29 Oct 2000 jameson   » (Master)

FreeSCI
Only two tries until everything was merged into CVS (woo-hoo!). Haven't received any feedback yet, though. Well, I'll assume that everything is well and that all outstanding bugs have fixed themselves magically...
Seriously, I need a big bunch of time to work on this. Maybe this evening after the AD&D session (I don't think that'll suffice to give the widget subsystem the kick in the butt it deserves).

As for AD&D, I think I'll try using some of the Evangelion soundtrack as background music.

LAN
Re-wired everything for 100 Mbps. I still need to find out which of the LAN adapters is responsible for slowing down everything to 10 Mbps, though. Since StarOffice doesn't yet compile on my Alpha (haven't tried it yet, but it appears to require a recent Java implementation, and it'll probably need a working C++ compiler as well), I have to run it remotely, which is why I need/want 100 Mbps. Actually, I don't really want to run StarOffice, but I'm being forced to produce .ppt slides for a seminar. My current solution to this is to somehow generate high-res .pngs from text description files, and convert them into .ppt using SO. I still need to work out the 'somehow' part, but that should be possible using GIMP scripting.

Yesterday
Went to EXPO 2000 in Hannover (Germany). Mostly disappointing- lots of flashy stuff showing how great the individual countries are (I found it pretty weird that Ukraine were showing a movie depicting their military power, though). Lost 0:3 in brainball in the Sweden pavillon. That got me thinking- is it really that hard for me to relax, or was it just the caffeine?
In the Canada pavillon, they were showing the most pointless 10-minute movie ever. The US completely forgot to have a pavillon. Japan showed a few interesting concepts regarding future traffic control/automated physical delivery services, which, however, failed to mention how they'd deal with some of the more japanese traffic problems problems, like rampaging mechas or tidal waves caused by spaceships crashing into their harbor. Others, like Germany, were completely unaccessible due to the number of people waiting in line (most of them appeared to have been camping there for several weeks). Some of the African countries weren't that bad, actually- especially for someone who didn't really know a lot about them. But in the end, the only three things that really impressed me were the engineering work and ingenuity behind some of the pavillons and structures, the fact that most of them would be deconstructed pretty soon, and the number of zeroes behind the non-zeroes in the decimal representation of the amount of tax money wasted in the mis-management of all of this.

Don't get me wrong- learning about the rest of the world is good and important, but specifically targetting most of the non-written information to that part of the population that suffers from ASD (Attention Span Disorder- it's not really a disease, but, rather, a fashionable way of life) and removing or censoring critical presentations (German) isn't the right way to do that.

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