www.BrettDaniel.com

Now that I've had a few days to think about (read: postpone) writing, I think it may be a good time to describe what I did during my week in New Orleans.

I hate to say it, but I found most of my time there rather boring. I spent a lot of the time watching TV, reading, or playing on my internet-less laptop. But I'm sure you don't want to hear about the boring parts of my week, so I'll skip ahead to the first interesting event: the annual Christmas Eve party at my uncle Dave and aunt Angel's ranch/compound. The evening began with a buffet dinner of Cajun food cooked by the half dozen families who came from all over Louisiana. Well fed, the crowd then waited to open the presents covering two large tables at the front of the room. Of course before they could begin, Santa, who happened to be my father dressed up in a large furry red suit, had to show up to hand out gifts to the two dozen children— i.e. those of us under the age of... oh... about 30. That done, the adults congregated for their yearly Chinese gift exchange. As always, it was quite entertaining to watch normally sane adults fight over small brightly-colored boxes. By the time they finished, the evening was winding down and many families were preparing to leave. My family capped off the evening with a look at a relative's (don't laugh now) tractor museum near the back of the ranch/compound. The museum was an impressively large and amazingly organized labor of love filling an entire barn.

After returning from the Christmas Eve party, my family decided to have our Christmas that night so we weren't as rushed to get over to the bigger Christmas celebration the next morning. I found that opening presents in a quiet living room with just the four of us was certainly much more enjoyable than the loud, rushed, and chaotic Christmas Eve party a few hours earlier.

The Christmas Day celebration took place the next day at my grandparents' house. Like the party the night before, it consisted of a whole load of people (I am told they were all relatives. Interesting.) packed into a small confined space. That aside, the Christmas dinner was absolutely delicious, and the subsequent giftgiving (and receiving) was equally enjoyable.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Some inquisitive souls may venture to ask why I'm posting at 2:30 in the morning. The short answer is that I had a long day. The long answer is that I woke up around 11 in time to get ready for the belated father's-side-of-the-family Christmas gift exchange. Following that and a couple hours of fiddling with the new computer, I met up with Jason, Michael, and Michael's girlfriend Tasha to hang out and watch movies. Because none of us could think of anything better to do, we ended up doing that until around 1:30. Now add the drive home, my nightly bedtime routine, and the time it took to write this short paragraph, and you can surely see why I'm up so late.

I must apologize. The reason I haven't posted the rest of my Christmas vacation story is because I spent the day putting together an awesome new desktop computer. My parents gave me the motherboard and processor for Christmas, and I had to buy the case, hard drive, and video card. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

I plan to post pictures of the construction tomorrow.

HOORAY!!! After a week of Christmas festivities with Sue's family in New Orleans, I have finally returned home to an my beloved internet connection. I'll save the full story for tomorrow when I'm not recovering from a 12 hour drive. Until then, I give you the following entry written last Saturday, the day my family arrived at my Aunt and Uncle's house. At that time, I expected to be able to connect to their cable modem, but unfortunately their service didn't like my unknown computer.

Every other year or so, my family packs up and heads south to visit Sue's family in sunny New Orleans. It seems that this year was one such year.

We began the trip yesterday afternoon after running a few last-minute errands and closing up the house for a week. Thankfully, one of the errands involved picking up the rented minivan that would carry our christmas gifts, our luggage, and the four of us in a reasonable semblance of comfort. The first eight hour half of the ride was pretty uneventful. We drove through some rather interesting scenery and got gas near a ufo house. We stopped that night at a hotel in the absolute middle of nowhere, which, incidentally, happens to be about an hour south of Louisville.

We got an early start this morning and made great time for the remaining half of the drive, arriving at my Aunt and Uncle's house about two or three hours earlier than expected. After the normal catching up and settling in, the rest of the nearby family showed up for a great lasagna dinner. Now it seems everyone is relaxing in preparation for an exciting week of Christmas celebrations.

More to come...

I know I probably shouldn't buy anything this close to Christmas, but how could I possibly pass up Reboot action figures?

Some of my more observant readers might notice that I have added four new "Source" links the bottom of the main menu. By clicking these links, one may see what exactly makes this website tick. Enjoy.

Note: I wrote the beginning of this post on Wednesday afternoon, but didn't get a chance to finish it until early this morning.

Last night, a bunch of us went to see the opening night showing of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Stuart was kind enough to buy advance tickets last week, and Michael offered his house as a staging point. The seven of us met around 8:30, wasted some time, watched some Terminator 2, ordered and ate pizza, then headed out for the theater around 11:00. When we got there, we were lucky to find seven adjoining seats, but unlucky in that they were in the second row right behind the freaks dressed up as wizards, elves, orcs, ringwraiths, and hobbits. After about 30 minutes of previews (how, I ask you, can anyone possibly think to make a prequel to Dumb and Dumber), the movie finally began to the joyous cheering of the entire theater.

Even with a day to ponder, I still find I have very mixed feelings about the film. On one hand it was an absolutely beautiful movie filled with the same kind of craftsmanship and attention to detail as its predecessor. The scenery, buildings, uniforms, battles, CGI: everything was absolutely flawless. I can't imagine Peter Jackson or anyone else could have made that aspect of the movie any better.

However on the other hand, THEY REWROTE PARTS OF THE STORY!!! I can't believe that they created a love triangle; made Faramir take Frodo, Sam, and Gollum back to Osgiliath (not to mention changing Faramir's entire character in the process); and ADDED ELVES TO THE HELM'S DEEP BATTLE!!! By changing the story so drastically, the writers have introduced plot holes that Tolkien's version certainly doesn't have. Now that Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are in Osgiliath, do the three of them have to cross the Dead Marshes a second time or will Faramir's men instantaneously transport them back to where they found them? Also, now that the elves are helping men defeat Sauron, will there be more elves helping at Gondor or will they decide to sail away before the third movie?

Perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on the differences between the movie and the book. Granted, the movie adds some great visuals to events like Gandalf's battle with the Balrog that the book leaves to the reader to imagine. Also it's understandable that there will be significant difficulties in compressing such an expansive book into three hours. However, I feel it will be hard for The Return of the King to fill in the holes left by The Two Towers.

All the same, the plot difficulties didn't get in the way of an entertaining movie. I'm definitely glad I saw it.

I hope you'll join me in wishing my stepmother Sue a happy birthday. The extended family came over today to celebrate and eat a wonderful batch of my father's clam chowder. Afterwards, Sue opened her gifts as sort of a one-person pre-Christmas teaser. Because I was at school during her real birthday last week, I finally got a chance to give Sue the Stomp DVD I bought for her after she and Dad went to the live show downtown. It seemed that everyone who stayed to watch the DVD was rightfully impressed. I love it when people like my gifts.

Happy Birthday, Sue.

Last night I took some time to make my PHP posting program a little more user friendly. I moved the hard-coded host and path strings over to the main posting form and consolidated the form and posting script onto a single page. My goal for going through all this work is to eventually release a self-contained and easily set up source file that others can use on their websites. Who knows, I might even be able to make a couple bucks helping them do it.

I decided to scrap the Java weblog program I was working on and instead write a PHP script similar to the one that didn't quite work the way I wanted it to. The old script's problem was that it tried to read and write files directly through the filesystem. In order for this to work, I would have had to make all my archive files world-writable which would have left them open to hackers (I'm looking at you, Brett G). Obviously, I didn't want to do that. The latest program uses a more secure FTP connection to update the files. Also, I don't have to go through all the nonesense of uploading local archive files while I'm here at home.

O how much easier things would be if Purdue's servers supported MySQL. I've about had my fill of flat files.

Katie, a.k.a. my senior prom date, a.k.a the Queen of the Nerds (trust me, that's her real nickname) has begun keeping an entertaining weblog about her life in the "Cayman Islands". I love it how people I know have begun making websites. I'm not the only one any more!

I am happy to announce that my Christmas break has officially begun. I got home around 2:30 this afternoon after one of the longest trips so far this year. Usually the ride takes about an hour and a half, but this time Dad and I ran some errands and grabbed lunch, extending it about an hour. As we were leaving a minimart, I saw a new Nissan Z in a neighboring parking lot. Of course Dad and I slowly drove by with our mouths agape. Aaaaahhhh... So beautiful... I wish I hadn't packed my camera in the back with the other electronics I was bringing home. Who knows how the owner got it so early; I didn't think Nissan had even started selling them yet. However he (you know it has to be a he) did it, seeing that amazingly beautiful car certainly made my month.

Speaking of computer science, it seems appropriate that the last exam of the semester, my CS exam, would be the hardest. I feel almost (but not quite) as bad about this one as I did about the first CS midterm. I think I did okay on the last three problems, but that leaves the first two up in the air. Like many of my fellow CS students, I'm hoping for loose grading and a very wide curve.

I suppose my consolation is that I'm officially done with my first semester of college. It went incredibly fast and rather well save a test or two. We'll see just how well once grades come out. I wish everyone reading this a wonderful month-long winter break.

I was working my way through my morning websurf when I came across this article on Joel Spolsky's weblog. As a freshman computer science major, I have to say it's a somewhat depressing article dealing with the vast experience a software developer needs in order to make anything productive on a particular platform. To know the ins-and-outs, to recognize the leaky abstractions, and to be able to overcome a particular problem in the best way requires years of work and experimentation. I've only scratched the surface in my few years of offhand programming experience. It's almost uncanny how well the third paragraph describes first year CS students (including myself).

Becoming proficient, really proficient, in just one programming world takes years. Sure, lots of bright teenagers learn Delphi one week and Python the next week and Perl the next week and think they are proficient. Yet they don't have the foggiest clue how much they're missing.

Anyone who knows me will agree that my reason for embracing a lot of things rests in that I want to become "really proficient" at whatever it may be. Joel's article voiced what I already knew: I've got a way to go before I'm a proficient programmer. Four years of Computer Science should take care of that.

"You don't seem very worried about finals. Are you sure you know what you're getting into?" Well, Dad, I had my math final today, and I'm happy to say I'm still breathing. The studying I did yesterday paid off in that I felt I knew what I was doing on the majority of the problems. Even so, I know I didn't ace it. If the teacher curves it similarly to the midterms, I'm in good shape. One down, two to go...