22
May

Must See Movies in 2007

Well, the year 2007 has been a great year for great movies. And there are still plenty of time left in the year for more. So my must see movies in 2007 that are in no particular order thus far are:

  • 300
  • Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  • Live Free or Die Hard
  • Ocean’s 13
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
  • Rush Hour 3
  • Shrek 3
  • Shooter
  • Spider-Man 3
  • The Bourne Ultimatum
  • Transformers

This is all that I can think of for now. If any come to mind I will post them!

Happy movie watching!

17
May

School Update

View at the top of Bren HallWell, this is the end of the seventh week of school. I have my last midterm of my junior year in one and a half weeks and my first final in two and a half weeks.

I also got my Economics 137A midterm back and I can say that I am very satisfied with the results. This was the one midterm that I was worried about since it was somewhat difficult and very tricky. But the professor, Professor Watson (PhD), is a good lecturer and he was able to make managerial accounting interesting. He also told some great jokes and stories which kept me “alert” (aka awake). I scored an 86 out of 100 and the average was 55.5 out of 100. So I am 30.5% above the average score. I could of done better, but there were a few little mistake I made. So far, going into final, I seem to have a little insurance from my good marks on my midterm.

I have also been taking some pictures of the campus with my camera phone in between class. Here are some photos below:
Economics 100B Lecture
Econ 100B Lecture
Library:
Library

Library Up Close:
Library Up Close
View at the top of the library:
View at the Top of the Library

Art Outside the Library:
Art Outside the Library

02
May

AIM 6 Review, Comments and Suggestions

Well, the new AIM 6 has been out for quite some time and it is time to give my thoughts on it. Compared to the previous version of AIM, version 5, AIM 6 sports a much new and improved look. In addition, it comes with a handy tool that lets you search as you type for your buddy. This is especially useful for those who have a massive list of buddies. The new AIM also allows you to change the color scheme of your buddy list window. In addition, an assortment of plug-ins have been released for Facebook, music, location, etc. One of the most dominant feature which I enjoy is tabbed conversations. This allows you to have multiple conversations with people by simply switching tabs. This saves a lot of room on the taskbar. But for those of you who like the separate window for each conversation, have no fear, you can always ungroup and regroup your chat windows.

The above is just a few of the many changes major changes that AIM has taken to keep their instant messaging client competitive. But I have found a few things that annoy me a little. First, is the installation of all these “mini” (a.k.a. useless) applications such as Wild Tangent, Plaxo, AOL browser, and so forth. Another thing that is annoying is how AIM has to have two processes running rather than just the aim6.exe process. The other process is the aolsoftware.exe process which is sadly needed to run AIM 6. Overall, AIM 6 uses about 30,000K of memory usage with those two processes combined which some might say bloated, but something has to be exchanged for the new look.

I have been also suggestions other things to the AIM team on their blogs which I hope some of my suggestions get implemented, but we will see if AIM will gain any more points for users. One of my suggestions was to implement the “Now Playing” song in an away message that updates whenever a new song is played by simply inserting a “%song” tag. In my eyes, Trillian might pull something off with their private beta version IM client.
One of my newer suggestions was a better AIM Today page that does not take the whole window, but a small window as found in the older version of AIM.

See below of my concepts:

AIM Today Concept

AIM + AIM Today Concept