-The CS softball team won our first regular season game the other night in the extreme cold. The final score was something like 12-2, but the game wasn't even that close. The other team's first pitcher often rolled the ball towards home plate as if she were bowling. They then brought in a second pitcher who threw fast-pitch style so that the ball was still rising as it went past the batter.

-I spent 3 and a half hours on Friday evening working on a problem for CS507 that involved infinite sets of prime numbers and Goldbach's Weak Conjecture. This class is the dark side of CS, the side that I absolutely hate. It's not a good sign when the professor comes in to class one day, glances at the board which is marked up from the class before, and states "that stuff is way too practical for this class". Especially when the stuff written on the board is unintelligible.

-In my other class, Computer Vision, I get to write a program that generates autostereograms. So far my program generates random patterns of dots, but it's getting there. This assignment is infinitely more fun than the one involving prime numbers and much more practical.

-The whole Direct Connect nonsense has gotten out of control. Now the school is sending letters to everyone who was signed on to the WashU DC hub saying that they are "strongly suspected" of downloading illegal materials. Actually, the school has no proof of this, but they are counting on the students' lack of understanding about how DC works. Most students will assume that because the school has the server log, they have a record of who downloaded and shared what. This, of course, is not true, since only search and chat traffic go through the hub server. For all the school knows, every single person could have been sharing legal mp3s, non-copyrighted files, or porn. None of these things are restricted in any way. Saying that because you were connected to a hub that had illegal files on it you must therefore have the illegal files yourself is like saying that because there is bestiality porn on the internet, everyone with an internet connection has bestiality porn. I urge any WashU students reading this to strongly consider protesting the charges, since the school in all likelihood has no proof that you did anything wrong.

St. Louis apparently hasn't gotten the memo that it's in the south yet, since it's still pretty chilly here. That doesn't bode well for the first softball game of the season, scheduled at 9 PM tonight. I used to have baseball practice in high school in February, and a miserable time was had by all who participated. And our practices were in the late afternoon, not after dark.

The most amazing things to me in the aftermath of the great Direct Connect shutdown are:

a) Most WashU students had no idea what they were using, saying things like "the school shut down Direct Connect". Direct Connect is a peer-to-peer file sharing program. While the school may have forced the creator of the WashU hub to take it down, Direct Connect itself is a program and has not been shut down.

b) Unfortunately for the RIAA, the problem still exists that most people don't view downloading copyrighted materials as a crime. No sane student would admit to a reporter that they murdered someone or committed arson, but even now they will post to their LiveJournals about how much they loved downloading mp3s on DC. The random lawsuits are obviously not working to change the mindset that it is somehow our right as humans to steal music, software, and movies.

c) This Chesky girl, who was quoted in the RF Times article about the WashU hub, is our school's Steve Bartman. She did what any other naive freshman would have done, that is brag to someone about how they have access to any song they'd ever want, yet somehow she is being blamed for everything. If she hadn't bragged about breaking the Digital Millennium Act, countless other students would have.

d) WashU students don't vote for their own Student Union or CS40 representatives or care about politics in the least, but when it comes to their own unalienable right to steal, all of a sudden everyone is an activist.

The Academy Awards are coming up, which means a whole night to wallow in my complete lack of caring about celebrities or what they're wearing. I used to be against the Awards, which are just an evening of shallow excess and movies that I've never seen getting rewarded for their artsy-ness, but Academy-provided DVDs often become illegal bootleg Divx films. So at least the awards provide society with something beneficial along with propping up the "garish and expensive clothing" industry.

Of all the films nominated for anything this year, I've seen the following:

Return of the King
Pirates of the Caribbean
Finding Nemo

That's a new all-time low, even for me. I would be angrier that this four-hour orgy of bad clothing is pre-emtping The Simpsons and Arrested Development next week if not for the fact that I'm still in a giddy state from Sex and the City being over.

But even this natural high has been tempered a bit by uncertainty over where I'll be living between April 30th and May 21st and the (probably temporary) shutdown of the WashU Direct Connect Hub. So in summary:

Deposed arch-nemeses: Sex and the City, The Academy Awards
New arch-nemeses: The Reserve at Forest Park, Freshmen who told the Riverfront Times the IP address of the DC hub.

At the end of the day, it's all a wash.

A few sports-related items today:

-Computer Science Department Softball season supposedly starts this week. This will only happen if the weather significantly improves, however. This year we will not lose to lame frat teams. Schedule TBA.

-Colorado football coach Gary Barnett is crazy. If you'll recall, his program was accused last week of throwing sex parties to attract recruits during which at least one woman was raped (there's no excuse for rape, but wouldn't these types of parties gain some sort of reputation amongst students?). He made matters worse for himself this week when, asked about the rape allegation of former female kicker Katie Hnida, he responded with something to the tune of "she was a girl and she was terrible. She couldn't kick the ball through the uprights." I don't see what this has to do with whether or not she was raped. Apparently it's ok to rape the bad players, but not the good ones. Regardless, his lack of common sense when giving a press conference is startling.

-The Yankees got A-Rod, and without really increasing their payroll since the silly Rangers are paying a majority of his salary. It's always funny when teams pay players to play for other teams, like the Marlins paying Mike Hampton to pitch for the Braves even though he was never a member of their club, but the funniest is and always will be a tie between the Orioles paying Albert Belle millions of dollars for the last few years, even though he retired in 2000 and the Mets paying Bobby Bonilla one million dollars a year for thirty years to not play for them. Imagine being so bad at your job that your former employer pays you pretty much for the rest of your life to not work. Now that's a sweet deal.

Ever since the opulently-named Reserve at Forest Park took over our building, there has been strange doings downstairs. The basement used to be a completely-empty room that we could see through a window from the parking lot, but lately there has been a lot of construction going on down there and they've covered the windows with cardboard or black plastic. What is this secret project they're working on? Here are the possibilities:

Office

Dave suggested that the Reserve, now sharing an office with Debaliviere, would like a workspace near the entrance to their row of buildings. It doesn't seem like a very swanky location for someplace called "The Reserve at Forest Park", but it's certainly possible.

Storage Space

It may just be wishful thinking, but perhaps they're building storage space for the tenants so that we no longer have to stuff our closets full of empty boxes. If so, they sure are taking their sweet time to put up some chain-link fencing. And why all the secrecy?

Weapon of Mass Destruction

The election is coming up fast, and Dubya had better uncover a DubyaMD in Iraq fast or else he's toast. Our government faked the moon landing, so why not cook up a weapon of our own and plant it on Iraqi soil to be "discovered" in, say, late October?

Alien Autopsy

Everyone suspects Roswell, NM as the most likely home of a crashed alien spacecraft, but that would be too obvious. The basement of Apartment 12 would be a perfect location for a secret alien autopsy, and this way if any strange alien microbes are released they can watch the residents to see how we react to the space germs.

Headquarters of Elite Crime-Fighting Force

The carjackings and armed-robberies have reached a point where no ordinary police force can stop them anymore. The only thing that can save us from becoming a cesspool is an elite team of superheroes using their super powers to clean up this town. The basement gives them a high-tech, Batcave-like headquarters and allows them to preserve their daytime alter-egos as computer programmers.

Time Machine

In order to keep rent prices down, Reserve employees can, using their knowledge of present-day sporting events, travel back in time and place winning bets. Thanks to these winnings, monthly rent will drop to $5 per month, but will rise back to current levels again to pay for time machine maintenance and to hire replacement employees when some don't return...

Giant Mousetrap

By far the most logical construction project, though, is a giant humane mousetrap. With all of the extra space downstairs there is from for a piece of cheese the size of a bowling ball and a glass casserole dish measuring 10 feet x 30 feet x 20 feet.

Let's play pretend for a second. Pretend that you sell products on the internet, and that these products are not particularly legal, per se. Perhaps you sell generic Viagra, even though Viagra's patent hasn't run out yet. Or perhaps your particular weight-loss formula hasn't exactly been approved by the FDA. Either way, you can't advertise on television, so you resort to mass mailing via the internet.

Direct marketing is a highly-effective and proven way to generate customers. You can get your message out to millions of people instantly, and obviously people respond or else companies wouldn't continue to market this way. However, this is one group of people who are not interested in your product, no matter how potent it is, how much it increases your manhood, or how underage the girls are.

These people are aware of your product, having received countless number of your messages before, but just aren't interested. They run spam-blocking programs like Spamassassin so that they don't get your messages. As a marketing director, do you:

a) maintain a list of folks who actually do respond to your messages, treat these as your customer base, and target them with custom-tailored values in an effort to entice repeat business out of them.

or b) attempt to thwart spam-blocking programs by inserting garbage characters and random words and phrases into your messages so that noncustomers continue to receive advertisements that they aren't interested in. Not only this, but the people who actually might be interested are receiving the same messages which have now been rendered unreadable and totally unprofessional by the garbage characters and random phrases.

Choice b does not seem to make much sense, yet that is the choice most often made. Anti-spam legislation still seems a long way off, but perhaps in the meantime the spammers will catch on to basic business sense.

Recently, a number of people have been bugging me (via their weblogs) to switch away from my dreary Microsoft jail and join them in the utopian, peace-loving, weed-smoking, communist-leaning world of Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, or [insert open-source trend of the week here]. Their arguments, although often well-thought-out, revolve around the assumption that everyone will enjoy tabbed browsing, half-working hardware drivers, or being seen around campus with an iBook as much as they do. That is, much more qualitative than quantitative.

I intend to do some pleading of my own, but hopefully my argument is a bit more quantitative. This newest of arch-nemeses is actually one of my oldest arch-neses: the MP3 format.

It seems like such a good idea, take a 60 MB wav file and make it a 2 MB mp3 file. Now you can store songs on your hard drive, download them illegally from [insert file-sharing trend of the week here], and load them on your trendy iPod so you look like those cool alterna-kids on TV that have better clothes than you and listen to Jet. But there's a catch, of course. In order to make big files so small, mp3 encoders rip out parts of the original song.

While they claim that the parts they rip out are "beyond the frequencies that can be heard by the human ear", it actually depends on how small you want the file to be. The lower the bit rate, the smaller the file, and the more like garbage it sounds. Most people encode at 128kbs, at which point the audio quality already starts to sound muddy. Specifically, drums don't sound crisp at all.

This was all fine when people are downloading for free, but now Apple has been able to convince their hordes of mindless followers to start purchasing mp3s, which is just hilarious to me. According to the iTunes site, default bit rate is 128kbs for their files, so you're paying 99 cents per song for something that is not remotely CD quality (some experts can still hear differences at 256kbps, but at 192kbps it's pretty close to fine for the average listener). This isn't a problem for band's like Jet that make their living on the retro-60's rock sound that is in itself muddy, but for music with any subtlety you're paying for crap.

I therefore implore everyone to use their tabbed browsing on their Macs to visit this page which talks about SHN, the most popular lossless sound compression format. They may only be 50% the size of wav files, and they won't play on your trendy iPod, but they will sound identical to a CD and you can easily verify that your files are not corrupt after downloading by using the md5 checksum.

You freeloaders out there can even find SHNs on both band-specific and general hubs on Direct Connect. If you're going to steal music, at least steal music that sounds the way the original artists intended it to sound.

Or at least around St. Louis. If you've ever eaten Chinese food with me, you know I invariably order the same thing: Sesame Chicken. It's the "cashews" of fake American Chinese food, if you will. But not all sesame chicken is created equal. In my quest for the perfect sesame chicken, I've come across various incarnations, some good and some very bad. Here's a quick guide to the various Chinese establishments in the St. Louis area ranked by the tastiness of their sesame chicken:

WonTon King (8116 Olive Blvd. between Skinker and 170):

Definitely the gold standard of St. Louis-area sesame chicken, Wonton King is also invariably empty so it is always easy to get a table (unless there's a private party). Not only is the flavor outstanding, but what really sets this sesame chicken apart from the rest is that it comes with broccoli. There's easily enough food here for 2 people, and it's only $10 or so. If you split it, you've got a tasty and well-balanced dinner for only 5 bucks, and you can't beat that.

The Jade Garden (9499 Olive Road on the other side of 170):

The building (and parking lot) are deceptively small, but Jade garden has two stories of cliched Chinese-restaurant stuff to get you in the mood for so-so sesame chicken. The price also hovers around $9-$10, but in this case the portion is only enough for one person and does not come with any vegetables. Another caveat is that the Garden serves a wide variety of horrific-looking food, including a raw fish (head, scales, and all) baked into a fish-shaped pie as well as cold chicken marinated in vinegar which was so bad and left such a strong aftertaste that David and I were unable to enjoy the rest of our dinner.

Chinese Express (311 Debaliviere Ave. across from Talayna's, next to the Forest Park metrolink station, and minutes from a potential armed robbery):

A favorite of many college students because of its price (half-orders for $3, huge whole-orders for around $6) and its speed (the "Express" part), Chinese Express doesn't offer sesame chicken but does have a similar-tasting Hot Braised Chicken that's just missing the sesame seeds. The flavor is a little off in a way I just can't explain, and they are closed on Sundays, which is invariably the day I want to eat there. Plus, one time I ordered a "full order" and they misinterpreted me as saying I wanted "four orders". And I usually get panhandled on my way to my car.

Joy Luck Chinese Buffet (8030 Manchester Road just west of Hanley):

Normally I am a big fan of Joy Luck, with its deliciously-misspelled all-you-can-eat entrees like "Potto Chichen" (potato chicken) and "Japaness Chichen" (Japanese Chicken), but when it comes to sesame chicken, Joy Luck is sorely lacking in taste. Not only is the sesame chicken red, for some reason, but it has a bizarre bad taste that could be at least partially due to it sitting in a heated bin for hours and hours.

I posted recently about wanting to purchase a humidifier for my room, and after much consideration I did so this past weekend. My comments on that original post conflicted about whether to go with warm or cool mist, and I elected to go with cool. This was only after much deliberation, surfing the web for comparisons between the two, and realization that Brentwood Target only carried two models, both of which were of the cool air variety.

I've discovered a couple of things about my humidifier and Apartment 12 in general over the past couple of days of usage:

1) Apartment 12 itself is too big to humidify. I say this because running the humidifier with my doors open had absolutely no effect on the humidity in the air and caused me to believe that the humidifer was broken.

2) I am able to sleep with incredibly loud noises as long as they are constant "motor-running" types of noises.

and finally

3) Moisture in the air repels mice. I have arrived at this conclusion because ever since running the humidifier, I have not seen our singular rodent friend. In fact, the only time I saw our former mouse...which is now gone...forever...was when Jim was over at our apartment.

I therefore conclude that Jim attracts mice. Q.E.D.

Yesterday I made a post about ESPN cancelling its show Playmakers due to pressure from the NFL over how the show portrayed the league and its players. Today I awoke to find that the post was gone. After David did a little digging, we found that the Movabletype log claims that the message never existed in the first place, even though I viewed my page multiple times yesterday with the message intact.

The only possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the post was removed and the MT log altered by the NFL during the wee hours of the morning. It's strange that all of my pro-NFL posts remain on the site while my one anti-NFL post disappears under mysterious circumstances. The only way we'll know for sure is if this post also disappears. If I should disappear, you'll all know who to blame. Sue the NFL for all they're worth.

Or so the saying goes at least. I would argue, after completing my Master's thesis defense yesterday, that the best defense is an unattended defense. Tom Brady claimed the other day that the best Super Bowl ring was "the next one", and similarly I would say the best defense is a finished defense.

Lucas and I theorized that by becoming a Master of Science we would have superhero-like powers over scientific things like gravity and the weather. However, this is clearly not the case yet since it is still sleeting outside. Perhaps the superpowers will kick in once I get my diploma.

But the defense is over with, and it went well. Thanks to those who attended, and special thanks to those who didn't attend. A word of advice to those younger folks is to make sure the notoriously rude and obnoxious professors are not in attendance, perhaps by scheduling your defense during a class they teach. Those who did not heed this advice suffered through shockingly tactless questioning, while mine seemed to go much better.

This weekend a friend I've known since middle school came to town, so I showed him and his girlfriend around the great town of St. Louis. Unfortunately, it's winter, so there's not much to do here that doesn't involve frostbite. Part of his grand tour (which also included the casino boats where I lost $40 to the cruel seductress Blackjack), included the Arch.

Normally when folks come to town I let them go up the arch on their own, but somehow I was talked into joining them for the trip up. It's bad enough that I'm afraid of heights, but it's even worse when the thing raising you up in the air is the size and shape of a washing machine with a sketchy wooden door.

Despite the horrible noise it made as it ascended, I did manage to make it to the top, where I enjoyed the view out the windows as I saw it from the middle of the hallway.

The other excitement this weekend was the Patriots in the Super Bowl. Despite a slow start, it turned out to be a great game featuring solid rushing, great passing, and frontal nudity. My money is on MTV planning Justin's little "rip off", the whole thing just seemed a little too staged. If someone was going to get naked, though, I would have preferred Jessica Simpson over Janet Jackson.