You would think that when conducting an interview of someone, particularly to record their account of events in history, and in this case the Civil Rights Movement, you would go through the trouble to make sure your recording is of at the very least, decent quality, right? After all, what good is listening to someone voice their entire experience to you if it’s difficult to hear and sometimes impossible to understand? It’s not good at all! In fact, if anything it is an insult to the person you’re interviewing and a clear waste of their time! (more…)

Recently I’ve been reading the Business Journal, starting with this article on pay-per-tweets. Another article that grabbed my attention was the report that
EBay CEO is ‘cautiously optimistic’. I go into more detail at my fast growing repository… [insert sarcasm].

I don’t have anything against cartoons, or some of the weird or bizarre messages they might try to send (hey there Disney), after all, every single one of us grew up with our own assortment of televised friends, right? Well, Johnny Test made some very disturbing parallels to the military in the episode that aired at 1800 on Cartoon Network today. (more…)

I find it tragically ironic that the events that have taken place today have occurred while I have been working in my college library to preserve historical documents from the 1960’s Civil Rights Era. Earlier, I came across a few documents I wanted to share, specifically to talk about the change (or the lack of) in America. I suppose it is only an eerie coincidence that while I pondered this article, I came home to find news of the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. on my television.

I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and the Holocaust Museum in Israel. I have been to Auschwitz and other concentration camps in Poland. Sometimes the memories of these places will creep up on me, but I honestly cannot describe any of them to anyone who doesn’t really understand. The only word I have to sum up my feelings for all these places is simply shoes. If you do not understand I’m sorry – I can’t help you. In any respect, I have been deeply vested in the history these monuments represent (because they are historical monuments), and that the museum in Washington D.C. was attacked by a hate-filled gunman is just horrifying.

Even more tragic, is the death of one of the security guards of the museum. 39-year-old Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns was reportedly killed by the gunman before other guards heroically returned fire. The gunman is still alive, who was identified as James Von Brunn – and guess what? He wrote a book. (now where have I heard that one before?) Sorry, I will not be posting links to his website, his book, or any other affiliations he might have like all the 24 hour news networks have been advertising (I wonder if his death was a marketing ploy…). James Von Brunn is still in the hospital in critical condition last I heard.

So who was oh, right (too soon), I mean “is” James Von Brunn? I have no idea, but apparently he was sentenced in 1983 to more than four years in prison. His non-white-supremest reason was to attempt to kidnap the Federal Reserve Board with a gun, knife and sawed-off shotgun. I guess in his old age those weapons get a little heavy (he was carrying a .22 rifle at the age of 88 when he attacked the museum today). Since then, he’s moved on from complaining about interest rates to strongly supporting his cause of white supremacy. (more…)

The iPhone 3GS is well on it’s way, and guess what? It’s the same price as the original iPhone 3G!* Even better, the iPhone 3G was knocked down to $99!!

Oh, you did see the asterisk? Hmm.. damn, I was hoping you would just take it as a typo. Alright! Fine! If you insist, here it is: *If you’re a new AT&T customer… (more…)

Going through my epic stake in the world wide web and definitely needed to change my glorious wordpress theme to something less trivial. This is simple, I love it, the colors need a little work, navigation needed to change, but all an all I think this will be okay. Stand by for another stream of uninteresting and spacious content that will trickle in when I have the time to post it. (Don’t hold you’re breath…)

Using the brand new Internet Explorer 8 (because that is the only version I have on this machine), I immediately noticed the pretty dotted black borders appearing over elements that were being “clicked on”. The real term is focus, but that’s too proper. Anyway, it is exciting that Internet Explorer is supporting :focus for CSS, but I find the outline it creates obtrusive by default. The way to get rid of this is to add the following to your css:

div:focus { outline: none; }

Just thought that was interesting that other elements besides images were being given a default outline value. Maybe they thought it would be a good idea. with the increase in multifunction interfaces. to make it easier to interact with a website, or track your interaction (ie. using tab to navigate a page).

The following are my classes for the Spring 2009 Semester:

CSA 283 – Data Communications & Network with Ms. Laurena A. Werner
CSA 464 – Algorithms with Dr. John E. Karro
LAS 208 – Latin American Civilization with Dr. Paula Gandara
NSC 411 – Amphibious Warfare with Major Murray
STA 368 – Introduction To Statistics with Dr. John H. Skillings

So far I have had the Statistics, Latin American Studies, Naval Science, and Networking, and today it’ll be round one for Algorithms. Unfortunately I have to go to Statistics in half an hour, but I thought I’d squeeze this post out before leaving. I still have a long way to go in organizing my work from last semester onto here. I might really half-ass uploading the notes from Databases since they’re really annoying to convert from OneNote to HTML. I’m going to go work out today, though my arms are sore from pull ups at PT yesterday morning, and hopefully get a lot more uploaded before going to Algorithms this afternoon.

The rest of these notes are going to look messed up. Yeah, sorry but if you want the full version, you can find the OneNote package here. The notes being posted here are just to help search through the notebook without having to download it first. (more…)

As with all the other notes, the full package is available here. Otherwise, the rest of this article includes the first set of notes which cover the Basic Concepts of Database Systems and include some of the definitions that were likely to show up on the first exam. These are word for word of what Dr. Uckan wrote on the board. (more…)