So I guess school projects can be interesting… especially when they lead to random wanderings around the internet. For my Operating Systems class I’m doing a group research project on distributed computing. SETI@Home is probably the most common example. Anyway, the topic itself is interesting I suppose, but it also got me to wandering around the internet. Way back when I went to school in Cheraw I got a job helping maintain their Mac computer lab. Just before I moved out east, the end of my Sophomore year, I decided (with permission) to install SETI on all of the lab computers. Well, it’s been almost 5 years since I left Cheraw and I got curious about how that little endeavor ended. According to the SETI’s stats that project ended up going a LOT further than I ever would have expected. The last result submitted by “Cheraw HS” was this year!! January 28, ‘05 to be precise. Those 20 odd Macs ended up contributing 8053 hours and 34 minutes of computational time to the project! Kinda cool how that little project that I started way back when actually ended up turning into something that lasted for this long!

In other news, Goshen’s music program is awesome. Let me list out the happening of the past few weekends. Last weekend: Spring Choir concert where all 4 major choirs from Goshen performed individually and as a whole. That was just fun to be a part of. THIS weekend: Lavender Jazz gave a GREAT concert! Apparently the program has had a pretty major boost in quality this year and boy am I enjoying the change. They even played Sing, Sing, Sing… one of my favorites! Next weekend: Cantus!!! In case you don’t know, Cantus is a men’s choral group and they are great. To add to the greatness they’ll be in Sauder Hall. Ah yes, way to be Goshen. But that’s not even the best part! Later that evening Jim (our men’s choir director) has been planning a Men’s Choir bash where we have the rec fitness center reserved for dodgeball, b’ball, swimming, etc w/ the guys. He’s gonna be grilling brats in the parking lot. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea… let’s invite Cantus! And they’re actually COMING! Say what you will, but playing dodge ball w/ role models in the choral world ranks PRETTY high up there in my list of pretty great things!! So there you have it, Goshen’s music department is great… nuf’ said.

(Dodge ball the end of April with John McCutcheon?? I’ll keep you posted! )

My first week-long break from bloging, ah yes, the joys of real life. But really I have had some really awesome times in the past week and a lil. Having Beth here for the weekend was a GREAT break from the all too often slow school weekends! Talking, Chicago, movies, and even some pseudo-cooking kept us plenty busy! Oh, and the Lincoln Park Zoo is pretty awesome for being free! Now it’s just surviving 5 more weeks… 5 more weeks shouldn’t be bad right? After all of that excitement it was back to another fairly normal week. So it goes.

This past weekend was entertaining in a musical way. I got in on Danny King’s piano recital which was excellent and then the GC Drum Core which was a very pleasant surprise. Then the spring choir concert on Saturday and an early start for Chamber choir singing at Kern Road Mennonite on sunday. Anywho, things were full enough I suppose and I still had enough down-time to get in a LIL Savage.

And now for something completely different. I was looking for an online photo management/storage system I ran into a week or so ago and ended stumbling across a real gem of a web tool! It’s called fliker and it amazes me! You type in a search word or two and fliker proceeds to search the internet and display a continuous stream of related thumbnail as fast as your internet connection can keep them coming. Not to be confused with google images, this is a new, somewhat more random and much quicker to browse format that is integrated with your system clipboard (no need to visit the parent site to grab the image). There are still a few bugs (I get a security warning when I first load the site and have had it crash Firefox once or twice) but on the whole I’m real impressed with this thing. So give it a spin!

Till next time, listen to more Tommy Emmanuel and enjoy the week!