Jared’s Blog

A bizzare thing happened to me yesterday while I was on my way home from work. I’m crusing along in traffic with the windows down. Suddenly, I feel something hit my arm and briefly in my peripheral vision that thing land between my legs. I glance down to see it’s a wasp!

My though process went something like this, “Huh? Oh shit! Is it alive? Yep, it’s moving. Crap! It’s probably pissed off too.” After getting over the shock that a wasp managed to fly into my car while I was travelling 50+ MPH down the highway, I tried to get it away from me. Instinctively, I flicked it, but it only made things worse. Now I didn’t know where it was, just that it was somewhere under me. While trying to keep track of the road and traffic, I was lifting up my leg to try and catch a glimpse of it. My fear was that it’d crawl into my shoe or up my pant leg and then there was going to be some real trouble. After about a minute of searching, I saw it. I gave it stomp to end the danger. Nope, not good enough. He must’ve put his stomp-proof exoskeleton on this morning. My next chance, I reached down, grabbed it by the wings and tossed it out the window.

Whew. Needless to say, my windows went right up after that.

Straight from the horses mouth, AMD press release announces $5.4 bn acquisition of ATI. Where does this leave AMD-NVIDIA??
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I heard the rumors a couple weeks ago and I got excited. Then things quieted down and I just gave up hope. Over the weekend there were a few rumblings of an announcement coming today and figured I’d just wait and see. So here we are, AMD and just purchased ATI. As the title says, this changes everything.

More than anything, it raises a number of questions. What does this mean for the nForce line of motherboards? Will we see AMD chips on ATI graphic boards? Mulit-core GPU’s anyone? What does this mean for ATI’s Intel supporting chipset? How closely will the two companies integrate their products? Intel + nVidia?
Personally, I’m worried about nForce. I hope nVidia doesn’t just drop AMD altogether. nForce has become the top of the line AMD chipset and it’d be a real problem if nVidia just decides to give up that market. Then again, maybe AMD will start producing it’s own chipsets with the help of ATI, just like Intel does now.

There’s just too many questions at this point and it’s going to be some time before the two companies really start to produce a combined product. Only time will tell, but let’s hope that time decides to give up the ghost sooner than later.

I’m alive! That’s a feat considering Saturday brought 100 degree heat to my corner of MN. If you bothered to read my last post, you’d know I moved. Really, I didn’t do too much moving of myself on Saturday. I had moved several things over in the previous weeks which only left a few large pieces of furniture to move on Saturday.

After finishing work on Friday and coming home to find the cable and internet service had been shut off, I decided that there was no point in sticking around the old place that night. With that I grabbed all my vital possessions (namely my computer) and drove over and tried to get some semblance of order going in my room.

Speaking of my room… there’s one word to describe it, cramped. This is another story, but I ended up buying a queen size bed which takes up about half the room. Add to that my computer desk, a dresser, a file cabinet, and a TV stand and there’s barely enough room to walk. I just keep telling myself that I will only be there for 9 months and that I can deal with it until then.

Back to the Saturday move. To say things went as planned would be a great lie. It was anything but. I showed up at the old place in the morning as requested by Laura, but no one else did. I gave it some time and then called to see what was going on. The first truck they got was in Coon Rapids instead of the local UHaul place and broke down 5 min away from the UHaul garage. More than an hour later, they had a smaller truck and were on their way, only about 3 hours behind schedule.

After that it, the load went smoothly. As far as I know, we didn’t do any major damage to the townhouse while hauling things out and with 5 people, things moved very quickly. As the day progressed, it heated up to over 100 degrees outside. It was brutal, but we kept ourselves hydrated and no one had a problem. Besides the truck, our worst problem was trying to get Hank’s couch in the basement. In the end, we took a door off its hinges and managed to only scrape the wood railing going down the stairs.

Lately, my free time has been non-existant and it’s starting to wear on me. Having time to myself to do whatever I wish is important to me and to my mental health. Hopefully with all this moving out of the way, now things can get back to normal.

In fact, I even had time to check out a show on Monday night. It wasn’t hooked up by Decoy. Rick and I went just to have a good time and check out some really good bands. The lineup for Strhess 2006 was as follows: Still Remains, Bury Your Dead, Darkest Hour, Poison The Well, and Shadows Fall. I did still shoot during the show. I’ve uploaded the pictures over at Flickr.

By the end of the week, I will no longer be a resident of Plymouth. My lease is up at the end of the month. There’s been a lot of big changes in the last couple of weeks in my life.

First of all, there’s this move. I have mixed feelings about the entire situation. I’m going to miss my current roommates and the dogs. I never considered myself a dog person before living here. I was not, by any means, an animal hater either. In fact, when I was a boy, our family had a dog. But it was a smaller dog and she was getting pretty old and senile by the time I can start to remember her. I always liked big dogs more than little dogs. To me, I want a dog that I can play with. Not one I have to worry about stepping on when I roll out of bed, but I digress. Sullivan and Mishka have almost become my pets too. Just today, I found myself quieting them from barking while at Hank and Laura’s new house. At the new place, Rick has a couple of cats, so I’ll not be missing my animal friends for one second.

Another thing I really didn’t mind was living with a female. Other than family, this is the first time I’d ever lived with one and I can definately say I appreciated the hominess she brought to the living space. Guys generally don’t do much decorating and if you put me in charge, the walls would probably be bare.

Another thing I’m going to miss is the slightly larger room and voluminous closet. I just bought a new queen size bed for my new place and after getting it install yesterday, I was left with little room for anything else. I figured where my computer desk will have to go and I will likely end up with my TV in my room. Finding room for the dresser may be a problem though. Small seems to be the theme at the new place. Narrow hallways, a puny bathroom, small rooms. It’s almost as if I’m back in college. Every time I start to think about that stuff, I just remember that I’ll be out of the place in less than a year. In a few months I’ll be searching for a new place all over again. Hopefully by that time I can save up some money and possibly invest in a house of my own. If not, I’m sure I can find another place to rent for awhile and possibly some new roommates.

Earlier this week, the rest of my family also made a move. A rather sudden one at that. I talked to the family on Saturday and they informed me they’d be moving on Monday. It’s strange to think of my family moving down here. I guess I’m just used to having some distance between us. There’s also some mixed feelings with this move as well. It will be nice to get together with the family more often now, but at the same time my parents can be very prying and I like to keep my distance.

Deep down, I really embrace change. I live for it. Life is boring otherwise. I’m going to be enjoying all the new things the coming days will bring and hopefully more positives are on the way.

Two posts in one day, wow! This is worth it, I assure you. I added a link to someone’s blog today. His name is Kevin and he is a homeless man who currently is in Nashville, TN. I’ve becomes quite the avid reader of this guy’s blog. Despite all the connotations of being homeless, he’s very intelligent and he has some great perspectives on homelessness.

Now you might be asking yourself, how the hell can a homeless man have a blog. Well, he was given a laptop by a local computer store and he uses wi-fi mostly from local coffee shops to get on the Internet. He also has a digital camera that was given to him and he sometimes posts videos. Amazing! The cool thing is, even if he didn’t have his own laptop and camera (which I’m sure could get him mugged real quick if they’re ever discovered by the wrong people), he could be doing this from some kind of public terminal like a library. He doesn’t need hosting as he just uses Blogger.

Every so often, I see an article about how Computer Science undergraduate and graduate enrollment numbers are dwindling these days. The articles often scream “crisis on the horizon.” Did anyone stop to think for a second about why these numbers are down?

I don’t have any sats to back this up and I’m speaking purely as a devil’s advocate, but what if these degrees aren’t needed as much anymore? Before I get blasted with comments, let me explain. In no way do I mean a secondary education shouldn’t be persued after high shcool. College is an experience that teaches you many valuable lessons both inside and outside the classroom. Secondly, it is hard to find a decent job these days without some sort of degree. Having that degree shows you had the drive to get the it and that you are serious about your future.

Now put those words aside for a second. How many times do you hear about people who dropped out of college or didn’t go to college that end up being very successful in businesses they start? How many hacking schools have you heard of (for the record I’ve actually heard of a couple)? One of the great things about computer programming is that almost anyone can just jump right in and get started. Most people have a computer and the internet. With a few free downloads, you can have a full development environment sitting on your desktop provided you spend the time learning about how to set it up. You can literally bootstrap your skills from the ground up.

I know this is possible because to an extent, this is what I did myself with PHP and MySQL and I believe it’s the reason I have the job I do right now. I don’t deny having a CS degree helped and accelerated my learning, but what I am capable of today would have been possible without my degree. I may not have as deep an understanding of it right away, but I certainly think, given enough time, I could.

One of the main motivators for writing this was listening to FLOSS Weekly, a podcast all about free and open source software. Episode 8 is an interview with Ryan Gordon, the guy who recently ported Google Earth and many games (such as UT2003/2004) to Linux. In fact, that’s his job. He ports software for a living. Frankly, I couldn’t find out if he has a degree or not, but he stated right in the podcast that he learned how to do this by teaching himself. There is no school for porting games to Linux, I am sure of that and yet this guy is making a living doing just that.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we have less CS students in the workforce (more money for me, mwahaha!). Maybe these kids are all taking the DIY perspective and teaching themselves. As I said, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but it’s something to think about. This also goes back to my blog post from last night. Being computer illiterate is just not acceptable anymore. Granted there’s a lot of hurdles you’d have to jump to go from being a computer illiterate to becoming a programmer, but you can do it and there are free resources out there to help.