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My Logitech Harmony remote for my Xbox360 came in yesterday. The thing is pretty cool so far. I love the ability to set up activities (i.e. watch a movie) and have it turn on all the devices involved for me as well as setting all of the inputs and everything. The only problem is my AV receiver can receive IR signals but it doesn't seem to be working (the default is RF). I think I need to do a firmware upgrade or something.

Table Tennis came in two days ago as well. It's pretty fun.

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Spring quarter ended what seems a life time ago, yet my grades were never finalized. I was haunted by this NR (no report). Well, the deadline for submitting grades passed, which meant my professor had to individually submit every grade.

Well, it's been 5 weeks since it ended and finally.. FINALLY I can put it behind me. (not that I had any doubt that I passed all my classes)

Hi guys,

OK, finally it is here. The class mailing list had gone dead and I had to collect the emails to sent you this. The registrar's office will change the grades soon. If I hear exactly when, I will let you know, but I suppose within this week the NRs will go away.

The following are the grades. I think was a little nicer with the cutoffs here than for the tentative grades I had sent before the finals. Thirty two students got A grades, and 56 were at B or above? - Damn, what was I thinking? :-)

(names removed) finished at the top. Special mentions go to (names removed) etc for making big jumps with the final exams to raise their grades. [my name wasn't listed, but I recorded a 29% increase or 3 letter grades, lol]

Sorry for the delays, again.

Jay

My final grade ended up being a B. So...

Thermodynamics - C
Modelling and blah blah - B
Earth's Atmosphere - A

Not bad. Summer school starts in two weeks though. :o

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Eight months ago the unthinkable happened to someone with such a long streak of bad luck as me. I won something. It was a contest put on by my favorite drink company, Pepsico, specifically the Mountain Dew division. I initially wanted to enter points just to get a sweatshirt and beanie, but when I entered one of the drawings (every10minutes) my name appeared on the winners list. PD, Anaheim, CA.

What I won was a XBOX360 before they would be sold to the public. I ended up getting the XBOX 360 the day before launch, but had already made preparations weeks before to sell it. I did sell it, for nearly 900 dollars. With the money, I upgraded my computer and bought my Dell 2005FPW lcd.

Things were going great until a month ago I decided to give Windows Media Center Edition 2005 a try. It was great, my computer became some kind of media headquarters. I was watching, pausing, recording TV. The only thing missing was... well, the TV. So I did a little reading on The Green Button and found out that I could add media extenders that would basically extend your media center to a television (duh).

It turns out the XBOX 360 can act as a media extender and when I tried to play GRAW on my computer with mediocre results (if 10fps can be considered mediocre), I convinced myself it was time to go full circle. My first XBOX3 60 allowed me to build my current computer and now my current computer was the reason I would be buying my second XBOX 360.

I ordered the Xbox $360 from Overstock for 360, but thanks to a heads up from Sam of this deal (remember what I said about my bad luck??) I was able to call in after an unsuccessful live chat and the nice lady credited me with 45 dollars to my Overstock account. I'll probably get a second controller. :nikko:

Set Up

Setting up the XBOX 360 was ridiculously easy. I basically just followed the directions to hook it up to my TV (1080i :yum and ran an ethernet cable from my router to the Xbox. Then I went to http://www.xbox.com/pcsetup per instructions and downloaded a small file. I ran the file and it connected to my Xbox. When I walked out to the living room I was surprised and excited to be greeted with the Media Center menu that I had grown accustomed to.

It looks and feels exactly like it does on my PC. The remote lags just a little bit, but everything is really responsive. The first test was to watch live and recorded TV and everything performed exactly like it does on my PC. I could pause, rewind, fast forward, set up schedules to record stuff (Like Wheel of Fortune for my mom! :p )

They wanted to see pictures from my sister's wedding so I started a slideshow with the full resolution images streaming from my computer. Viewing the files at 1080i is simply amazing compared to the s-video cable I used to run to the TV. The slideshow didn't lag at all even though it was being streamed from the PC.

Other Media: Transcode 360

Of course, TV is only half the battle. Media Center also allows you to listen to your music (works just like from Windows MCE) and movies. The problem, however, is that the extender does not support DivX, Xvid, etc. codecs, which means you're SOL if you want to play back your legally backed up DVDs... or are you?

Luckily, someone has come up with a solution. Transcode 360. Basically what it does is it converts the divx files to wmv faster than real time and then streams the file to the Xbox360 (extender) where it plays. After trying it on about 3-4 movies, I'm pretty satisfied. The movies look great on the TV, especially a high definition DVD that I happened to have.

Transcode 360 is able to transcode most media formats, but Windows Media Center doesn't recognize all formats as video files (.mov, mp4, etc.. I stumbled upon a registry hack that fixes all of that too.

1. Open Regedit
2. Expand HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
3. Find the extension you want WMCE to recognize as a video file
4. Add a string value to that entry called "PerceivedType"
5. Set the value to "video"

Games

Oh yeah, those. :p I only have GRAW (free!) right now, but I've played a bunch of games in the Arcade and they're pretty fun. I ordered Rockstar's Table Tennis (32 shipped from Outpost) which should be here in a day, and Burnout Revenge (17 shipped from eBay, I had some money in my Paypal acct) so that should keep me occupied for a while. Of course I got a subscription to Xbox Live and some marketplace points as well.

I also have a Harmony Xbox 360 remote coming in soon I hope

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I bought my Sigma 8mm f/4 EX Fisheye lens a couple of months ago (about 5 or 6) to dabble in some panoramas but ran into some bad luck (mainly the fact that my tripod was stolen from my car ). When things finally settled down I was the new owner of a Feisol carbon fiber tripod with giottos 3-way pan head (not baller enough for a ball head yet!)

It took me a couple weeks to talk myself into purchasing a carbon-fiber tripod. I've gotten over that whole impulse buying thing, thankfully, but by the time I splurged on a new tripod I was deep into Spring quarter and Thermodynamics. So I put panoramas on hold and gave the 8mm some regular usage and I liked it a lot, but the time for Panos has returned!

I shot a wedding on the 25th and gave shooting panos a whirl. The basic gist of it is I'm using my 20D w/ 8mm fisheye in portrait mode which gives me ~170 degrees up and down and about 67 degrees left to right, so I form the cylinder by rotating the camera around the nodal point (phiosaurus pano head! lol) and then cap it off with an up and down shot, which I forgot all about. I blame it on all that time off, I swear!

Anyway, I constructed the panoramas using PTGui and put the quicktime files together using a program called PanoCube Plus.

I'll probably go a little more in depth with making panoramas in a video tutorial or article or something later, after I get better at it.

Regular Pano

360-180 pano

It's a small world after all.

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My third year in college ended three weeks ago. Well, it should've ended three weeks ago. I was enrolled in three classes, which made my finals week cram much less stressful. I made notecards as usual, went to all my review sessions and finished all three finals. I did well, at least I felt like I did well walking away from all of them but one.

Thermodynamics. It was kind of like nightmare, haunting me. I had dropped it a year ago because I wanted to get on Dean's list (which I did get on). This quarter, there would be no Dean's List. I knew that. I was just trying to get a D anyway.

He based the test on the homework, so I studied my printed out solutions for a couple hours. I was one of the last ones to get the exam, he ran out on my row. It's always the anticipation that kills me. When I'm taking the test, I'm not nervous or anything but those moments before the test when you have all those equations, theory, problems running through your mind are a killer. I finally got the exam and poof. Blank. By my calculations I needed a 20/40 on the final to get a D in the class. When I handed it in 2 hours later I was hoping for a D-.

A week later, the unthinkable happened. My thermo professor decided it'd be a good idea to make the midterm worth nothing and make the final worth 90% of the grade. Gee, if I had known that maybe I would've tried a little harder.

It ended up working in my favor though because he curved the class a little bit which helped me (look at the pitiful means on some of those tests )

I ended up with a C in the class and with only two grades a mystery I was feeling pretty good. I had an A+ going into my ESS55 class and a C+ going into my CEE110 class, so things were all good...

And then grades came out.

Uh.. NR? Great. Thanks to Loc's advice, I checked which professors were late with turning in their grades. Ok, no error on my final or anything. It turns out he didn't turn in grades for anybody.

Hi guys,

Many of you may have seen that you all got NR ("No report") grades for CEE110 for now. Well, I couldn't do anything about finalizing the grades as Lawrence made a booboo and forgot to attach the spreadsheet to me in his email on Tuesday and seems to be still away from his email (I wonder where he went on vacation - like in some remote corner of North Dakota or something? -- he still has not seen my urgent emails in the last 4-5 days). So I do not have the grades for the final homework. Inadvertant mistake by him, as he did email me well on time, on Tuesday. I immediately replied that the attachment was missing, but he must have juiist dashed out on vacation or something.

Anyway, I informed the registrar's office that I will finalize the grades and submit as soon as I hear from Lawrence.

If any of you see Lawrence anywhere, please tie him up and take him to a computer, please .. Sorry folks, I don't know what we can do for now; but I am sure we will hear from Lawrence soon, and I will email you the grades.

Jay

Hi folks,

I had emails asking if the NR grades will automatically turn to F and all that. No, don't worry; this is not due to your fault, so none of you will have any problems.

I did hear from Lawrence yesterday. He is coming back to town only by July 9th. Will try to see if there is anyway to get this done before that ( because it turns out that we will have to fill up 88 individual grade change sheets after July 7th .. Horror for us!) ..

But, it will be done at least by the end of the July 10th week. Regardless of when it gets done, none of you will be running into any trouble. If any of you need a letter from me for any urgent reasons (GPA for scholarship/financial loans etc), let me know.

Regards,

Dr. Jay

I then get these two e-mails. Horror! It's July 7th today.

Part of me hopes the grades don't show up today. Part of me hopes that someone has to fill out eighty eight grade sheets. The quarter was supposed to end three weeks ago. What's another couple of days now?

UPDATE! It's 8:23PM right now. I haven't received any e-mails or indication that the grades have been filed, which means that somebody has to fill out 88 individual grade sheets. Let's hope mine is on the top of the pile.

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