Greetings From Arizona

Hello readers, my friends Seth and Molly and I went on a trip to see Seth's family in Arizona. This afternoon we climbed a mountain. It was awesome. The scenery is beautiful here and Seth's family is great. Tomorrow morning we're leaving for Las Vegas. Pictures will be posted shortly after Christmas, hopefully.

Coding Blog

I'm guessing most people who actually bother to look at this blog don't care to hear me rant about programming, so I'm creating a separate blog to discuss my projects. But if you have nerdy interests like me, here's the URL:

http://codingcraig.blogspot.com

Camera Bag

... mine lacks a little legitimacy/function

Finals Week Update

So finals week is dumb. That goes without saying. I've spent waaaayyyy too much time studying. However, apart from that, I've been entertaining myself by writing an application which does the following:

• Scans my computer for music files and generates a list with information about track title, album, artist, and track number
• Allows me to check whether I have a physical copy of the album or not
• Allows me to check whether I want to keep or delete the song
• Calculates if it's worth it or not to buy the whole CD or just the songs I like (if I like 4 songs out of the CD, I could buy them online for $4.00 or maybe if the CD is old enough, I could get the whole CD from Amazon used for $3.50 or so)

Basically the objective is to make sure I don't have any illegally-acquired content, so I have some ground to stand on when I talk about copyright reform. Secondarily, it allows me to purge my library of all the crappy music that somehow smuggled itself onto my computer (I've never downloaded a rap song in my life, yet I somehow have dozens in my library?) Thirdly, I get to hone my Python skills on a somewhat fun, useful project.

In other news, I'm going on a roadtrip to Arizona pretty much as soon as finals are over--I'll be gone until Christmas Eve and it will be the first trip I've been on since I've had my camera. I hope to return with some decent pictures to play with. [Edit: Seth wants to play pokemon while we're driving to and from... win.] We likely won't have Internet most of the time and even if we do, I hope to be too busy to do much updating. Updates will come after I get back; however.

Good luck to everyone who still has finals!

Things I Like (what I have been working on in my absence)

• Open-source software
• Ubuntu (Operating System)
• easy to use (I'm seriously considering installing it on my parents' machines)
• secure
• hard to screw up
• Software Center -- get all of your programs for free from an "App-Store" like location, rather than hunting through the internet
• powerful
• I can do anything I would normally do on Windows or OSX on Ubuntu
• free
• better than OSX and Windows (surprisingly)
• people designing and developing software to better computing for everyone, simply because they enjoy it
• a lot of programs are superior to for-profit programs
• DIY (do it yourself) projects
• Programming
• Python (really easy, powerful programming language)
• learning to use a computer as a tool to create my own tools
• creating tools for other people to use (see open-source)
• Graphic Design
• open-source GD programs
• GIMP (Photoshop alternative)
• Inkscape (Illustrator alternative)
• web design
• fun blogs by graphic designers
• http://pishposhandsuch.blogspot.com/
• Web development
• web design
• Python for web