roguelazer's website

Yep, I'm back in Fall River. The plane ride (Sat. Mar. 10) was, as expected, painful and long. But I am indeed home. Yay me.

I just read Chris Clarke's "How to Explain Things to Libertarians". It is officially an awesome piece of writing that I recommend everybody read - particularly those of you who may be tempted by the writings of Ayn Rand et al. But hey, I'm just a crazy leftist, what do I know?

As you may or may not know, HMC shares what is essentially a backbone line to the Internet. Sometimes, if you get it just right, that can mean really, really excellent things. As this photo shows. No, that's not doctored. If you go to some of my photos on flickr, you can see more of these insane speeds. And I just wanted to say that that is awesome.

As I sit in the VLSI lab waiting to meet with Prof. Harris and the rest of the Clay-Wolkin group, I thought I'd post my Geek Code on this blog. Ya know, just for fun.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1.2
GCS/M/MU d-(+) s:+(:++) a18 C++++$ UL*++++>$ P+>++ L++++$
E--- W+++>$ N++ !o K w++(--) !O- M++$ !V-- PS+(++) PE(-)
Y+>+ PGP++(+++) t+ 5- X+ R tv b++++>$ DI+ D++ G++ e>++++ h
!r-->++ y-->+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

What's the matter with southern California, eh? It was 81 degrees Fahrenheit here yesterday! It's FEBRUARY! The way I understand it, that means snow and ice. At the very least, shouldn't it be cold enough to require long pants? Crazy weather...

So, only one more day left in the week, and I've only got two classes. Then it's the week-end! Woo!

I almost forgot to mention... I bought a guitar! I was looking for something small and dorm-room-ish and ended up narrowing it down to either a Martin Backpacker, a Little Martin, or a Baby Taylor (of either the mahogany or spruce variety). After playing all three, the Backpacker sounded like it was being played from inside a tin can and the Little Martin sounded like it was underwater. Both Babys sounded absolutely excellent, and I ended up going with the mahogany for its slightly richer tone and great look. So far, it's been treating me pretty well, but I'll keep you apprised of the situation.

Hello again invisible readers. Just thought I'd relate all of the terribly interesting things that have been happening lately...

• Chemistry test today. Could have been much worse. Trust me. Quantum chemistry can get hairy, but it didn't.
• Did some more work on CSS/PROFILE today. Eugh. Can't the various people who want to know about my finances (IRS, Department of Education, College Board, Harvey Mudd, Bank of America, etc.) just get together and only make me go through all of this once instead of a million times?
• Watched yesterday's House today. 'twas awesome, 'nuff said.
• Also watched yesterday's Stargate SG-1. I noticed that Claudia Black has full billing now, neat. It wasn't a particularly innovative episode, but it was well executed, which makes me happy.

Yay? I guess that's good stuff. Now I've got to go do some homework. It never ends.

I've just gotten around to upgrading my version of Beryl to the latest svn/prerelease (through the xeffects overlay) and, wow. It's a huge improvement over 0.1.4. Much faster, more stable, and more featureful. I can't get over how awesome tabs are (under the Grouping configuration). I have yet to find something they're useful for, but they're still totally awesome.

In other news, mechanics midterm today. Woo. Well, I suppose it could have been worse.

Okay, that's enough mucking around with the blog I suppose. I've got a chemistry section quiz tomorrow that I ought to be studying for.

The way I count it, this is my third attempt at keeping a web log. Fourth if you count that website I made for reviewing PDAs, which I mostly used to chit-chat. So you, kind reader, will have to forgive me if I seem a little bit disillusioned about the entire process. Nonetheless, here I am. I thought that I'd again join the ranks of the "bloggers".

So, after that little introduction, perhaps you want to know who I am and why you should read this blog? The short answer is that you probably shouldn't; it promises to be boring and sparsely populated. The longer answer is that my name is James Brown and I am a student at Harvey Mudd College, a small science-oriented college in Claremont, California, although I originally hail from Massachusetts. To sum up the most important bits, I'd say that I'm a GNU/Linux-using hacker Democrat musician. Yeah...

If you're still reading at this point, you must be either very bored or very dedicated. Either way, enjoy my random thoughts. Oh yeah, and about the title. It's just an S-expression that yields a fairly useless anonymous function. You can expect to see plenty of miscellaneous programming references here, too.

Editor's Note from the future: this website was, at the time, called (lambda x blog)