the eXternal mind

A fellow house-person has been keeping track of quotes from people around her. I convinced her to put up the quotes on the Avery website. They are really funny to me, but I suppose you might have had to be around to fully appreciate some of them (certain quotes are really reflective of the people who uttered them). I appear in there a few times (mine aren’t really that funny though). Here’s one:

Michael: “So I got the right answer for number five, but I think I did it the wrong way. Doesn’t it break symmetry or something?”
Susan: “Um, no, because it’s over a function that isn’t symmetrical.”
Michael: “Ohhhh….okay, thanks!” (walks away)
(I hear him mumbling to himself down the hallway joyfully):
“So I’m not crazy! I’m still sane!”

From time to time, Avery House (the house I live in) holds social events of various kinds. One such social event is this faculty dinner/dessert night thing where we students invite professors to come and eat dinner with us. This is usually followed by dessert and some performance by the students.

Last month (February), we held one of these dessert night things. I heard from people that last time, most of the performances were classical (vocal and/or instrumental). This time, the new organizer (Ning) was trying to get some variety with music genres to keep things interesting. Since I dabble on the guitar a lot, we teamed up, and along with a drummer (Ryan), we scrapped together some really crappy equipment (the crappy/cheap guitar I had here at Caltech, a cheap electronic drum set, and an alright PA/mixer system).

The video is here: Avery House (Caltech) - Winter Dessert Night 2007

I play in the first song, middle part (~22:56) and in the last song (~1:03:11). Forgive me for trying to sing, and for picking an emo song (Vindicated). I didn’t have a second guitarist, a bass player, a decent drum set, or a decent guitar to attempt a good rock song. In addition, I’m wasn’t sure the faculty would have enjoyed some of the songs I wanted to play. Well, I wanted to do “Bitch Please II” by Eminem, Dr. Dre, Xzbit, Snoop Dogg, and Nate Dogg but I was talked out of it…

I lost this post when my previous host tried to transfer my site to another server. Luckily, Eugene had a copy of the post on hand, and this is the recovered post:

In the past, Firefox was giving me a lot of grief when I could never update the program automatically. It always failed with the error message: “Software Update Failed. One or more files could not be updated. Please make sure all other applications are closed and that you have permission to modify files, and then restart Firefox to try again.” Once, I tried working with people in the firefox IRC room, but after an hour, no one could come up with a solution. Today, I happened to chance upon Richard Davies’ blog post where he describes how he solved his update failed problem. He noted that Y’z Dock, a mac os-like dock bar for windows monitors the programs in the dock and therefore, prevents firefox from overwriting the files. BINGO! I use AquaDock instead of Y’z Dock (less resource hog), but the exact reasoning applied here. All I had to do was shut down AquaDock and Firefox was able to update perfectly. Hopefully, this post will reach people who are having the same problem.