Well, I finished up my second year at UF this past Thursday. Fortunately, my three exams went pretty well so it felt good ending on a high note! I’ve spent the past couple days cleaning up the apartment for the summer and getting ready to head back to Orlando. Katie, my older sister, is graduating tomorrow from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with a degree in Spanish! Seems kind of weird to think that she is done with college and I’m about half way! Time is just flying by! Now that its summer, its time to start working again! FINALLY!...

UPDATE: Turns out the blank text messages I have been receiving are because of some updates that T-Mobile has recently done to their voice mail system. Apparently, the iPhone now interprets the information from T-Mobile about the voice mail status as blank text messages. Its a little annoying I guess but I can live with it since I have an unlocked phone and I don’t pay crazy fees to AT&T every month. If you want to read more about the problem, you can read this thread over at hackint0sh.org This morning I received a blank text message on my iPhone!...

I’ve had my Gmail account for about 4 years now and so I get a decent amount of spam. My address has been around long enough and used to sign up for various things that I average about 50 spam messages a day. Fortunately, Gmail does an excellent job of filtering the spam so I don’t ever have to look at it. I was deleting the spam though and noticed this message. Quite an elobrate message and strange to see the effort that someone went to making this: Mrs. Ruth Madoff West, Liverpool, London. My Great Compliments, I’m Mrs. Ruth Madoff, 67, wife...

As a part of our Circuits 1 Lab we had to develop a final project. My partner and I successfully built an infrared tranmitter and receiverthat would toggle an LED light on the receiver board. Doesn’t seem like a whole lot but it was definitely an interesting circuits project to build. I figured I ‘d post a picture here since this is the first major circuit project of the many projects ahead during my career as an electrical engineer. It was a bit messy but it worked fairly well.

I personally enjoy cooking a fair amount. Nothing hits the spot quite like a nicely cooked meal to help alleviate the stresses of the college lifestyle. Naturally, if one eats a lot of crappy food then they will start to feel crappy so I make sure to cook myself a number of good meals each week. I enjoy cooking a lot of different meats but am a little limited so I don’t have a grill. I really wish I had a big grill to cook steaks and grill fish on but I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get a house of my own. Even though I don’t have...

I woke up extra early this morning (aka 9:30AM…I love being a college student) to buy tickets to the U2 concert in Tampa! Now I don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend so I was hoping to get tickets for one of the upper levels where I would still get a good view. I refreshed the Ticketmaster page at 10AM on the dot and the ordering form appeared instantly. I did a search for tickets in the $55 price range and it offered general admission tickets on the field. I didn’t really want these tickets since I wanted a guaranteed seat since I probably...

Windows 7 should be coming out sometime this year from what I’ve read on various technology blogs and because of that I am extremely excited! I have been running the Windows 7 Public Beta on my HP dv6000 laptop for a few months now and I’m loving it! I have found that it is considerably faster than Vista in a number of ways. It boots up faster, switches users faster and browses files a whole lot faster. Now I know its not a whole lot to be excited about, but the main thing that has made me the happiest is faster network browsing! Yes, I know,...

The alliteration in the title of this post says it all…sort of. I am in the market for a car and have been keeping tabs on Craigslist for the past month. I probably won’t actually buy a car until after the summer or even November but I am still looking around and getting a feel for prices. The point is, please post pictures of cars that you are selling! I have seen so many Craigslist postings where people are trying to sell a car for thousands of dollars but can’t even manage to post pictures! If someone is going to make a large purchase...

Thunderstorms are amazing to watch and listen to. Fortunately, living in Florida, I get to see and experience a good number of these every year! The shear power of these storms is incredible and the way they develop is amazing. Lightning is also a rather remarkable phenomenon that is just unbelievable. Did you know that lightning can reach temperatures of 50000 degrees Fahrenheit? That is four times the temperature on the surface of the SUN! It is rather incredible to think that people get struck by lightning and still survive somehow. The loud trickle of...

I have always been a pretty good worker and good at getting things done. I always get things done in time and don’t have any trouble getting my homework done by the due date. Recently, I have been rather unproductive. I still get all my work done but I’ve become pretty good at wasting away time sitting on the computer. I’ve always read on Lifehacker about the various things that people do in order to get things done. You can read about the various methods here if you want. I love reading the things posted on Lifehacker everyday. I have started...