EPKPhoto’s Tidbits

Classes have been in session here at RIT for a week now. Tim and I moved in without any major issues. I'm actually impressed at how well we fit into our apartment. Honors Freshmen Orientation also went well…and gave me way too many new names to remember. They're a cool bunch, though (any freshmen reading this?). Now its back to the old game of juggling classwork, honors work, ITS work, and crazy-college-random-fun :). Week 1 went smoothly, so I think I'm up for the challenge. Now I just have to get around to posting all those orientation photos that are still unedited.

Summer flew by as usual.  Here's a quick note to let people know I'm heading back to Rochester tomorrow.  I'm still packing and preparing for the day on the road.  I'm excited to see everybody at RIT again, especially since classes don't start for another two weeks.  After I write this, the computer is the next thing to be packed…so if you need to get a hold of me, I advise calling my cell.

I'm finally back home in Virginia, and I just posted a gallery of miscellaneous photos from RIT during this past spring quarter. The photos include people sliding in the mud after a rainy spring day, playing Kan-Jam outside Baker, getting food from The Commons, experimenting with a cheap airplane from Sol's, and discovering the illuminating properties of lava lamps. I am really looking forward to editing the photos I took in West Virginia. Some turned out quite well, so there's something to look forward to!

RIT's spring quarter ended this past week…a time that brings feelings of both happiness for classes ending, and sadness for friends separating. I certainly felt that combination of emotions. Yesterday, I left RIT with my father to travel to West Virginia. Here I am currently staying in the beautiful home of my great aunt and uncle while we work on some renovations of the Princeton, WV house of my grandfather, who passed away a few weeks ago. My mother traveled to meet us earlier today and drove up my new (used) car for me to see for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven't updated in a while, so nothing has been said about my spring break and the beginning of this spring quarter. I went to Washington, DC with some other students during the break, and I'll be sure to describe that more when I post the photos of the trip. In the meantime, I thought I would just mention that this quarter is off to a good start and could go many directions. I have an excellent set of interesting classes, so I can only hope for the best and keep up with the work to get the most out of them. While you have nothing else to do, feel free to check out a couple bug reports I filed on the Linux kernel in Ubuntu Feisty and Fedora 7 (I know, thrilling ;)). You can find them at Ubuntu's Launchpad and RedHat's Bugzilla.

I have been trying to balance studying for exams and work on final assignments with free time and playing in the new snow that has fallen :). I just wanted to put up a quick post since I have been spending quite a bit of time in my test install of Fedora 7. In the recent couple weeks, it has begun to look like Fedora's next release (though delayed a few weeks) will be much more of an improvement than Ubuntu's next release. This excites me since I have been a Fedora fan since the Core 2 release. To tease you, I thought I should post a couple screenshots from Parallels of the new graphics that recently were added to the development repositories. Take a look after the break.
Read the rest of this entry »

As the quarter is nearing its end, things have been quite busy. No need to talk much about that, though. I'd rather mention that the weather forecast is finally showing some temperatures above freezing within this next week here in Rochester. We have had solid packed snow on all the walkways across campus since it has been too cold to melt anything. That may change quite soon :). Also, I am going to the hockey game tonight against Mercyhurst. It is RIT's last home hockey game of the season. Last night's game was an exciting win from what I heard, so I hope tonight's game lives up to that standard. Read on for Parallels and Linux comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that RIT classes have been back in session for the past week, I'm back to balancing class work, Honors work, ITS work, and job searching for a summer co-op. The first week back was a bit hectic, but now that things are under control, the rest of this quarter should go well. It certainly doesn't hurt that the Rochester winter is still being quite wimpy. We got an inch of snow last week, but that melted by the afternoon. The clouds are still overcast as always, though. That's all for now…don't be afraid to leave comments to any of these posts!

This will be my last update from RIT until the fall! Exams are over, and I am quite happy with my grades. Now that I don't have to worry about school work, and all my stuff is pretty much packed, I can get a good night's rest for the drive home with Dad. It's sure to be a hefty task getting all my possessions home and unpacked, so in the meantime I have some websites of interest. First, regarding my Ethanol rant a few posts ago, check out this article from BusinessWeek that takes a well-rounded look at some of the issues I raised. The second article demonstrates one reason I am very happy being at RIT. It ranks universities based on visits from the campus network to MapWoW.com, a site that uses the Google Maps API to display the map of the extremely popular online game World of Warcraft. RIT landed third on the list, which does not surprise me at all given how wired this place is.