Excuse the poor quality of the shot since it was taken with my laptop webcam. No SD870 IS and no memory card for my DSLR. Whoops.

Looking over at the whiteboard in the SE lab and what do I see? The notes from the orientation meeting that happened yesterday or last week or whenever. And dead smack in the middle of the notes is, in full capitals, “NO PHYS 115 OR PDENG”, along with a mention of not to say anything about EDCOM. Oh, and below the EDCOM comment, “NO POO”. I guess it’s the humour of the orientation leaders for this year…

I suppose they don’t want to scare the Frosh coming in this year with horror stories of PHYS 115, though I would scare them since no one realizes that it’s difficult until 75% of the classes fail the midterm. And to not make any mention of PDENG? Wasn’t that what PDENG was saying they didn’t do? Didn’t PDENG say that all incoming students were made aware of their mandatory participation in PDENG? Then why shouldn’t the orientation leaders be telling them something they already know of?

Oh well. I suppose it’s more lambs to the slaughter.

I’m in the SE lab right now and I’m plugged in and no on Wi-Fi, and I just ran a SpeedTest.net Internet speed test and I got 372 Kb/s download and 1,056 Kb/s upload. This is only slightly faster than surfing on a 56.6K dial-up modem from back in the days! Nevermind the fact that Rogers Communications cheapest Internet solution, Ultra-Lite Internet, has a download speed of 500 Kb/s and and an upload speed of 256 Kb/s.

Even more interesting is that when I’m streaming the Wimbledon match from ChannelSurfing.net and then load up my Netvibes page, which loads probably over 50 RSS feeds, the Wimbledon stream doesn’t stutter.

The Internet provided here is ridiculous and an absolute shame for the University of Waterloo. How can they not provide decent wired Internet speeds for regular browsing? This is not even torrenting off their servers! And it’s a Sunday! When there’s no one on campus! Intelligent community of the year, my ass.

Ever since I got back from London, I’ve had the opportunity to work with two computers - my XPS m1330 and the custom PC I built last summer. Though it’s incredibly flexible to be able to work on my PC in my room or free float through my house on my laptop (it also helps that they’re so equally matched in terms of specs), the fact that I don’t have the files I need at my fingertips when I need them is frustrating. If I would go home on the weekend with my laptop, I’d have to make sure I had the files I needed for the weekend before I left, otherwise I’d be left to reconstruct files from scratch (e.g., I had to rewrite my resume one weekend). Making sure my two computers are in-sync with each other was a full-time job. That was until I installed Live Mesh.

Microsoft, with whatever’s going through their head, has several file synchronization utilities available for mass consumption (in various stages of release, might I add). They may accomplish different things each, but it still is confusing for the end-user; even the technologically-adept user that will be a multi-computer user that will require file synchronization. There’s Windows Live FolderShare, Windows Live SkyDrive, and of course, Windows Live Mesh, and maybe others (I can’t find the satirical article pointing out all the options). And I’m not the only only one to see this.

But ever since I started to use Live Mesh, it’s been another story. I started out by using it for basic documentation syncing, and even though it was kind of annoying how it didn’t instantaneously sync to Microsoft’s servers right after I closed the file, it would still be quick enough that I could transition seamlessly from desktop to notebook or vice versa. But just last week, I had a genius idea, if I don’t say so myself. And I may be one of the first:

Sync your Eclipse (or equivalent, but I’m preferential towards Java) workspace to Live Mesh so you don’t have to develop on only one computer!

Sure, you may end up with a long list of ugly updates in your Live Mesh news like below, but it’s been so great to be able to go to school and work on the last updated code. It’s like having your own SVN server without the hassle of all the setup, but without the benefits of version control.

The next thing to experiment with is using Windows Live Mesh to sync other things I share between my two computers: maybe Firefox bookmarks, maybe Windows Live Messenger conversations (though that’s upwards of several hundred MB), and a bunch of other applications. Funny, who would’ve thought that Live Mesh could be used to synchronize common files between computers?

As a Software Engineering student with an interest in computer hardware (truthfully, how it looks and not how it works though), I would have a better idea of what components cost and which one is better than others. So when I saw a couple Facebook Marketplace ads for old computers selling at ridiculously inflated prices, I just had to laugh.

Take for example this one I just saw today:

For Sale, PowerBook G4 15″; used; in excellent condition–selling to upgrade, contact me with any questions–$1000 obo.

STOCK SPECS:
1.25GHz PowerPC G4
512K SRAM level 2 cache
512MB PC2700 (333MHz) DDR SDRAM
15.2-inch (diagonal), 1280×854 resolution, TFT widescreen
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA/100
SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
Built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit)
Built-in Bluetooth; built-in 54-Mbps AirPort Extreme
Built-in 56K V.92 modem
Full size keyboard, illuminated with ambient light sensor
Mac OS X version 10.3 “Panther”
S-video to composite adapter, DVI to VGA adapter

Asking price? $1,000 obo. Wow. I could go on and on about each component in this dated laptop, but I’m just going to say that the seller probably just mistakenly added a zero to the asking price.

Here’s another example:

Two year old, like-new Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop for sale… in perfect working condition.

Dell Inspiron 6000 D Specs:

1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M 730 (Sonoma), 533MHz FSB and PCIe x16 chipset
15.4 inch WSXGA+ LCD Panel (Samsung)
512 MB DDR2 400 MHz ram
60 GB Ultra ATA Fujitsu 4200rpm hard drive
64 MB ATi Mobility Radeon X300
Microsoft Windows XP Home
24x CD-RW/DVD (Sony)
Intel 2200 b/g internal wireless card
6-cell lithium ion battery
4 USB ports
1 IEEE 1394 FireWire port
Secure Digital I/O card slot
1 PCMCIA card slot
2 front facing speakers
VGA output
Optional S-Video and composite video out with adaptor cable
Audio-out (headphones) and Mic-in
Integrated 10/100 network Ethernet card
Internal 56k modem

Asking price? $400 obo. This one is slightly more reasonable, but still. I’m looking at the numbers on some of the components, like 60GB hard drive, 512MB RAM, and 1.6GHz Pentium M (not even dual core). Unfortunately for the seller, $400 could buy a fairly decent laptop nowadays. Throw on maybe $200 more and you can get a respectable budget laptop from FutureShop.

Technology is a bitch, and unfortunately, trying to make money by selling second-hand PC components is really just impossible.

How nice of Best Buy to begin marketing left-handed D60s. I got this image in my e-mail this morning.

Feelin’ on top of the world… except we’re not. These are the standings for my Intermediate level Beach Volleyball intramural team. My team is Crash and Smash, in second place when you sort the teams by their Spirit of Competition (SOC) values. The only reason we’re in second place is because we have a lower SOC value compared to the first place team, otherwise we’d be in first place due to alphabetical ordering of team names (it pays to be alphabetically earlier) since they don’t keep track of the scores of individual sets for a further tie break.

I don’t like the fact that the Beach Volleyball intramurals are self-refereed. I know that this is the way that it’s usually done in most beach volleyball leagues, but usually the competency of the other teams in other leagues is higher. I know this comes off sounding snobby and elitist, but one of the teams we played against didn’t know that the score is counted using a rally point system (since about 2001 for all types of volleyball) and each player is only allowed to serve five times in a row consecutively and not through five rotations (i.e., their team lost serve, then we lost serve, but the same person would go and serve again).

We’ve played against teams that disregard the intramural rule of not volleying off a serve (it’s a difficult rule to adapt to, but it is a rule). In previous games, I’ve agreed with the other team to disregard that rule but in the playoffs I’m definitely going to play by it. It adds another dimension to the game when it gets difficult to receive deep serves. We’ve also played against teams that don’t call blatant lifts with open palms, with their excuse being, “Oh we haven’t been calling those all season.” Seriously. And then there are the teams that try argue with me when I call them out on their infractions. I’ve refereed far too much volleyball not to be able to discern an open palm lift from a closed fist. They miss open-handed tips (very simple to call and very easy to discern from a closed-fist punch) and they don’t bother calling volleys sent over the net without the shoulders square to the net.

Beach volleyball this term has been fun, but at the same time it’s been frustrating. The lack of a referee really has teams going at each other a lot more, especially when one team wants to play by the rules all the captains have agreed to (that would be my team) and the other team wants to relax the rules a bit. We haven’t really played anyone so far that gave us much of a challenge, so I look forward to playing against some teams that did fairly well during regular season play.