Over the past week, it has been raining a lot here in Bozeman. Most days have been overcast, with drizzle or rain through the day. This weekend the weather finally passed, revealing the snow left on the mountains. So today, I ran out with the camera and pieced together a 13.8 mega-pixel look at the mountains to our north.
Below you can download a lower quality 0.5 mega-pixel version, or the full 13.8 mega-pixel behemoth.
Over the past few months, I’ve had horrid problems with several of my websites hosted with Dreamhost. Pages hung without loading, or were very slow during peak periods. Server loads were regularly over 120.0, and were about 40.0 at their lowest. Today, that all changed! I talked with Michael, an administrator a Dreamhost, and he helped move all of my sites onto a new server. Everything now runs perfectly, and is very fast. Yay Dreamhost!
So, I started poking around on the new server I’m installed on. The server is called colbert.dreamhost.com and has only three users: root, me and a user called colberteagle. Hmm, interesting. Well, it ends up that the server hosts colbertnation.com, the official website of The Colbert Report. That’s crazy–I’m the sole neighbor of Stephen Colbert himself! To prove it, here’s a screenshot of a directory listing on the server, showing only the three users. Also, some handy links to my forward and reverse DNS entries.
Continuing to look around, the server has 2GB RAM and is a quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processors. For now I’m only sharing it with one other website, and the server load has yet to go over 1.0 all day long. Very sweet!
Over the past week, I moved out to Bozeman, Montana for graduate school. Last Sunday, I drove about 1,118 miles to get out here. It took about 15 hours driving time, and I averaged 70.44mph and 35.06mpg. Considering I had 820GB of live disk space with me, that gave my car an average data transfer rate of 117.48Mb/s, or the equivalent of 78 residential DSL connections.
Thankfully, I had a hotel to stay in for two days. On Tuesday night I stayed at a friend’s house (Taylor), and then on Wednesday night I slept in a Physics conference room on campus. From Thursday to Sunday I stayed with another friend (Cody), sleeping on their couch. This whole time I was calling several dozen people with apartments/rooms listed in the local paper and around campus. I spent several hours outside Arby’s because they have free wireless Internet.
Because Bozeman is such a large college town, their population has slowly doubled over the past week as students are coming back. With thousands of students looking for housing, most apartments are filled the first day they are listed. Late Saturday night I finally found a place to move into! For the next few months I’m sharing an apartment with Chad, who was a Civil Engineering student at MSU. This is just in time, because I’m starting school Monday.
Also, because of my fellowship position at WTI, I have a very nice office (okay, it’s a cubicle) with free parking that is walking distance from campus. Yes, it means I’ll be walking a few blocks in freezing cold, but at least I can laugh at the students scrambling to find a parking space before their next class starts.
Last fall I was coder on the UMD team at two area programming contests, and loved it. I wish we could have done more. We won first place at DigiKey DKC3 2005, and took first at our location in the ACM regional competition.
Anyway, because we were the first team at UMD in a long time, we were asked to throw something together explaining what we learned:
Over the past few nights, Catalyst has been working on recording the song “Bigger Than My Imagination” by Michael Gungor. Saturday it took about 3 hours to get the drums, guitar and djembe tracks down. Sunday night we finished up electric guitar, bass, keyboard and vocals in about 4 more hours.
Then came mastering! David, Shawn and I set up some JBL speakers and took a few hours to EQ and mix over 41 tracks. Everything sounded incredible, and we finished about 2AM. We went home, and I mastered through the rest of the night. (I fell asleep in my chair at about 5AM while doing a listen-through.) Anyway, I woke up again and cleaned all the vocal tracks. By about 2PM Monday I had a finished master mixdown. Ran some last changes and cutting, and burned that baby.
David Ball on drums and djembe, Shawn Sislo on guitar and lead vocal, Chris Linder on electric guitar, Levi LaPorte on bass, Spencer Newman on keyboard, Emily Ball vocal, Anna Larochelle vocal, and Jeff Sharkey engineer.
It sounds really good through several systems, but the vocals are still quiet. Shawn needs to be panned center and Emily and Anna to the sides. Other stuff will probably change too. E-mail me with what you think about how it sounds!
A few weeks ago our Physics class took a trip to MINOS, a large particle detector on in Tower, MN. The 6,000 ton detector lives a half-mile underground in the old Soudan mine. Our class spent the weeks leading up to the trip learning about Quantum Physics and exploring particle interactions.
Anyway, I’m working on MINOS stuff over the summer. Our first project is to build a Hardware Database to track all the pieces and parts in the detector. More fun diving into PHP+MySQL! I can now install Apache+PHP+MySQL on any Windows XP box in less than eight minutes.
Catalyst is a youth ministry started by a group of youth. I’ve got a bunch of pictures from our events and people. There are some old pics to begin with, and some equipment pics toward the end.
David Ball on drums, Spencer Newman on keyboard, and Jeff Sharkey engineer.
We’ve been blessed with an awesome sound system: over 6,000 watts of Crown power amps, and 7 JBL speakers (2 FOH, 4 mons, 1 sub). That system seriously kicks. I’ve also been working with my FirePod’s with them; we did a mixdown a few months ago that you can listen to above.
