Left for Atlanta in the early morning and made it back safely in the afternoon. Worked on Microelectronic Circuits Lab homework in the evening, finishing up Problem Set 16. Wrote several final exam questions for CS1371.

Had a nice date with Sarah. We started off with lunch at McAlister’s, a quaint little sandwich shop, where we caught up on old times and quantum mechanics. After lunch, we went and watched Gothika at the movies. It was pretty creepy, so I think that next time we should watch something more appropriate.

Sarah and I spent a large portion of the evening at Barnes and Noble, where we perused art books and others, ranging from religion to philosophy to mathematics. Sarah taught me about M.C. Escher, an artist famous for his so-called impossible structures. I also learned about the Artchive, a website offering art scans from hundreds of different artists throughout history.

Sarah had a craving for artichoke-spinach dip and we therefore had dinner at Olive Garden. I’m glad I got to spend today with her.

Jabber is a decentralized, open, instant messaging system, similar to AOL Instant Messenger. If you aren’t using it, you probably should be. It’s supported by most major clients, such as gaim and Trillian.

Consequently, the first major accomplishment of today was getting the Jabber server to run on freya. The jabberd server is now running and is fully operational at jab.ds-x.com. I had to open ports 5222 (server to client communications) and 5269 (server to server communications) on the router to get it to work. I can be reached at barik@jab.ds-x.com.

The second accomplishment of the day was getting Openbox and WindowMaker to work on the Microsoft Windows machine here at home. It’s currently running on Cygwin/X and gives me the familiar Linux environment that I’m used to.

Purchased a 2.4 GHz router range-extender antenna (278-845) from Radio Shack after accidently breaking the antenna on a Linksys card at the house.

Renewed barik.net until the next decade. Installed jabberd on freya, but it’s currently firewalled off because I don’t have time to edit the configuration files. It wouldn’t work anyway until DNS resolves. Upon further examination, jabber messages are sent via XML and many jabber settings can therefore be configured by simply telnetting to port 5222.

My (little) sister Tia was the highlight of Thanksgiving dinner. She made an excellent cornish hen dish with lemon and rosemary, in addition to several other dishes which made for a great Thanksgiving. She also made a very delicious pumpkin pie.

Nicky and I had lunch at Olive Garden. There seems to be quite a bit of traffic on the Interstate as a result of the holiday traffic.

Made several modifications to the online journal software. Added a barik_r read-only SQL username to prevent web users from writing into the database. This is now the default user for all journal operations. Added a Link entry at the bottom of each journal entry to allow users to directly link to a given entry. The link is followed by the MD5 checksum of the journal entry.

Worked with FruityLoops. The step sequencer is where the user lays out the drum and melody patterns for songs. The channels are on the left and the dots are on the right. Each dot represents a sixteenth note. To the left of each channel are the volume and pan (or balance) controls. A right-click on these controls resets them to their default value. Clicking on the channel name brings up the channel settings.

Downloaded a DOS bootdisk and upgraded the A7M-266 BIOS to version 1007 using the AFLASH utility.

Had an opportunity to finally watch the three hour Nova special on quantum mechanics and string theory. It really gave me a new perspective on the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

The Debian servers are completely flaky today. It’s irritating. I re-subscribed to the Debian mailing lists by sending an e-mail to the Debian mailing list server with the subject line of subscribe. I was unsuccessful at getting Gnome 2 to work under Debian, despite my best efforts.

Graded Exam 3 for Computing for Engineers. Stopped by the Office of Human Resources to get my hiring paperwork straightened out. Confirmed the barik.net domain transfer with Network Solutions. Good riddance. Finished Experiment 8 and Problem Set 8 for Microelectronic Circuits Lab. I’m pretty certain that I’m one of the few students in the class who have the correct answer for it.

Tera and I went out to dinner at Surin of Thailand restaurant on Highland.

Met with Ben in the afternoon to work on our live variable analysis. The project doesn’t work, and SML has some annoying quirks that seem to hinder any sort of rapid development.

Activated my Discover Card. Of particular interest is their Discover Deskshop software, which allows you to generate single-use credit card numbers for online sites.

Caught up on some well-deserved sleep. My family and I had a brief lunch at Willy’s Mexicana Grill before going our separate ways. I’ll see them again over Thanksgiving break.

Intrigued by the .hack anime series, I decided to once again investigate the world of online MUDs. As a high school student, I used to be a complete addict at these sort of games, but slowly grew out of it after entering the Alabama School of Math and Science. MUDs are one of the few remaining places in the online world that have not been engulfed by corporate consumerism.

Read a large portion of Sun Tzu’s Art of War from Project Gutenberg. Found some minor typographical errors in the text and e-mailed a report to the maintainer. The errors were promptly corrected and the new file has been uploaded. Ths book is now one step closer to perfection.

It’s time to renew my domain. Transferred the barik.net domain from Network Solutions to GoDaddy.

Went to the library to clear up an erroneous late fine. Turned in the second phase of the VLSI project. Stayed late at school to work on another Microelectronic Circuits Lab experiment. I’m sick of Perl, so I started learning the Python programming language to avoid doing real work today. My family is in town this weekend for my sister’s piano competition, hosted here at Georgia Tech. We went out for a late-night dinner at La Fonda.