I have been listening to a few of the songs off of the new System of a Down album “Mesmerize” and I have to say that I’m impressed. I have never been a big fan of the band’s lyrics, which are extremely left wing but this album has music that just makes it too hard not to listen to.

The new single “B.Y.O.B” (Bring Your Own Bomb) is a great composition but its lyrics leave me wondering whether these guys know what they are talking about. Most of the song has the lead singer asking “Why do they always send the poor [to war]?” and “Why don’t presidents fight the war?” which are a little ignorant. We don’t always send the poor, end of story. Last time I checked our military was made up of volunteers, people who chose to be there. Whether they are poor or rich they chose to join. If it was for the education then I applaud them but they still have to do their service (that they signed up for) to get the benefits. There are plenty of service men and women who are college graduates (commissioned) who do just as much fighting and dying as those who are enlisted. The lyrics to me represent an ignorance to the facts, maybe even a knowing ignorance.

Anyway, I’m rambling… The song is good and the album should be great, check it out.

With school complete and the final grades slowly trickling in the hard part comes. The move itself should not be too hard but I still have to find a place to live for next year. There have been a few houses that I would like but they were either too much money or in such disarray that they weren’t worth renting.

I’ll continue my search today and see if there is any others I can find.

Sorry for the lack of updates, the move and finding a place to live have taken up most of my time.

Review Sessions

• Philosophy
  1. Wednesday, May 4, 6:00pm
• Political Science
  1. Friday, May 6, 4:30pm

Exams

• Philosophy – Friday May 6, 7:30am
• MIS Seminar – Friday May 6, 1:30pm
• Political Science – Saturday May 7, 10:30am

My schedule is not too bad, my Friday will just be packed with tests and a review session (which I am not sure I need). School’s almost over and the summer is almost here…

What is going on with the weather? It was beautiful last week with temperatures in the 70’s and 80’s but yesterday just turned nasty. I woke up and the temperature had dropped to 38 degrees and it was lightly raining. Turning on the TV I saw that it was no better anywhere else around West Texas. In Amarillo there was a light snow.

This just isn’t right. Every year the last winter storm has moved to a later date. Last year we had our last winter storm in early April, with a little snow and temperatures in the 30’s. The year before that we had a winter blizzard (well, to us Texas folks a blizzard) in late March with the temperature during the day hovering around 80 but that night the temp dropped to 28 and we received about a foot of snow.

If this trend continues we could have our last winter storm halfway through July. Weird stuff.

Josh installed Mac OS X 10.4 – Tiger today and already I am very impressed.

Dashboard is nice and I can already think of some very cool plugins for it. The ripple effect is a little over the top but I can live with it…

One of the coolest things is the RSS screensaver. It takes a feed that you specify and goes through each of the entries outputting them on the screen. It then gives you the option to type a number and go to the article online in Safari. Very nice…

I will probably get Tiger installed on my machine tonight so more posting on it tomorrow.

After a few weeks of not knowing what was going to happen this summer I have finally accepted an internship at Shell. I will not go into exacts about what I will be doing as I do not know their blogging policy and don’t want to violate and “non-disclosure” agreements. I am mostly looking forward to learning a little bit about the corporate world and how programming and IT work in such an environment.

Look for more updates soon, I know I have been bad about keeping things current.

Google has a new beta feature called “My Search History“. It allows anyone with a Google Gmail account (or any other Google account) to login and keep track of their searches, from anywhere.

Some people are already screaming foul over privacy issues, which, in my opinion is just stupid. I am guessing Google already tracks searches by IP, now you have access to your own searches when you are on the road instead of trying to remember what you searched for. If you don’t want Google to remember your searches based on your username just don’t sign in, it’s as simple as that.

If you have a Google account definitely check it out and see if you like it. If you’d like a Gmail account send me an e-mail at s [at] badice [dot] com.

The Flickr Blog has announced some updates to the Pro accounts, including a price change to $24.95 for a 1 yr. account. The other updates include a monthly upload limit of 2GB for Pro accounts and 20MB for free accounts (along with 200 photos available through the archive).

I always thought the price was a little high for me to purchase a Pro account but with the update in upload a month and the cheaper price I will probably end up purchasing one sometime this month.

After reading this entry by John Zeratsky I realize that he is absolutely right. There is nothing out there right now that fufills my needs on my PC or Mac. The idea of having a tool that can sync with something online is a great one and would be the most beneficial piece for me.

Hmmm… Gives me an idea for a project.

Well I am just about fed up with my MIS Seminar class. To me, college courses should not consist of point-and-click instructions, even if it is a .NET class. Do not bore me, or the rest of the class with information that will not help us get ahead in the business world. Teach me things that are useful, things like creating a Web Service from scratch, transversing XML trees, and distributing a project across multiple developers in the IDE, especially with a tool like .NET.

There is no point in giving every person in the class the exact same project and making them all have UML diagrams, case studies, and screenshots for the entire project because you know what they learn from that? Nothing. Give us papers, assign us research, anything would be better than being thrown a generic project that does not illustrate the points a professor is trying to make.

If you are going to use .NET at least teach the proper way to create a Web Service and distribute across multiple projects. It is worse to give us the wrong information than none at all.

This could have and probably will be a whole lot longer.