Back To Normal Life
Frosh week turned out very well. I'm extremely tired and glad to have life get back to the normal flow of things. On the other hand, a schedule as busy as last week's does have a certain appeal to it. I made sure to save the Yukon's OnStar number so that I can prank call the rental truck frequently.

Course-wise, I can see that some courses will be crazily hard or keep me crazily busy. I'm looking forward to Electronic Materials as well as Integrated Circuit Design & Fabrication, and maybe the Music elective I'm taking, though I haven't had the first class of that yet. The two Systems courses are much less exciting.

On the EngSoc side, fantastic improvements have been made to how EngSoc can handle wireless connections via WPA with user-specific certificates. I've gotten wpa_supplicant to work smoothly, meaning that it should be a lot more sane getting a wireless connection with the laptop. It should also be hugely beneficial to Windows users, who can just double-click on the certificate file to connect. Finally, it should allow a properly configured access point to be plugged in anywhere and just work against our server, which saves a lot of cabling.

On a side note, we now officially have the coolest fridge hack. Over the weekend, the temperature-sensing circuitry died (though the individual components on the PCB appear to work), and the fridge was getting very warm. As a temporary fix, my dad rigged the compressor into an always-on configuration, and the whole thing is plugged into an X-10 appliance cube. Our NetWinder cron daemon now controls the fridge from the basement; less on-time in the evening, more during the day. Who needs a computer inside the fridge anyway?!