All of last weekend was entirely devoted this year’s ballroom competition at MIT. My affiliation, the University of Connecticut, provided sponsorship including a hotel room at the Hyatt down the road from MIT. Just a few minutes’ walk away from the competition venue, I was able to get a great night’s sleep both Friday and Saturday without having to worry about traffic or transportation. I competed with Tracey, Brittney and Kailee for a total of 19 dances and we all had a great deal of fun. It’s also my pleasure to report that, despite a lack of placements in most events, and given the relative difficulty of the competition, my partners and I did very well and showed definite improvement. Read on for full results in the usual format.
Continue reading ‘2009 MIT Open Ballroom Dance Competition Recap’
In what became a whirlwind of ballroom-related activity, I competed with Kailee and Tracey at Harvard on Sunday in addition to competing at Holy Cross on Saturday. Since Brittney, my usual partner for Smooth dances as of late, was unavailable Sunday, it was my pleasure to dance Smooth with Kailee for the first time ever. And we did great! Additionally, I danced with Tracey for the first time ever at a competition — a dream come true. She carried me through the Rhythm dances and we even achieved a placement. Read on for the usual detailed results chart.
Continue reading ‘2009 Harvard Invitational Ballroom Competition Recap’
2009 Holy Cross Ballroom Competition Recap
Last weekend, I competed at the 10th Annual Holy Cross Ballroom Dance Competition with Kailee (Standard events) and Brittney (Latin and Smooth events). Altogether a beautifully run competition, as usual, competing at Holy Cross was a lot of fun. In addition to the dancing itself, there was a photo shoot session in which I posed with Kailee. As for placements, it was a very fruitful competition for us. Read on for full results.
Continue reading ‘2009 Holy Cross Ballroom Competition Recap’
SafariStand and Safari 4: Still Working!
I’m happy to report that in my short experience with Safari 4 (released as a public beta at time of writing), the tab sidebar at least seems to work beautifully still. ‘Top Sites’ tabs show a black thumbnail but everything else with regards to the tab sidebar seems to be in perfect working order.
Unfortunately, I have noticed that separator bookmarks (-:-) do not appear as menu item separators within the bookmark menu anymore. I have no doubt that this functionality will return soon in a future update.
Sunday, February 22nd was a pretty busy day for me. Travelling out of Logan Airport would have been enough to keep me plenty busy. But on top of that I decided that I didn’t want to miss more of the BU competition than I had to, which happened to fall on the same day. With my international flight departure at 8:20PM, I figured that I could at least attend the first half of the competiton, conveniently allowing me to compete the International Standard events with Kailee again as I have been over the last several months. Read on for full results breakdown and commentary, plus a surprise!
Continue reading ‘2009 Boston University Ballroom Competition Recap’
Philips SRU-8010 Not-So-Universal Remote
I’ve had the Philips SRU-8010 Universal Remote for quite some time now, but never really got it working quite well with my Windows Media Center Edition USB Infrared receiver (or cheap knockoff). I got the receiver working very well on my Gentoo Linux HTPC with LIRC‘s mceusb2 driver but wasn’t able to get my remote to play perfectly with the whole setup. I was able to overcome the issue with a roundabout strategy and am pleased to report that I now have my whole media center, including my HTPC, TV, and sound receiver working together via universal remote. Read on for the details.
Continue reading ‘Philips SRU-8010 Not-So-Universal Remote’
I’ve been using Fring to make SkypeOut calls over WiFi. Not only does this shave billed minutes off of my phone bill, but what with the iPhone’s 3G chipset being unreliable as all hell, I honestly prefer to make some of my calls via Skype anyways as long as I know I’m going to be in WiFi range for the duration of the call.
Here’s how to get Fring to work with SkypeOut: prepend the call number a + followed by the country code of the recipient of the call. For example, when calling a phone in the U.S. add +1; (800) 867-5309 then becomes +18008675309. To get the +, I simply press and hold the 0 key on the dial pad in Fring.
I’m not sure that this was always required, as I could have sworn that Fring used to ‘just work’ most of the time, but maybe I’m mistaken. Either way, I’m glad to have it working again!
iPhone 3G Dropped Calls: Solved?
As a follow-up to my previous post on dropped calls with the iPhone 3G, I’m happy to report that I no longer experience the issue. I haven’t had any major problems with dropped calls on my iPhone 3G, including while switching between EDGE and 3G networks, since I got a replacement unit under warranty from Apple. The ‘Genius’ at the Apple store gave me a bit of hassle the first time and sent me back home with a re-imaged/flashed phone but was happy to replace it right away when I brought it back in the next day with 20% of my calls dropped since the previous day. The replacement unit’s been much better so far — I think now I’m just experiencing the same poor reception that the rest of the iPhone 3G market is stuck with. Hopefully Apple gets their act together soon on this one; it’s been a pretty dismal last few months for them with new launches.
Dropped Calls, the New iPhone, and 3G
Since I got the new iPhone 3G, I’ve been getting a whole ton of dropped calls. Not just the normal amount that I used to get on the old iPhone’s crappy reception, but even more weirdly so, calls would drop immediately without any warning — no silence on the other end, no garbled sound, no period of inactivity, nothing other than three maddening beeps and a “Call Failed” message on the phone. It seems that others on the Apple support forums are having the same issue and provide some insight as to what might cause it.
Continue reading ‘Dropped Calls, the New iPhone, and 3G’
Allowing Access to FTP Disk Only Via FTP
For bandwidth shaping reasons, I wanted to be able to allow access to my FTP disk (mounted at /var/ftp) only via FTP (hosted by ProFTPd). As it turns out, this is quite easy to do using a couple of UNIX permissions tricks and some ProFTPd voodoo. Read on for the basic description of how I’ve done it. Continue reading ‘Allowing Access to FTP Disk Only Via FTP’