As promised, here are the pictures of the statues that currently look like something.

MTU Winter Carnival Preview 2005

They are looking better today. A lot of work has been done during the weekend.

School has been going alright. The trend has been a very busy first part of the week and then it gradually slows down during the rest of the week.

We haven't gotten that much snow lately, but they like to let it pile up and only plow a narrow walkway. Occasionally they bring around construction equipment and take away a lot of it. This is a picture my webcam caught...



I wonder where they put it?

The snow statues seem to be coming along nicely. They don't seem as impressive as last year, but maybe that's because I see them every day. When I get around to it I'll take some pictures for a preview.

My plan to migrate to Linux has had its good and bad moments in the past few weeks. I have two main problems, one of which is "fixed". My TV card isn't really supported but I found some software to get it to work. After a ton of work (mostly because I didn't read carefully) I got it to work. By work I mean show the TV stations. I haven't totally figured out how to record stuff or if I even can. The second problem is my webcam. Logitech's webcams are pretty well supported in Linux so I left that for the end because I figured it wouldn't be a problem. Well it turns out I bought one of the only webcams that doesn't seem to have a Linux driver. That alone probably kills my plan for Linux to dominate my main computer. I'll have to keep looking around for other options though.

Remember the noise cancelling headphones I talked about before? Well after using them for about three weeks I have to say they are the best pair of headphones I have ever purchased. With music playing you can only hear very loud things or people talking loudly near you. You won't even notice if someone comes in the room while you are wearing them. They are bliss for noisy dorms.

So what cool stuff have I been looking at on the net recently? Plenty! Remember the Lemmings PC game? Play it free online. How about an ASCII generator? It takes your text and changes it into characters to look all cool like that. I'd post an example but it doesn't show up well, I tried. I'm sure I've found more links since last post but I always lose them. I'll post more next time.

Another week down.

The heating system in the dorm here is really messed up durin the winter. I haven't turned on the heat at all yet but it is still really, really hot in the room during the afternoon and night. Last night I opened the window all the way and we ended up leaving it open that way all night. So...



-2 wind chill and a fully open window. You'd think this would make the room really cold but it really didn't. Instead, the ice between the storm window and the normal window melted (probably within half an hour) and then the snow OUTSIDE our window started melting.

You know there's a problem with the heat when snow outside starts to melt.

The snow and cold has been hitting Houghton hard. We've had subzero temperatures and -30 wind chills for the past few days. On top of that we've had large snow storms.


Here we see a picture outside my dorm when it was a snow storm which I thought was pretty bad at the time.


Here's the same area during the last snow storm. Yes, those cars are supposed to be on the sidewalk, they were working on a snow sculpture.


Here's the people actually working on the statue during the storm.

I'll probably take some pictures of the snow statues so far and post them later. A 'Winter Carnival Prevew'.

In other news, Google released a new version of their image organizer, Picasa. I haven't played around too much with it yet but it seems pretty cool. Go get it.

So the first week of school back has been a busy one. The classes I signed up to this semester have much more reading assigned than I had in last semester's classes. The social science class has a ton of the reading and it's all horribly boring. Hopefully it will slow down. Even math has reading? Why? I have no idea.

All my computer science classes are about designing programs instead of actually programming them. I can't decide if that's good or bad. I like actually writing the programs but designing them might make them easier for me to code later on.

The noise cancelling headphones I talked about in the past post are working okay in the dorm environment. It blocks out all human voices (provided the person isn't shouting) while you are actually playing music but it doesn't seem to block out loud music that other people are playing. Well worth the price though.

It's become very cold out lately. The problem is the high winds which are blowing around snow that creates the image of fog. The snow has been blown around so much that the webcam was blocked earlier today. The wind and I cleared out a little section from the window now though and you can see through a portion of the webcam now, check it out. If you see just a white picture then just refresh the page or wait until it changes. This happens because the light outside is so bright.

I'm off to classes.

...until I go back to school.

Like always, I haven't been doing too much since last post. In summary, I've been working on my Halo Stat Downloader, went to Chicago for a day, and sat around watching TV.

There's a few links and products I want to talk about though.

With some money I received for Christmas I purchased theseTargus Noise Cancelling Headphones. I had been very interested in the noise cancelling technology ever since I had seen the Bose version, but $300 seems way too pricey for headphones. After some researching I found that the Targus had the best 'bang for the buck' (and it was even one of the cheapest ones) so I went over to Best Buy and got it.

They are amazing! Noise cancelling was designed to take out the noise of airplane engines while you are in an airplane so it takes out car noise and any loud appliance (like dryer or dish washer) just by flipping a switch on the cord. However, if you play music you cannot hear what anyone is saying even if they are right next to you.

I was so interested in noise cancelling because of dorm noise and I'm hoping this will solve my problems. People constantly play loud music in my hallway and I can't stand listening to it.

I also ran into a PC game called Project-Entropia. It's one of those games that is a giant universe (online) and which normally costs money. Project-Entropia is different though. The universe uses a currency (PED) and you get currency from REAL US dollars. Each dollar bill is equal to 10 PED. You transfer money to the game via credit card. Say you end up killing a bunch of stuff in the game and end up with more PED than you started with. Well then if you wanted to you can cash out your currency and bring it back to US dollars.

In short, you can make money in this game! Obviously, most players don't or else the game wouldn't still be online but the idea is really, really cool. The computers I use at home aren't fast enough (or enough RAM) to play the game so I'm going to have to wait until I go back to school to play. I don't want to pay any money though and I've heard it takes a lot of effort to play without money so I'll probably end up stopping after a day or so.

Oh, if you need a wireless router you can get one FREE from PC Connection until the end of the month. Actually, you have to pay for shipping and the postage to mail the rebates, but it still sounds like a deal.

If you've actually read this far I guess you can look at my webcam. Currently it is pointed outside my window in Green Bay. It eventually will be pointed outside the window in Houghton. I've been having problems with the lighting because the camera is meant to be pointed indoors so if you see a picture on the page that is either way too light or way too dark then just wait and hopefully it will fix by itself or I'll eventually fix it.

View the webcam

Edit: And happy new year!