Photos from our Christmas celebrations are online. There are a few from our trip back up north after my parent’s Christmas Party. After that they are from Christmas Eve, Christmas, and the day after. Aelscha and I are now heading up to Sunday River for the week, and will be once again away from contact. Enjoy your New Year’s celebrations!

I feel righteous. I just donated $25 to an Internet radio station I regularly listen to. Merry Christmas, SomaFM.

I just enabled mod_gzip for the static pages on isomerica.net (Wordpress, the blog software, already compresses the dynamic pages). What a difference. I specifically wanted to reduce the size of my rawdog RSS aggregator page, which runs about 261K. mod_gzip can bring that down by about 70%.

On gentoo, enabling mod_gzip is very easy:

emerge mod_gzip
Run the command indicated to update apache’s config.
Edit /etc/conf.d/apache and add -D GZIP to the options line.
Restart apache

Today is a day off. After this, two more finals and then I am done! In other news, on Monday my lab group presented our design project - the analog Volt/Amp/Ohm meter. Our meter and presentation was so good we won an award, and a +1 letter grade for everyone in the group. Not that I need a +1 letter grade in that class, but the honor is pretty cool regardless. The extra time we put in making the meter look nice and measure AC voltage really paid off.

Hopefully soon I’ll get a chance to write some more. Now that my Calculus final is behind me and my court observation done I can relax and breeze through my “easy finals.” The court observation was pretty cool, too: I observed the beginning of a jury trial in an assault case. Even more interesting was when the court recessed to let another jury come in and read the verdict in a murder trial. It was almost Hollywood. After the verdict was read a woman ran from the courtroom crying. After this the assault trial seemed pretty mundane!

I am now registered for the following classes:

• Calculus II - MATH 426
• Intro to Digital Systems - ECE 543
• Data Structures - CS 515
• Energy and Environment - CHE 410

Even more exciting, Aelscha’s mother happened to notice my name in the Nashua telegraph. Because I made “highest honors” and applied to UNH while I was living in Hollis, my name is printed under the Hollis heading. I don’t know why Abby’s name isn’t there; her grades were as high as mine.

1.) Octopus eyes have no blind spot.
2.) Caffeine is used in artificial insemination (of animals) to make the sperms swim faster.

Science News has a really nice article explaining the problems of obtaining randomness and the levels of random needed for various tasks. When I was in middle school I wrote a math paper on random numbers, so this topic is even more interesting to me.

I happenned to briefly be in York, Maine this afternoon and took some photos of the sunset from a parking lot. It was a beautiful sunset. Click on the image to view more photos taken earlier.

Exposure: 1/125, F4.0. It feels like I’ve filled up the homepage with photos; I promise I’ll get back to writing actual words soon :)

A few photos I took today. Frederick, with flash. Check out the full size original (if you have a decent connection!). The detail on her furry little face is great:

A Nissan driving down the road. I was trying to play around with panning. If I recall correctly, this image was actually shot through our window. I kept it because I liked the composition.

Plants that were left in a tray and haven’t survived the fall. I liked the composition, but wish I had focused it better:

My family etc have been pestering me about what I want for Christmas. Apparently I’m impossible to shop for. Anyway, there is a list, updated occasionally, for y’all to peruse.

Some of these are for me. Some of them are for people.

• Chopsticks. Imported from Thailand by a woman who runs a small imports business.
• Scrunchies made from handwoven chenille.
• A quilted wall-hanging.
• An ornament made by a woman who does paper quilling. The framed art of hers is beautiful, but spendy.
• A doorknob hanging sign. If I put in any more detail about this it will give away the recipient.
• A hand silk-screened shirt.
• A mini-journal with a hand-made paper cover.

Yay for spending money.

What: A party!
Who: You! And anyone you might feel like bringing.
Where: Our apartment. Directions here.
When: Didn’t I already mention this? December 10. That’s a Friday, and the last day of classes for us.
Why: Because we feel like it. Because we haven’t had a party since summer. Because soon it will be Christmas break and all the people who are local friends now will soon not be.
There will be: Food (We’re planning on there being veggie stuff, if you want vegan let us know). Soda. Small amounts of alcohol. Nifty and exciting people (because our friends are all really cool). Games (quite possibly. Bring some!).
A question: If I make Christmas cookies, would it be fun and cool to have lots of colored frosting and make elaborate decorated cookies? Or would that be lame and a waste of time and energy to prepare?