I can’t figure out why iChat is so slow nowadays. The window is unresponsive and takes a couple of seconds to do anything like scrolling or focusing the window. This is unacceptable to me. I’ve tried rebooting with no avail. It might be because I have a large number of contacts, but even so this is unacceptable given that I own a top of the line PowerMac.
Does anybody have any idea, or will I be forced to switch to Adium which is looking quite stable and feature rich at the moment.
I signed up for Audioscrobbler, a free service that records the songs you play and then keeps track of statistics and suggests other good songs.
Songs I’ve Recently Listened To:
[[Removed because it didn’t work]]
One has to wonder how my site shows up as the number two result when searching for UConn Riots 2004.
Interesting searches people have used to find my site:
Kinja is a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.
??Via: Kinja??
Of course, I signed and included all of the blogs I read of people I don’t know. So therefore don’t expect your listings to show up if I know you. My Kinja page does, however, give you a glimpse into other people’s blogs/news sites I find interesting.
Well, I’ve gone and done it… registering for Fall ’04 that is.
Here’s the official breakdown:
All in all, it’ll be 13 academic credits & 3 “fun” credits, making this my easiest semester at the U yet.
In case you were wondering how it looks time-wise, he’s a screenshot from iCal:
There was an interesting article in today’s New York Times entitled New Lesson for College Students: Lighten Up. I’d recommend reading it, especially if you are one of the overworked college students it talked about (like myself sometimes).
It comes at an interesting time as I get to register for Fall classes on Thursday. I’m having a tough time deciding exactly how much I want to/can handle.
For sure, I’m taking:
This puts me at 14 credits, including Marching Band which we know is infinitely more work. Now I can’t decide on my last course. I’m considering
Each of those classes would put me on my way towards graduating or would satisfy a premed requirement.
Alternative, I could take a “fun” class:
A few weeks ago all resident hall tenants were allowed to participate in a survey regarding features to be added/removed to the standard room rate. The ones on the survey this year were Newspapers, Cable TV, and Voicemail. Personally, I voted for the addition of free Newspapers and the retention of our voicemail program despite it’s cost. I voted against Cable TV since there’s cable in the lounge already and I don’t have the desire to watch.
The results came back in today’s Minnesota Daily:
Are you willing to have no more than $10 per semester added to your room/apartment rate to have three newspapers (USA Today, Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press) available to you Monday-Friday in your residence hall/apartment?
Results show number of votes/percentage of votes
Yes: 1090/53.99%
No: 925/45.81%
N/A: 4/0.2%Are you willing to pay approximately $80 per semester for cable TV in your residence hall room/apartment?
Yes: 1177/58.3%
No: 841/41.65%
N/A: 1/0.05%
While nothing really surprises me, it saddens me that more people would rather spend $80 a semester for cable tv than $10 a semester for THREE free newspapers (in addition to the Minnesota Daily) every day.
Umm, hello. Free papers are way cool.
I ran into a link to The Rasterbator a month or two ago and was curious as to how it’d turn out. Essentially it takes an image file you submit and creates a rasterized version of it, essentially a picture with only a white background and black circles of various diameter on a set grid. The “darker” the the part of the image, the larger diameter the black circle is.
I, of course, choose to do a portrait of myself [link dead], namely one that I took while in El Paso for the Sun Bowl.
The software on the site allowed me to crop the part of the image I wanted and then let me choose how many sheet of paper to print it on. I choose 2×2 since my printer was running out of toner.
It then processes your image and returns a pdf file of the output. In case you are curious, here’s the pdf output [link dead].
So I printed it and hung it on the wall. The final result:
I decided it looked pretty good, so I made one of Dave too:
UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries is a new project by the University of Minnesota to offer unlimited free blogs to all staff/students/faculty. The system is easy to configure and get started—just login with your x500 and give them a title/tagline for your blog. For example, I got one setup in under 5 minutes or so.
It’s easy to add new posts (just the standard MovableType interface), but perhaps not so obvious if you have never used it before. They do an okay job trying to offer some links to tutorials/help sites, but there’s no direct hand-holding along the way.
I find it relieving (and quite interesting) that they left all the power-user features of MT (like being able to customize all of your pages with templates) in place. However, the beginning user is likely to get confused and will have a tough time fixing any mistakes if they go messing around.
I found the lack of installed plugins depressing, especially since the individual user will have no power to install “personal” plugins for themselves. At a bare minimum, I’d recommend installing MT Textile which significantly speeds up the time it takes to write, and allows beginning users to easily add links and such.
I think it will be interesting to see how adoption goes, especially since it looks like they will be providing each user ample space (they assumed 180mb per user or something like that per 3 years). It also has the benefit of no ads and quick loading times. The only detractor is their obligatory legal statement on the bottom of every page:
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
However, that is easily circumvented with a little bit of css, namely by adding the following to the styles-site.css template.
h5{ display:none; }
Another feature that many people (namely those coming from blogging “communities” like Xanga and LiveJournal) will miss is the ability to “subscribe” to other people’s posts and quickly view new entries. Albeit, this problem is easily survived with RSS readers (like the excellent Net News Wire), I don’t think enough of the users will understand such a concept.
They finally fixed the drinking fountain on our floor. About time, it had been out of service now for 2-3 weeks after it had somehow managed to get stuck in the “on” position. And, we get a bright shiny new drinking fountain, straight out of the cardboard box. New! I can’t believe it. I thought the people running the reshalls were a bunch of cheapos.
Brad Froehle 