EPKPhoto's Tidbits

The quarter keeps chugging along here at RIT. As usual, things continue to get busier as we get closer to finals week. Earlier today I met with three of RIT's trustees to discuss the Honors Program with a small group of other upper class honors students. We described a wide range of topics from the program's benefits to its shortcomings to see if the trustees should invest their time to push it to the forefront of RIT's agenda. I came away from the meeting with an improved understanding of how the trustees operate and their perceptive personalities. In other areas of the blogosphere, Blog Action Day has been underway. To that end, I'm closing this post by reminding you to read up on my history of ethanol articles. It seems I don't post my thoughts on the environment often enough, so I'll try harder in the future!

After weeks of waiting, you can now see the photos I took during this year's RIT Honors Program Freshman Orientation on my website. In my typical fashion, I have posted a ton of photos (349 to be exact) instead of whittling them down to the best of the best. For those of you who participated in the events, there's a good chance you're in a few of them. Enjoy the galleries, and let me know if you want digital copies of any of the photos.

I'm a bit overdue for a new photo gallery on the site, so I took some photos at the RIT Honors Fall Picnic this past Sunday. Big Dave helped by snatching my camera for a few shots…so try to guess which are his :). Another tidbit for those who care, I recently added text messaging to my cell phone plan, so feel free to flood my number with texts. If you need my cell #, it's listed on my contact page.

Classes have been in session here at RIT for a week now. Tim and I moved in without any major issues. I'm actually impressed at how well we fit into our apartment. Honors Freshmen Orientation also went well…and gave me way too many new names to remember. They're a cool bunch, though (any freshmen reading this?). Now its back to the old game of juggling classwork, honors work, ITS work, and crazy-college-random-fun :). Week 1 went smoothly, so I think I'm up for the challenge. Now I just have to get around to posting all those orientation photos that are still unedited.

Summer flew by as usual.  Here's a quick note to let people know I'm heading back to Rochester tomorrow.  I'm still packing and preparing for the day on the road.  I'm excited to see everybody at RIT again, especially since classes don't start for another two weeks.  After I write this, the computer is the next thing to be packed…so if you need to get a hold of me, I advise calling my cell.

I'm finally back home in Virginia, and I just posted a gallery of miscellaneous photos from RIT during this past spring quarter. The photos include people sliding in the mud after a rainy spring day, playing Kan-Jam outside Baker, getting food from The Commons, experimenting with a cheap airplane from Sol's, and discovering the illuminating properties of lava lamps. I am really looking forward to editing the photos I took in West Virginia. Some turned out quite well, so there's something to look forward to!

RIT's spring quarter ended this past week…a time that brings feelings of both happiness for classes ending, and sadness for friends separating. I certainly felt that combination of emotions. Yesterday, I left RIT with my father to travel to West Virginia. Here I am currently staying in the beautiful home of my great aunt and uncle while we work on some renovations of the Princeton, WV house of my grandfather, who passed away a few weeks ago. My mother traveled to meet us earlier today and drove up my new (used) car for me to see for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven't updated in a while, so nothing has been said about my spring break and the beginning of this spring quarter. I went to Washington, DC with some other students during the break, and I'll be sure to describe that more when I post the photos of the trip. In the meantime, I thought I would just mention that this quarter is off to a good start and could go many directions. I have an excellent set of interesting classes, so I can only hope for the best and keep up with the work to get the most out of them. While you have nothing else to do, feel free to check out a couple bug reports I filed on the Linux kernel in Ubuntu Feisty and Fedora 7 (I know, thrilling ;)). You can find them at Ubuntu's Launchpad and RedHat's Bugzilla.

I have been trying to balance studying for exams and work on final assignments with free time and playing in the new snow that has fallen :). I just wanted to put up a quick post since I have been spending quite a bit of time in my test install of Fedora 7. In the recent couple weeks, it has begun to look like Fedora's next release (though delayed a few weeks) will be much more of an improvement than Ubuntu's next release. This excites me since I have been a Fedora fan since the Core 2 release. To tease you, I thought I should post a couple screenshots from Parallels of the new graphics that recently were added to the development repositories. Take a look after the break.
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As the quarter is nearing its end, things have been quite busy. No need to talk much about that, though. I'd rather mention that the weather forecast is finally showing some temperatures above freezing within this next week here in Rochester. We have had solid packed snow on all the walkways across campus since it has been too cold to melt anything. That may change quite soon :). Also, I am going to the hockey game tonight against Mercyhurst. It is RIT's last home hockey game of the season. Last night's game was an exciting win from what I heard, so I hope tonight's game lives up to that standard. Read on for Parallels and Linux comments.

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