longklaw.com

As much as I enjoyed watching the Olympics, I am glad that they are over. My favorites were the swimming events and the women’s beach volleyball (the celebration after the gold medal match was better than the match). I’m hoping that I can find some other stuff on tv this week. I think NBC has a lot of new shows debuting in the next few weeks.

Dave Chappelle has a new comedy special called “For What It’s Worth” premiering on Sept. 4, but it’s on Showtime. Unfortunately, I don’t have Showtime, so I might have to wait a while to see it.

I found out last night that the Ying Yang Twins will be at Mississippi State this Friday. They’re the ones who sing “Salt Shaker”. It might be worth checking out. Not much to do around here anyway.

A couple of days ago I reinstalled Linux on my PS2. I messed something up the first time and I never got a chance to do any real stuff on it before. I was able to get some simple OpenGL programs to run. I’ll be making the next Final Fantasy in no time.

I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 on my laptop. It only took about 2 hours. I hope I don’t have any major problems with it.

I’ve been playing a lot of GTA 3 lately since I never beat the game and the sequel comes out soon. I’m a little behind on the video games.

Check out these links when you have time:
Halo 2 gameplay footage – I can’t wait to play this game.
How to Write Unmaintainable Code – Jason sent me this one. It’s a little long, but I thought it was pretty funny.
HomestarRunner – Really cool Flash stuff. Check out the Strongbad emails if nothing else. Thanks again to Jason for telling me about this a long time ago.

It’s been 2 weeks since I made it back to Starkville from Dayton, OH. As much as I liked being in Dayton, it feels really good to be home. Living out of a hotel room is not my ideal living situation. I missed having a kitchen, having a shower with decent water pressure, and a lot of other little things. The worst part was not having a car because I didn’t have the freedom to move around like I normally do. On the bright side, not having a car did meant that I had to interact with the other interns outside of work more than I may have in the beginning, which turned out to be a good thing. The work that I did involved visualizing radar data using VTK and Paraview, both produced by a company called Kitware. They can be good tools to have on my belt if I decided to go into scientific visualization as a career. All in all, it was a good summer. The first five weeks were really hard on me, but things got much better after that. I’m glad to be back, and I’m ready for football season to start.

I think I’m actually going to try to make it to football games this year. I used to go to almost every home, but I’ve been going to fewer games each year. Last year, I only went to one game. Our record has been 8-27 over the past 3 years, so it’s been hard for me to motivate myself to lose 5-6 hours out of a day to go out and support a team that’s probably going to lose. I could watch on TV or listen on the radio and still get other stuff done.

Our new football coach Sylvester Croom, has caused a lot of excitement for our program. He’s the first black head coach in the history of the SEC. He was a running backs coach for the Green Bay Packers before he came to our school. Hopefully, he can turn the program around in a few years. I’m not too encouraged by the fact that after every practice, he talks about how many mistakes they are making and how much improving they need to do. At least they are improving. I saw on the news the other night that Coach Croom is implementing the West Coast Offense. I can’t wait to see that! It’ll be interesting to see something new on offense. I hope our new quaterback and our receivers are up for it.

Today was the first day of classes at MSU, and campus was crazy. There were so many people, but it’s usually like that on the first day. I’m sure it’ll settle down in a few weeks. I actually rode the shuttle to the union because I didn’t think I could find a parking place nearby. It’s pretty easy to spot the freshmen. They’re the ones that look so young and don’t really know what they’re doing.

I finally started working out again today. I know that I’ll be feeling it in the morning. My goal is to lose 60 pounds in 5 days (just kidding).

MSN has a list of Top Ten Business Movies. I’m not surprised to see Office Space on the list.

I watched Cold Mountain. It’s a really good movie with a bunch of recognizable actors, but I thought it was a little too long.

I finally got my desktop machine up and running again. Since I had been getting a lot of random crashes over the previous few weeks, I decided to do a repair on Windows a few days ago. During the installation process, I kept errors that always repeated when I restarted Windows. After thinking things over and trying some suggestions, I finally decided to wipe the drive clean and reinstall Windows. Luckily, I was able to get the important data off of the drive. Now that I had taken care of that, I could finally play my new game that’s been sitting around unopened for a week: Doom 3.

Doom 3 seems like an awesome game so far. I’ve only played through the first few missions. It looks great. My only complaint is how dark the first area was, but I’m sure they meant for it to be hard to see. I was worried that my system wouldn’t handle the game so well, but I haven’t had any problems. The people that say this game is scary aren’t kidding. I’m eager to try it out online even though I’ll probably get beaten.

I finally got around to making a website. Everybody else is doing it, so why not me? This is a work in progress, so I’ll add more stuff and try to make it look better as I get time. I hope this will help people stay up-to-date on what I’m doing, because I get a lot of complaints about that. I also plan to post some of the pictures that I have taken with my camera, some information about the work that I’ve done, possibly a resume, and whatever else I feel like putting on the site.

The name of the site is a nickname that I sometimes use when I play video games. It’s the name of a sword in a series of books by George R.R. Martin, but I spelled it with a “k” instead of a “c” like he does. I hope I can’t get sued for that.

That’s all for now.