Wolgemut in Paradise

Yesterday I caught a Wolgemut (vol-ga-moot) live performance at Iolani School in Seto Hall. They played the kind of music used to performed in medieval time. I know nothing about music, but I can tell that their instruments look really cool. Also, Swedish bagpipes sound so much better than Scottish ones.. or maybe the people at CMU weren't quite as good. ;P

PFOSSCON 2007

nmh and I went to the Pacific Free and Open Source Software Conference (PFOSSCON) yesterday (2007-01-20). The event was organized by the Hawai`i Open Source Education Foundation (HOSEF) and held on UHM campus.

R. Stallman, the guy who initiated the GNU project, was there to give a talk. I've heard of the word "idealist" before, but I didn't think that anyone like that would exist in today's world. Mr. Stallman has gotta be one of them. I enjoyed his talk eventhough I can't say I completely & whole-heartedly agree with him.

The other two speaks were from Vyatta and Sun. The Vyatta guy was talking about "Open & Flexible Router"-which uses an x86 machine that runs Debian based OS to act as a router. The guy from Sun (graduated from Punahou! yay!) was talking about their FOSS: OpenSolaris, OpenSparc, and Java. Sun++ actually sponsored all free food and goodies. The event was packed with Haoli (hawaiian for white people) - and more importantly - all geeks! I have to say I've never seen these many geeky white guys in the same place on Oahu before. They are like.. rare species or something, consider that most guys here are either jocks or surfer dudes (or both). It's nice to see that geeky white boys do exist under the Hawaiian sun too!

Anyway, I was just there for the free food.. what can I say... I'm a grad student!

APS 2007

So after of less than a day of really working on it - I finally submitted the paper for IEEE APS 2007 conference. Here is the exact thought I have on this paper:

Is Twisting Student's Arms A Crime?

Apparently, all papers under the Lubeckes got accepted to IMS 2007 conference. I did not submit the paper, but I got a ripple effect out of it too! My advisor was on a must-have-more-paper mood today (in a good way), so she spent a good five or ten minutes after the group meeting to convince me to submit a paper for APS conference. The only problem is - it's freaking due on Monday! I'll have three days to work on it! Oh! Not to mention the fact that we're just going to use previous data to draw a different aspect to it. I was not even involved with taking the measurement for the data! How uncool is that!?!

Oh, and she was all smiley and everything when she said, "did I twist your arms enough?" ... Great.. just great... :P

Shape Up or Ship Out!

My advisor is back on the island. I'd better start doing some work and get some results!!! eeepp!!!

Oh yeah, I'll get to play with a body armour for my research! How cool is that!? :D

International Phone Card Gimmick

Last night I decided to try "Hello Asia" phone card by Sprint. Because my officemate said that it was good. So I went to Longs and bought one for $10. Apparently, this card got the same rate as anything else available; however, there are all these hidden fees:
- weekly maintenance 50 cents
- single maintenance 69 cents
- connection fee 59 cents (after the third call, the ad says No connection fee*)
- post call fee 20 cents (if the call exceeds 15 minutes, which hello? it always does!)

All top of that, the card expires in 6 months! I had the most difficult time connecting at 10PM HST (about 3PM in Bangkok), and all this time I thought there was something wrong with my parents' house. I actually called up the customer service but that did not help. So I gave up after 5 trials. Finally, at 9:30 this morning I could call home (2AM in Bangkok). It was just way too annoying.

I have been using a "Sears Connect" card by IDT since I moved to Hawaii to phone home (Thailand Direct - the collect call service to Thailand, is no longer available in Hawaii). The card has last 12 months without any maintenance fee. I can't actually believe that Sears actually provides the best Asia phone card out there. And all these times I thought I did not find the best deal and just use it out of convenience.

I've gotta get my mom and dad on Voice over IP... seriously...

FoxTrot Cease to Dailies

I am greatly sadden by the untimely departure of the daily FoxTrot strip. But I guess Mr. Bill Amend would like to spend more time with his World of Warcraft.. , I mean, family. I have not been able to find a new fix for geeky comics (except from Jorge Cham's Ph.D. Comics). Maybe I'll just have to go to the bookstores and read all the FoxTrot books (wonder how many I have not yet read).

Happy New Year 2007!!!

about... five days too late :P

This year, I resolve to:
1) work harder
2) complain less
3) call home more often
4) lose weight
5) sprout wings and learn how to fly... :P