Thursday October 19, 2006 at 9:14 AM
Over the past few days its been cold and rainy and snowy out here. Yesterday we woke up to about two inches of snow (yay!), but most of it’s gone now.
Anyway, back in July I ran across an eBay auction for a cheap webcam, and picked it up with the idea I would start a live webcam when I finally had high-speed Internet. Well, here it is!  This is the view out over Michael Grove looking west. It should update every 10 seconds, and is also being archived so I can make some cool time-lapse video later. Here are some interesting links for the project:
Right now there is a dedicated Windows 2000 computer that captures and archives images from the webcam. It uploads to an Ubuntu Apache server, which is then port-forwarded through my Qwest DSL modem to the world.
Sunday October 08, 2006 at 4:00 PM
This weekend my parents drove all the way out to Bozeman to see me for a few days. Their vehicle came out packed with various furniture, and went back packed with Wheat Montana.
While they were here, we drove up to Big Sky and walked around. There is a lot of construction going on before the snow arrives. Speaking of which, our forecast is saying we’ll get snow on Monday and Wednesday this week.
Also, you’re probably wondering what the “spinning noodle” is. Its actually called the “Wind Arc,” and will spin around in the wind. I walk past it every day on my way to classes.
Tuesday September 26, 2006 at 5:25 AM
Over the past week, it has been raining a lot here in Bozeman. Most days have been overcast, with drizzle or rain through the day. This weekend the weather finally passed, revealing the snow left on the mountains. So today, I ran out with the camera and pieced together a 13.8 mega-pixel look at the mountains to our north.
Below you can download a lower quality 0.5 mega-pixel version, or the full 13.8 mega-pixel behemoth.
The piecing was done using Panorama Factory, and final coloring in Photoshop CS2.
Tuesday September 12, 2006 at 10:31 PM
Over the past few months, I’ve had horrid problems with several of my websites hosted with Dreamhost. Pages hung without loading, or were very slow during peak periods. Server loads were regularly over 120.0, and were about 40.0 at their lowest. Today, that all changed! I talked with Michael, an administrator a Dreamhost, and he helped move all of my sites onto a new server. Everything now runs perfectly, and is very fast. Yay Dreamhost!
So, I started poking around on the new server I’m installed on. The server is called colbert.dreamhost.com and has only three users: root, me and a user called colberteagle. Hmm, interesting. Well, it ends up that the server hosts colbertnation.com, the official website of The Colbert Report. That’s crazy–I’m the sole neighbor of Stephen Colbert himself! To prove it, here’s a screenshot of a directory listing on the server, showing only the three users. Also, some handy links to my forward and reverse DNS entries.
Continuing to look around, the server has 2GB RAM and is a quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processors. For now I’m only sharing it with one other website, and the server load has yet to go over 1.0 all day long. Very sweet!
Monday August 28, 2006 at 7:04 PM
Over the past week, I moved out to Bozeman, Montana for graduate school. Last Sunday, I drove about 1,118 miles to get out here. It took about 15 hours driving time, and I averaged 70.44mph and 35.06mpg. Considering I had 820GB of live disk space with me, that gave my car an average data transfer rate of 117.48Mb/s, or the equivalent of 78 residential DSL connections.
Thankfully, I had a hotel to stay in for two days. On Tuesday night I stayed at a friend’s house (Taylor), and then on Wednesday night I slept in a Physics conference room on campus. From Thursday to Sunday I stayed with another friend (Cody), sleeping on their couch. This whole time I was calling several dozen people with apartments/rooms listed in the local paper and around campus. I spent several hours outside Arby’s because they have free wireless Internet.
Because Bozeman is such a large college town, their population has slowly doubled over the past week as students are coming back. With thousands of students looking for housing, most apartments are filled the first day they are listed. Late Saturday night I finally found a place to move into! For the next few months I’m sharing an apartment with Chad, who was a Civil Engineering student at MSU. This is just in time, because I’m starting school Monday.
Also, because of my fellowship position at WTI, I have a very nice office (okay, it’s a cubicle) with free parking that is walking distance from campus. Yes, it means I’ll be walking a few blocks in freezing cold, but at least I can laugh at the students scrambling to find a parking space before their next class starts.
Tuesday June 06, 2006 at 2:54 AM
Last fall I was coder on the UMD team at two area programming contests, and loved it. I wish we could have done more. We won first place at DigiKey DKC3 2005, and took first at our location in the ACM regional competition.
Anyway, because we were the first team at UMD in a long time, we were asked to throw something together explaining what we learned:
So, I’m posting it here for those interested, and also for Google to pick up the link. 
Monday May 22, 2006 at 11:04 PM
Over the past few nights, Catalyst has been working on recording the song “Bigger Than My Imagination” by Michael Gungor. Saturday it took about 3 hours to get the drums, guitar and djembe tracks down. Sunday night we finished up electric guitar, bass, keyboard and vocals in about 4 more hours.
Then came mastering! David, Shawn and I set up some JBL speakers and took a few hours to EQ and mix over 41 tracks. Everything sounded incredible, and we finished about 2AM. We went home, and I mastered through the rest of the night. (I fell asleep in my chair at about 5AM while doing a listen-through.) Anyway, I woke up again and cleaned all the vocal tracks. By about 2PM Monday I had a finished master mixdown. Ran some last changes and cutting, and burned that baby.
David Ball on drums and djembe, Shawn Sislo on guitar and lead vocal, Chris Linder on electric guitar, Levi LaPorte on bass, Spencer Newman on keyboard, Emily Ball vocal, Anna Larochelle vocal, and Jeff Sharkey engineer.
It sounds really good through several systems, but the vocals are still quiet. Shawn needs to be panned center and Emily and Anna to the sides. Other stuff will probably change too. E-mail me with what you think about how it sounds!
Tuesday May 16, 2006 at 5:12 PM
A few weeks ago our Physics class took a trip to MINOS, a large particle detector on in Tower, MN. The 6,000 ton detector lives a half-mile underground in the old Soudan mine. Our class spent the weeks leading up to the trip learning about Quantum Physics and exploring particle interactions.
Anyway, I’m working on MINOS stuff over the summer. Our first project is to build a Hardware Database to track all the pieces and parts in the detector. More fun diving into PHP+MySQL! I can now install Apache+PHP+MySQL on any Windows XP box in less than eight minutes.
Tuesday May 16, 2006 at 4:21 PM
Catalyst is a youth ministry started by a group of youth. I’ve got a bunch of pictures from our events and people. There are some old pics to begin with, and some equipment pics toward the end.
David Ball on drums, Spencer Newman on keyboard, and Jeff Sharkey engineer.
We’ve been blessed with an awesome sound system: over 6,000 watts of Crown power amps, and 7 JBL speakers (2 FOH, 4 mons, 1 sub). That system seriously kicks. I’ve also been working with my FirePod’s with them; we did a mixdown a few months ago that you can listen to above.
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