I told you I would be back!

See, I'm getting better at this blogging thing already!

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm already anticipating that this year won't give me much education from the classroom.  I'm hoping my ideas for my project and thesis will develop nicely and I'll end up with something interesting as well as satisfying the requirements of my program, but I may have to work pretty hard to pick a topic outside of the pre-existing ones that each professor has to offer.  Or they may be super flexible, I'm not sure yet.

However, I've reached the conclusion that I need to be coding something, or I'm going to lose what I've learned in the past (and go crazy from too much free time).  With that conclusion, I've decided to start looking into Open Source projects and seeing if I can contribute.  It'll have to start out small just so that I can get the hang of the code base and the tools and the community practices, but I think it's a really good place for me to get some of experience that I was lacking last year.  Who knows, maybe I'll even start working on something widely used and respected like VLC or Mozilla Firefox!

So, if any of you nerdy folks out there have any suggestions, please send them my way!  Any projects you think would be interesting, or tricks/tips if you've done any open source contributing yourself.... Whatever, just send any thoughts you've got.

But, classes start in 8 hours, so I should sleep for now.  Till next time! 

The Nerd in Me

At this point I think you all know that I've signed a lease on an apartment and have just finished moving in! I'm in the process of arranging the furniture that I have, and trying to find a few last pieces such as another side table and a TV and stand.

However, this post is not about my new apartment! (That post is coming soon, I promise. I've been taking pictures along the way with a nice blog post in mind.)

This is what this post is about:




Now, I'm sure this doesn't look very exciting, but let me explain what is happening here. My new apartment doesn't have internet hooked up yet, so I figured I would just be able to stay in touch via my iphone. Okay, that's all well and good, but that keyboard is tiny and gets really annoying for long emails and the like! So, I decided to research a bit and found a way to connection my laptop to my iphone to the internet, so I'm online with my laptop! I won't go into too many of the gory details, but essentially my iPhone is online via the Cellular network, my laptop and iPhone are connected via an ad-hoc wifi network, and my laptop is SSHed into my iPhone to create a socks proxy for web browsing. Okay, I guess those were the gory details. Anywho, it's pretty rockin'. And now I won't have to worry about going back home to work on my Grad School applications since I have internet here now!

Love you all, hope you're doing really well and enjoying 2009 so far. Pictures of the apartment are up next, so stay tuned!