USF Architecture is Sweeeeet!

I just finished touring what will be my studio space for this semester and it looks great. By the number of desks, there should be around 16 students in the class, a great number compared to some of my past classes. I also took a peak in some of the other rooms. The wood shop looks cool with a bunch of different tools and next door, the computer lab is brand new with big monitors and fast computers. I can't wait for class to start!

Weekly Update 7/6/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I haven't heard back from any more companies on sponsorships. I did follow up with a guy from thermaltake so hopefully I'll have banners up soon for them. I'll post another picture of my LAN Party surprise tomorrow.

The LAN Party Initiative
I'm going to get a Counter-Strike: Source and a Half-life2: Deathmatch server for our group soon. East coast Source servers are still backorder at gameservers.com. These server cost money to run so consider using these options to support it. To raise addtional funds I'm going to sell reserved slots for $3 dollars (good for a spot on each server) or add $3 dollars more and get some admin privileges such as setting the map rotation. Discuss this more over here

Inside LAN-O-THON
I bought a hard drive to setup freebsd on so this week I'll start working on my server guide.

MCD Portal (the CMS I'm writing)

The CMS I'm writing is coming right along. I got the display block system setup and now I'm starting work on the first module- Users which is probably the most critical as it controls user registration, login and who has access to what and I started laying out the database setup for it. The first subcomponent I'm have to tackle is the ACL (access control list). the ACL is the bit of code that detrimes whether not a user has permission to access a component and will allow me to grant indivual users the rights to somethings like add news articles but not others like delete those articles. I've never used such an advanced ACL setup like this but I'm using the ACL componet of the Zend Framework so going to be fairly easy I hope. My goal is to have a working site by the end of July. The next module is news and then search and then I would like to work on recreating all that ALP can do using my new cms.

Personal
My parents family room remodeling project is getting closer to being done. The walls were painted and the floor got tiled this week but we are still waiting on the trim, finish electrical and windows to replace the old ones. I can't wait to be done baby sitting this project so I can work on other things.

My dad took off work today so he could finally clean and prep the sailboat he bought used a few months ago. He's been so busy that we've haven't gone sailing on yet and it's just been sitting in storage so I'm glad the boat's getting one step closer to being sailable. The picture left is the only picture of the boat I have at the moment. Its from the sales listing so I have no idea who the guy on the boat is. I'll try and remember to take a new picture tomorrow.

A Fish in a Coffee Pot

My fish tried to stage a jail break so I had to find a place to put him till I could buy a new bowl. It just by happened that the spare coffee pot was about the right size. This is starting to sound like something from a Dr. Seuss book. It's hard to see the break in the little picture but the break is on the very front towards the bottom.

(Ok, I fess up, my fish ain't smart enough to do it on his own, I broke the bowl while I was cleaning it)

Electricity is Great!

The reason I didn't have electricity

My home in Orlando is under going some renovations and today the electrical contractor upgraded our electrical panel, meter and weather head (that part where the powerline from the street comes to the house) but it meant that power was disconnected for seven hours. Seven hours without air conditioning during the middle of summer in Florida is loads of fun. I knew that today was the day but I still stayed up too late last night and planned to sleep in but I woke at 8:38 to the sound of my uninterrupted power supplies beeping that the power was out and had to get up and shut down all of my machines (and stop that insane beeping noise). The upgrades took only a few hours to install but then I had to wait for the city's inspector to check off on it. The inspector came an hour late but he said everything great and called OUC (our power company) to grant them permission to reconnect the power. OUC was like an hour and a half late but finally it all got done, the master switch was flicked and the air conditioner never felt better when it kicked on.

I got into the SACD

Well for those who haven't heard yet, I got accepted into the Masters of Architecture program at USF's School of Architecture and Community Design. I turned in my letter and signed up for classes. I had to wait almost three months to hear anything. Its nice to know that my dream is one step closer to coming true.

My favorite LAN Party Game

If you look at the pictures of my past events, it is easy to tell what my favorite game is: Half-life 2: Deathmatch.

The game is cheap to buy on Steam (it is only $9.99) and its also available as part of Valve's Temporary Tournament Steam Accounts if you wish to provide the game free at your event. It is relatively easy to learn and the gaming action is non stop. If you die, you respawn in a couple of seconds rather than have to wait till the next round starts like in Counter-Strike. It is great fun to yell at the person who just threw a radiator at you only to return the favor a few seconds later. It can get to be very competitive as the final seconds of the round approach and there is a three way tie going on only to be broken by the guy sitting next to you. For veterans, there are plenty of great community maps to play on. My only grip is that the game doesn't have any bots for n00bs to play against or fill servers with when there is only one player is on the server. This game has been the center of most of my LAN Parties because of the number of people who enjoy playing it. You can't beet the fun of creaming the next to with a toilet or making someone fly with the RPG.

Over all this is the one game I will always host at my events.

Cool Color Tools

When I was working on the skin for this blog, I found some cool color tools...

• Colorjack Studio an interactive color picker
  
• this one generates a color scheme form a picture but i didn't like what it came up with 1 & 2
• this one finds related colors

btw. an even better skin is in the works.