+=+ Matt's Blog +=+
Listen. You smell something?

Fun qoute of the day:

“And shepherds we shall be, for Thee, my Lord, for Thee. Power hath descended forth from Thy hand… that our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command. So we shall flow a river forth unto Thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be, In Nomine Patris, Et Filii, Et Spiritus Sancti”

Can you name the movie, before you look?

Recently I’ve been on two trips over to Europe for work, and I’ve gotten a lot of chances to sit on a plane trying to figure out just how numb a human posterior can get. During the course of the last couple trips there were some things that struck me as interesting, and made me go hmmmm…...

I’m sure we’re all aware of how all airline flights nowadays are non-smoking. It seems like everywhere you look there is some no-smoking sign staring you in the face. I can’t imagine actually being a smoker and being taunted by these signs for the duration of a 10 hour flight. It must be torture. Well, despite being 33,000 feet in the air, nature still had my number. So on one of my trips to the lav, what struck me as very odd, is that on the door of a lavatory on a Boeing 767 (AA), there is an ash-tray…. What’s up with that?! All the signs saying “don’t smoke”... but just in case you do, put the butt here. hmmmmm…...... This reminds me of all the safe-sex advocates out there… “don’t have sex before marriage, but just in case you do, wrap it in one of these”. hmmmmm…....

Another thing struck me as interesting while I was gone… Tell an Italian that you are from any city in Texas, and they will tell you that you live in the city where Kennedy was shot. Three separate people on three separate occaissions. What’s up with that?! That would be like me asking a Roman if they had ever met Apollo… hmmmmm…....

Ever play that game in the pool? Inevitably, someone would always jump out of the pool only for the “seeker” to proclaim, “fish out of water!”

I suppose we all take risks in life; and every now and then we get up the balls to try something new… something we’ve never done before. If you are one of the lucky few, everything works out and you live happily ever after. If you’re one of the un-lucky few, things don’t work out the way you expected and you suddenly find yourself standing on the edge of the pool… shivering from the cold air and listening to those around you screaming “fish out of water!”

Perhaps some of you are wondering what the hell I’m talking about, and think that I need to lighten up and not take this so called game of Marco Polo so seriously. If this describes you… you do not know me well enough to read and understand what I’m saying.

Marco… ...

I just posted pictures from my recent excursion to New Orleans this past week. It was a lot of fun, but very hot!

I left on Tuesday night with Cristina and we arrived in just over 8 hrs at about 12:15 AM on Wed. We checked into our hotel at Prince Conti in the French Quarter which was a great location. The guy working the front desk was an interesting fellow to say the least. After we checked in, we decided to go down to Bourbon St., which was only a half a block away! We walked around a little bit and stopped into a bar where they were playing blues/jazz… although, they stopped playing for the night right as we walked in… poo. We paid $13 for two normal beers (yes, $13) and walked around a little more before deciding to retire.

Wednesday morning we went to Cafe Du Monde for some Cafe Au Lait and Beignets. mmmmm…. Anything to feed my coffee addiction is a blessing in my book. Afterwards we checked out the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and walked around a little bit. Then we hopped onto the St. Charles Streetcar route to go visit the Garden District. There is a LOT of money in New Orleans. We walked past Loyola and Tulane which are right next door to each other… how odd. Anyways, later that night we went down to Bourbon to get dinner and try to “experience” New Orleans. Dinner was great and our waiter was just simply entertaining. He convinced us to eat more than what was comfortably reasonable. I tried a beer called Abita Amber for the first time. It was fantastic. After dinner we went down the street to a bar that had an open balcony where we could go and look down at Bourbon street. While on the balcony, we were flashed once (by a girl that shouldn’t be allowed to do such things by way of mercy on the general public) and offered a drink by a businessman from Richardson, TX. He offered us a drink from his cup which we graciously declined. What’s up with that? Who offers a total stranger a drink from their cup? Obviously he’s never heard of mono.

Thursday we got up and went to Cafe Beignet, a small cafe that specialized in breakfast foods of sorts, mostly French in origin. Then we went to check out one of the local cemeteries which was morbidly intriguing.

Bourbon street reminded me a lot of 6th street here in Austin. Except that, here in Austin, you’re not allowed to take your drinks out in public. Also, Bourbon street attracted a much older crowd… which was slightly disgusting at times to see 50 yr olds acting as though they were 21 again. Maybe they were 21 with 29 years of experience…

It was fun, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. God bless “Nawleans”.

So, along with my new Canon PowerShot came a pretty nifty little application that will stitch photos together to create a panoramic image out of a series of smaller images. I used it to create the photograph below.

Another summer brings new adventures. This summer I took a trip into Rocky Mountain National Park with my friend Tony. I took a ton of pictures. The trip was a lot of fun, but very tiring. I saw a lot of wildlife: elk, deer, marmots, chipmunks, more deer, squirrels, bluejays, woodpeckers and even more deer.

Please check out my pictures and leave comments in the gallery or here if you have questions/comments about them. There’s 174 pictures altogether. I took them all at max resolution and size with my new Canon PowerShot SD400. I love it.

The last 40 or 50 pictures in the gallery were taken from Trail Ridge Road. It is the highest paved highway in the US, topping off at over 12,100 feet and stretching for over 10 miles above the tree line. I’ve never seen more beautiful views of mountains in my life.

Now that my dream of hiking in the Rockies is finished, my eyes are set on two other adventures: the Appalachian Trail, and Venice. Yes… I know… they are quite different from each other.

Fun quote of the day:

Spandex: it’s a privilege, not a right.

Can you name the movie before you look?

Sidenote: I published pictures of my new apt.

I hate moving.

I’m sure everyone can relate. At one point or another, we’ve all moved into a new house or apartment and suddenly realized just how much junk we accumulate over the years. Not to mention how many boxes of that useless junk are left over artifacts from a childhood that seemingly ended just yesterday.

So, as you’ve guessed, I just moved into my new apartment. I finally have a majority of it all put away, but there are still some random things that don’t quite have a proper place yet.

I met last night for some beers with some friends from Applied Materials. Its always a pleasure to hang out. Cheers to Mike, Megan and Bhupen.
They bought me a cool Wi-Fi Detector from Canary Wireless, that will detect wi-fi hotspots and gives a readout indicating whether or not it is WEP/WPA protected. The major cool thing about it, is that it even displays networks that aren’t broadcasting their SSID!

I obviously still haven’t updated my software page… other endeavors have taken a priority. We all know that a geek’s mind acts like a stack. First task in, last task completed. I guess I’m no different.

I found a cool command line utility to use in Mac OS X which allows you to manipulate disk images and copy CDs/DVDs without expensive software like DVDxCopy, Nero or Toast.

1. Unmount the disk you are about to copy
   hdiutil unmount "/Volumes/nameofcd"


2. Copy the disk to your HDD (create an image)
   hdiutil convert /dev/disk1 -format UDTO -o "~/Desktop/nameofcd"


3. Burn the image to disk
   hdiutil burn "~/Desktop/nameofcd.cdr" -noverifyburn -noeject

I must recommend a good book I recently picked up at Barnes & Noble. “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” by Aaron Hillegass. ISBN: 0321213149

Fun quote of the day:

I don’t know how to put this… but, I’m kinda a big deal… people know me… I’m very important… I have many leather-bound books… and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.

Let the summer begin! Only one more final exam keeps me with one foot in the college world and one in the real world.

Shoutout to a good friend I haven’t heard from in a really long time; George Hinkle. Good to hear from you, can’t wait to see you this summer.

My PowerMac came last Friday… I was so excited that I was twitching. Since I maintain a couple websites written in ASP.NET, I installed Virtual PC so that I could run WinXP on my PowerMac. I then installed VS.NET 2003 into that windows installation and dedicated 1 gig of ram and 1 processor to the virtual machine. It hauls. [period] It’s faster than my actual windows PC. I’m utterly amazed. Greese your stick shifts and fasten your safetybelts, this baby is ready to fly.

Since I’ve got my room all packed up and ready to move, and my next final isn’t until saturday, I’ve got nothing to do. So, I’ve been catching up on my web development. I’ve spent all day with my eyes glued to PhotoShop and XCode. As a side note, I’ve decided that XCode needs some built in deploy tools which allow you to FTP files back and forth from within the IDE.

You should all check out some of my latest development effors:

• Cristina Castro


• Before the Throne Worship

So, I think I’m about to work on updating my software page.

Have you ever really loathed something? Have you ever been really close to completing the object of your loathing, but time has seemingly stopped dead in its tracks? School has become the object of my loathing. Bleh… let me out! My wings must simply spread a little.

In other news, I ordered a new printer last week. My old one died right before finals and end of the semester (how appropriate). I’ll bet the folks at Epson were holding seances and doing all kinds of voodoo witch-craft, plotting when would be the most convenient time for their product to fail. That was the last inkjet printer I will ever buy. They break too easily. I decided to go with a new laser printer from Samsung. It is an ML-2151N, I bought it from NewEgg. It’s a really nice printer with a network port built right in. Works with Mac, Linux and Windows.

My new PowerMac is supposed to be delivered tomorrow… I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for it. Its actually a good thing it didn’t come earlier. It probably would have given me even more of an excuse to procrastinate studying for finals… as if I need another excuse.

Another note, and shameless plug… I’m webmaster for Before the Throne Worship, a praise & worship ministry at the University Catholic Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They are a real cool group of people. They love doing concerts and things for different churches and youth groups throughout the diocese of Austin. So, if you are a youth minister, and want to schedule a fun activity for your youth, this is for YOU!

I had (IMHO) a good idea a couple weeks ago. I was sitting in class and doodling on my paper when an idea for a new website popped into my head. Remember folks, you heard it here first… I’m calling it CodersToolbox. Basically, the idea is that every software developer has their own special “bag-o-tricks”, am I right, or am I right? So, the website is a place for you to store your tricks so that they’re accessible from anywhere. You can store your snippets of code privately in your own personal “code locker”, where you’re free to organize them however you like…. complete with syntax highlighting and all. You can also mark your snippets as public, which then lets other people check them out as well (and hopefully Google will find them as well). You can provide a short description about the code and others will be able to rate and leave comments about them (assuming you’ve marked the snippet as public). This site wouldn’t be for troubleshooting ideas or code problems (there are plenty of good sites already out there for that; e.g., Experts-Exchange.), but it is mainly a place to store good bits of code for reuse during later projects. If you have ever asked yourself, “I wonder how I would…”, then I hope you could find the code snippet to fill in the blank (or at least get you started) at this website.

Anyways, that was kind of long winded, but I’ll keep you updated with further developments.

So, here it is… my first blog entry on my new fangled website. Nifty, eh? I thought the title for this post was appropriate because the first posts always get pushed down to the bottom, thus being the last.

I just finished my transition into my new webhost, which I love. www.hostgator.com, you should check them out, if you are in the market. They provided me with this fancy little blog software from WordPress. Of course, being the compulsive person that I am, I felt compelled to modify it significantly to fit the layout and style of my site.

For those of you that care, I’ve switched my website from ASP.NET to PHP. My reasons are quite on the fuzzy side. If you are not a geek, you probably wouldn’t understand. But it has some practical reasons as well as some, "damn the man" type mentality behind it. I love the .NET framework and I think it has a lot of great features and good innovations. However; I can’t bring myself to support a company that does not encourage diversity of thought and freedom of knowledge. I am an open source "nut", but I’ve only recently become such. The practical reason for my switch, is that I have recently developed a great liking for the Mac. Specifically, the iBook G4 I’ve been toting around campus for the last 1.5 years and the PowerMac Dual G5 2.3GHz that is on its way to my door step any day now. {{{drooling}}} As we all know, .NET is not exactly the most friendly to non-MS platforms. Though, I do intend to install Virtual PC on my Dual G5 and run VS.NET within the virtual PC for my late night .NET fixes.

So, you IE users are probably wondering, what’s the deal with the messed up layout at the top of the page? My answer, IE stinks. Download a browser that actually adheres to standards. Actually, that’s my cop-out answer. The layout looks fine in Safari, Firefox, Netscape and Opera, but for some reason has a funny space in IE that I can’t seem to get rid of. Any one out there that knows how to fix it, please feel free to let me know.

Starting in July, I’ll be working for IBM. As a result, I’ll be doing a lot of traveling around the globe as well. I thought it would be fun to create my blog now, so that I can tell funny stories about it all later. You know, like my trip to Italy where we got pick-pocketed by a Gipsy. Or the Spanish guy that threw his coffee in my face because I said something in my broken spanish that I didn’t mean to say. This website will also give me a place to post pictures from my trips as well.

Some of you may ask, "what’s the deal with the title of the blog?" Well, if you must ask, then you are obviously not a Ghostbusters freak like I am. [shakes head in shame].

Anyways, one more week of school… forever! One project, One paper, two tests and one final left. Count me in.