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I am P373R - LiveJournal.com
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Wikipeter!
Wanted: Computer Engineering Job
Well, I have graduated from MSOE finally. The commencement was nice. My parents came down to Milwaukee for the first time since I've been there. My friends came down and gave me an awesome shout out (thanks). I have handed in all of my official papers as of today, so I just need to transfer my laptop and move out of the dorms. It should be a decent holiday. I just need to find a job now :).
So, thanks to all my friends who have provided me support, or if anything good company. I appreciate you making my life better, and hope I can do the same.
Also, as you can see I have not been using LJ much. I am considering closing my account because I use it so little. If you want, you can try to find me on facebook (no myspace).
Happy Thanksgiving!
What Else.
Well what else have I been up to since the LAN? Lots-O-Stuff:
I went to Indiana via Milwaukee to pick up a GTO (my "good deed" of the summer.) During this trip I went sailing on a day sailor with some college friends. It was fun and different. I also missed Flambeau Rama (no offense friends but I have no regrets). I went camping during the worst storms of the summer at Potato River Falls. The rain chased us out, so I was bummed that we didn't get to go hike the river area, but as I reminisced with Andy, I noted that you always remember the "miserable" camping trips with the storms and the rain the most (in a strangely positive way). A decent sized tree fell on my Mom's Caravan and broke the mirror off during that storm. I'm replacing it today. Early in the summer I took the exhaust off my truck. It sounds awesome, but at the same time it is unreasonably loud (too much of a good thing I guess). Gabe and I took his Jeep on on the Rock Creek Expedition and we totally jacked it up on some trees and rocks, as well as hit some serious mud pits. Gabe and I picked up a free Kawasaki motorcycle in another, later in the season rain storm. It was quite the little story in its own right. I hauled our old lawn tractor to Michigan and visited my father, toured the lands, and went to a big party deal with lots of people I didn't know and karaoke with Upper accents!
By Friday I will be slowly making my way back to school, so I only have a few days to tidy up and get all packed. Take care and enjoy the rest of the summer.
Bug Zapper Lan
Well we had our Summer Lan. It was held in the Carriage House del Sam. After the typical network problems and bickering over which games to play we gamed. The game of the night was Unreal Tournament 2003. For what it was worth we were all of similar competence at the game. I also played some CS: Source w/bots. The mascot of the lan was the Bug Zapper. I finished off my Hogarden beers (good stuff) and drank some NOS and Mt. Dew. Afterwords the weather got pre-storm. We packed it up (thanks for the help AndyF). We conversed. I called it a morning, and on my way home I saw Mel and Ian on their way home, safe travels. Here is a photo of the damage.
WTF have I been doing???
The BULLETS! - Took apart Intrepid
- Took exhaust off Dakota, Project RalliDak
- Wired up Hella fog lights on my Dakota, very bright
- Installed Eclipse head in Dakota, MP3's are back
- Visited Josh in Point
- Watched fireworks in EC w/ Sam & Lee and my family
- Body work on my Intrepid, in progress
Visiting Josh was a good time. I had only been there in the winter. I saw lots of sights. I also had good company for the drive. It went well. I zoomed over to EC for a photo finish arrival for the fireworks. We ran to the baseball field and they started the fireworks as we were looking for seats. I have been taking apart/fixing my vehicles. The Dakota sounds very cool without its exhaust, but it is very loud and I drive only at night so I a feel bad about being that noisy. I have new pipes to put on. In the itterum I have been working on my Intrepids. I'ts a slow process since my time is so oddly distributed. I am taking an online course. It provides enough pressure and responsibility that I need to consistently put work into it an not my other projects. I also am my own victim of bad sleep habits. Been visiting and being visited by peoples has been fun and interesting. Take care, see everyone sometime!
Visited States
These are the states I can remember being in at some time or another.
create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide
Mr. T: The Cartoon
Wow. I just saw Mr. T: The Cartoon on Adult Swim. It is totally absurd. Mr. T is surrounded by animated dorky white gymnast kids. They have a pet bull dog which sports a Mr. T mohawk. Hilarious.
Back in PF.
I have been back in PF for a few weeks now. So far things are going well. The summer is clipping right along, to say the least. I don't have most of my stuff unpacked from college yet, which is getting just annoying enough for me to do something about it. I am already hearing plans in the works for road trips and I can only speculate about my own. I am signed up to take 6 online credits of social science courses from NTC during the summer, it will be a new experience for me. Hopefully that will go well. I have, for the most part, enjoyed being "out in the country." When I stop and take a break to appreciate it, it is really nice and quite refreshing after being in the city. Last night I stayed late over at Nate's for his sister's grad party, and afterwords there was a large bonfire, which was boss. The prior night I visited Matt out at Smith Lake Campgrounds, and I briefly saw his new truck. I've managed to alter my truck to be satisfyingly noisy, and I just hope not to annoy my neighbors or the cops. So far the summer is going well, the weather is behaving, except for the cold nights. I have a lot of work/school/trips planned so I'm sure I will be busy. Have a good summer.
For All Those Concerned
I am officially done with school on May 27th. If you for some reason want to attend my Senior Design show it is open house on Friday May 26th from 11AM to 3PM in the basement of the Cudahy Center. I will be around the greater Milwaukee area for a few days after that. Then I will go home. If there is something cool going on that weekend let me know. Otherwise have a nice summer.
Please note:
My school address and phone number will no longer be valid. Next year I will have a different number and room. If you need me call my cell.
Fights.
Well I got in a shout out with a certain unnamed suite mate today. The specifics of the fight aren't so important, but I can't stand how the person yelled at me, gets what they want (which was stupid anyway) and then goes on acting like nothing happened. I'm still very upset, and I do not like being treated disrespectfully. I'm faced with the classic situation where in the aftershock of the moment you want to press it on further and just push it over the top and on the other hand you want to be mature and let it blow over (because the prior makes you an ass). Either result is infinitely unsatisfying.
This will only mean something in the right hands.
http://www.zug.com/gab/index.cgi?func=view_thread&sort=active&head=1&thread_id=64475
My First and Last Spring Break
Well last week, Monday through Saturday, I went on a spring break road trip. We left Milwaukee for St. Louis, Missouri. We stayed overnight at a hotel and then on Tuesday we visited the Arch. It was very cool. We saw the movie on the building of the arch, and it was totally old school and very informative. We then took the elevator to the top. The view from the top was more than amazing, and the viewing room was very small, think submarine. The freakiest thing was that, due to the nature of the arch, you could see underneath yourself. That same day we toured the Budweiser brewery in St. Louis, which is their origins and headquarters. The facility is very historic and has many one of a kind buildings and antiquities. The shear volume of beer they can put out is truly amazing. I sampled some Michelob beer that is not sold in Wisconsin. After that we visited the Cahokia Mounds in Cahokia, IL. I learned about these Indian Mounds in my American History I class I had last quarter, so it was interesting to actually see them in person. They are pretty amazing considering how large they are and how long it took them to be built. They are vaguely similar (I think not related) to the Aztec/Mayan style pyramids (history scholars don't own me). On Wednesday we drove to the Mammoth Caves camp grounds. It was my first time in Kentucky, and even though I knew it was going to be rural I was still astounded when I really saw how rural it was. It is a very beautiful area, although I'm used to it since I grew up in a rural setting. Crossing the Green River was very interesting because they had a small ferry that could hold three cars running back and forth instead of a bridge. Signs that say "Road Ends in Water" now have meaning to me. The camp grounds were not too busy do to the fact that it was early in the tourist season and it was the middle of the week. On Thursday, we took the "Frozen Niagara" tour of the Mammoth caves. It was a very satisfying tour. It was very safe but it was not nerfed. You would bump your head and have to duck and contort to make it through, which makes it much more awesome. Our tour guide was very interesting and of course full of knowledge. I also was the only person there with a glow stick, which was probably the most fascinating visual for the small children there, oddly enough. I would defiantly recommend a flash light or a glow stick, some spots are pretty dark. After that we took the Green River boat tour. It was pretty relaxing and also interesting. We then visited the Nolin Dam, which is a huge dam project on the Green River by the Army Corps of Engineers. It rained the whole day, pretty much our first taste of poor weather. We cooked some good camp food and slept in the rain. The next day we packed up and visited the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY. There must have been a meet going on there as there was many beautiful personally owned Corvettes in the parking lot being shown off. It was raining so many of the owners were anxiously polishing their cars. The museum was very interesting and they had some amazing vehicles on display. Anyone who pays homage to the automotive industry can appreciate it. The prototypes, race cars, and behind the scenes design process exhibits were especially interesting. We then headed home, taking an overnight break in Indianapolis.
cmd -weekend.exe
// AUTHOR: PETER TOMICH
// DATE: 12 APRIL 2006
// DESCRIPTION: A C PROGRAM TO EXECUTE EASTER WEEKEND int main()
{ ENUM {Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday};
int CurrentDay;
CurrentDay = getCurrentDay();
If(Thursday == CurrentDay)
{
DriveTo(Home);
} ELSEIF(Friday == CurrentDay)
{
HangOut(Home);
HangOut(Friends);
} ELSEIF(Saturday == CurrentDay);
{
EasterDinner(Family);
SpendEvening(Friends);
} ELSEIF(Sunday == CurrentDay);
{
DriveTo(MSOE);
} return 0;
}
Bose Suspension
http://www.automobilemag.com/news/0410_bose_suspension/
I've seen stuff like this before, but this seems particularly good. Watch the video for sure.
The Show
I went to Jeb's basement show last night. It was very enjoyable, everyone's performances were really good. It was definitely worth the cover charge :-D. Everyone that performed had a unique style and it was nice to see such diversity in one place. I got to see some very exotic instruments and techniques as well. I met a few new people and played with the various pets. Overall I would like to thank Jeb (and the other performers and guests) for the very non-typical Friday night.
Mud Flaps
These are those $300+ rally mud flaps I was talking about [http://www.autoseattle.com/jaos4.htm]. I did some more research on rally mud flaps and found that the ones that are normally used (besides specific cut EVO/WRX ones) were much cheaper.
Old Timers Horn
I have done a lot of very interesting things since I last updated. Some of which I can't recall at the moment. Besides school, I hung with John, whom I haven't seen for at least a half a year. I saw his new living quarters and they are very nice. He has a boss movie setup with a projector and a wide pull-down screen (lager than some theatre screens). We also went to the FIRST Robotics regional competition. Its a big national event that has be running for 15 years now. High school students form teams and they build robots to perform a competitive task (this year it was more or less basketball). It reminded me of FBLA, but for techies. This was the first time the competition was held in Wisconsin, at the Milwaukee U.S. Cellular Arena, walking distance from MSOE. It's probably the second largest venue in Milwaukee, after Miller Park. The best part was the free admission. One of my MSOE CE friends is a volunteer mentor for a local Milwaukee high school team so I got a little inside information on it as well. I was very impressed by the turnout of students. It was huge. There were many teams from Milwaukee, Chicago, Kansas and Wisconsin. I would guess about 20 teams or so, each one having at least 30 members. This was only a regional competition so it is a very large scale event. Kansas walked away with "1st Place" but they handed out A LOT of awards so many teams received recognition and several continued to nationals. Secondly I was impressed with the quality of the robots and support equipment that these teams had. Very high quality, highly finished units complete with sponsor logos, plexiglass, self automation (AI) and of course sophisticated computer controlled electro-mechanical systems. I didn't see a single robot break down or cease functioning. Thirdly I was impressed with the sponsor support. Many companies I respect and would like to work for were sponsors. Companies like HP, Plexus (local to WI and hires MSOE grads), Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, TYCO and BOSCH.
I'm also signed up to get ham radio licensed. I hope it goes well.
In my miscellaneous searching for car stuffs I found this hilarious description at a British rally accessories site.
OS X on a Dell
I very successfully installed Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.3 on my Dell Dimension 4700. I am running a dual boot setup on an 80 gig SATA drive. The first partition is setup as an NTFS Windows XP partition and the second is setup as a HFS+ journaled partition for OS X. Overall the whole process went very well. There was a minor hickup on the install that I was able to resolve with my common sense experience with operating systems. The OS X install went very smoothly after that and presented no errors. I was able to boot up into OS X very successfully and it had working video, LAN and sound drivers on top of the other necessary functionality to run. I am currently piloting it as a total solution for my computing needs. It mounted my digital camera with no problems. I verified that DivX works using VLC media player. I downloaded Fire, a multi client chat program like Trillian and successfully got that working. I tested out the Safari browser and it seems ok, although I installed Opera and would probably use that instead. Firefox would also work and it is mainstream enough that sites verify compatibility. The included email client is very nice and works great with my MSOE Microsoft Exchange email. I like it more that Outlook 2003. OS X easily (easier than XP) logs into my Windows 2003 server and streams media off it without problems. The other major thing I need to test is burning DVD/CDs. If this works OS X will meet most of my serious needs.
I have had only one major problem. This would not be a problem if I was not dual booting XP and OS X. When choosing which OS to load via the Windows XP bootloader, you have to set XP's partition active. When you select OS X from the bootloader menu, it will attempt to load OS X. However, OS X's bootloader, Darwin, will default to loading the primary partition which is Windows XP. This is very annoying and there is no real solution, Darwin simply does not correctly support this approach. I can still get into OS X by manually selecting it in Darwin and I'm content with this. Other solutions include installing GRUB or some other bootloader, but I want to make this as easy and safe as possible because I intend someone besides myself to use this machine later on. Just this alone took tricky config file editing in both OS's and my knowledge of Unix/Linux was really helpful for this, so it's not for the faint of heart.
That's all for the cons at the moment. To pros are that OS X boots WAY faster than XP. I did not time it but it is much faster, and much faster than Linux which is usually slower than XP to boot. This is not a huge deal for a person like me who leaves the machine on all the time, but it is still something I really appreciate. Also shutdown is much faster too. Also the OS shell GUI does look really nice on a flat screen monitor. The only complaint I have is that in general window management (resizing, minimizing, changing focus) seems clunkier than XP and takes more time to get the same results. This is probably part to due with not being adapted to it and I might not notice if I used it all the time. Also the "right click" on the mouse does very little in most apps in OS X, and this has become a way of life for me as an XP user. The Taskbar works well; it takes snapshots of the window when it is minimized which is nice eye candy. I still prefer the "start button" in XP to it.
In the end it is the best Unix GUI shell I have ever seen and I don't think many could argue. I've used KDE and Gnome on Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Fedora Core, and Ubunto and they are great GUI's but can't hold a candle to the speed and quality of the OS X shell. I also am slowly getting adept at Unix and it is a good OS and will be a good OS for a long time to come. Linux developers don't get mad at me I love you guys.
To answer the question of whether I will be changing, currently it is no, but I am not deterred by much, so its still a very open option for me. One thing I am waiting for is to see whether it will be legally available for generic Intels. Purchasing it would be the ethical thing to do, as well as adventitious for after market driver support for all the features of my sound card and full support for my ATI X300 PCIe video card (no drivers at the moment, but it works with the generic ones).
Week 2.
This is the second week of the quarter. It allows for a slight misleading lull in the storm before week 3/4 midterms come slamming down. Well I will enjoy it while I can. I will be doing something for St. Pat's day. He is the patron saint of engineering so I have to! Also I am going to try running Mac OS X on a P4 Dell (I'm no traitor; it's sweet) I just bought. Who says I'm not diversified! I think it should at least be as entertaining as Linux, and there are so few new things for me to do with computers. Also I am more or less sitting around waiting for spring to come. I know I will enjoy a warm day when it comes. In the mean time I have to worry about classes and getting Senior Design done. It is going good so far, progress is very difficult to judge because of the way certain tasks unfold.
Goals:
- Green Beer
- Easter
- Spring Break
- Senior Design
- Go Home
- Fix Cars
- Enjoy
Dell 4700 Specs:
- P4 2.8 GHz Prescott w/HT
- 80 gig SATA
- 512 MB DDR ram
- ATI X300 PCIe graphics
Modestly Odd Car Sightings in Milwaukee
I recently saw a black four door Integra. I also saw a mid-90's Caprice Wagon Police Car. There is a strange looking Buick Roadmaster with behind the grill police lights, a police push bar and a Le Mans racing strip (double black on Buick burgundy) on campus. I know there are some others that I have forgotten.
Milwaukee to Park Falls the long way!
This Friday I disembarked on a long adventure after my rough finals week to pick up the Intrepid parts car I purchased. It was located in Lower Michigan. I left Milwaukee and drove "around" Chicago. Well that was ridiculous, rush hour Friday is to be avoided. They were doing some intense construction on the busiest part 294 and used the tolls to bottleneck traffic. At least it wasn't HOT out; it was decent weather w ...
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