Author: John Paganetti

Freedom!

Ah, sweet, sweet freedom.

I’m no longer on 56k, as it is now a week since I went over my bandwidth. Two problems…I forgot all the crap I had meant to download, and I’m probably just going to go over it again in 3-4 days.

Change

Much like Rob, I’ve noticed a lot of changes coming with college.

Two of the biggest ones:

My internet connection is currently worse than it was at home. That makes shit really hard to do. I know, this shouldn’t be one of the *actual* changes I notice in college, but its still pissing me off, and changes the way I spend my free time.

Second, I carry my cell phone on my everywhere. I never have, and still don’t like cell phones, but I actually keep one on me now. Its just how it is.

Couple other things. AMC has quickly become my favorite channel on TV. Good stuff on there.

Some other stuff, cause I’m in that mood. Also, theres a good movie on AMC, and I’m kinda distracted.
A lot of the words I use regularly have changed, but not because of someone else saying it. I normally pick up changes in vocab from someone else. I use ‘dig it’ and ‘bogus’ way too much. I’m scared I’m going to slip into ‘groovy’ sometime soon.

I keep thinking there was something more important to write about, but I can’t think of anything.

Updating this site is a bitch on 56k though, and I’m not sure how well I’m be doing it. So I’m sorry, but I’ll see if I can do anything about it. I may start updating on my laptop from wireless locations around campus. We’ll see.

*sigh*

EDIT: I remember: “pants”…more on that tomorrow, I think.

Crystal XP

I posted about this on the main page a while back. It made your XP look pretty spiffy and gave it a OSXesque dock for launching apps. I thought pretty well of it, and gave it a try. I’d just like to tell you all I don’t think its worth it.

I’ve always been using a skinning program (WindowBlinds for the most part), and I can choose my skin, instead of this just giving me one. And, if I want a dock, I can just use an open source one which is totally seperate from the skin.

Here are a couple screen shots of Crystal XP on my computer. (they’re bitmaps because I totally forgot to make them something better…deal)

http://www.somjuan.com/old/images/upload/crystal.bmp
http://www.somjuan.com/old/images/upload/crystal2.bmp

Yup.

Only Juan Way?

This is pretty awesome, and probably made it worth waking up today.

I’m a big fan of From The Shadows, a downloadable tech show that just rocks. Box 6.0 (the latest episode) should be coming out soon, so I’ve been checking the site pretty often. I randomly notice a topic called Big Idea 2, and check it out.

Someone has an idea that is extremely similar to the Juan Way Tour, and he’s done much more research into it than I have (which is a good thing).
However, he’s looking to pull this off in the summer of 06. He has some pretty ambitious plans, considering he’s stationed in Afghanistan right now, and won’t be back until sometime next year. We’ve talked a little on IM, and will be talking more as time goes on. It’d be great to see this launch.

Sometime soon there will be a site for it (something like tour.somjuan.com or whatever). It’ll have more info, and be a general center of operations.

I’ll probably be posting more frequent updates about this, since things are happening again. I’ve got kind of mixed emotions about this. On one hand, I’m thrilled that this will be happening, and that there are people who I don’t even know that are interested in it. On the other, I’m kinda disappointed that someone is gonna pull it off before me. Stupid pride. Stop messin shit up for me.

It would be pretty excellent if he could pull it off, and we’re sharing some ideas. If he goes through with it next summer (or even the summer after that) I’ll totally be there.

Would any of you be interested / able to?

Aw Fuck

Ok, I went over my bandwidth in my dorm, so I’m not all that happy.

Basically, the UConn network gives you 5 Gigs for any given 7 days. I knew this was going to be a problem once I heard about it. I can go over 5 gigs in a day if I’m working on something.

If you go over this limit, they knock you down to about 56k speed for a week. If you do it three times, they’ll knock you down to that speed for the rest of the semester.

The thing is, they don’t have any way of letting you know how much bandwidth you’ve used. You can tell what your usage has been for the last week, but not for the current day.

They send you a nice little email telling you that you’ve made a boo-boo, and what the consequences are. They also say several times in the email that your P2P apps will be incredibly slow or non-functional. So I assume this bandwidth cap is in place to limit P2P downloading, keep their students from getting caught and sued, and keeping their names out of the papers.

Perhaps 5% of the total bandwidth I used in the last 7 days have been on a P2P network, and they were on Bittorrent downloading a legitimate file.
Even more was on Yahoo! Music, who I subscribe to. Yahoo! is not P2P, not at all.

This system is bogus. They limit legitimate downloads in their attempt to stop filesharing at their school.

I really, really hate ignorance.

2.4GHz

Ah, this is another fun blog entry.

I’m sitting up in my room, its 11 at night, and I’m bored out of my mind. I look over and see my wireless headphones, sitting there, useless. For one reason or another, they didn’t want to work. They have power going to them, but it doesn’t broadcast any sound. I can’t figure out why, since its the exact same setup I have at home.

Anywise, I play around with it for a minute or two, and try to get it to work. As I’m scanning the frequencies, looking for my music, I hear something that sounds like a radio show. I tune it a little more so the sound comes in better, and I realise its two people on their phone!

Most wireless phones broadcast on 2.4 GHz, which is the same frequency as my headphones. I had thought most wireless headphones used some sort of encryption between the phone and the cradle (the part of the connection that is broadcast out to the world, wirelessly), but I guess not. Even if that is true, this is college, so the cheaper the phone, the better (so I’d doubt they have encryption).

I’m going to play around with this a little more, since we have a wireless phone in our room.
I’ll be sure to keep you all posted.

By the way, the conversation wasn’t too interesting, and sounded a little like the Jerry Springer show without the crowd and the host.
And for those of you interested, I never got my music to play on them.

The Aristocrats

Alright, I saw the aristocrats tonight. The entire movie is about one joke. The joke is fairly simple:

Guy goes into a talent agency to pitch his act.
“What do you do?” asks the agent.
“We come out and crap on the stage.”
“What do you call yourselves?”
“The Aristocrats.”

However, the joke is how each comic tells the “We come out and crap on the stage.” line.
It gets rather ridiculous, but its a very funny movie as long as you aren’t easily offended. Also, it has the best closing credits of any movie I’ve seen this year.

Now, at the end of the credits, it lets you know that you can make your own Aristocrats joke, and send it into them, and if you win, you get $1000 and your version of the joke will be on the DVD. Pretty spiffy.

I’d highly encourage you guys to go wild on this one, since I know you can. Its too late for me to post some examples from the movie, but perhaps someone else can, or maybe I’ll do it in the morning.

Watch the trailer, and you’ll get the idea.

Or just go see the movie, its totally worth it…but probably not with the family…

Transporter 2

Ah, gotta blog about tonight, because tonight was a good night.

I’m back home for the weekend, so I can visit with family and go to a music festival (most of saturday). I’ll also be asked over two dozen times how college is.
The answer is that it isn’t all that different. I don’t know, maybe its just me, but college doesn’t phase me much. I sleep, eat, and live in a new place now. k.
It would probably be a lot different if I didn’t know so many people there, but I do, so why not make the most of it?

So, tonight I get back home, the dog and family are all happy to see me. After dinner (Fong’s) its straight to Java. I talked to a bunch of folks earlier in the week, to see who’d be around. We had quite a crowd, considering people were leaving for school left and right.

I arrive, and I’m the first one there. I grab my XTREME CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE and go to sit with robbie taylor, who has randomly been at java the last couple times I have. He’s playing chess against some girl. He introduced her to me, but I didn’t catch her name. It was loud, and I was waiting on my milkshake a couple feet away. They play chess, I help each side not make crappy moves. Some time later, Jack shows up, and we move to the back of java.

Jack has his laptop with him, in an uber case which seems incomplete without handcuffs. I think its bulletproof. We’ll need to test that sometime.
Anywise, we play around on the javapalooza wireless network, which was just as sketchy if not more than the time I brought Cassidy there.
We manage to get online for a few seconds, but without internet we just use it for Pinball and Minesweeper.

Morello, Scott, Dave Carta, Craig Dennis, and Rob (after that girl left, I assume) all join our table in turn. Java randomness ensues. I see a bunch of folk I know from MHS (who are seniors now, I guess). I guess they’ll be replacing us as the regulars. Maybe not, whatever. At some point I ask Rob who that girl was, and he tells me its joanna. I was kinda pissed by this, but I’m not really sure why. So I guess I’ve technically met her, but I totally didn’t know I met her. Bah. Also, deedee never showed up. I thought she would, but apparently theres something going on between her and scott. I dunno, I haven’t seen deedee in a long time, and she’s even gone on a road trip in the time that I haven’t seen her. Not a Juan Way scale trip, but its still a road trip. Oh well, those were the only two things that bummed me out tonight.

At some point I mention that Transporter 2 is out today, and that I had meant to go see it. I hadn’t seen the first one, but had heard good things. Jack has the DVD at his house, and he has a laptop with a DVD drive with him. We run back to his house, grab the DVD, head back to java, and watch as much as we can before we need to take off for the movie. Only Jack, Rob, and I actually watch the movie, but thats probably for the better. I don’t know if we could have fit anyone else on that bench.
We turn the subtitles on, because we can’t really hear the laptop’s speakers over the music and people in java. People start to leave while we’re watching it, which kinda sucks, but the movie is good, so I guess that cancels out?
I dunno how that works.

In the end its just Jack and I left, and his battery starts to die about 5 minutes before we were going to leave for the theater. We knew we weren’t going to finish the movie, but we were planning to watch what we could on the walk down to Destinta, and even as we were buying our tickets. It would have been fun to explain that we were watching the first one as we got in line to see the second.

Transporter 2 was loaded with ridiculousness. If there was one word to describe this movie, it would be ‘awesome.’ But more in the 80s teenager sense of the word, instead of the dictionary definition. We determined that the main character has to do a certain amount of stunts to keep his ridiculous card, such as riding on the top of an elevator instead of inside it. There are obviously lots of other examples, but that is most of the movie.
The Ridiculous Card reminded me of the Crazy Test for some reason. More on that another time, I think.

Alright, its getting close to 2 and I think I’m going to go to bed.
Dig it

College’d

Alright, first blog entry from college.

Couple things. I just noticed my site got crawled by turnitin.com (one of those sites that lets teachers check for plagarised work). So if you were thinking of posting some homework or a paper on here (not really sure why you’d want to), might want to think again.

Anywise, things have been pretty easy going and generally laid back so far. Even though its just the first week, I wouldn’t doubt that this would last throughout the whole year.

But, with the way some of my classes and such are set up, updates will be even more random that they are already. Sundays and Mondays are my worst, and you probably shouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t anything new on the site those days. Otherwise, I just update when I find free time.
I updated today during lunch.

Its fun though. And anything that anyone has told you about college is probably true.

Right, so I’ve gotten distracted at least 5 times while writing this blog entry, and its over an hour since I started it, so I’ll just post it now, and add a new entry if I ever remember what I was going to say.

Crap. I just remembered. I’m not taking that last paragraph back.

I was wearing my Staff shirt from Greyfox today, and a random dude I was passing by recognised the festival. He wasn’t a student, but it was a pretty cool encounter nonetheless. He also helped me figure out where I was going, because I had some lecture in an obscure backroom.

I think thats it, but my brain will probably spite me and remember something again.

Damn. It did. This entry is getting much longer than I had meant it to be.

A friend of mine from back in 6th grade is at UConn. I had’t seen him since then, but it turns out he’s in my major, and a bunch of my classes. Also, he’s the first person on campus who I’ve seen wearing tye-dye (and you should know by now, I think more people outta wear tye-dye).

Oh, right, remembered more stuff. I really, really, really need a minifridge. I really owe the Ryans and my roommate because they’re the ones I’ve been mooching off of this whole week. Oh well.

fin.