait a long time again to be served. This was bad because Matt was supposed to be arriving at 8:15 or so to our house. But his bus was late so everything turned out ok. Except that I forgot Sean's name for some reason, I feel really bad about that and so I am blaming Angela. Matt and I watched some Family Guy after he arrived, but didn't do much else.

On Saturday we got up early (9:00am) and Angela came over and we went to look at apartments for Matt. The first one was the best, so it kinda sucked that we even bothered with the others. Matt and I also watched Memento which was very good, but I think I need to watch it again because it went backwards so I am sure I missed a few things. We went out Saturday night with Mike and his girlfriend and his sister to a Chinese Restaurant and I had the Curried Chicken. I managed to eat it all but I was very full after, it was good though. We also rented and watched Adaptation and that was another very good movie.

On Sunday Jen, Matt, Angela and I went to Pizza Hut for the lunch buffet and I ate too much again. As a result of this weekend I have decided to not eat too much anymore because it isn't cool. I also did what had to be the easiest CS assignment ever (other than early cs130 stuff).

I made a sphere in OpenGL with lights and cameras and all sorts of things. I think OpenGL is going to take a while to get on to, but I found what looks like a good tutorial.

The lines are the axes:

The distorted (not by me) sphere.

Turkey weekend! Lots of turkey, well only twice, but still pretty good. I managed to not eat so much that I felt ill at any point.

I also got to go to the reception part of Krissy's wedding, it was great. Very nice decorations and food and stuff. The DJ was also an Elvis impersonator and he was very good. I told Matt and he was surprised because he thought that the music was just from a CD or something.

My birthday is coming soon which means so is Indiana Jones, yay! All good except for the midterm on the same day.

I watched Bowling for Columbine last night and it was pretty good. It may be a bit one-sided, but so are most things. It certainly did have a lot of interesting stuff in it. The one thing that I found most interesting was when Michael Moore was asking Canadians if they lock their doors. Everyone said no. At first I thought that he meant at night or when no one wa home, but then I found out he basically meant all the time. He was really surprised that most people here leave their doors unlocked when they are at home. I know people who don't even know where the keys to their house are and so haven't locked their doors in years. The US is a strange place.

I rebooted today, which was fun because I haven't in a while, see:

mclausch@duffman:~$ uptime
16:57:56 up 17 days, 18:36, 13 users, load average: 0.10, 0.10, 0.05

Now this is special because I updated all kinds of software on my computer during those 17 or 18 days, things that really should have caused me to reboot, like X. But whatever, it was fun while it lasted.

Anybody remember the b-trees? I sure do.

B-trees courtest of Michael McCool, destroyed by CS240

My site has a new feature! The "Pictures" section is now functional. The page parses my main journal file, picks out all the images I've posted and properly displays them with the alt text as a description of the image. Check it out!

Update time, wow I'm sucking with this.

I bought volume one of the Family Guy, which is sweet, no more crappy quick time and real media files for me. I will probably get the other volume for Christmas, if I don't break down and buy it first. I'm really excited about Indiana Jones though, hopefully I will get it for my birthday. I think I need more money, I wouldn't mind owning the Simpsons and Futurama on DVD either.

Work is good, its all about the Perl, which I enjoy very much. It is exactly my type of language, it knows what I want even when I don't. I may also get to help create an online ordering system using a database and...Perl! :)

This weekend is Thanksgiving and I think I am going to seriously try to not eat until I feel sick. It is very hard to do when everything tastes so good though. Kim is going to Krissy's wedding with Matt, congrats Krissy.

Learning openGL isn't going so well since I keep not doing it. I should really start. Just like I should really add more content to this site and learn a bunch of other stuff. But work just takes the motivation right out of you. I hope real life isn't like this.

Recent movies: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and American Wedding. Both were quite entertaining although the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was only original in its premise. I hope that American Wedding is the last of the American Pie series because it seems like a good place to end. Next up is hopefully Bowling for Columbine and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, both of which won't be quite as uplifting I'm sure.