Brendan O'Connor: November 2007 Archives

So, Sunday night I had a fairly large catastrophe: upon returning from the week's tournament, I opened my laptop to find that, well, it couldn't open quite right. Upon further examination, it turned out that the left hinge's bottom half-- a cast-steel solid part-- had sheared, completely, a situation made even worse by the fact that the left side, on this laptop, contains the wires necessary to make the screen work. Now for me, this would be an extreme problem in the best of times. I bring my laptop (all 17 pounds of it) to every class, to office hours (which were, coincidentally, to start about 2 hours after I found my laptop's problem), and I had intended to bring it with me to Daytona on Thursday. Obviously, that couldn't work; the laptop can barely hold itself up, much less go on a 12-day trip across thousands of miles. (And, of course, my usual luck with TSA would lead them to ask all sorts of questions about the exposed wires. Great.) This situation was made particularly ironic by the fact that I have, for quite some time, been planning to buy either the cute little Asus eee, or the liberal and hilarious-looking OLPC, when either was released-- and in fact, was planning to decide and get one the next morning. (A rational person might ask why I need *two* laptops; the answer is fairly straightforward. I need a powerful workstation, but because I don't live anywhere for that long, it needs to be movable in fairly short order; hence, a big, powerful laptop would be in order. At the same time, I pick up and go to class, research, office hours, and a host of other places all the time, which tends to contraindicate having a big, heavy laptop. Since I need all of the above, I went with the big one, and settling for being taunted every time I pulled it out-- but with the advent of these two extraordinarily good, cheapish (both sell in the US for < $400, compared to the UMPC at $3000+) options, I decided enough was enough.) However, neither computer could get here before I left for Daytona; a quandry. My solution, then, has several parts:

1. Give an old Dell workstation (named Sisyphus, for its unbelievable weight; anyone who's lifted a circa-1996 Dell knows what I mean) to a friend who has a laptop.
2. Steal her laptop.
3. Dump everything on her laptop onto Sisyphus. (Luckily, as they both run Ubuntu, this takes only about an hour, and she has every program she's used to.)
4. Dump my things onto her laptop. (This takes more time-- cleaning up my Vista laptop reveals how bad I can be at system organization, as well as more of Vista's, ahem, "features.")
5. Take her laptop to Daytona.

This last should be particularly fun at the airport, as my friend, having lived in Qatar for a large part of her childhood, has Arabic stickers all over her laptop. So we'll see what TSA thinks of this. (My next blog post could be from Guantanamo Bay. Of course, that's always a likely possibility for me. :-) ) At least Cortana, my new extraordinary server (Athlon 64X2 6000+ @ 3.0GHz, 2GB RAM, and *seven* hard drives; the file server / VM server of my dreams) came online a couple of days ago, making much of this transition easier (amazing what one can do with a TB of RAID-Z space and dual GigE ports-- but more on Cortana's setup later). So then: one more midterm, another violin lesson, half a lab section, and I'm off to Daytona Beach! Amusingly, the venue for the tournament is *right* next to the ocean-- amusing, because being Magic players, none of us will go near it. Time to go study some more-- for class, and for judging. No one likes an under-studying judge!

It'd be great if I could manage to update this regularly; I suppose I'll settle for "when I can get a chance." Anyway, lots of interesting stuff has happened recently:

• I got to judge at the Magic State Championships at Dream Wizards. Fun day, including watching another student from Hopkins, Nick Scamman (aka the Jedi, due to his long Padawan braid), take the first steps toward certification by shadowing a judge. We also had to handle a medium-sized crisis due to a player not understanding that in order to play in States, you have to prove in-state residency-- but things were handled eventually.
• I attended the Blumenthal Lecture for this year, given by the CEO of Northrop Grumman, Dr. Ronald Sugar. It was an interesting day; I was able to chat at lunch with a variety of the NGC leadership about the work and research they're pursuing, and then see Dr. Sugar's overview of all the new toys NGC is building, like giant lasers and new aircraft carriers. Interesting to hear their take on the direction defense needs to go-- and also interesting to watch them build a relationship with Hopkins and its students.
• I got my flights and hotel information for Grand Prix: Daytona, and so it's real: I'm finally going! I'll be a real invited judge and everything, which will be really excellent. I fly out there the night of the 15th of November, and then I'll drive back to my grandmother's in Jacksonville for Thanksgiving, before flying back to Hopkins on the 25th. A host of really great judges will be in attendance, including my L1 mentor, Toby; it should be a great time.
• JHUMagic (37 members! Holy crap!)has advanced in its quest to become an official student group; all we have left is to submit a constitution (which will be done this week), but we've already received approval from Student Council. Yay! (Now we can do room reservations, which is really helpful.)
• I'm starting the internship grind one last time. I've had a few interviews already, and only one of them made me flatly cross the company off my list (no, I won't say who); the rest were very interesting. I'm seriously considering staying in Baltimore this summer (shocking, I know), depending on who I end up working for-- but we'll see. It will, of course, depend in large part on which offers I get, and which sound the most interesting.

And now, naturally, I have to run off once more; I have two examinations in the next ten days, in addition to a violin lesson, a host of emails and phone calls with Important People both in and out of industry, research checkpoints, building a server, and-- oh right!-- packing and studying for Daytona and Thanksgiving. Hopefully the vacation will allow for more reflective posts-- but wait, when did I last relax during a vacation? :-)