I've gotten hooked on watching The Sopranos, and I'm halfway through the second season of episodes right now. I watched the very first episode a couple weekends ago when nothing was going on and ended up getting dragged into the story. If you haven't seen it before, it really does match up to all the hype it gets. It's nice that studios are releasing full seasons of episodes on DVD these days.

I'm still using Netscape 7.0 preview edition for all my web needs, and haven't found anything major to gripe about (other than the typical AOL icons and bookmarks that are installed on startup). The browser hiccups a little when loading this page, but a quick Reload usually fixes that. On the web side of things, I probably won't do any major renovations of the site for the next school year, but I am learning how to program Java servlets. It's a technology that won't be useful right away, but will be very useful someday when I'm running my own server.

On the work front, I finished JUnit work and am starting on a redesign of the common GUI architecture that we created last year. I like these kinds of projects best because they're a mix of design and new coding with very few worries about legacy code and "making new stuff work in old limitations". This past week, I also resumed work on PRIMA (see the Coding page for more info). My mention of it in the last news update sparked my motivation, and I've been working on it at night after work. I've created the data structures representing pitches and intervals, and written various algorithms to deal with enharmonic equivalence and key signatures.

Because of this, I didn't do any composing at all these past two weeks. I'll probably pad my schedule at school this coming year as a result. I'll still have the thesis done in the fall, and do any exams during that semester, but I'll hold off on thesis defense and all that good stuff until early in 2003. I already had some breathing room worked into my Spring schedule anyhow, just in case something like this happened.

I finally finished reading A Beautiful Mind after a month of starting and stopping. It really is an interesting book, but its epic length makes it hard to read all at once. The movie of the same name did a really good job of following the real timeline. Of course, things were simplified for the Hollywood audience, but many of the real details were used.

This weekend, I went down to Charlottesville to help my sister move across town. Nothing else to report on that -- it just didn't fit in any of the other paragraphs.

Here's a couple news articles on artificial intelligence that were neat:
Can a PC think for itself?
Robot on the run

Also, happy birthday to Liz (whose birthday was June 21), happy birthday to Nikki (whose birthday is June 24), and happy birthday to Kathy (whose birthday is June 29). If I were still doing daily updates, I'd give them each a nice little banner, but my sporadic updates seem to be unpredictable these days.