Well, I made an 89 on my COBOL final. I thought I did better than that, but it’s hopefully still enough to get me an A in the course. I also finished up both program assignments tonight and turned them in. So I’m officially done with Fall 2002.
Now maybe we can go see some movies tomorrow and I’ll actually be able to pay attention instead of worrying about homework and tests. The big problem now is deciding what to see – Star Trek, James Bond, Analyze That?
Quick, somebody call Satan and ask him how the weather is down there.
My boss just walked into my office and showed me a report about Linux. He then went on to suggest that I start looking at using Linux on some of the computers in the district.
Of course I’m already running Linux on my desktop machine and on one of the servers at the high school. So I showed it to him and he actually seemed interested. The plan right now is to look at the K-12 Linux Terminal Server as a way to beef up our old Pentium 75’s by using them as thin clients.
The cost savings of reusing old computers, improved stability, lack of virus worries, etc. seem obvious to me. Now it’s just a matter of convincing a commitee of people from each campus. This should be a lot of fun.
I meant to put this in the previous post, but I forgot so I’ll just add it here. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than one post in a single day.
There was an article on CNN the other day about how The Two Towers was available on DVD in Shanghai for about a dollar. The article says DVD, but I’m pretty sure they were actually VCDs. Anyway, Patra was in China a while back and one of her friends from the cruise ship bought a copy of it. When they got back to the room to watch it, they discovered it was actually Clash of the Titans. I guess sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
I only have one more final exam to take this semester. Unfortunately it’s dealing with the COBOL programming language. I’ve been studying COBOL for a few months now and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was invented as some cruel punishment for programmers.
If anyone out there would like to see us and possibly win some free computer stuff, you should come to the [H]ard|OCP Hardware Workshop in Dallas on December 20. It starts at 6:00pm and will be followed by a presentation from AMD that will end around 11:00pm. It’s free to get in and there are lots of free prizes, so if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. We’ll be there.
I came in to work this morning and checked my e-mail as usual. I had 10 new messages and PopFile correctly identified all of them as spam. It’s nice to find an intelligent, well-written program that actually does what it claims to do. It is Open Source and written in Perl, so I guess that’s to be expected.
I really need to update this site more often… I think that would make a great New Years resolution. How often would you like to see things posted? I’m thinking I could probably post something everyday, and major updates about two or three times a week. I’m always coming across interesting web sites that I would like to share with people or things that I’d like to just remember for later. Oh well, I’ll see what I can do.
We took some pictures of the Thanksgiving festivities two weeks ago, I’ll try to get some of them posted as soon as possible. I have finals this week, so it may be a few days before they appear.
I’ve spent a little time this morning playing with PopFile. PopFile is a really nice e-mail filter for blocking spam. The interesting thing about it is that you “teach” it what is spam and what is not. Since I installed it this morning I received one legitimate message and three spam messages. I had to tell it that the first two spams were spam, but it caught the third one automatically. They say that the longer it runs, the better it gets.
I’m also still working on my software section. I even pulled out some of the old stuff that I worked on in high school. I’ll try to get that posted after finals. It should be interesting.
Patra’s back in town for a few weeks.
She’s been pretty much all the way around the Pacific Ocean for the past 6 months and for some reason she still came back to Paris…
Finally, some pictures of my new car. I had actually hoped to take some better pictures this evening, but it’s coming a flood right now…
Yes, this is a lot like the Civic we had a few years ago. Some people at work thought that I just hadn’t driven it in a long time.
As for the truck – it was nice, and it came in handy when we needed to move something big, but this car is about 10 times more fun to drive.
It’s midnight on Sunday night, it must be time to update the web site.
I added a couple of new galleries tonight. The first one has some family pictures.
The other has pictures of Paige and me.
The family gallery is just pictures of Paige’s family right now. We never remember to take the camera to any of my family’s get-togethers.
Paige’s parents stopped by last night with Pat, John, and Luke. We finally found the best way to keep Luke out of trouble while he’s here. I think this made Max a little jealous though.
Tomorrow night I’ll take some pictures of my new car and post them. For those of you who haven’t seen it or heard about it alreay, it’s a silver 2002 Honda Civic Coupe. If you remember our old silver Civic, it’s almost just like that only brand new with a CD player and a 5-speed. So be sure and check back tomorrow for that.
I figured I’d better post something just so no one thinks that I’ve been worked to death. If anyone out there was hoping to score a job at the school district, you can forget about it now.
Dale, who retired last year, is now back at work. The “powers that be” used an interesting hiring technique to get him back. He had been teaching a class in the afternoons at the high school. They basically just cancelled his class and said “You can either come back to work or go home…” Needless to say, this has taken a lot of work off of my back.
Once things settle down again at work, I’ll try to get back in the routine of posting new pictures and occasional ramblings up here for everyone to see.
I’m also going to be adding a software section pretty soon. Graduation is in about 15 months. I’ll officially be a computer scientist then, so I guess I should start showing off some of my work.
Classes in Commerce start back up tomorrow. I’m taking three this semester – Survey of Algorithmic Languages, Intro to Databases, and Object Oriented Programming. It should be interesting. The good news is I’m now only 16 months away from graduating.
The school district still hasn’t hired anyone to help me out in the Technology Department. So if you live around here and would like to work with me, go to http://www.parisisd.net/ and click on “Employment” to find out about the position.
I guess I should go to bed now. I’d hate to fall asleep during the first day of class…
