Jeff's Journal

Well here it is half way through November, and I'm doing an October wrap-up. Between working on all of my current class projects, my goal is to write a short script to make adding entries trivially easy. Then I can really start sharing my life with the world.

October was an adventuresome month. The first weekend of October, I headed down to Middlesboro, Kentucky to take a tour of the Cumberland Gap Tunnel. The tunnel is an extremely interesting piece of information. I will soon be writing up an account of my experience there over on KentuckyRoads.com.

On the 25th of October, my best friend David Raney got married down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I spent several days down there, and was the best man in David's wedding.

Besides that, there has just been a lot of school going on here in Urbana.

This year has really gone by fast; 2002 seems like just yesterday. In about 11 hours it will be October in my time zone. October has always been my favorite month. I enjoy fall in general. I've always preferred cool weather; there is something brisk and energetic about fall weather. I enjoy the changing of the leaves, watching them fall, and hearing them rustle in the wind. On top of all of this, October is also my birth month! So hands down, October is my favorite month.

School is progressing well. My class projects are starting to shape up so soon there will be lots of work to do.

A major distraction to my work will soon be coming up though. On October 21st, Railroad Tycoon 3 will be released. I'm sure to be tempted by this game...

School started back on Wednesday. Nothing else too exciting going on. Maybe I'll post my schedule at some point.

Ryan's wedding was fun. All of my former 200B roommates, save J.D., were able to make it. Additionally some of my other friends from college-Phil Summers, Brad Strobel, and Rob Lenny(sp?)-were there.

I went down there late Thursday evening and hung out with Brent, Kyle, and Ryan at Ryan's apartment. I had to come back to Urbana Friday morning to finish up some grading from CS 321; so I left when Ryan left work. I met up with Kyle and Brent in Indianapolis on Friday afternoon.

Kyle, Brent, and I had planned to stay at Ryan's apartment Friday evening; however, he got a bit carried away at the rehersal dinner and ended up inviting a total of 12 people to stay overnight at his tiny apartment. So Kyle, Brent, and I ended up staying at a hotel near Ryan's apartment in Bedford, Indiana.

The wedding itself was at the United Methodist Church in Paoli; the reception was about 15 miles north of Paoli at the First Baptist Church in Mitchell, Indiana. After that we all drove back to Paoli and then 40 miles to Louisville, Kentucky for another reception.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. I've posted some photographs from the wedding on the 200B website.

Additionally, the trash mess outside of my apartment has been cleaned up! Excellent.

Well the trash problem has gotten worse. Now a bicycle has appeared amongst the ever-growing heap of trash.

I know most of this trash is coming from people in 1010 West Stoughton; however, the 1010 West Stoughton dumpsters are nearly completely empty!

I can only hope trash day comes soon.

Well it's my favorite time of the semester again: the time where I get to spend hours on end grading exams! After having to spend two hours watching students take an exam on Saturday afternoon, I spent hours over the next day and a half grading, and I'm still not done. Fun, fun, fun!

I took a short break this morning to finish the project of adding all of my websites into my new website management software. KentuckyRoads.com and 200b.org are now completely integrated into my new software tool. I've also updated the design of the 200B website. I decided to play around with CSS some more; specifically, I've tried out the float attribute. It's behavior seems a little funky, but I used to make the navigation menu on the 200B website.

Speaking of 200B, Ryan will be getting married this coming Saturday. I'm gonna make the trip to Paoli on US 150. I live two blocks from US 150 here in Urbana, Paoli is on US 150, and Louisville, the location of the reception, is on US 150. I should see some nice Indiana back roads.

The residents of the surrounding apartment who are moving in and out have managed to overflow the dumpster that is ten feet from the door to my apartment. The dumpster is intended to be used by only the resident's of my building; however, many residents of the neighboring (and much larger) building use it, and this is what happens. You can see in the background of this picture that the building next door's dumpsters aren't nearly as full. The garbage collectors will never pick up all of the trash here, and it will lie around the area for months to come. Oh well, college towns are cesspools.

After nearly four years of not knowing what to do with the domain name thebadplace.com, Jeff has decided to make it home to his online journal. It will now become a repository for the accounts of interesting events in his life.

So I resurected an old program I wrote back in my days at the Internet Applications Lab, stripped it down, and made this page with some of my favorite URLs. I'll probably flesh it out a bit at some point.

Hmm... I'm thinking I'll start using this page as a journal.

Nothing to interesting to say right now. Just been doing some programming.

Jeff has completed a major reorganization of his web space. This reorganization involved the moving of WebCam2000 to its own domain and the withering of the Stratoware.com domain. A couple of things have also been removed from TheBadPlace.com. For instance, Jeff's archive of school papers is no longer online.

StratoSetup and Windows Restart have also been downgraded to the status of "no longer actively maintained." Jeff might still update them in the future, but he has no plans to do so at this time.

The main part of Jeff's web space is now generated using new site management software. The software is a distant cousin of the software used to create Jeff's KentuckyRoads.com web site. This version of the software uses a collection of Perl scripts to build static HTML pages based on a MySQL database. Jeff plans to test the software, do some refactoring, and release the software at some point in the future.

One of the new features of the site is the ability to comment on "news items" such as this one. See the "view/post comments" link below for more information.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns about Jeff's website, feel free to contact him.