Shouzer

I got a job offer today from General Motors! As you can tell from the exclamation point, I’m pretty stoked. It’s in Warren, MI which is near Detroit, so I guess I’ll be spending my summer up there.

I’m going to be setting up real-time, hydraulically-actuated vehicle laboratory tests for structural evaluation. I’m not quite sure what that means yet, but I’m excited about it.

Well, the title of the post most definitely gives this away…but I’ll say it again–I’m an uncle!!!

My sister delivered a healthy baby boy, today at 5:39 p.m. weighing in at 9 lbs, 13.5 oz and was 20″ long. They named him Issac, and he’s doing well, as is my sister.

As soon as I get some decent pictures, I’ll post a couple of them up! I couldn’t stay the night in Kentucky as I have class tomorrow.

Hope everyone enjoyed their thanksgiving breaks!

P.S. Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes.

I had my first round of classes today, and this quarter looks like it will be much better than the last. First of all, I don’t start until 11:45 3 days a week. I can’t describe how wonderful it is to wake up at 10 and still have time to cook a decent lunch before going to class.

My classes seem like they will be more interesting too. I’m not going to talk about it much to avoid looking like a huge nerd. I have a continuation of my hardest class last quarter, signals, but I have a much better prof this quarter. The material looks like it will be a little more practical as well. Plus, 15% of that class is a series of mini-projects in LabVIEW, which is the programming language I worked with 40 hours a week over the summer. Those should be some cake points. I’m only taking 16 credits this quarter too, 2 less than quarter.

My break was good too, but I talked about that some already so I’ll spare you.

Today was my first day back at school after our Thanksgiving break. All in all, I’d certainly have to say I had a good break. I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked, but that’s because I was generally doing other things that were probably more worthwhile. My grandparents were in town, so it was cool getting to see them, too.

The biggest problem I had was yesterday. I had put off some homework until I got back to school, and it wasn’t even all of it–I had actually done one of my ECE assignments and both my lab write-up and pre-lab on Saturday. So I wasn’t just putting everything off until the last minute. It turns out, though, that CS 473 was probably the class I should have gotten done early. I started working on all of that around 830 or so last night and I was up until 330 this morning. Yet we still didn’t have it finished. I woke up around 800 and headed over to the CS building, where we met with the professor for office hours. Our homework was due at noon today and we got it turned in around 1130. So all in all I spent about 10 hours working on it in the last day.

I partook in my first day-after-thanksgiving shopping today, affectionately known as “Black Friday”, symbolizing the first day of the year in which retailers are said to get “in the black”. I’m sure you are as interested in reading of my experiences as I am in writing them, so I will spare you. I saw Quint at JCPenny around 5:15, and a Russell trio + Jordy at Staples around 5:30. Staples was without competition on their BF deals. I’ll let Jared edit with his deals, and here are mine:

Best Buy
Spinter Cell: Chaos Theory for Xbox
39.99 – 30.00 sale = 9.99

Kohl’s
Black & Decker Crush Master 450 watt blender
Reg. 34.99; 17.64 – 2.65 Early Bird Special = 14.99

Staples
Wireless Intellimouse Explorer x 2
49.98 – 35.00 instant savings = 29.88

PNY 512mb Attache Flash Drive
54.98 – 35.00 instant savings – 10.00 easy rebate = 9.94

Staples Surge Strip
5.94 – 6.00 easy rebate = FREE

PNY 512mb PC3200 DDR400 Desktop RAM
89.98 – 30.00 instant savings – 20.00 easy rebate = 39.94

Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM internal hard drive
119.98 – 50.00 instant savings – 40.00 easy rebate = 29.94

Digital Research 16x double-layer dual-format internal DVD drive
89.98 – 50.00 instant savings – 20.00 easy rebate = 19.94

The last 3 items will be used for my Windows Media Center box that I plan to construct.

I got all of my Christmas shopping done tonight. My sister and I went to the mall and did it all in one trip. We figured out what we wanted to buy before we left of course, there was no way we would be able to come up with all of those gift ideas on the fly.

I feel really relieved to have it done, which is weird because I wasn’t worried about it at all. It just feels good to have it all done I guess. I do still have to buy a present for my sister, but that shouldn’t be hard.

I saw the new Harry Potter movie last night, and overall I liked it. Although, my brain did spoil the ending for me since I knew what was going to happen.

I only complaint I had about it was that they couldn’t jam in everything from the book. There were several things which they did not explain thoroughly enough to warrant including in the movie. For instance, they did not tie Neville’s dismay over the crucio curse to his parents’ torture very well. It was there, but I doubt many people noticed it. Harry’s pursuit of Cho was hardly worth having in the movie either. It added an interesting layer to the book, but the movie would have been fine without it. I was also disappointed that they did not include the Weasley twins’ jokes. Those were highly entertaining, but I guess they just would not fit in the movie.

Still though, I liked it a lot. It was the first time I had read the book prior to seeing the movie, so it spoiled it a bit, but I was still entertained.

First, they sued a bunch of their potential customers over file sharing. Then, Apple came along and introduced iTunes, which kept them happy for a while, but now they want more money.

“We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue,� he said. “We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.�
Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.

So he wants some of Apple’s profits on the iPod. I wonder if this guy thinks before he opens his mouth because this is ludicrous. While we’re at it, Warner should get a share of Sony’s profits on the diskman, Creative’s profits on their MP3 player, etc.

I guess it doesn’t really matter to me anyway, since I use All of MP3. Props to Jared for introducing me to it.

Source

I finished my last final this morning, and now I’m officially on break! That’s right, I’m coming to you live from Herrin, IL. My last final turned out to be pretty easy. It’s time to start worrying about truly important things, like when I’m going to go see the new Harry Potter movie. And maybe even some Christmas shopping.

The windchill is 3 degrees, I’m getting ready to walk to class. I will now insert an electric heater through my esophagus and melt my innards.

[Update by Kyle:] Once I got outside, I decided that driving to class would be much smarter than subjecting myself to the quarter-mile walk. I proceeded to park in a permit-only lot (which ones aren’t?), where I received my first U of I parking ticket. Was it worth it? Well, I still have my toes.

I had my electromagnetic fields final today. I mentioned before that I needed to get an A on it to get an A in the class. Well, at this point, I’m going to be happy if I get a B. That final was a killer. 40% of it was a concept inventory test that all of my classes have, except this one actually counted. I would say less that half of it was over material we covered in the class. Basically, it was how well you remembered physics II and III from freshman year. Then, there were 6 open ended questions. I didn’t know how to do 2 of them. I would assume I still passed the class, but I’m pretty upset that I did so poorly. I guess I’ll get over it though.

Why didn’t we get this idea first?
(I won’t be all sneaky and make you click the link just to figure out what I’m talking about [although you should still click it]. It’s an intersting article about facebook and the kid who created it.)

I had an exam this morning in my Signals class, and it lasted four hours long. All of the finals at Rose are scheduled in a 4 hour block, but this is my first that actually took the whole time. I have to say that it was not an enjoyable experience. Plus, I don’t think I did all that well.

I’ve got 2 left, one tomorrow and one Thursday. I’d like to do well on both of those because I’m right on the border between A and B.

Don’t know if this is new or old, but it’s new to me.

Google SMS

Basically, it gives your cell phone a lot of the powers of helpful internet stuff. Directions, 411, Business lookup, weather, and some other stuff. Plus, it’s basically free if you have a text message plan (otherwise, you’re just charged normal rates from your service carrier). It seems pretty “hip” to me.

Well, I’ve been working on taking some of the archived sites I have on my computer and taking screenshots of them. It’s a slow, laborious process, but it’s kind of cool. I’m putting all the shots online so people can check out the progression that Shouzer (and my web stuff in general) has gone through.

You can check it out here. I’ve separated the different pages into their relevant folders. I’m planning to put up an actual page with descriptions and such for everything there. Right now, though, here’s a quick summary.

Back in 1999, Kyle and I had the idea to create a website. It was going to be what was then called an E/N site, or everything/nothing site. This is more or less the precursor to weblogs, now known more commonly as blogs. In that regard, we were pretty far ahead of the curve.

We’d both had a couple of other sites on the internet back then, which were more or less your typical homepages. I doubt most people even have what you would have considered a homepage nowadays. This was our first venture working together though.

One day in class, Kyle thought of the name ‘Shouzer’. I have no idea how or why, but it was original and it stuck. We were so confident that we would one day own shouzer.com, that the original sites were names shouzer.com, even though they were actually hosted at shouzer.virtualave.net. There was no ‘.com’ about it. In the shouzer.com folder, they’re layouts 1 & 2. Looking back, I’m still extremely impressed by layout 1. Like I said, this was over 5 years ago. That would have made me about 14-15. That was skill.

After the second layout, we split up for some reason and created separate sites. I don’t know why, really, but we did. The result was two sites called Blatantly (mine, short for blatantly arrogant and biased) and Plugworthy (Kyle’s, as it was worth a plug). The progression of Blatantly can be seen in the folder. It was about this time that I also created the Shouzer Network, or Shouzernet for short. The screenshot of that page can be seen in the ‘other’ folder.

After a year or so, we decided to get back together and create The DKS Weblog. While I kept posting on Blatantly for a little while after that, it was more or less the end of that site for me. Like when we split, I can’t really remember why we decided to start blogging together again, but we did. That site lasted a good while. I believe it was somewhere in the range of September 2000 to January 2003, and I had a lot of fun with it during that time. I remember there being a couple months when the site was down while I redesigned it, but I can’t remember either why it was down or for how long exactly. Maybe Kyle could remember that a little better.

It was in February 2003 that I purchased the domain for Shouzer, but the ‘hellsing’ coming soon was up forever. The first post I have in the database from the site was in November 2003. So it obviously took a while to get the site up and running. This was likely a result of my laziness, mixed with the fact that it took a rewrite of the blogging software we used. The real Shouzer.com was my first ever experience with a database, so it took some getting used to. It was also my first time ever creating an entire layout from only CSS. It was also the end of my senior year in high school. Suffice it to say, there were a lot of things going on keeping me from finishing the site.

Since then, the site has gone through a few changes, but not much. The site went through 3 layout changes, and then I migrated the DB and software over to WordPress, which required us to use WordPress themes for the layouts. I haven’t had the time or motivation to create my own layout yet, but I’m hoping it’ll happen sometime next semester. The biggest thing I regret is that the WordPress-based site doesn’t use shouts like the old site used to. Shouts were a system that let anybody post anything to a thin column on the side of the page. It was a nice way for friends to keep us updated with their lives even if they don’t have accounts to post on the main site. I liked shouts a lot.

Wow, this turned out to be a monster post. I ended up writing a lot more than I planned to, and I only scratched the surface. I guess I care about this site, and its beginnings, quite a bit.

[Edit:] I got rid of the ‘other’ folder and just put all the files in the main folder. It seems to make sense from a hierarchical perspective.