Blog. Thoughts, photos, and more

Really bummed. Pretty decent day skating around the Boston area, but after getting some grub at this place on Newbury we came back to the car to find a few things missing. Of which was my 5d mk II and my Olympus gear/adapter. Ian’s video camera and fisheye also stolen. Probably close to $6k worth of stuff between us.

Whoever the culprit is had stolen the bag that my skates were in…they seemed to go through the contents of our bags in this sketchy little park area down the street. Found my skates and bike lock, but basically in a pile of piss. Pretty upset about this whole thing. I hope insurance plays out and/or we get our gear back.

Dragged myself out of the house to see the fireworks with a few friends. There were SO many people all along the river and getting home took forever. A lot of sitting around, but the fireworks were pretty good. D.C. still does it better though.

I used this board in 2008 for a microprocessor system design class. I know little to nothing about FPGAs and remember little to nothing about this board…so though it’d be a cool idea to hook it up to one of my computers and see what I could do with it. Except I’m running linux now and have never been so hot at the command line…so learning that too.

Today I made some LEDs flash with some simple assembly. Woot. I need to think of a cool project to do. Maybe a modem.

Did a little over 59 miles on my bike today….I started near home and went up to the New Hampshire state line, then came back pretty much the same way. Almost got caught in the rain but I’m too fast for that. Average speed = 16.8 mph. Top speed = 38.3 mph! I track my routes with this little program on my phone. Think I need to get a dedicated GPS though as my phone doesn’t last too long like this.

Damn I love cycling.

I was supposed to shoot a basketball today at Boston College (versus Virginia Tech)…but it is raining so hard. And apparently the BC campus is completely surround by a gate and charges like $10 for parking that isn’t even close to the stadium.

Instead I’m home with chips and salsa and trying to think of other things to do. Oh boring winter. Maybe I’ll do more crossword puzzles.

Look how high that score is.

I used Google Latitude for maybe a month. Someone invited me to it and it seemed like a cool idea at the time, but it’s also a huge (though consensual) invasion of privacy. Think about it. If you’re using Latitude, Google (and whoever may be associated with Google) knows where you are – always – and is endlessly collecting data about you. They also know where you’re not. They also can see everything in your Gmail inbox, but that’s another story.

It seems like this can be used for strategic advertising, but also possibly by criminals. I stumbled across this site called Please Rob Me that finally persuaded me to shut off latitude. I don’t use foursquare or anything GPS related with my twitter. Social networking is going a little too far.

Here’s where I tell everyone that I’ve got a new blog set up…and whole new site! I was originally planning on transitioning my old blog, but upon trying to change the directory all the WordPress core files existed in, I had a little mishap and seemed to had broken my blog for good. The only alteration I could find was in the .htaccess file pointing to the “new” directory, but changing it back did no good. So I couldn’t export any of my old posts. Here goes again!