Back in Action Take 2

After about a month of darkness I have finally reinstalled vmware on my computer. I plan to finish posting the pictures from my trip across the country. Who knows, if I get really ambitious I may even dig into my code to fix the problem in the comment engine. This is the beginning of a new era. More to follow…

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Road Trip Part 1

Below are pictures from the first two days of my road trip. My friend and I departed Illinois at the irrational hour of 6:00am. Soon we were headed north into Wisconsin. It was less than a week after the rains that caused the massive flooding in the Midwest. I was very tempted to go see what once was Lake Delton, but instead we pressed on into Minnesota. It was three hours into the trip and I needed a nap.

Virtually nothing worth noting happened for the rest of the day. There was a point where I thought the line to the gas tank of my car was messed up because two gas pumps in a row overfilled the tank, luckily it has not happened again. We stopped in Sturgis South Dakota before heading on.

The next morning we made a brief stop to see Devil's Tower and then continued on to Wyoming and eventually Yellowstone. We arrived at Yellowstone around 4:00pm and drove around for about four hours before getting stuck behind some fool driving 10mph on a road where passing was not an option. Finally we got to Gardiner, Montana where we enjoyed some buffalo burgers.

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Back In Action

I am no longer in Illinois and the server has finally been unpacked from its box. Soon I will post some details about the two-thousand mile journey to the west coast.

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Scheduled Downtime

Soon I will be leaving my apartment in Champaign for the last time. The past few weeks have been great. I have not had class, work, or any other responsibilities. But like all good things, my vacation from life must come to an end. Once I move out the server this website is currently on will no longer be plugged in. It will be back online once I move out to Seattle and have internet, which will likely be at the end of June.

But for now take a look at some final pictures I took of the University of Illinois campus.

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This is the end beautiful friend

Four years in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program at the University of Illinois have taught me a few things:

I am a mediocre Electrical Engineer. I have little to no natural affinity for understanding the solid state physics underlying transistor operation. Signal processing is not fun. Given the option of eating a worm or designing a circuit to modulate a radio signal from bare transistors and circuit components, I would have a very hard time making a decision. Electromagnetic Fields are cool, but virtually impossible to understand without your right hand and the corresponding rule. While I, along with all ECE students have done all of these things, I did not like them and given the choice will refrain from doing so in the future.

Computer Engineering is a very cool discipline, probably. The last hurdle in my education was our computer architecture course, which is notorious for having one of if not the most time consuming laboratory component in ECE. It was somewhat bittersweet, because I found that I really enjoyed the course and was one of the few courses I could honestly say that I was pretty good at. It is a shame that the Computer Engineering curriculum had this as a very high level course, such that most students do not take it until they are seniors and have possibly already set up jobs in other industries. This was both the first and likely the last time I would design processors.

Speaking of jobs, I will be starting in just over a month. I have had a job in the software industry set up for about six months now. Originally I did not think that I would want to be a programmer. I took an internship last summer as a Software Test Engineer at an eCommerce company after I couldn't find anything in hardware due to lack of experience and skill. To my surprise I really enjoyed the work, so now I will be filling a similar position at another company.

Finally, I would like to bring up the adage that we are told so often. In so many words we are all told at some point or another that you can do anything you put your mind to. I am surprised but pleased to report that this bit of blind optimism actually has some truth behind it. The caveat that is not told is that putting your mind to something actually means possibly devoting an inordinate amount of time. Given an infinite amount of time the statement would be completely accurate. Unfortunately since there are only 24 hours a day the truth is questionable. This does not mean that one should not have ambition, but just make sure that ambition does not get in the way of you living your life.

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I fail again

I recently bought a new hard drive to replace a small dying one. I decided to reshuffle my data on my existing hard drives so I could keep all of my important data mirrored. Everything went off without a hitch, except that I lost the image of the virtual machine which hosts this site.

What does this mean? I basically lost everything that changed on this site in the past month. I was able to retrieve some of the blog posts from google cache, but the comments are gone. What have I learned out of this experience? Weekly automated backups are always a good idea no matter how careful you think you are.

I should also note an additional failure. Many of my readers have requested more frequent updates. I will try my best to fulfill these requests.

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Cellulosic Ethanol Plant

Most people are familiar with ethanol. It is becoming more attractive as gasoline continues to increase in price. Unfortunately most ethanol production in the United States is based on converting corn to ethanol. It is questionable how efficient this really is. Here is an interesting article about Range Fuels setting up a new Cellulosic ethanol production plant .

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Now For Comments

I have finally gotten around to work on this site. I have added comment functionality, which still might be a bit buggy. All of my other changes will probably not be noticed.

Behind the scenes I have changed a great deal. Now most of the content of the site is being pulled from a database. This means that I know have much more flexibility in the way I display content on the site. I am no longer using static html pages, but using php to generate html and javascript which is what you eventually see. I have started experimenting a bit with AJAX which you will notice if you use the commenting feature. It basically allows me to change the content of the page without having to reload it.

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TED talk on Greentech

If you have a few minutes take a look at this video I found on Ted.com.

"I don't think we're going to make it," John Doerr proclaims, in an emotional talk about climate change and investment. Spurred on by his daughter, who demanded he fix the mess the world is heading for, he and his partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers embarked on a greentech world tour -- surveying the state of the art, from the ethanol revolution in Brazil to Wal-mart's (!) eco-concept store in Bentonville, Arkansas. KPCB is investing $200 million in green technologies to save the planet and make a profit to boot. But, Doerr fears, it may not be enough.

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Some Progress

I spent some time to work on the site a bit this morning. I was able to accomplish quite a few things:

• Database is now up and running
• Hit counter on bottom of page
• Photo pages
• RSS Feed (I am not positive this is 100% correct yet)
• Various CSS tweaks

I was particularly impressed with the photo slideshow viewers that I was able to use from Picasa albums. They look much nicer than anything I would create myself in actionscript. They also keep traffic low because all the image hosting is on Google's dime. I notice that they have not released a new version of Picasa since late last year. Hopefully they continue this free image hosting service even though their stock is down from the mid 700's to 433 as of Friday.

I did not move the actual content of the site over to the database yet. This is partially due to the amount of time it will take to write PHP parsers to generate pages from database rows, and also because I am not sure this is how I want the site to look yet. It makes more sense to get more content up and finalize a design before I go creating a data processing system.

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Welcome

Hello World!

This is the Beta of my personal webspace. Currently the content is a bit sparse, but in the future you can expect to find my blog, pictures, and whatever else I decide to put up here. I have a large list of things I would like to do, but it may take a while since finding the time to work on this is difficult. An abridged list follows.

• Refresh the look and feel of the page to make it "my own"
• Find a cool picture viewer.
• Get my database running so content is not stored in static html pages

So for now you should take a look at another great website: lostinthemoment.com or MichaelWelburn.com. Now I will leave you with a quote that I have found inspiring.

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. - Bill Gates Show Comments (0)