The VT Free Culture Club and the VT ACM chapter hosted RMS at VT. Most of the thanks goes to Conley for organizing and pretty much doing all the bitch work.

My thoughts on RMS: He is the definition of a dirty hippy. Which is mostly okay by me since I am a hippy at heart, myself. Of course, there is also a downside to this, in that he is going around giving speeches and hence he quickly becomes the face of Free Software movement. The thing about a face is it needs to be attractive and it needs to put forth an air of professionalism especially since he is selling an idea to corporations. When I say this, I don't mean RMS is ugly, but he tends to carry himself as if social graces don't matter: he scratched himself on stage, he took his socks and shoes off in the middle of his speech.

It pains me to complain about these things, because I believe if a person presents a valid idea we should evaluate it even if the person is buck nekkid and picking his nose, but he is trying to sell an idea to a culture that values these things and he comes off being very ineffective at selling things to these people. (Don't hate the player hate the game).

As a speaker, he came across fairly warm, he made people chuckle a few times. I didn't agree with all his points, though. . He is a moralist in regards to software where as I am a pragmatist. He sees un-free software as evil and free software as good, where as I see it as a choice where free software represents a tool to improve collaboration (and possibly security).

The last thing to mention is his personality: while he comes across as a fairly warm speaker on a personal level he comes off as being very rude. I am not sure if it is because he doesn't understand social graces or doesn't believe in them, or maybe he just has Aspergers's Syndrome.

In undergrad I got two degrees and completed something like 200 hours of courses in 9 semesters, so how did that mess me up? Well the first thing it did was leave no time for doing research and as as a grad student your life is research. Besides getting a leg up, it's a wonderful way of experimenting with the different branches of a science. Not sure if you like data storage? Do some research in it, find you hate it and drop it in undergrad so by the time you hit your grad school you can start with both feet running. Because I was a double major I was never in one department long enough to learn about research or develop a relationship with a professor. Oh, I stood out especially in the CS department, I asked good questions, got good grades, but rightly so professors expect you to come to them about research.

I think the second thing that gimped me was arrogance. In high school I was smart enough to be bored even in the gifted classes. In public school this isn't hard, so don't immediately think I am a genius. I think I found 2 teachers tops who I felt like could answer all or nearly all the hard questions I asked. (They were both Ph D's at the part-day Governor's School). Thinking back to undergrad, I don't think I ever made a conscious decision not to seek help, it was just a habit at that point. I did get help a few times, but mostly I worked on my own or with classmates as the assignments permitted.

Help isn't useful just for the assignment you can't quite complete, it tells the professor that you give a damn and if you know the stuff anyways just go to office hours and have a chat every once in a while. Many times (especially in Physics where The Curve tends to rule the class) professors will be kinder in grading to the students who ask for help. If you talk enough you'll hear about his research and maybe find something interesting to work on.

Found this little beauty while reading through some blogs. It's basically all about how the evil evolutionists are corrupting our children and forcing them to learn lies. *cough*YEAH RIGHT!.

Even though I grew up around this sort of thing it is so intellectually alien to me. Besides not accepting evolution, which I can understand if you don't have the scientific background for it. I just don't understand why people feel the need to convert by fear. I have always believed that conversion to or from religion can only come via internal means. This is probably why I have always found proselytizing so vulgar.

As an aside my goal tonight is to actually write about my undergrad career as I said I'd do earlier, blogging just isn't nor can it be a priority for me at the moment.

I just finished filling out three applications for three different grad schools. The truth is, if I had planned better then I could have just applied straight to a Ph. D. program and only done all this paperwork once. I made a couple mistakes that both gimped my ability to choose and gimped my resume. I kind of got to the end of my undergrad school and didn't know where I wanted to go, I barely even knew if I wanted to do Physics or Computer Science.

I think I could have done much better if I had known the right questions to ask (or even asked any questions at all). Unfortunately, I learned a bad habit from high school which was to be overly independent and try to do everything on my own.

I am planning on writing a couple entries detailing all this and maybe someone, somewhere while read them and use them. If not, at least it will give me some mental lubrication for writing about other things that have been rolling around in my head.

It has taken me a while but I am slowly getting around to rebuilding my site, including my blog. This is the third or so system I have written. It is written in django and is entirely incomplete, but it will serve my needs for now :). The comment system requires users to login, but I have enabled allowing an openid account, so it shouldn't be too painful. OpenID is automatically offered by LJ so my friends that are LJ freaks shouldn't have any problems.

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