Monthly Archives: December 2005

Death of a Thumbdrive

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Well, my Sandisk mini Cruzer gave up the ghost last night. Not a bad drive though, and I’ll probably get another one someday. It lasted me a year (which seems to be a little over par for me) and it went through the washer and dryer a couple of times. I tried using it yesterday though and couldn’t get any OS to enumerate the drive, so it was more than simply a bad partition.

After verifying that neither Linux, OS X or Windows was going to verify the drive, I promptly took it apart and beat the flash chip into 4 pieces. Gotta keep that data secure since it had my private keys on it.

I still haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to buy a new one right now. I don’t honestly use it that much… I generally just stick to scp and transfer things like that back and forth. I’ll probably end up getting one after the first time I need it though… we’ll see.

Semester Grades

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My final grades for the semester came back, I didn’t do too badly, though I’m sure I could have done better had I put more effort into it. Oh well, lessons learned, profs I’ll never have to take again.

I passed all three of my PE classes:

  • Beginning Archery
  • Beginning Rifle
  • Leisure Sports

    • Both Orientation to the Social Sci and Themes in Western Civilization with one of my favorite professors at Tech came back as As. So did CyberLaw.

    History of Michigan and Historiography were both Bs, but I shouldn’t have that prof again, which I’m happy about. American Foreign Policy was a B too, though this was mainly procrastination and a lack of interst on my part. I’ve discovered that I’m far more interested in domestic politics than international. While I do enjoy the broad overviews of international politics, the details just don’t seem to engage me. It seemed as if everytime I’d work on a discussion of international relations, I’d bring the focus back to the domestic details. Oh well, perhaps International Law over the summer will go well.

    In the spring I’m scheduled for some fairly interesting classes, hopefully I can get my head into school a bit more:

  • American Constitutional Law (SS3660) – I had this prof for CyberLaw, should be interesting.
  • Social Problems (SS3710) – I’ve heard stories of Dassbach, at the least… it should be entertaining.
  • Military History of the U.S. (SS3505) – Terry Reynolds, one of my all-time favorite Tech profs.
  • First Aid/CPR (PE3985) – What? I non-0 level PE course, crazy!
  • Broomball (PE0210 L02) – Oh, yeah!
  • Techniques for Teaching Math (MA3910) – I get to learn to teach via manipulatives. Block time!
  • Speech Communication (FA2090) – The one class I’m probably going to dread.

    • Winter Break has come again

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    My third fall semester at MTU is now over. I don’t have any of my grades yet, but they should be coming in soon and I’m fairly confident. Most of my friends have left town, but I’m going to be staying for work.

    I doubt I’ll get to many customers calling, but I’m going to be putting some work into our intranet site and add a few features. Since it is written in PHP and uses a MySQL backend I’ll be learning a bit about that as well. One of my roommates has kindly loaned me a couple of O’Reilly books (SQL pocket reference, SQL in a Nutshell and Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL) which will come in handy.

    It looks like I’ll be leaving Houghton on the 23rd and driving back up on the afternoon of the 31st, straight from my cousin’s wedding reception (perhaps I’ll take the time to change clothes). I should be back by midnight though and I hear rumour of a New Year’s party at my house if anyone is interested (it will probably be BYOB and we have a couple of couches that are comfortable enough to sleep on).

    Google Adsense

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    So, as some of you may have noticed, my blog is now sporting Adsense (and has been for about a month now) , Google’s ads. I’m going text only, so hopefully it doesn’t prove to be too annoying for anyone reading this.

    I didn’t get too many clicks until December rolled around. Through today, Adsense has earned me about $15. That’s 39 ads clicked and I’m paid an average of $0.84 per click. While I’m not earning as much money as some of those people who actually live off of their Adsense revenue, it might pay the bill for my new cell phone this month, which isn’t bad in my eyes.

    Adsense was pretty easy to set up too. It took about 10 minutes to register an account and about a day later, I got a test debit to my checking account (though you can also opt for a check in the mail). Actually implement the ads on the website was pretty easy too. On this site, I just dropped a chunk of javascript into a CSS file and poof!, Google ads. On my Foamy mirror, I did have to go through and put the javascript on each page (I just mirror it for a guy, so I’m not redesigning it to use CSS, which I don’t know well enough for that task). If anyone is interested in setting it up on their site and has trouble, let me know.

    For the rest of you, have a heart, click the occassional ad and make some money for me at no cost to you.