Twas the Week of Unofficial

The time is upon us again for the annual celebration of unofficial st. patricks day. Dreaded by the University of Illinois faculty as a day of recklessness and disgracing a school's honor, the student body looks forward to this event all year. The premise of Unofficial is that you wake up early and drink green beer and do Irish Car Bombs all day and the big thing is that YOU DON'T MISS YOUR CLASSES! This creates for some interesting events and an unusual amount of public drunkenness on this prestigious campus. There is few things that this university makes an effort to control and this just happens to be one of them. My freshman year there was plenty of fraternity parties (kegs and eggs are amazing) and people drinking and celebrating on any patch of lawn they could find. Green floods the streets and havoc occurs. The havoc however is mostly from those that don't attend the university and are attending from other campuses and cities. They simply don't know how to control themselves here and are giving unofficial a worse reputation than it deserves. This year they have tried to crack down on the bars and stores on campus and have restricted 1 keg per residence and that the bars cannot serve pitchers of beer and shots must be diluted. I am unsure whether I stand behind the universities involvement. It would seem their acknowledgment of the event and taking action almost seems worse than doing nothing and not associating it with the university and its policies.

Another big thing is the Chief. A proud symbol and mascot of our university has been removed and have outraged a majority of the student body. It's a constant debate that I've lived with as in Cleveland we dealt with the same issues with Chief Wahoo! which in my opinion is much worse than the University of Illinois symbol and they have never done anything regarding Wahoo! The students replied with a proper send off to the chief as they mourned at his last game by switching their shirts from the usual school orange and blue to all black, symbolic of the death of the chief. I've recently become a big supporter of the chief and I think its crazy to go against the wishes of the majority of the student body and disregard a large number of alumni that have canceled season tickets to university sporting events and have said they will not donate while the chief isn't here. I'm glad someone has the balls to stand up to the university and make it hurt.

I have to go finish some work right now but I will continue on other current events soon.

My Mard Gras Slide Show!

It's been a long time..

I lost the information to get back to my blog for a long time / being busy. I think that I will (over time) recount the past year as best as I can remember.

Topics Include:

• Internship at Riverglass
• Projects and other accomplishments
• Getting Dropped from University of Illinois and how it was the best thing that could have happened to me.
• Delta Sigma Phi and how I am still in awe of what I've been a part of here.
• Different Relationships and events that have shaped me into the person i am presently
• Web technologies
  
• Programming Languages
• Internships
  
• Entreprenurship and General Ideas about building a company
• New things I am trying to do.
• .......okay so there's a lot but I think you get the point

I will update this as much as I can (when i get time!). Until then, live like its your last second.

SigSOFT - Prof. Research Project

The meeting wasn't as indepth as last weeks introduction to the Overhaul Project.

Actually, Jay showed up and neither him or Luke knew if he was supposed to be there today (bad communication i guess).

The research I will be doing will look good for grad applications if I decide to do that and also writing an extension to firefox will look good for a lot of companies.

This Project is going to require a lot of research/learning in various areas :

• Network Programming (Beej's Guide)
  
• Peer 2 Peer Programming and Techniques (Jay has a Paper)
  
• Mozilla Firefox Source Tree Code
• Exploring the innerworkings of Overhaul.

I'm debating if I'm going to attempt to learn and teach one of these topics, hopefully I'll have the mastery of them to the level where I can do that.

I'll link anything I can, Human Knowledge belongs to the world!

A New Beginning and Overcommitted

Well a little bit about myself.

I am the Recruitment Director for my Fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi. I'm a Computer Science major at the University of Illinois. I'm starting next week as an intern at Riverglass Inc. I am a member of SigSOFT, a special interest group directed in Software Engineering. I am doing research with a grad student, Jay Patel, on the Overhaul Project by developing an extension for Firefox in C++ that will utilize the Overhaul Apache Module. I am also working on a Collaborative Text Editor that will be written completely in Java and will be able to support multiple people editing the same document at the same time (or multiple documents if they wish per session). Between all of these (oh yeah I also quit a different job with the University as an Engineering Workstation Op), I have been very strapped for time. I also intended on working out more often which I haven't had a chance to do all semester so far. With our rush finally ending ( keyword: finally ), I think I might be able to schedule and find time to do everything I originally intended on doing.

Wish me luck!