Matt's Cool and Interesting Blog of The New Millennium 

Thank you Mr. Gates

According to this press release, Bill Gates is giving Carnegie Mellon University 20 million dollars to build a new "Gates Computer Science Center". This new building will be located between Smith and Newell-Simon Halls. I'm not quite sure where they mean, cause the campus is pretty packed over there, but an artists conception looks like this:


Once I figure out where that drawing is of I'll put up some photos of what it looks like now, here.

The best thing about this is that I'm pretty much guaranteed that all of the clusters inside will be running Windows and not the annoying Linux variants that are populate many other clusters around the campus.

The Next Random Comic Update

Baxter sent me a whole lot of content for the Random Comic Generator, so it looks like Friday will contain a big update. Check out the comic generator sometime Friday night and hopefully you'll see some good additions.

Getting Busy

Sorry if I don't write anything too funny here for a while. My classes have just went into hyper-homework mode, so pretty much all of my free time will be spent on that. In the plans though is an update to the Random Comic Generator, along with a possible contest where you can win an autographed copy of a random comic. Stay tuned!

Dining at CMU

Dining at CMU stinks. It was bearable last year, but they made some policy changes and now it's worse than ever. I should just get off the meal plan, but I like to eat on campus because it's more convenient. If you just use cash on campus your getting ripped off. There's no way around it.

How Not To Make Ramen

Today, I made myself some ramen for lunch. This usually goes well, but when I packed to go to school I forgot a bowl. Being resourceful and shrewd I figured that I could probably make it in a coffee mug. I must have forgotten how much is inside ramen. I had to really force the brick and break it about 6 times to get it in the mug. I filled the mug with water. Very little water was inside the mug, because there was no room due to the ramen. I also forgot how absorbtive ramen is. Now I am eating an incredibly hot mug of flacid noodles with no broth. How yummy.

Early Shakespeare Texts Go Online

Some of the earliest copies of the text from Shakespeare plays are making there way online according to this BBC article. Unfortunately these plays overlook the alternate play used in some of the first performances of Othello which include references to several later works of literature.

MacGyvering A Trombone Lyre: A Story With Pictures

As many of you know, I play trombone in the Kiltie Band here at CMU. I picked up the trombone over summer so I really have no idea what I'm doing. Today I realized I was missing another essential part of being a band member. A lyre.

A lyre holds music to your instrument so you can read music and march simultaneously. Since I didn't have one and am an engineering student at one of the best engineering schools in the world, I decided to make one myself.

The next two pictures show my trombone. The first one is unedited. The second one I edited in Paintbrush to show mysef exactly what I wanted.




In this picture, the red is something that would hold the music up and the blue is a clamp! Incredibly technical, huh?

My next step was to come up with supplies. I found some duct tape, rubber bands, a paper clamp, a paper clip, and the broken pen clip of my luckiest pen. Yes, I have a luckiest pen. I broke it by accident the other day. I'm still mourning.

I started assembling the parts. I put the rubber bands around the trombone, because that way it would hold everything together without getting gross ducktape goo on the finish. I slid the pen clip in the rubber band so I'd have something to work with. I then taped the paper clamp to the pen clip. It was pretty sturdy. To hold the music up I sacraficed the paper clip and made a support rod.

Here's an unlabeled picture of it:


And a labeled one:


It holds together pretty well. Hopefully it will make it through the football game Saturday!

Here's a final picture of it holding up the ever popular "Hey Song".

Thursdays

For me, Thursdays are really long. How long you ask? Well, I have classes from 8:30 to 4:00, with a short break for breakfast. Then I have band at 5:30 and a lab from 6:30 to 9:30. As you can clearly see, Thursdays are really long.

Pleasant Lunch

Today I had a really pleasant lunch. I mean if you could think of the quintessence of the intersection of pleasant and lunch, the lunch I had today would be it.

10 Chicken Wraps Out of 10!

Research

Anyone know anybody who needs a research assistant at CMU in the computer engineering field? I really need to do some research.