Well, I’m 24 years old today. (Or, if you’re counting in base 16, I’m finally 18… but then again, I’m 30 in base 8. Yeah…I know, I know, I’m a CS geek…)

Too bad that my birthday has to be sandwiched in between two days of final exams…at least I’ll get to celebrate over the weekend, anyway.

Wow. I realize I haven’t posted in an incredibly long while… I’ve been ridiculously busy with schoolwork lately. But that’s finally starting to wind down as the semester comes to a close.

I just had the sudden impulsive urge tonight to reformat my old Gateway laptop and install Ubuntu Linux alongside Windows. No real idea why… just something I felt like doing. Figure I might as well put it to good use with a Unix-style operating system, since I’ve gotten far too Unix-savvy over the past several years, rather than just leaving it sitting there doing nothing…

I’m not normally one to randomly post memes in my blog, but, well, being somewhat of a language geek, I felt like taking this little quiz…

This is particularly interesting since I’ve lived in Georgia all my life! (Though then again, southern did end up as the 2nd-place result…)

(Incidentally, the HTML output on this quiz thing is broken. For some reason, what ends up getting copied to the clipboard, at least in Mozilla-based browsers, is a regular space rather than a non-breaking one as specified on the page, which causes the graph to be thrown totally out of whack. But the reason there’s a non-breaking space character in the first place is that the quiz makers didn’t properly encode their HTML entities. Anyone else taking the quiz can fix it by searching for > < and replacing with >&nbsp;<.)

Ooh. Firefox 2.0 is officially out.

OK, so you’ve probably been wondering where my web site went for the past couple days.

Well, to make a long story short, my hosting provider had some serious hard disk corruption on the system where my site is hosted, it was so bad that a file system check couldn’t salvage it, and (I can only assume because my domain name starts with ‘z’…) there was no automatic backup stored on their servers.

I’ve restored most of the site, but there might still be some stuff missing; if there is, just drop me a line using the e-mail link in the right margin letting me know what page is missing.

Also, as a result of this server crash, I’ve completely lost any e-mail that you might have sent over the past couple days— so if you sent me anything important, send it again now that the mail server is up and running again.

Finally…Athens, Georgia has upgraded imagery on Google Earth. It’s still not the highest resolution possible, but it’s still much better than what it used to look like!

Here’s a screen capture, just for proof:

For what it’s worth, it’s upgraded on Google Maps, too.

OK, I’m going to confess, first of all: this is all the result of my own stupidity. Now that that’s out of the way…

I had a bottle of water in my bookbag today, because it’s so easy to get dehydrated in this heat. In fact, I’ve been doing this quite often recently.

My digital camera and graphing calculator, admittedly both very old devices that were bound to stop working eventually, were also in the same bag.

I’m sure you can see what’s coming next from a mile away.

Somehow the cap on the bottle of water managed to come undone during the course of the day.

So yeah. My calculator’s screen is now too fogged up to actually be visible, and it’s likely that the board is shorted out as well. My camera seems to be under the delusion that the mode switch is set to ‘preferences’ even when it’s not, and the arrow keys move the cursor on that screen in completely random directions. Gahh! Maybe letting them dry off for a bit will make things miraculously work again, as happened with the digital clock that I managed to completely drench a couple years back.

My PowerBook, on the other hand, was in the other pocket of the bookbag. It survived, power cord and all. Yay for something not going horribly wrong.

Edited about 15 minutes later to add: The camera is miraculously working properly again. Whoa. Not bad, especially for a camera that’s almost 7 years old, heh! The calculator’s screen is still too fogged up to be legible, though.

To get between Athens, Georgia, and the Atlanta airport (which also serves as a station on Atlanta’s MARTA rail system), Greyhound is $40 round-trip, and involves a transfer that makes the trip take about 3 hours each way. There’s also a direct shuttle to the airport, but it’s $40 each way.

Just for clarification, this is for a trip that is less than 80 miles.

And no, there’s no rail connection. The state government keeps talking about it, but it seems like it’s just going to be one of those things that’s forever under deliberation.

Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit ridiculous? It really does seem to me like non-drivers are being treated somewhat unfairly here… I have no problem with paying a slight premium for the service, but it really does seem like it should be either more affordable or more efficient than that.

Just a random inquiry to readers of this blog, prompted by my investigating minor changes to the bus routes around campus:

Which system map do you think is easier to read for UGA‘s campus bus routes, last year’s version, or this year’s version? (Warning: both are PDF links to UGA’s site.)

Honestly, I find last year’s easier to read! By using one line for several routes, there’s less visual clutter; readability is further enhanced by including the route names, not just color codes, on the lines. I’ve never been a fan of using color as the sole distinguishing factor for things; once you get past a certain number of colors, things get hard to distinguish even for non-colorblind folks. Speaking of which, here’s GraphicConverter’s simulation of how the legend appears to a colorblind rider… oh, the ambiguity!

The catchphrase of the week: “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.”

No, it’s not the deranged rambling of some homicidal maniac. Rather, it’s the horribly inaccurate misinterpretation of perfectly ordinary dictation by Microsoft’s speech recognition engine.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new Egg Freckles.

(via Digg)