The age-old question “What’s inside shazow’s head?!” has been answered: It is, indeed, a brain. And a vitam E pill taped to the left side of my forehead. No, I don’t have a fragment of my nose growing on the back of my head, it just got a bit cut off in the image. Aren’t my insides sexy? You’d do them. I know you would.

More pictures here: /files/photos/20060125 fMRI/

All of this brainy beauty is under the Creative Commons license — go wild.

So, how was the fMRI? Some was what you’d expect from watching too much TV, other parts were not. For one, it does make those weird sounds when scans are in progress. Not sure why (all those magnetic waves interfering with the atmosphere, making the molecules go berserk, thus producing noise?). Aside from different types of (really loud) noises (presumably depending on the type of scan), there was a faint chirping-like noise in the ambience the entire time.

The scan took just under an hour (I’m guessing 45~50 minutes, I wasn’t timing it). That included an anatomical scan, as well as a bunch of speech-related tests and other scans. That’s almost an hour of being unable to move in a very crampy plastic tunnel with loud noises. Fun (it kind of was).

So, it’s giant magnet, yes. But apparently the magnetism can be localized to different parts of the MRI tunnel (is there a more technical term?), and that was confirmed because my metal pants-zipper didn’t even twitch (while I was asked to remove my hoodie due to its zipper).

What’s more? I had to wear insulated headphones. Not sure if there’s an actual speaker inside the tunnel like we often see in movies, but all the instructions I heard were from the headphones. Don’t know what else to mention, questions are welcome.

The coolest part of this whole ordeal? The Windows-only (turns out there are Linux ports) scan-reading program (MRIcro) ran flawlessly under Wine. Go Linux.

How not to ask for help (#gentoo @ irc.freenode.net):

[02:02:46] <roRisc> help. upgraded from 2.6.12 to 2.6.14, and X dies

[02:02:49] <roRisc> at startup

[02:02:55] <shazow> roRisc: how does it die? error?

[02:03:06] <roRisc> shazow, yes. error.

[02:03:13] <shazow> roRisc: and the error is…

[02:03:13] <mat_b[home]> haha

[02:03:26] <roRisc> shazow, something that doesn’t make much sense…

[02:03:32] <shazow> roRisc: oh, thanks.

[02:03:34] <mat_b[home]> lmao

!!!

I got my first 90, hoorah! This puts me ahead of schedule in operation improve-my-cgpa. The plan was to get all marks above 70 this semester (achieved) and at least one mark in the 80’s (achieved). Then I was supposed to go for another one or two 80’s this semester, and then finally go for a 90 in my final year. Well, now the bar has been raised and I have no choice but to try even harder. :’-(

I learned one important lesson this semester: More remarks = more marks.
CSC324 - 90% - 4 remarks (2 assignment remarks + 2 midterm remarks)
CSC343 - 80% - 2 remarks (1 assignment remark, 1 midterm remark)
And the rest of the 70’s have no remarks (except my highest 70 which might get one exam remark, depending on whether the Professor is going round my mark one percent up).

I passed my Operating Systems course (with a modest 74%), and as promised, I’ll release a sexy gzipped archive of the shazow.net CMS source (under the GNU GPL license) sometime next week (when I have time to strip it of any hardcoded stuff). Along with that, depending how my course load goes, I’ll go on to develop a new module (you’ll see) and a couple of improvements to the current UI module.

Stay tuned (or something).

My preliminary schedule for the coming semester has been updated: /files/school/schedule3s.html

I’ll be dropping one course from that selection, most likely CSC318 on tuesday nights, so I’ll have tuesdays off (not that it will accomplish much, I’ll probably still come down to campus).

My fate for Operating Systems will be announced any day now. If things don’t go well, I may waste ~$700 and take some courses during the summer. Conveniently, my expenditures for the previous year have been very limited, so I already have enough money saved up for next year’s tuition. So, worst case, I can forego working full time in the summer (yet again) and concentrate on school and a couple of side projects to pay for my expensive lifestyle of weekly restaurant-eating.

Here’s a brief summary of my accomplishments for this winter break:

• Built two computers (for my relatives and parents of the significant other).
  Lesson learned: Latest NForce4 chipset motherboards don’t work with the latest Maxtor SATA2 hard drives.
• Played a fair amount of WarCraft 3 (mostly the Dota Allstars map).
  This is good in that I haven’t played a single game of anything since summer-time.
• Started another project which will never be fininshed. Named FeedNoodler (for now), it’s going to be an improved web-based RSS feed reader. It’s being co-developed by Hyfen (of doom). If you want to contribute somehow for some reason, you may contribute to the FeedNoodler Wiki, such as by adding to the Wishlist.

Possible plans for the future?

Something needs to be done with shazow.net. Right now it’s at that stage where it works well enough for it to be a shame to abandon, but not complete enough to do all the fancy things I’d like to do. One option is to migrate to an existing blog system like WordPress. By the likes of Maria, this action would be considered a sell-out. I agree with her.
So, I decided, if the OS/161 gods bless me with a passing mark, then I’ll opensource the shazow.net codebase and start on rewriting the core node-handling system into something more powerful and secure so that other people can start on writing nice modules for me to use.

Lastly, I want to mention good things about my fantastic host, DreamHost (referrer-enabled link).
They recently upgraded their services and features 4 to 8-fold. Their basic service, for example (the one I’m using), was upgraded to a ridiculous 20 GB of disk space and 1 TB monthly transfer cap. This is, as they said, jawdropping. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a new host. Now, I just need to find of a good way to waste all that space. :D