Two Slashes

For everyone else, there are prank calls.

Alright, so maybe I don’t have the cleanest record when it comes to telephony.  I’ve been the silent listener in a few prank calls (though I’ve never placed one myself, and if you’ve ever met me you can probably figure out why), and I’ve done a bit of manual wardialing.  Technically, that doesn’t make me a troublemaker, at least no more than most of the people I’ve met.  And at no point did I overstep past slight annoyance into genuine mischief.

On the other hand, there are always people willing to cross that boundary without any thought at all.  Usually it’s for a laugh, but there will always be times where there seems to be some further motive driving these people, a reason you know they’re going through the trouble to mess with your head.

If you thought that I was giving you just such an example, you won’t be disappointed.

Last Saturday, I got a phone call around 2 A.M. from one of my friends.  Such late phone calls themselves aren’t unusual or even unexpected, but when the first words you hear are inquiring about whether you’re contemplating suicide, you know something is up.

After I reassured my friend that I was not dangling from the ceiling, he proceeded to tell me that someone had called his home only a few minutes before, and that one of his parents had answered.  This unknown caller (who I have no way of identifying) proceeded to tell my friend’s parents that it was me calling them, and hinted that I was in a depressed state and considering suicide, or at least something around those lines.  Naturally, as soon as they hung up, they did what any responsible parent would do:  flipped out.

My friend was out and returned home minutes after the phone call, at which point he immediately called me to verify that the story was, as he believed, false.

Between the two of us, we took what little information we could put together and realized that someone (we don’t know who) was trying to screw with both of us, and that it had to be someone with the resources and enough brains to use fake caller ID information (or use this…*ahem*).  After all, who else would think to spoof their phone number as 212-666-1337?  (For the uninitiated, 212 is an area code in New York, 666 should be instantly recognizable, and 1337 is a “hacker” designation for someone with “elite” or “advanced” (a truly skilled person wouldn’t brag) skills.)

I’m not writing this because I have a guilty conscience for my past actions and thought a story would be a fun way to clear them, or even because the events that transpired over the weekend are weighing on my mind.  This post is, like so many others, a reminder that there are people willing to screw with your thoughts, willing to overstep social boundaries simply because they’re bored one Saturday night.

Sure, there are times where we want to break from the mold, times we want to be just the slightest bit darker than we usually are.  While indulging these desires isn’t a problem, just make sure you do it in a manner that doesn’t hurt other people.  There are constructive ways to channel that energy; I suggest you find one.  Especially if you’re the mystery caller.

I don’t know when, exactly, but a thought came to me at some point this weekend, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.

I find it highly unlikely that anyone has noticed (or, if they have, they haven’t bothered to say anything) that the software on my projects page hasn’t been touched in at least a year, in some cases quite a bit longer than that.

Considering my interests as a computer scientist, I guess I find it kind of funny that I could let such a thing happen.  I must admit that I myself am using some of the current “active” projects less and less.  Since I started using the Windows 7 beta (and now the release candidate), I have little use for SkipTo as I can simply press the Windows key, type a few characters, and away I go with the same application I would have launched with my own tool.  (Admittedly, I could have done this in Vista, too, but I won’t bother beating a dead horse, especially one I refuse to ride.)

Alright, maybe I caused this particular bug. I guarantee that you don't know what the solution was, though.

At heart, my best guess is that this is something of a motivation issue.  After hammering away at code for hours on end at my summer job, and after all of the work I’ve put in over the previous school year, it’s been a little hard as of late for me to come home, sit down, and find the desire to stare at monospaced fonts and locate misplaced semicolons for a few hours in hopes of doing anything productive.

I’ve also noticed that whatever efforts I’ve put into any form of development (outside of work) as of late have been for personal use with no intent of making them public, or helping other people with their own unique problems.  I’ve hacked together a tool to help me rename and reorganize my MP3 library, butchered the Last.fm plugin I use for WordPress into something that displays my application-usage statistics from Wakoopa, and made minor tweaks to various tools to enhance my own productivity.  I’ve modified WordPress themes, helped design a new one from scratch, and experimented lightly with Blogger (for 20SB, of course, as I have no intention of leaving WordPress anytime soon).  This lack of sharing and public utility isn’t something I’m completely proud of, and I hope to rectify it at some point, but (as any regular well knows) I have an odd habit of promising things here and then not delivering, so a promise this is not.

The best way I see to motivate myself at this point is to scrap the “crap” I’ve got sitting in my projects page (honestly, Visual Basic 6 is dying, anyway), and start working on a few fresh projects.  What I need, however, are the ideas for the replacement projects, things people like you might actually have a use for or that might be useful as a proof-of-concept.  I’ve picked up a few decent suggestions over the past few days from a handful of people, but I’d be more interested in working on things that more than one or two people would ever find useful.

If you have a suggestion, leave a comment.  In the meantime, I’ll be staring at that blinking line trying to decide what I’ll be making it run away from.

This post is partially because feel this weekend deserves an excellent recap, partially because I want to acknowledge some of my newfound friends, and partially because I don’t want to make the same mistake I made by not posting about the tweetup I attended a few months ago hosted by Tricon.

A brief explanation of the occasion is probably in order first, I suppose. For those of you who were not in the loop, the 20 Something Bloggers decided that this weekend would be a great time for (the first) summer meetup, a way to meet the people behind some of the blogs and forum postings keeping the community alive, and, as a central location for a good number of the group (as well as being an event-filled and tourist-friendly location for those who would be traveling), it would be held in Chicago.

Thursday
Of course, no trip to a blogger meetup in Chicago would be complete without Rachelskirts or her friend Sean, so we jumped on an inbound train and found ourselves in the Windy City one long (though fun-filled) train ride later, just in time for the “official” pizza dinner.

After some wackiness with the Giordano’s we originally had planned to eat at, we ended up spending quite a bit of time waiting outside Pizzeria Due (an extension of Uno’s ), chatting, deciding that street sweepers were worthy of grand theft auto, and generally enjoying each other’s company before heading in to discover that Dell Mini 9s (like mine) make excellent cell phone chargers in a pinch, realize that some people easily confuse Dr. Dre with Dr. Who (*ahem*), and determine that I’ve helped enough people out to earn the rank of “The #$&#ing Man.”

Friday
Long train rides aren’t necessarily entertaining or comfortable when riding solo, so I skipped the events on Friday (in the physical sense), instead opting to poke and prod at everyone on Twitter.  (In retrospect, being underage and spending the evening at a bar probably wouldn’t have been the most pleasurable of times, anyway.)

"You're doing it wrong!"

Saturday
Saturday was supposed to be the official 20SB wine tasting, but Rachelskirts, LovelyAnomaly, and I decided that we didn’t want to participate. (Well, that wasn’t much of a choice for me, but I wouldn’t have gone anyway.) Instead, the three of us took a hike (a painfully-crowded bus, actually) north to visit a nature museum, decide that the age limitations on children’s play areas don’t apply to us, (in Rachel’s words) “hack” the exhibit kiosks (because visiting about:blank is akin to hacking, apparently), and (with many thanks to the Subway that thoughtfully had its operating license suspended the day before) discover what Lovely and Rachel described as the best darn crêpes ever.

A little more wandering, an El ride, and a confusing map of the Merchandise Mart later, we found our way to Bucca di Beppo, where we caught up with the rest of the group and met Tim, perhaps the best server I’ve ever met (and little did we know his name was actually Tim until we got the receipt – we were simply calling him that to give him a name until that point). Too much food, good atmosphere, and plenty of people to talk with.

Sunday
I might not have had a chance to physically meet up with everyone (again), but I did get a chance to claim that I have seen the present-day version of the time machine from Back to the Future, find a $150 keyboard marked down to $10, assist with softmodding a Wii, and work on other things related to the next episode of TechCentric, so I can’t complain that the day was wasted.

Monday
Why might I be including Monday, the day after the meetup officially ended? Well, if taking the hijinks back online wasn’t enough, Monday has been a crazy day of people trying to find those last few stragglers on Twitter, Facebook, the 20SB site, their blogs, or wherever else they may be, swapping stories, and helping each other write up their experiences (when you have a group of bloggers hanging out, it’s expected that they all write up something about it, right?). Oh, and deciding that MomInRealLife owns everyone’s phones, of course.

It’s been fun meeting and trading jokes with some of the people behind the curtain, so to speak.  I’m glad I went, and I’m more than willing to do it again (sooner than next year, even).  Here’s to the success of the 20SB Ultimate Meetup!

If it’s easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Wednesday was probably not your day.  If you’re Kathleen Danielson, for example, you avoided any links lest they end up Rickrolls.  I feel that April Fool’s Day is a pretty amusing (and dangerous) time to be an Internet…well, addict, I guess, and it’s a day I particularly enjoy.  (The danger is only compounded if you were spending your day in the fetal position worrying about Conficker, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Compared to recent years, I think that this year’s bag of tricks was relatively tame.  DeviantArt (at least, as far as I know) wasn’t propogating 4chan memes (mudkips, anyone?) and the most YouTube did was flip videos upside-down.  Sure, ThinkGeek had bacon paste (but who doesn’t love bacon), and it sounds just believable enough that it might end up like their 8-bit tie from April Fools’ past.

I thought this picture only added credibility to my April Fool's joke, even though it was only by coincidence that Rose happened to tag me right after my status change. Apparently I was the only one to think so.

I myself decided to participate, though I didn’t really come up with my pranks until five minutes before midnight.  For starters, I was uncreative enough to be one of the dozens of people changing their relationship status on Facebook.  And, in a stroke of luck, a friend soon tagged me in a photo that made my status change almost believable.  Alas, I didn’t hear anything from my friends when I changed my status to claim that I was in a relationship, but a few friends started an uproar on the return trip.

The other trick started off on a new site of mine.  At the recommendation of Rachelskirts, I purchased the domain ShouldIUseComicSans.com to match a similar offering (thanks, @EricVictorino) only a few hours before, then decided that it changing what it said would be an excellent joke (but for one day only).  People fell for it, too.

I’m trying to come up with even better pranks for next year, though I’m coming up short.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as I have 363 more days to dwell on it.  (Suggestions are most welcome, though it might do better to e-mail them so there isn’t a public record to ruin the surprise.)

The corporate giants with the practical jokes weren’t the only people headlining on April 1, though.  Conficker, the latest worldwide scare, managed to slip through the day with very little fanfare.  Of course, there were isolated incidents, like my college campus blaming an outage on the worm, but on the whole I didn’t see too many news articles regarding the blasted thing.  Some people seem to think that this is exactly how it should be, though (and I agree).  However, you can’t deny that the Internet is still wholly intact.  (After all, you’re able to read this post, right?)

And, on a completely unrelated note, I decided to mess around with my dust-collecting Tumblr account.  There’s more information about that posted on the blasted thing, though, so I’ll let you visit if you’re interested in the matter.  (Hey, it could use the traffic anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing:  I’m in a relationship…alright, I don’t think you believed that for a second.  I don’t blame you, though.

The calendar says February 28, and that can mean only one thing:  the Comment Block experiment has come to an end.

In case you’ve been pulling a Rip Van Winkle, I’ve been following in Justin’s footsteps by trying to provide a “meaningful” (ha!) post each day for a month.  (If you want to read what you missed, you can peruse the contents of the appropriate tag at your leisure.)

It was partially an experiment to see if it was possible for me to come up with daily original content.  While I might have managed to squeak through this shortened month, I don’t think I would be able to continue much longer.  I’ve already exhausted most of my Evernote notebook, and the remaining clips are not likely to be kept much longer.

Top top it off, I’m only partially happy with the results.  While I did manage to keep to the one-post-per-day idea alive, the posts sometimes ended up with timestamps of a few minutes after midnight (and exactly midnight in one case, though all of the posts were well within my confused version of a day ), and some of what I wrote really isn’t as intelligently written as I would have liked it to be.  I suppose it comes with the hectic life of a college student, but I think it would have been better to have given myself the time to get the post worked through to satisfaction rather than have to worry about publishing before midnight, especially considering I put more than two hours of work into some of them.

I also experimented with my writing styles and post formats a bit, trying a few ideas (most of which won’t be seeing the light of day again, I think).  I’ve also developed a few more ideas that might be more worthy (and lead to some more regular posting, too).  I threw out a few project ideas (to more feedback than I was anticipating), brought school and my blogging a little closer together, attempted to expand on my incessant tweeting (which may become a weekly feature, though I haven’t decided yet), and put good use to the review category.

If I were to do this again, I’m definitely going to be making a few small changes.  As I said before, I wasn’t impressed with some of the content I wrote, so that would be the first thing to receive some work.  I would also have to find a reasonable time limit that doesn’t trample all of my schoolwork and other projects in the process to make the posting more manageable than the midnight deadline I’ve been trying to follow for the past month.

Look forward to me trying for a more manageable and predictable post schedule.  I’ve already proved I can find the time, so it’s more or less a matter of finding topics and expanding on them.  Expect a little of everything once I recover from this past month, but in the meantime, I’ll be riding off with The Limousines.

Imagine that.  The month is almost up.  Stay tuned for the wrap-up of the previous month in pseudo-randomness, which will be arriving at some point in the near future.

Many people see their twenties as a turning point for their lives.  They’re just starting to figure out adulthood, but sometimes they’re not quite ready, like the single bunch of green bananas you always end up with at the supermarket.  Others are so ready that they end up looking like this orange by the time they leave their teens.  Either way, there’s plenty to blame for why that piece of fruit looks the way it does, and everyone comes out the tail end the better for themselves.

Posted to 20SB earlier today was a request for topic suggestions for a graduate-level writing assignment, the goal of which is to write twenty pages on life experiences.  I like the prompt, having had a similar (though much shorter requirement) for a rhetoric class I took last year:

If you had to write 20 nonfiction pages as a 20-something, what would you write about? College? Debt? Growing up?  (slightly modified for readability )

To be honest, I don’t know if I have a real answer to that question.  You’ll notice how infrequently the “Personal” category has been used since I first opened it up in December to rant about my issues with the previous holiday season.

It’s not for lack of trying to come up with anything, though, especially since I started this whole “Comment Block” project.  Granted, there are a few differences between writing a (comparatively long) essay to be read by at most a handful of people (let’s add in the point that usually you know these people in real life) and a digestible yet public blog post (potentially read by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people you’ve never met, and indexed, categorized, and cached a half-dozen times before you even have a second chance to think about what you’ve published).  There’s a happy medium that needs to be found.  Compared to old writings from a previous blog (of which I have only scraps, sorry), I’m a lot less revealing in what I post (and at the same time a bit more boring, I assume).

I know my personal tangent there is a bit unrelated, but considering the discussion on 20SB is limited to members, I figured I’d bring the question out into a more general audience.  What would you write about if you were given this prompt?

Earlier today, I had a short discussion with a friend and electrical engineering major about some of the similarities and differences we have in our respective curricula.  Somewhere along the line, we ended up discussing the fact that computer science majors at my school have to take a semester-long ethics course (for credit, thankfully), while electrical engineers get a whopping two lectures on ethics near the end of one of their sophomore-level classes (with an optional supplementary course for juniors).  Funny, isn’t it?

The summary of the CS course, reworded (for obvious reasons) but otherwise stolen directly from the course website:

The course focuses on the theory and practice of ethics as it relates to computers and information technology.  It uses group work and presentations to teach the basics of ethical decision-making.  Course topics include risk, reliability, privacy, warfare, business ethics, patents, copyright, and more. Students will be expected to write 12 short summaries as responses to reading assignments, participate in in-class discussions, and present topics to the class. Attendance is mandatory and will be factored into your grade.

I’ve discussed a few of the topics (namely, the privacy, copyright, and reliability points mentioned above, as well as others mentioned on other areas of the site like Netiquette) on this site before, with mixed results.  (I have a feeling there will be some recycling one way or another when I enroll for this course. )

Perhaps there’s something to be said here.  Are the computer science students, the same developers responsible for designing things like BitTorrent, required to take this course due to some stereotype that paints us as less honest than our electrically-oriented brethren?  Are the minds to blame for (and I can’t believe I’m using these examples again) Storm, Sasser, and the like the reason CS students have to take this course?  tI’m not entirely sure, but the posted cheating policy leaves plenty of room for improvement:

Nobody should need to cheat in a class discussing ethics and professionalism.

(Yes, it’s that pathetic, and it sounds as though cheating is an acceptable course of action in any other class as written.  Cheating is obviously not the best way to get through a course, but they might do well to reword their policy.)

The course is designed to require as much input from the students as possible.  While I don’t think this is a bad idea if implemented properly, it is almost certain to fail when most of the topics are student-taught and require the students leading the discussion to implement some form of game.  (Would now be the appropriate time to jump back to stereotypes and mention that CS students aren’t supposed to be sociable creatures in real life? )

Ethical, eh?  In what sense of the word?

I was in a remarkably entertaining conversation with Nick last night when an idea I’ve been sitting on managed to rear its head once more.  As you might have noticed, I occasionally come up with project ideas and put some varying amount of effort into it before I end up dropping it.  (The software projects I host here might be reasonable examples of that.  They’ve been stagnant for how long?)

Last night, I was slightly more optimistic that my idea could be pulled off, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that there’s not much viability behind starting yet another “overheard” site (with a few friends as fellow moderators, of course) unless I come up with an awesome gimmick that would make the idea interesting and more original.  Consider this post an RFC.

Plenty of people already (ab)use Twitter (myself included) for the same thing (when they’re not submitting quotes to one of those sites, anyway), and while longer comments and quotes can’t be relayed as easily, people still manage to get the job done.  There are Facebook groups (a terrible idea, by the way) dedicated to sharing the stupidity among fellow group members, too.  (I should know – I joined one at one point.)

If I were to go through with this anyway, I’m also stuck on the format and implementation.  While getting another Tumblr account (I reserved my name a while ago, but haven’t put it to use yet) would be one idea, something feels amiss about having to share user credentials with everyone involved with the site (as opposed to a per-user system).  I would probably put in another WordPress installation to start and work my way from there as it’s also the most expandable solution I can think of.

One of these days, I’ll probably put together a post with a few of the more hilarious and/or outrageous comments I have lining the edges of my class notebooks and chat logs, which were what triggered me to consider starting a new site in the first place.  In the meantime, you’ll just have to hope that the poor girl I overheard saying this can figure out what’s going on in time for Valentine’s Day.  Speaking of which…

Imagine that.  Once again, I’m brainstorming straight into a blog post.  It’s not like this hasn’t been done before…  I almost think this post is worthy of starting another tag:  “memory dump.”

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I’ve been blogging in some form or another for longer than I can remember.  (I don’t mean to use a cliché here, but I really can’t pin a more specific timeframe down.)  I’ve had a few previous projects I’ve scrapped before they were even made public, and then there was the previous (public) blog hosted by a friend of mine for about a year.

Out of boredom and a sudden burst of curiosity, I’ve started probing for any remaining backups from that previous blog over the past few weeks.  I don’t think there are any left in existence, though I’ve managed to find and piece together a few small tidbits of posts from here and there.

What’s amusing is noticing, even from the mere snippets I’ve been able to collect, just how a few years can have a huge impact both in voice and topics.  A lot of the older posts (the ones I have managed to recover, at least) are nothing more than tiny little blurbs about the holidays or a few words attached to a post made.  Compared to my lengthy spiel about the holiday season from hell, I wonder where and how I ended up transforming from a quiet type into a “professional ranter”™.

One of the things I noticed is that I was a lot more consistent with my posting, though my posts usually tended to be no more than a sentence or two, and some were posted straight from Digg.  Now, it’s hard to think of me posting anything that short (I aim for upwards of 400 words per post – especially during the Comment Block – and usually end up doubling that number by the time they’re published), but at the same time I’m more irregular in when I complete them.

In an effort to encourage me to both become a little more active and personal in my posting (and as something I should have plugged much more prominently and sooner), I joined 20SB, a group of twenty-something blogging enthusiasts with a lot to say and a great community (including several authors from blogs I already follow).  While I’m not intending to go from statue to sponge, hopefully it will loosen my tongue a little bit once the Comment Block is over.  We’ll see what happens with that, and I encourage you to join as well if you fit the age bracket.

If you think this post sounds a bit funny, you’re right.  It’s been sitting in a draft folder for  at least two weeks, and I put together only minor edits before I clicked Publish.  I have too much stuff going on tonight to put much more effort into this post, though I intend on revising (and/or rewriting ) it when I get the chance.

Alright, so that title has a largely-unrelated UNIX joke in it.  Take out the joke, and it’s pretty accurate to this post, though highly geeky.  Please continue only if you are prepared to be bored.

One of the computer science classes I’m taking this semester entails a lot of coding in C as we explore lower-level interactions with operating systems.  The first coding assignment we were handed was nothing more than a group of menial tasks, something that just about everyone in the class did in a day or two with little to no trouble whatsoever.

Our second assignment, however, is more interesting, if not infinitely redundant.  As I stated in my previous post, I’ve spent my spare time this weekend working on writing a simple shell according to the specification they gave us.  (In between helping all those iPhone-toting people do their thing yesterday, of course.)

Among other things, the requirements include:

• A rather crappy infinitely-recording session history system that keeps track of the commands you’ve run and allows you to list and/or re-execute them as you wish by simply referring to them with a number.  While this might be useful, there is a point where this becomes excessive for an assignment like this.
• A 256-character command limit. I hate to say it, but plenty of commands I use on a regular basis are way over this character limit.  Looks like I’m better off sticking with something that isn’t this project, eh?
• Keeping track of the number of successful commands entered.  Alright, so this behavior can be found elsewhere.  It’s not really all that interesting, though.
• …and more!  (Sorry, I had to.  Well, maybe it’s true, though.  There are other requirements for this assignment.)

Typically, I wouldn’t have a problem with an assignment, but there’s something so wrong about reinventing the wheel, especially when a simple search on Google turns up more examples of the exact same thing than is necessary.  (There are so many usable results that I’m wondering if people are just going to try and claim a result as their work and check that in.)

I understand the idea behind the assignment, and it makes sense to an extent to be doing some of the work as it serves as a demonstration of where the concept could be useful, but there’s no reason to be re-coding the same applications countless others have done.  The possibilities for implementation may be endless, but limit that list to the number of practical possibilities and you’ll find that the number shrinks quite nicely to two or three, at most.

Stick a fork() in me (oh great, another joke); I’m going to stop ranting before I turn this into a week’s worth of posts.  Back to coding…