(Otherwise known as Edrick-speak for "Hi, guys!")

After much, much, much, much, much pressure on TW to get his new servers working properly, and a few days of the two of us fooling around with reconfiguring his network, I finally have a site that's actually responsive! Woo! Guess what that means? More posts! There's been a lot that's happened since my last post, so I suppose I'll write up a little something every day until I get caught up.

Some quick points on what I've been seeing and doing, though, that I will hopefully follow up with complete posts:

• Feedburner was purchased by Google, who took the opportunity to wreck the service.
• I did, in fact, purchase an iPhone 3GS and have been loving it in spite of its Apple-ness.
• I've become far more active on Facebook and Twitter, if there are people who care about that.
• I've joined the Mysterium Committee in the areas of Web Development, Communications and Location.
• Someone got angry and went around blocking all YouTube videos of Kumikyoku.
• I've been on a Star Trek marathon, nearing completion of TNG and readying TOS.
• My WoW guild has been falling apart for reasons nobody wants to explain.
• I'm ramping up for another semester of university that starts on September 8th.
• I saw District 9 today and hereby order you to watch it at all costs.

And I'm sure there's more to discuss once I get my creative juices flowing once more. But until then, I would encourage everyone to see if you can break the site. I've updated lots of things, reconfigured lots of other things, and had to change the feed back to my standard WordPress RSS address because the Feedburner service has been completely destroyed by a Google that doesn't seem to care that there are tons of people who are unable to get access to their Feedburner dashboards after the merger. (Seriously, how long has it been? I still can't get access to mine. I don't care anymore. I'll find a feed manager later, but it'll never be Google.)

Okay. I've lived without a cell phone for years now. I keep getting asked for my number (especially at school) and I keep saying "cell phone? NOPE!" Well, the time has come for me to seriously consider getting one. I'll need one definitely before school starts, and preferrably as soon as possible, especially with my current escalating involvement with the Mysterium Committee. As such, I've broken down two plans that I would use:

iPhone Nation Family Plan:

• Fee for family plan: $69.98 per month.
  • Nation 550 Family Plan, starting with 2 lines: $59.99 per month.
  • Additional 3rd line: $9.99 per month.
• Fee for iPhone data plan: $60.00 per month.
  • First iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
  • Second iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
• Unlimited nights (9pm to 6am) and weekends (Friday 9pm to Monday 6am).

Grand total per month: $129.98 (Taxes apply.)

Splitting family plan fee with three people: $23.32 per phone per month.

Each iPhone user pays individual data plan. Added to family plan fee: $53.32 per iPhone per month.

iPhone Individual Plan:

• Fee for Nation 450 Individual Plan: $39.99 per month.
• Fee for iPhone data plan: $30.00 per month.
• 5000 minutes nights (9pm to 6am) and weekends (Friday 9pm to Monday 6am).

Grand total per montht: $69.99 (Taxes apply.)

So that, folks, is the breakdown. Basically, I save $16.66 a month by sharing monthly minutes with three other people. I don't know how feasable that will actually be. Personally, I can see myself using a lot of minutes over a month just with emergency school-related calls. Team projects and such. I was asked many times last semester for my cell number, and I imagine if I gave one out, I'd be dinged with multiple 5 minute calls that would eat up the family pool of minutes. So would it be worth it for me to pay extra for a guaranteed 450 minutes every month (plus insanely high, though not unlimited, minutes for nights and weekends) or do you think I could fit within the family share?

Another concern is that once I'm locked into a contract, I couldn't move from, say, family plan to individual plan with my iPhone. Capella, however, was able to switch from individual to family, and since going from family to individual means more money in AT&T's pocket, I would assume it's okay to do that. I don't want to be stuck in family or individual for 2 years. (Although I don't see myself moving a considerable distance away from my family while I'm in school, which will last at least 2 more years.)

Yet another concern is about getting a texting plan. Should I? I won't text. At all. I'll use the 3G data plan I'm paying out the wazoo for to use IMs or something instead. The iPhone 3GS supports background applications, right? AIM in the background is all I'm asking for and texting I would never use. Then again, the question was never if I would use texting but if other people insisted on sending them to me anyway. Then I'd still have to pay for all their little crappy messages. Is there a way to block texts? Is this even that much of an issue? How many people have trouble with people sending them unwarranted texts?

Then, of course, there's the coup de grace: Which iPhone do I get? I've waited all year to get a cell phone because I knew Apple was coming out with a new one and I wanted it. Above all, I wanted a bigger, better still camera that also functioned as a video camera. Wish granted! Clearly, I want a 3GS, but which size? To be perfectly honest, I'm thinking about getting the 32GB version. I can see myself extensively taking photographs and videos and perhaps recording lectures and definitely putting music on the thing, not to mention downloading all those awesome Tower Defense games from the App Store. My only issue lies with the fact that there is no iPhone disk mode like the iPods have, otherwise it would double as a portable hard drive like I use my iPod for all the time. Then I would totally justify the cost of the 32GB version.

We shall see... Anyone have any advice?

UPDATE 1: Then there's also the Unity family plan which costs 10 more dollars per month, offers 700 monthly minutes, plus doesn't cost said monthly minutes when calling both AT&T cell phones AND land lines! For $10 more total ($3.33 per person that will be using this plan), I think I would pick that. Calling home for free would be nice.

Five things I learned this year during my July 4th vacation:

Thing 1 is learning that Bolt is my new favorite movie, taking the solid place of Wall-E, which tenuously took the place of The Black Hole. I found myself wanting to watch it this weekend and, not being able to, I was a very sad puppy. I figured there was no use denying the fact that I've seen Bolt more times in 3 months than I have my old favorite movies over the course of my entire life. I was so distraught, as a matter of fact, that I completely forgot my personal tradition of watching Independence Day... Well, okay, that's not the reason, but still. Pretty close. (You know, I should make a list of my favorite movies.)

The reason I couldn't play Bolt is Thing 2. I learned that my old laptop can't play HD movies. Whether it's because the video file for an hour-and-a-half movie in 1080p weighs in at 7GB and there was a hard drive bandwidth issue or because 1080p at 30 frames per second is too much for the video card bandwidth to handle, the end result was the same on 3 different video players and 2 sets of codecs: A split second of clear video immediately followed by either insane garble or lots and lots of audio/video skipping. The laptop is a 2.0GHz Pentium M with 2GB RAM and a 256MB nVidia GeForce 6800 Go. My Dell Mini 9 played the thing better than that laptop. (Although we're talking maybe two seconds of legible footage compared to merely one second.)

Thing 3 was learning that even a certain board-controlled privately-owned lake can get caught up in such a power struggle that they can't install tornado sirens without ruining everything. It is sad, though comforting, to know that it's not just a certain community based around a certain adventure game that can't seem to get along from one group to another, but the whole of humanity itself! In the immortal words of the last poor sap who was utterly destroyed because of the words themselves: "Can't we all just get along?"

Thing 4 was learning that I haven't blogged in such a very, very long time. Why? No idea. Not a whole lot to say and not a whole lot to say that I want to tell the whole wide world. I figured I would make Capella happy and post a list of things I learned over the weekend! Which leads me to Thing 5 that I learned:

It is entirely possible to get sunburn by driving for 3 hours in a convertable with the top down on a cloudless day. I'm not saying I did, but I certainly came close. I think it was the combined effort of yesterday's standing outside all day and today's 3 hour drive home in bright, bright sunlight. Either way, convertables are fun, and I didn't even lose my World of Warcraft hat in the wind tunnel of a car!

You know what would be nice?

It would be nice to have an honest comparison of IIS and Apache without it being an open source fanaticist article by a guy on a crusade against anything bearing the name Microsoft. Apparently, according to them, IIS is one giant exploit waiting to happen because... Oh wait. They never say why. They just assume that sites running IIS are hacked because of IIS itself and not because the admin left something open on his own negligent self. But then you have Apache, which is clearly superior for the simple fact that it runs on Linux. And we all know Linux makes things better just because it's Linux, don't we? If it runs on Linux then it must be secure!

Anyway, I'm thinking about shifting my router and web services over to Windows Server 2008. (I would install R2, but apparently that's only for x64 processors now, which is awesome, but not for me, since my server system isn't going to have a 64-bit processor.) My primary reason for this is... Well, let's face it. I'm a Windows kind of pup. I'm running Windows 7 RC on my main machine, for crying out loud. Everything I have is built around Windows... Except for my router server, which is, sadly, running a copy of Ubuntu Server. It's alright, but definitely not plug and play on a Windows network. Every time the thing restarts, I have to manually restart the Internet connection (thanks to a poor Linux-wide implementation of ADSL PPPoE) and then manually start folder shares, which have suddenly blocked out the family computer for no apparent reason. On the bright side, it's rather stable. Although my copies of Vista and Windows 7 has less downtime than my server due to problems. (And then there's Ubuntu on my Dell Mini that acts like Windows ME.)

I don't know though... I might just decide to shift the work load to larger computer by installing a newer release of Ubuntu Server. It's hard telling. It really is. On the one hand, I'm growing increasingly sick of the arrogant open source community. Whenever you go look for help, you're innundated by it. On the other hand, I already know a lot about running one, so I don't need a whole lot of help. Plus, it just sits there and does its thing once it's all set up, but, see, Windows Server will do the same thing once it's set up, too. I guess it's a question of: Do I want to stick with what I know, or do I want to take the time to learn something new? And face it. Windows Server is going to be a lot closer to my intended field of work than Ubuntu Server will ever be.

In preparation for school finishing up, I put in an application to my guild for another raiding position. The latest WoW patch brought in a new dungeon, so I'm looking forward to participating in some first-attempt strategies and a long line of failures before making any progress! This'll be the first time I've actually done a dungeon that someone doesn't already know how to do... ANYWAY!

I was accepted this morning into a primary healing position! (Last time, I was technically only a backup that kept getting called up because there wasn't enough primary healers.) So, as a result, I shall be doing scheduled raids Friday and Saturday nights from 10pm to 1am. And since I know people are all the time going to be asking me to do stuff during those times, I've taken the liberty to look up a Google Calendar widget for my blog! Tada! There it is on the right, showcasing my happy raid times. (Actually, just the dates. You have to click to see the times.)

Maybe I'll use Google Calendar more often now?

UPDATE 1: Alas, the Google Calendar plug-in is broken. It seems to be wreaking much havok with is very hacked together CSS for the hidden window that popped up when one clicked on an event. Clearly, the plug-in is no longer in use! Good riddence. (Until I can fix it?)

UPDATE 2: Iaian7 managed to troubleshoot the problem in about 10 seconds, thereby solving the insane CSS problem and making me look STUPID. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!

Due to lack of homework, I've managed to find a creative outlet to pour my free time into... TW recently created a version of the Myst Theme in 8-bit. (You know, like the old NES sound effects?!) This afternoon, he approached me with the idea to actually put his theme to the intro video from the original Myst. I had already been playing around with After Effects for a project (that is still currently secret), so I figured, hey! Why not? It'll help me learn the ropes of a video editing program, which is something I've wanted to do since forever!

Behold! The culmination of 3 hours of work (plus whatever TW put in):

So after I saw the finish production, I thought it might be neat to break it up into the individual parts and show people how Myst is put together and why it took 3 hours to put the video together. Basically, Myst (and Riven) is put together with a massive collection of still images, videos, and sounds, and the videos are placed on the still images wherever they're needed. Very rarely is there a full movie playing. It's mostly little windows playing in certain areas of the screen. Wanna see?! I know you do:

So there you are, folks! Be sure to rate them both! And, dare I say? Watch for more of these videos in the future! (That is, if TW keeps on making the music. Otherwise it's just a video everyone's already seen a hundred times.)

I've hit a crossroads. Actually, it appears that I came to one the day I transferred to a Computer Science major, but I was able to ignore it while I took a parcel of general education classes. Now that I've emerged from my first semester (and World Changers) without a problem, I've revisited the crossroads, only this time I have to make a choice! Bummer. College can just never be simple, can it? It's harder to plan and pay than it is to actually take the classes. Anyway, the choice?

Do I continue Computer Science or not? Economics is out of it. That never seemed to be an issue with my advisor, so that will continue to be my second major. The problem lies with the mathematics courses for Computer Science. See, when I was at Ivy Tech, they apparently didn't bother to cover everything necessary to advance me from Algebra to Calculus. Not even close. My placement test when I transferred was dismal and I had a feeling there'd be a problem. Basically, what it boils down to is this:

I take a math class during the summer to prepare myself for Calculus. I don't need to transfer anything, because it's not a prerequisite, but this is just so I'm mentally prepared for Calculus. Sadly, my university doesn't offer anything during the summer, so I would have to go back to Ivy Tech. (Always a scary idea.) Once I do that, I take Calculus I in the fall at IWU, then Calculus II the next semester and so forth and so on. No problem, right? The catch is that I can graduate very quickly, thanks to the points I carried from Ivy Tech. My credits aren't a problem. The problem lies in the scheduling of the math classes. If I do Computer Science, I will take lots of heavy math classes. One per semester. There are 6 classes, so I'd be pinned up in school for almost an extra year JUST taking math classes, even if I start now. I can't avoid them if I stay with Computer Science.

My other choice: Computer Information Systems. Less theoretical stuff. No math. At all. If I did CIS, I wouldn't have to take another math class unless it was General Statistics for Economics. (Which is recommended, but not required.) What's the difference between Computer Science and CIS? I'm not really sure. In fact, let me show you how close the two programs actually are:

Core Courses for Computer Information Systems:

CIS-117: Essential Foundations for Computing
CIS-125: Introduction to Computer Science I
CIS-126: Introduction to Computer Science II
CIS-221: Data Structures
CIS-222: Object Oriented Programming
CIS-225: Systems Analysis
CIS-236: Machine Structures and Programming
CIS-336: Programming Languages
CIS-382: Database Programming Development
CIS-480: Applied Software Development Project
CIS-490: Senior Seminar

(The bold is a class that is not in Computer Science.) That's all I'd have to take for CIS. The remainder of the required hours would be filled up using Economics classes, thanks to an "independent track" option for CIS. Basically, with CIS, you take the core classes listed above and then specialize in either Business, Communications, Graphics, or Mathematics. The math specialization is pretty much Computer Science except for 2 missing classes, so anyone who takes CIS Math Track should probably just pick CS entirely. Okay, that's CIS. Here's CS:

Core Courses for Computer Science:

CIS-117: Essential Foundations for Computing
CIS-125: Introduction to Computer Science I
CIS-126: Introduction to Computer Science II
CIS-221: Data Structures
CIS-222: Object Oriented Programming
CIS-225: Systems Analysis
CIS-236: Machine Structures and Programming
CIS-320: Introduction to Software Engineering
CIS-325: Analysis of Algorithms
CIS-336: Programming Languages
CIS-385: Theory of Computation
CIS-425: Operating Systems
CIS-480: Applied Software Development Project
CIS-490: Senior Seminar

(Again, the bold are classes not in Computer Information Systems.) This, however, is just the core of each major. As you can see, there is little difference. CS does, though, clearly go in the direction of theory and algorithms and the whole "why does it work?" instead of a "how does it work?" focus. To be honest, I'm not even sure I care why a computer works. I've definitely always been interested in how they work! But let's not forget the required math classes for CS:

Computer Science Mathematics and Physics Cognate:

PHY-230: Electronics
MAT-253: Calculus I
MAT-254: Calculus II
MAT-280: Linear Algebra
MAT-353: Differential Equations
MAT-373: Numerical Analysis

These are required. It's not a specialization option like CIS offers... I either do these or I don't get a degree in Computer Science. The problem is that I'm not prepared for MAT-253. I can sign up for it, but I won't understand a bit of it. But even if I were to miraculously understand Calc 1 this Fall, I would still have a massive schedule overflow simply because I have to take each math class separately.

What's at stake? (I know I'm repeating a lot, but I'm thinking it through as I write this.) Time. Lots of time at school. Time at school means lots of extra tuition fees. So while I'm potentially wasting time, I'm also racking up a pretty impressive student loan during that time. Time I could have been graduated and making money in a job somewhere using my CIS/Economics majors. Why would I sacrifice the extra time and money? Is Computer Science really something I want to do? It looks almost identical to the less demanding CIS program, except for the math and theoretical classes.

Do I care about theory? Right now? No. Would I care if I actually got into it? Who knows? If I dropped CS for CIS, would that be the "lazy" way out? It almost feels like I was set on getting a degree in CS and then found out that it's hard, so I decided to take something easy. Almost. Not only is it more a scheduling problem than a skill problem, but, at the same time, I don't really know why I picked CS to begin with. Probably because I had always assumed CIS was just a "I know how to plug in a monitor" degree, but having looked at it, I see it's just as complex as CS in its own right. It just lacks the classes that explain WHY a computer works, but it still delivers on programming and the basic HOW a computer works. Get it?

Also, I might add that since the two are so vastly similar, I could always do CIS first and get out into the working world as soon as possible, and then go back later for Computer Science, since it would almost literally be "okay, I'm here for the math now!" I mean, it's not like CIS is a completely different direction! In fact, it's far more like a degree for a position halfway to Computer Science, and if I ever wanted to go all the way up to CS, I would just pick up where I left off.

So therein lies my crossroads dilemma.