My muse has not been inspiring me to write much as of late.
Thursday: cooking club returns. Andrew made roast chicken and quinoa; I made a pear/walnut/feta salad. I ran off to campus to meet with the Campus League of Puzzlers to work out content for our upcoming weekly column in the Daily Cal.
Friday: Went to the Qualcomm infosession. That company is building some serious goodwill with the Berkeley CS department. Thanks to their behavior in the wake of the Atheros acquisition, they're building some serious goodwill with the open-source community too. Cool folks, and I will definitely be watching what comes out of that company in the future.
While meeting with Dave Wagner, I came up with a clever idea that I may do a piece of for my master's project. I have a hard time finding ideas that are big enough to be interesting, but still have small enough pieces that I can cut them off and complete them in a reasonable timeframe, so this was good.
That night, I went into SF and met up with Matt Mullins and David Mackey and a bunch of other folks from imo. We ate dinner and discussed all manner of nerdy things at a pub. It was good meeting some new faces and seeing all the old ones.
My graphics card's fan was striking the casing and making terrible noise again, so I took it apart and tightened the screws that fastened the fan to the card. That tiny adjustment appears to have done the trick. My desktop is darn near silent, which is good, because that's what I had in mind when I built it.
Saturday: I spent a decent portion of the day installing Debian on my Wii. This was fun, and eventually I was successful in getting a proper development system set up. I tried building libfreenect for the Wii. Apparently, no one uses libfreenect on big-endian systems, because there were compile errors until I fixed the endian-conversion routines. In the end, it turned out that the Wii is just too weak to reliably handle the traffic. On the upside, the code got cleaned up a decent bit.
Matt came up to Berkeley that night, and we had dinner at Barney's Burgers (which, for the record, is excellent). On the topic of burgers, one of the things that I'm excited for this summer will be living closer to The Counter, which also has fantastic burgers.
Matt showed me his new Ford Focus and all the bells and whistles and automagic parallel parking. I was surprised that Matt wound up buying an American car, but after seeing it and hearing how excellent the salesperson had treated him, I had to admit that Ford's offerings are definitely competitive.
Right before I went to bed, I got nerd-sniped by an email from Dave Wagner, posing a puzzle that amounts to designing a quine with a language that looks like a compression format. I still haven't completed a solution, but I'm definitely going to fill up a piece of graph paper with ideas.
Sunday: puzzled over puzzles. Did part 2 of the aforementioned Kinect-on-Wii attempt. Called my family and talked for a while.
I have an appointment to have maintenance done on my car at early-o-clock tomorrow, so I'll be heading to bed now.