i have a couple of draft posts sitting here, and they are never going to be completed so i figured i would go ahead an post what was already there:

08/03/22 8:25 PM - i need a wingman

i went to a YSA activity last night. they had a coulple of local bands playing.. the first band was decent, the other two got progressively worse.. not my taste i guess. i was talking to a girl from my ward about me and women and she pointed out smething I’ve known for a long time: i need a wingman.

08/03/25 12:44 PM - its time to be more adventurous

i really need to just be less responsible. don’t get me wrong, it is important to be responsible about many things in life. but sometimes i think i have such a big sense of responsibility that its stifling. i have to analyze every decision before i make it, and i usually end up just making the simple easy one.

08/05/19 12:46 PM - patriotism

we went to a church fireside tonight. the topic was patriotism. the man speaking shared the story of his son who had died in combat in iraq less than a year ago.

08/05/27 11:41 PM - crappy night

got invited then uninvited to dinner, so i went running and took a shower and then planned…

08/06/23 7:13 PM - the terrorist boogeyman

[no content]

08/09/22 6:23 AM - dear barack obama

now that you have changed your technology stances (one of the things that i most respected and supported you on), i will no longer wear the campaign pin i got at the fair. to me, this is proof that you really are not about change, but are more about giving in to the wants of the media and entertainment industries. it makes me sad.

[i wrote this last one after just reading a quick summary that obama had taken all mention of net neutrality off of his website. it turns out this wasn’t true, hence i never posted this.]

ok, so back in high school i had a big crush on rachel leigh cook. my friend and i went to see josie and the pussycats (still one of my all time favorites), and i was just enamored. then i went out and rented she’s all that, and i fell even deeper for her. i downloaded desktop backgrounds and i put up posters of her in my locker at school. anyway, i was friends with the girl who’s locker was next to mine, and so i would go over to her house sometimes. her little brother and his friends had little rock band called superheroes by night. for some reason they decided they wanted to write a song about my crush for rlc. so, lo and behold, at their next concert, they played the song. and it was on the lp they released. and according to everyone it was the best song on the album. i was extremely close to sending a copy of it to rachel just to see what she would say. anyway, the post of this is not to re-announce my love for rlc (though i still do have the josie and the pussycats movie poster up on my wall), but to announce that in some random searching i found that the mp3 of the song is available for free here. i just cracked up and wondered how many people have tried downloading this song to hear about my high school celebrity crush.

ive been really exhausted lately from lack of sleep for some reason. i guess i just need to get my body used to 6 hours of sleep again. anyway, yesterday was pretty tough as far as being tired, but i still had a rough time sleep last night. i had a very unpleasant sleep, and i woke up this morning at around 5:30 covered in sweat and my pillow covered in saliva. i was having a nightmare about operating systems and seriously the first thought i had was “no! you need to have mutual exclusion!” (i think there is maybe one or two of you reading this that will actually get that…) lets just say it was of my less pleasant experiences.

i was having kind of a rough day, so i went up the canyon this afternoon for some alone time. i was wearing my church clothes but i walked a bit up the trail (and got quite dusty), but it was really pretty and peaceful. the pic is where i turned around. when i got back i read some scriptures (mosiah and romans), and read a bit from one of my favorite books, believing christ. i felt much better afterwards. i just did a lot of thinking about my goals and whats important to me.

i was trying hard to just let this be, but i can’t. the editorial on page 4 of yesterday’s edition of the daily unifarce about the youtube being blocked on campus was completely and totally insulting to all of us here on campus.

lets take a look at what was said.

“It’s revolutionary. Its influence has reached into almost every realm of American life. Type a word, any word, into the search search bar and you are sure to find a match, or thousands.”

oh hey, this youtube thing sounds pretty sweet.

“Two of the cultural institutions which this phenomenon threatens most have decided to embrace YouTube in an effort to thwart its potentially parasitic relationship to them.”

i am really not sure if this is meant to be a bad thing or what? so institutions like the media and the political realm are being shaken up and are now evolving along with advances in technology. ok….

“Weezer’s triumph in beating YouTube before YouTube could beat it indicates a shift in thinking: YouTube can be a tool rather than an enemy.”

beating youtube? i have no idea what you are talking about.. it sounds more like they made use of youtube to further spread their music.. evolving along with technology.. i am pretty sure means weezer is a smart band. do you realize how you are ultimately arguing against yourself here?

“YouTube is also a potential menace in the political realm.”

once again, this seems like a MAJOR PLUS in my mind. anything to shake things up politically is a good thing.

“The bottom line is that anyone can post anything, making YouTube a breeding ground for misinformation and hostility.”

really? i had no idea. i always thought that if i read/saw it online, then it must be true.

“misinformation… Many attribute the defeat of Republican Senator George Allen in 2006 to the heavy YouTube viewing during his campaign of a video clip of him making allegedly racist remarks.”

the fact that you followed up your misinformation sentence with this is well… i will let my readers draw conclusions from this obvious political bias.

“CNN hosted a series of debates in which presidential candidates for the 2008 election fielded questions submitted in video form. … [The debates] actively involved a wider range of constituents than ever before.”

once again, which side are you trying to argue here?

“At BYU, YouTube is more than just an obstacle to moneymaking or power-gaining.”

wait a second, are you trying to say that anything that gets in our way of making money or gaining power must be a bad thing? things like marriage, family, the Gospel, etc etc….

“YouTube is a threat to the inspiring, uplifting, productive, safe environment we now enjoy.”

ah, ok, you are finally getting to what i guess is the point of your article, though you have actively argued against this point up until now by telling me how great youtube is for giving us more knowledge, bringing power to the common man, and shaking up the establishment. i really think you need to retake your high school rhetoric class.

“YouTube’s terms of service forbid uploading material that may be considered inappropriate or defamatory, but the sheer volume of videos uploaded makes that policy difficult to enforce. It’s the nature of the beast.”

ah, so what you are saying is that youtube has the POSSIBILITY to be a “threat” to our environment. let see what else could possibly be a threat to our bubble-like “safe” environment… streakers… people with guns… someone driving by campus playing music with swear words… oh jeeze, now that i think about it, just about ANYTHING could possibly be a threat.

“..a student who accesses wholesome content on YouTube from an outside server will not be kicked out of BYU.”

ah, so what you are saying is that we are only concerned about POSSIBLE threats when its on campus.

“The titles of YouTube videos are sometimes misleading. Anyone could mistakenly open an obscene or even pornographic video.”

oh, so you mean like anything on the internet? like if hackers take over a perfectly good site and put up pornography? gosh, it sure seems like the current BYU filter is definitely not doing enough to stop these POSSIBLE threats!

“To have such content playing on a campus that has promised its students an environment of purity would be tragic.”

so what you are saying is that because its POSSIBLE that something bad might come through youtube, then we ought to just ban it all. i am really failing to see how you are justifying this position while still letting ANY of the internet be available on campus.

“…to adopt the “if you can’t beat YouTube, join it” attitude is to be cavalier with the values and virtues that BYU promised us and we promised BYU.”

which values and virtues were these again? obviously not the ones about seeking out good knowledge, seeking to empower the common man, and shaking up the establishment… perhaps you mean the virtues of money making, gaining power, and trying to control every aspect of a persons life? or maybe just being technologically impaired, backward and out of touch? i don’t think those were the virtues and values i proscribed to when i came to this institution.

this article was terrible, through and through. the person who wrote this ought to be ashamed of themselves. i know i am ashamed to have to admit that it was printed by my university’s newspaper.

ok, so i am back in the swing of school now. i bet a lot of you are wondering what the butt happened to me for the past few weeks. its been pretty wild and crazy, so i will try to fill in the details over a few posts.

at work, i got a couple of new projects. i started working with the software engineers to see what doing some software dev was like. i was helping implement hardware texture and lighting in the windows xp driver. i will be honest, i don’t think i contributed much. i found out a lot about direct 3d and general 3d graphics processing. i also learned a bit about driver dev and testing. i did check in some code into the driver repo… who knows if it will ever make it out to customers or not. but it was a good experience nevertheless. given a few months of that, i think i could really enjoy it.

i also was working on writing some documentation and then helping out with the usual testing, debugging, etc. i stayed busy.

the last week was all pretty whirlwind it seemed. we had a few last lunches with the team and with the interns. i did a lot of talking with huy about grad school, working, etc. i still have a ton to think about.

i gave my exit presentation on the friday before i left, which honestly made it a bit tough to go one for another week. but i think it was a good recap, just to look at everything i had done. here are a few highlights:

i quoted some of my blogs, in particular this and this. the question i asked at the beginning of my presentation was whether i achieved those goals or not.

i said that while there were of course some things i disliked, i thing i learned from everything. i did a ton of really cool projects. things like:

• encoded hd videos for an atom demo at a conference.
• researched and gave a training on google’s android.
• became a content expert on the CUI SDK. i wrote a sample app for switching displays, helped a customer write an app for blanking displays, and debugged a bunch of other CUI SDK apps.
• modified the intel installer framework to install our media codecs
• helped give a moblin training
• setup a method for distributing linux codecs through shell archives
• did a ton of testing and benchmarking
• helped with japanese translation on customer machines
• etc

my point was that i definitely learned a ton and experienced a ton during those 8 months.

and the perks were great too. a bunch of free dinners with customers at some nice places (i never did blog about the $950 dinner, did i?), free drinks, and in the last week they started giving out free fruit which i made sure to take advantage of. i’ve talked about kudos quite a bit, and i am embarrassed to say how many i have gotten.. i wonder if i need to declare those on my taxes?

i pointed out what i thought were my weaknesses too. i still do too much waiting around for people telling me what to do (this is the part of me that is still an undergraduate student). and when i am having trouble, i needed to be better at going out to find the answer, even if it means talking to someone i don’t really know very well. i think these are things i will improve on with time.

my exit interview was on thursday afternoon. i had it with the manager two levels above me, so it was a bit daunting, but he gave me lots of praise in addition to the review my manager had written for me. i was ranked as an outstanding intern, which i felt pretty happy about. i think thats definitely something that will help me in my future job search.

after that, i finished cleaning out my desk (i brought home a bag of various pieces of swag), wiped my laptop, turned in my id badge, and was walked out of the building. the end of my 8 months as an intel employee.

this was a good experience for me. i am really really grateful i had it, and i know its definitely going to help me later on in life.

its been about year since ive given a software review, so i figure i might as well start again. for those of you who visit the site, you will see my microblog (aka my twitter feed) on the right hand column. i blogged last year about the app i use to update twitter on my mac, mood blast. but now that i have an iphone, i’ve got a number of options for updating my twitter while out and about.

probably the most widely known iphone twitter app is twitterific. version 1.0 was just waaay too laggy, so i gave up on that pretty quick. twittelator was pretty decent, but definitely had gotten hit with the ugly stick.

twinkle is the app that hits all my needs just right. personally, i think like the UI more than twitterific’s. very clean and useable. but the really killer feature of twinkle is its neaby tweets screen. twinkle uses the iphone’s AGPS to keep track of the location you are tweeting, and it lists other nearby tweets. granted, its not totally useful, but its still pretty cool to check out what other people nearby are tweeting about. actually the coolest thing i have used it for was keeping myself sane while driving across nevada. every few hours i loaded up the twinkle nearby screen just to see who else was around tweeting. as i expected, the only tweets were from other people driving through, most of them complaining about how desolate places like battle mountain nevada are (no offense to any battle mountain readers… do they have internet there?). it was just kind of fun to see what other travelers were experiencing as they went on the same trek as me… kind of made me think about being in a wagon train heading west and seeing a message scratched into a rock along the trail.

the cool things technology can do.

hi again everyone

yes, i am still here. i survived the long and lonely trip across nevada and the salt flats. i’ve just been busy for the last with getting started with the semester. i have a blog post in works talking about my last few weeks in sacramento, so hopefully i will get that up soon.

right now i am in the library in my favorite study area (5th floor cubicles on the west side), listening to the byu game and starting on some studying. i plan on going lifting with goda later on and after that watching a japanese film at the international cinema.

just keeping ya’ll up to date.