Matt's Page

so I found a movie I had lying around on my computer -- I was playing around with lego mindstorms trying to make an "ant-like" robot that lays down a trail & follows it back somewhere. never actually did anything cool with the robot, though.

I reinstalled the OS on my work laptop. I'm now using Debian, mostly the stuff in the testing (sarge) repository. Using firefox 0.8 for web, and thunderbird 0.5 for mail. Does anyone know how to get plugins (acrobat is most important) working in thunderbird? Email me if you have any hints.

Overall, I'm really impressed with the ease of setting all this crap up, and most of the applications look great (especially after installing the MS ttf fonts package). I'm especially impressed with firefox and Rhythmbox (an iTunes clone).

Maybe tomorrow I can actually be productive again.

Got back on sunday night from a weekend staying with my roommate Tom and friends in Bangor, ME for Tom's going-away party. His dad runs a great pub where we spent a couple nights partying. We also walked around Bar Harbor, which was really nice and quaint and tide-pool-y, and we got down to Acadia National Park, where we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain (supposedly the first place to see the sunrise in the USA, at least in the summer). Acadia is one of these parks where they've (tragically) paved over the entire thing with roads and walking paths, have a summit center complete with 2 porta-potty units standing outside, and signs all over telling you to "Leave no trace" and to "Keep this delicate mountain ecosystem intact". Shoulda thought of that before you put the road there, folks.

We also invented a great game you can play with cardboard coasters at bars, which we named "Cadillac" in honor of the day's activities. Watch this space for details.

P.S. The Blogger site's new color scheme is really nice, but their page layout doesn't work so good with Mozilla 1.2 on linux.

So there's a lot of change going on through the next few months. Micaela got in to two very competitive med schools, and she'll be deciding which one she'll be spending the next four years at this week. Bluefin is moving to a new location this week, and we're interviewing candidates to replace my co-worker Than, who's going to CMU in the fall. My roommate Tom is going to Kent State in the fall, and so I get a new roommate in July. I'm beginning to think that I'm ready for a change of pace soon myself.

The good news is that I've got lots of good trips planned for the summer. Micaela and I are going down to New York City on Memorial Day weekend -- we're planning to take my grandma to the NYC Ballet. Also, it looks like my brother Dave and I might do a repeat of our bike trip from Plymouth to Provincetown that we did last summer. And in June, we're going down to Arlington VA to celebrate the retirement of our high school principal.

Anyways, I got a lot to think about, and plenty of time to think about it as people at work are frantically filling boxes.