PlanetUSF

I was walking today,
down the street,
down my street
and I thought I saw
fire in the trees,
orange it was
and reddish-yellow too
and I stopped
for a scared moment,
“Fire in the trees!”
I thought shakily
but as I got closer
to the brilliant
hues of fire
in the trees
I discovered that it
was just the changing
colors of the leaves.

So for the longest time, I wanted to get back into silver halide photography, you know, the analog thing with the, grains, light sensitive crystals, fixer, developer, stop bath, variable contrast paper, gelatin, safe lights, dodging and burning, darkroom timers, paper safes, d-76, change bags, film!

Did I miss anything? Yea, so, is 35mm film dead? Well yes, and no. Guess what, its cheap as hell to get a darkroom setup now. Check eBay for everything from used enlargers to film cameras. I recently picked up three Nikon SLR’s, a FG, a FE2, and a F4s. The FG and the FE2 are both “manual” bodies. The both have a manual film advance lever for well, advancing the film after every exposure. The both have to be manualy focused. They both have an “aperture priority” mode which lets you select the lens aperture size and the meter automatically selects the shuter speed. The FG is a little newer, and has a “program” mode which lets the camera body do all the work, meaning both the shutter and aperture is selected for you. Now thats no fun now!

There are quite a few arguments as to what is better, film, digital, bla. Heres the deal, film will be better than digital in terms of quality. No pixel is going to beat an 8×10 film view camera with a nice Schneider lens up front and a massive 80 in^2 of film in the back in terms of price/resolution/tonal range. Even a 6×6cm beats up the 10MP cameras of today (dec 2005). Now on to the 35mm film format (24×36mm), its just about done for. Digital is just as fine in absolute resolution. Its cheaper, its faster, it’s CCD is more sensitive to light, you get the results instantly, its perfect for the journalist! Hey, guess what, thats what the 35mm film format was designed for in the first place. But its not dead yet!

FE2 vs FG, the FE2 is hands down the best little manual focus body ever made by nikon. Its small and lightweight, about 500g. It has mirror lockup via the self timer, exposure lock, depth of field preview, double exposure switch, shutter speeds from 8sec to 1/4000th of a sec. 1/250 flash sync, interchangable focus screens, exposure compensation, a nice meter view in the finder with ADR which stands for Aperture Direct Readout, a funny little feature that lets you see the aperture setting of the lens through the viewfinder via a small lens in the body pointing to the aperture ring. The F4 also has this.
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The FG is also a great little camera, in fact its smaller and lighter than the FE2. But, it lacks a few things. Shutter speeds only up to 1/1000th, no DOF preview, no AE lock, the needle meter is replaced with blinking red LED’s (not worse, just diff) But, it has a program mode.

The F4s has to be the freeken king of all Auto Focus 35mm SLR’s First, It can take all the new AF Nikon lenses, except the new G lens, which doesn’t have an aperture ring. And it can mount all the AI, AI-S manual focus lenses (from the FE2 and FG etc) and still have “Matrix Metering” work! and take all the other non-AI and older manual focus lenses with just spot metering. See, it came out in 1988 when all the photogs were still transitioning to auto focus cameras and Nikon needed to have a camera which was compatable with the older lenses while people slowly changed over their lens collections. But it didn’t mean Nikon made a compomized camera body. The F4 has all the feautres of the FE2 plus some. Down side, its a brick size and weight wise. Oh well.

I’ll post pics of the other cameras when I get home.

For now, enjoy some FE2 in your screen.

Mathematical definition

Given a Riemannian manifold with metric tensor gab, we can compute the Ricci tensor Rab, which collects averages of sectional curvatures into a kind of “trace” of the Riemann curvature tensor. If we consider the metric tensor (and the associated Ricci tensor) to be functions of a variable which is usually called “time” (but which may have nothing to do with any physical time), then the Ricci flow may be defined by the geometric evolution equation

\partial_t g_{ij}=-2 R_{ij}

Relationship to uniformization and geometrization

The Ricci flow was introduced by Richard Hamilton in 1981 in order to gain insight into the geometrization conjecture of William Thurston, which concerns the topological classification of three-dimensional smooth manifolds. Hamilton’s idea was to define a kind of nonlinear diffusion equation which would tend to smooth out irregularities in the metric. Then, by placing an arbitrary metric g on a given smooth manifold M and evolving the metric by the Ricci flow, the metric should approach a particularly nice metric, which might constitute a canonical form for M. Suitable canonical forms had already been identified by Thurston; the possibilities, called Thurston model geometries, include the three-sphere S3, three-dimensional Euclidean space E3, three-dimensional hyperbolic space H3, which are homogeneous and isotropic, and five slightly more exotic Riemannian manifolds, which are homogeneous but not isotropic. (This list is closely related to, but not identical with, the well-known Bianchi classification of the three-dimensional real Lie algebras into nine isomorphism classes .) Hamilton’s idea was that these special metrics should behave like fixed points of the Ricci flow, and that if, for a given manifold, globally only one Thurston geometry was admissible, this might even act like an attractor under the flow.

Hamilton succeeded in proving that any smooth closed three-manifold which admits a metric of positive Ricci curvature also admits a unique Thurston geometry, namely a spherical metric, which does indeed act like an attracting fixed point under the Ricci flow. This doesn’t prove the full geometrization conjecture because the most difficult case turns out to concern manifolds with negative Ricci curvature and more specifically those with negative sectional curvature. In this case, mathematicians expect that the Ricci flow should evolve an arbitrary negatively curved three-manifold into one which is locally isometric to H3. Indeed, a triumph of nineteenth century geometry was the proof of the uniformization theorem, the analogous topological classification of smooth two-manifolds, where Hamilton showed that the Ricci flow does indeed evolve a negative curved two-manifold into a two-dimensional multi-holed torus which is locally isometric to the hyperbolic plane. This topic is closely related to important topics in analysis, number theory, dynamical systems, mathematical physics, and even cosmology.

Note that the term “uniformization” correctly suggests a kind of smoothing away of irregularities in the geometry, while the term “geometrization” correctly suggests placing a geometry on a smooth manifold. Geometry is being used here in a precise manner akin to Klein’s notion of geometry (see Geometrization conjecture for further details). In particular, the result of geometrization may be a geometry that is not isotropic. In most cases including the cases of constant curvature, the geometry is unique. An important theme in this area is the interplay between real and complex formulations. In particular, many discussions of uniformization speak of complex curves rather than real two-manifolds.

It is possible to construct a kind of superspace of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds, and then the Ricci flow really does give a flow (in the intuitive sense of particles flowing along flowlines) in this superspace.

Relation to diffusion

To see why the evolution equation defining the Ricci flow is indeed a kind of nonlinear diffusion equation, we can consider the special case of (real) two-manifolds in more detail. Any metric tensor on a two-manifold can be written with respect to an exponential isothermal coordinate chart in the form

ds^2 = \exp(2 \, p(x,y)) \, \left( dx^2 + dy^2 \right)

(These coordinates provide an example of a conformal coordinate chart, because angles, but not distances, are correctly represented.)

The easiest way to compute the Ricci tensor and Laplace-Beltrami operator for our Riemannian two-manifold is to use the differential forms method of Élie Cartan. Take the coframe field

\sigma^1 = \exp (p) \, dx, \; \; \sigma^2 = \exp (p) \, dy

so that metric tensor becomes

\sigma^1 \otimes \sigma^1 + \sigma^2 \otimes \sigma^2 = \exp(2 p) \, \left( dx \otimes dx + dy \otimes dy \right)

Next, given an arbitrary smooth function h(x,y), compute the exterior derivative

d h = h_x dx + h_y dy = \exp(-p) h_x \, \sigma^1 + \exp(-p) h_y \, \sigma^2

Take the Hodge dual

\star d h = -\exp(-p) h_y \, \sigma^1 + \exp(-p) h_x \, \sigma^2 = -h_y \, dx + h_x \, dy

Take another exterior derivative

d \star d h = -h_{yy} \, dy \wedge dx + h_{xx} \, dx \wedge dy = \left( h_{xx} + h_{yy} \right) \, dx \wedge dy

(where we used the anti-commutative property of the exterior product). That is,

d \star d h = \exp(-2 p) \, \left( h_{xx} + h_{yy} \right) \, \sigma^1 \wedge \sigma^2

Taking another Hodge dual gives

\Delta h = \star d \star d h = \exp(-2 p) \, \left( h_{xx} + h_{yy} \right)

which gives the desired expression for the Laplace/Beltrami operator

\Delta = \exp(-2 \, p(x,y)) \left( D_x^2 + D_y^2 \right)

To compute the curvature tensor, we take the exterior derivative of the covector fields making up our coframe:

d \sigma^1 = p_y \exp(p) dy \wedge dx = -\left( p_y dx \right) \wedge \sigma^2 = -{\omega^1}_2 \wedge \sigma^2
d \sigma^2 = p_x \exp(p) dx \wedge dy = -\left( p_x dy \right) \wedge \sigma^1 = -{\omega^2}_1 \wedge \sigma^1

From these expressions, we can read off the only independent connection one-form

{\omega^1}_2 = p_y dx - p_x dy

Take another exterior derivative

d {\omega^1}_2 = p_{yy} dy \wedge dx - p_{xx} dx \wedge dy = -\left( p_{xx} + p_{yy} \right) \, dx \wedge dy

This gives the curvature two-form

{\Omega^1}_2 = -\exp(-2p) \left( p_{xx} + p_{yy} \right) \, \sigma^1 \wedge \sigma^2 = -\Delta p \, \sigma^1 \wedge \sigma^2

from which we can read off the only linearly independent component of the Riemann tensor using

{\Omega^1}_2 = {R^1}_{212} \, \sigma^1 \wedge \sigma^2

Namely

{R^1}_{212} = -\Delta p

from which the only nonzero components of the Ricci tensor are

R22 = R11 = − Δp

From this, we find components with respect to the coordinate cobasis, namely

R_{xx} = R_{yy} = -\left( p_{xx} + p_{yy} \right)

But the metric tensor is also diagonal, with

gxx = gyy = exp(2p)

and after some elementary manipulation, we obtain an elegant expression for the Ricci flow:

\frac{\partial \log p}{\partial t} = \Delta \log p

This is manifestly analogous to the best known of all diffusion equations, the heat equation

\frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = \Delta u

where now \Delta = D_x^2 + D_y^2 is the usual Laplacian on the Euclidean plane. The reader may object that the heat equation is of course a linear partial differential equation— where is the promised nonlinearity in the p.d.e. defining the Ricci flow?

The answer is that nonlinearity enters because the Laplace-Beltrami operator depends upon the same function p which we used to define the metric. But notice that the flat Euclidean plane is given by taking p(x,y) = 0. So if p is small in magnitude, we can consider it to define small deviations from the geometry of a flat plane, and if we retain only first order terms in computing the exponential, the Ricci flow on our two-dimensional almost flat Riemannian manifold becomes the usual two dimensional heat equation. This computation suggests that, just as (according to the heat equation) an irregular temperature distribution in a hot plate tends to become more homogeneous over time, so too (according to the Ricci flow) an almost flat Riemannian manifold will tend to flatten out the same way that heat can be carried off “to infinity” in an infinite flat plate. But if our hot plate is finite in size, and has no boundary where heat can be carried off, we can expect to homogenize the temperature, but clearly we cannot expect to reduce it to zero. In the same way, we expect that the Ricci flow, applied to a distorted round sphere, will tend to round out the geometry over time, but not to turn it into a flat Euclidean geometry.
[edit]

Recent developments

The Ricci flow has been intensively studied since 1981. Some recent work has focused on the question of precisely how higher dimensional Riemannian manifolds evolve under the Ricci flow, and in particular, what types of parametric singularities may form. For instance, a certain class of solutions to the Ricci flow demonstrates that neckpinch singularities will form on an evolving n-dimensional metric Riemannian manifold having a certain topological property (positive Euler characteristic), as the flow approaches some characteristic time t0. In certain cases such neckpinches will produce manifolds called Ricci solitons.

Many variants of the Ricci flow have also been studied:

* Various curvature flows defined using either an extrinsic curvature, which describes how a curve or surface is embedded in a higher dimensional flat space, or an intrinsic curvature, which describes the internal geometry of some Riemannian manifold,
* Various flows which extremalize some quantity mathematically analogous to an energy or entropy,
* Various flows controlled by a p.d.e. which is a higher order analog of a nonlinear diffusion equation.

Some of the most interesting variants are examples of all of these possibilities. In particular, the Calabi flow, which, like the Ricci flow, is an intrinsic curvature flow. This flow tends to smooth out deviations from roundness in a manner formally analogous to the way that the two-dimensional vibration equation damps and propagates away transverse mechanical vibrations in a thin plate, and it extremalizes a certain intrinsic curvature functional. The Calabi flow is important in the study of Calabi-Yau manifolds and also in the study of Robinson-Trautman spacetimes in general relativity. An intriguing observation is that the underlying Calabi equation appears to be completely integrable, which would give a direct link with the theory of solitons.

Curvature flows may or may not preserve volume. The Calabi flow does; the Ricci flow does not, so to be more careful in applying the Ricci flow to uniformization we’d need to normalize the Ricci flow to obtain a flow which preserves volume. If we fail to do this, the problem is that (for example) instead of evolving a given three-dimensional manifold into one Thurston’s canonical forms, we might just shrink its size.

Damn, No Pictures…Oh Well…:

Knot theory is a branch of topology inspired by observations, as the name suggests, of knots. But progress in the field does not depend exclusively on experiments with twine. Knot theory concerns itself with abstract properties of theoretical knots — the spatial arrangements that in principle could be assumed by a loop of string.

When mathematical topologists consider knots and other entanglements such as links and braids, they describe how the knot is positioned in the space around it, called the ambient space. If the knot is moved smoothly to a different position in the ambient space, then the knot is considered to be unchanged, and if one knot can be moved smoothly to coincide with another knot, the two knots are called “equivalent”.

In mathematical language, knots are embeddings of the circle in three-dimensional space. A mathematical knot thus resembles an ordinary knot with its ends spliced. The topological theory of knots investigates such questions as whether two knots can be smoothly moved to match one another, without opening the splice. The question of untying an ordinary knot has to do with unwedging tangles of rope pulled tight, but this concept plays at best a minor role in the mathematical theory. A knot can be untied in the topological sense if and only if it can be smoothly moved through the ambient space until it assumes the shape of a circle. If this can be done, the knot is called the unknot.

Modern knot theory has extended the concept of a knot to higher dimensions. One recent application of knot theory has been to the question of whether two strands of DNA are equivalent without cutting.

* 1 History
* 2 An introduction to knot theory
o 2.1 Knot diagrams
o 2.2 Reidemeister moves
o 2.3 Higher dimensions
o 2.4 Adding knots
* 3 See also
* 4 Further reading
* 5 References
* 6 Other resources

[edit]

History

Knot theory originated in an idea of Lord Kelvin’s (1867), that atoms were knots of swirling vortices in the æther. He believed that an understanding and classification of all possible knots would explain why atoms absorb and emit light at only the discrete wavelengths that they do. We now know that this idea was mistaken, and that the discrete wavelengths depend on quantum energy levels.[1][2]

Scottish physicist Peter Tait spent many years listing unique knots in the belief that he was creating a table of elements. When the luminiferous æther was not detected in the Michelson-Morley experiment, vortex theory became completely obsolete, and knot theory ceased to be of great scientific interest. Following the development of topology in the late nineteenth century, knots once again became a popular field of study. Today, knot theory finds applications in string theory, in the study of DNA replication and recombination, and in areas of statistical mechanics.
[edit]

An introduction to knot theory

Creating a knot is easy. Begin with a one-dimensional line segment, wrap it around itself arbitrarily, and then fuse its two free ends together to form a closed loop. One of the biggest unresolved problems in knot theory is to give a method to decide in every case whether two such embeddings are different or the same.
Two unknots
The unknot, and a knot
equivalent to it

Before we can do this, we must decide what it means for embeddings to be “the same”. We consider two embeddings of a loop to be the same if we can get from one to the other by a series of slides and distortions of the string which do not tear it, and do not pass one segment of string through another. If no such sequence of moves exists, the embeddings are different knots.
[edit]

Knot diagrams

A useful way to visualise knots and the allowed moves on them is to project the knot onto a plane - think of the knot casting a shadow on the wall. Now we can draw and manipulate pictures, instead of having to think in 3D. However, there is one more thing we must do - at each crossing we must indicate which section is “over” and which is “under”. This is to prevent us from pushing one piece of string through another, which is against the rules. To avoid ambiguity, we must avoid having three arcs cross at the same crossing and also having two arcs meet without actually crossing. When this is the case, we say that the knot is in general position with respect to the plane. Fortunately a small perturbation in either the original knot or the position of the plane is all that is needed to ensure this.
[edit]

The Reidemeister moves

In 1927, working with this diagrammatic form of knots, J.W. Alexander and G.B. Briggs, and independently Kurt Reidemeister, demonstrated that two knot diagrams belonging to the same knot can be related by a sequence of three kinds of moves on the diagram, shown right. These operations, now called the Reidemeister moves, are:

I. Twist and untwist in either direction.
II. Move one loop completely over another.
III. Move a string completely over or under a crossing.

Knot invariants can be defined by demonstrating a property of a knot diagram which is not changed when we apply any of the Reidemeister moves. Many important invariants can be defined in this way, including the Jones polynomial. Older examples of knot invariants include the fundamental group and the Alexander polynomial.
[edit]

Higher dimensions

You can unknot any circle in four dimensions. There are two steps to this. First, “push” the circle into a 3-dimensional subspace. This is the hard, technical part which we will skip. Now imagine temperature to be a fourth dimension to the 3-dimensional space. Then you could make one section of a line cross through the other by simply warming it with your fingers.

In general piecewise-linear n-spheres form knots only in (n + 2)-space (a result of E.C. Zeeman), although one can have smoothly knotted n-spheres in (n + 3)-space for n > 2 (independent results of A. Haefliger and J. Levine).
[edit]

Adding knots

Two knots can be added by cutting both knots and joining the pairs of ends. This can be formally defined as follows: consider a planar projection of each knot and suppose these projections are disjoint. Find a rectangle in the plane where one pair of opposite sides are arcs along each knot while the rest of the rectangle is disjoint from the knots. Form a new knot by deleting the first pair of opposite sides and adjoining the other pair of opposite sides. The resulting knot is the sum of the original knots.

This operation is called the knot sum, or sometimes the connected sum or composition of two knots. Knots in 3-space form a commutative monoid with prime factorization, which allows us to define what is meant by a prime knot. The trefoil knot is the simplest prime knot. Higher dimensional knots can be added by splicing the n-spheres. While you cannot form the unknot in three dimensions by adding two non-trivial knots, you can in higher dimensions, at least when one considers smooth knots in codimension at least 3.

The geometrization conjecture, also known as Thurston’s geometrization conjecture, concerns the geometric structure of compact 3-manifolds. It was proposed by William Thurston in the late 1970s. It ‘includes’ other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and the Thurston elliptization conjecture. Here are some essential concepts used in the conjecture:

3-manifolds exhibit a standard two-level decomposition:

1. the prime decomposition, where every compact 3-manifold is the connected sum of an essentially unique collection of prime three-manifolds, and
2. the JSJ decomposition. For a three-manifold to have a JSJ decomposition, it must be prime.

Here is a formulation of Thurston’s conjecture:

Separate a closed 3-manifold into its prime decomposition (capping off spherical boundaries with 3-balls), and then each irreducible summand is reduced by its JSJ decomposition. The interior of each of the resulting manifolds is covered by a simply-connected homogeneous space such that the group of covering transformations are isometries of the homogeneous space, thus endowing the manifold with the local geometry of the homogeneous space. In addition, each manifold (with its induced Riemannian metric) has finite volume.

There are exactly eight such simply-connected homogeneous spaces that admit finite volume quotients; they are called Thurston model geometries.

The following is a list of the eight geometries:

1. Euclidean geometry
2. Hyperbolic geometry
3. Spherical geometry
4. The geometry of S2 × R
5. The geometry of H2 × R
6. The geometry of SL2R
7. Nil geometry, i.e. geometry of group of normed upper triangular 3-by-3 matrices.
8. Sol geometry, i.e. geometry of group of upper triangular 2-by-2 matrices.

In the list of geometries above, S2 is the 2-sphere (in a topological sense) and H2 is the hyperbolic plane. Six of the eight geometries above (all except hyperbolic and spherical) are now clearly understood and known to correspond to Seifert manifolds and certain torus bundles. Using information about Seifert manifolds, we can restate the conjecture more tersely as:

Every irreducible, compact 3-manifold falls into exactly one of the following categories:

1. it has a spherical geometry
2. it has a hyperbolic geometry
3. The fundamental group contains a subgroup isomorphic to the free abelian group on two generators (this is the fundamental group of a torus).

If Thurston’s conjecture is correct, then so is the Poincaré Conjecture (via Thurston elliptization conjecture). The Fields Medal was awarded to Thurston in 1982 partially for his proof of the conjecture for Haken manifolds.

Progress has been made in proving that 3-manifolds that should be hyperbolic are in fact so. Mainly this progress has been limited to checking examples, although there are some notable results.

The case of 3-manifolds that should be spherical has been slower, but provided the spark needed for Richard Hamilton to develop his Ricci flow. In 1982, Hamilton showed that given a closed 3-manifold with a metric of positive Ricci curvature, the Ricci flow would smooth out any bumps in the metric, resulting in a metric of constant positive curvature, i.e. a spherical metric. He later developed a program to prove the Geometrization Conjecture by Ricci flow.

Grigori Perelman may have now solved the Geometrization conjecture (and thus also the Poincaré Conjecture) and there seems to be a consensus among experts that the proof is correct, at least in the case of 3-manifolds with finite fundamental group. Note that Perelman is eligible for a million dollar prize, which he seems uninterested in, but his work will need to survive two years of systematic scrutiny after publication, before the Clay Mathematics Institute can deem the conjecture to have been solved.

A hyperbolic 3-manifold is a 3-manifold equipped with a complete Riemannian metric of constant sectional curvature -1. In other words, it is the quotient of three-dimensional hyperbolic space by a subgroup of hyperbolic isometries acting freely and properly discontinuously. See also Kleinian model.

Its thick-thin decomposition has a thin part consisting of tubular neighborhoods of short geodesics and/or ends which are the product of a Euclidean surface and the closed half-ray. The manifold is of finite volume if and only if its thick part is compact. In this case, the ends are of the form torus cross the closed half-ray and are called cusps. One way to generate many cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds is to take the complement of hyperbolic knots and links, e.g. the figure-eight knot, Borromean rings, and many 2-bridge knots. Thurston’s theorem on hyperbolic Dehn surgery states that most Dehn fillings on hyperbolic links and all but finitely many Dehn fillings on hyperbolic knots result in closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

One can sometimes manually construct a hyperbolic 3-manifold, such as with Seifert-Weber space, but more often, they result from constructions such as the above-mentioned Dehn filling method. Also, Thurston gave a necessary and sufficient criterion for a surface bundle over the circle to be hyperbolic: the monodromy of the bundle should be pseudo-Anosov. This is part of his celebrated geometrization theorem for Haken manifolds.

According to Thurston’s geometrization conjecture, any closed, irreducible, atoroidal 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group is hyperbolic. There is an analogous statement for 3-manifolds with boundary. (Notice that hyperbolic 3-manifolds satisfy these properties.) Heuristically, this means that “many” 3-manifolds are in fact hyperbolic.

The retrieval processing is still in progress. We are doing this in two ways: there’s an automated process running 24 hours/day since Monday, restoring files from a list of users we generated. In addition to that, we will manually restore the files from anyone who has been posting to the blogs. If you have problems accessing your email, please first refer to the FAQ. If you still cannot access it, simply post here and someone will be in contact with you.

Alex Campoe

Visited the Vintage Motorcycle Museum in of all places, Solvang, Cali. The medium sized collection included a few famous bikes, namely the Britten v1000, Suzuki RE5, Norton x105 (yes, two rotary engined bikes!), that bike that was rode with the rider laying on his belly, a new Ducati’s and Hondas. Then came the drinking, I mean, wine tasting tour…

Click here to view the motor gallery where the pics are.

I’m a mariachi singer,
sings crazy songs
traversing the country side
in search of the
nearest victims to serenade
as they lay dying…
I can see crystal fragments
raining
down
all around us…
I play a bezouki like no man you ever seen…
slam down black coffee…
Like a junky
slams down blackballs in
a desolate alleyway
watch it! bike cop!
suddenly stands up to full height
sees bike cop bearing down fast
run…uuuuuuh aaaaaaah!
I’m Super-Junky!
I knew my legs
were still attached to me!
wind in my face:
feels good, feels great in fact.
clump! clump! clomp!
up the stairs,
come one, you can make it old man!
get that key out!
quick dammit!
Aaaaah…who is it?
Police! Open that f$#%&&* door old man!
Why yes officer?
Don’t gimme that line you old junky c$%%sucker!
I just chased you four goddamned city blocks!
Now…–
all of a sudden busty blonde appears in the doorway,
Excuse me officer! My husband’s been home all night with me
and if you have a problem with that,
take it up with my f%%^&& lawyers!
Yes, good night, sir!–
slams door in stricken cop’s face…
Still raining
crystal
planes
of experience
and we duck into a doorway,
quick, kiss deeply for a little bit
until the torrents slow…
My lover’s coming soon
I call her the Luminous One,
she shines so bright
she’ll burn your eyes
right outta’ your f@#$#%^ head!…
Heart beat’s slowed drastically,
caffeine has dissipated markedly…
Time for cheap beer! Make it Pabst!…
There’s no time like the present
for you and I to waste
trashing your mother’s bedroom…
I’m not mad
just bad,
so if you think a
mere finger shake at me
is all it’s going to take
to set me straight,
think again!…
I’ve always wanted poems to
write the sunset
and crazy dreams
and humiliate virgins
on their wedding night,
I’ll get back to you
when I find them.

I can’t see the forest
from the trees
because I’m lost in the woods,
to be honest here,
and everywhere I go
it just looks the same–
it’s like a mall somewhere in suburbia
it’s always the same old stores
the same droll salespeople
the same lame mallrats
the same sluttily dressed junior high babes
hoping against hope to be hit on
by one of us “older” guys–
so anyways now I’m here
all alone, and sometimes
I see others passing near
and I yell, “Hey! Hey! Where are you going?”
but they don’t hear me,
they also think they’re all alone–

so I just keep walking.

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Go to https://mailbox.acomp.usf.edu and select the Folders option after you login. You may have to re-subscribe to your folders after we have restored them.

All of the people who could not previously login to the system now should be able to login. Backups are still being restored and probably will continue for the next couple of days. We are still looking into ways in which we can speed up the restore process. The difficulty is that we have backups to perform (both Blackboard and the Help Desk Online software have been upgraded over the past couple of days) and we only have a limited number of tape drives to work with.

All people who posted to the threads are being contacted for a follow up. If we can manually resolve any issues we will do so.

A reminder: some of the folks posting are claiming significant loss of money due to the lack of service. I strongly suggest these users refresh their memory and read the Acceptable Use Policy on UNA

Thanks,
Alex Campoe

If you are reading this, you are probably one of the users who are still having issues either logging in the system, or you have missing mail files (INBOX, mail folders, etc). Here’s the situation:

1. The standard way to restore files from backup tapes was not being efficient enough. At the speed things were running, it would take us 9 days to restore all the files. Eric Pierce has worked out a different way to restore these files. We manually tested this approach on a few accounts and are now ready to do them automatically.
2. We have also determined the reason some folks were not able to login at all. We are also ready to initiate the correction automatically.
3. We wrote a program to fix both issues outlined on (1) and (2). This program will start running some time this morning.

The files recovered by (3) will be named in the format “INBOX-recovered.” You will be able to see them as one of your subscribed mailboxes.

Thanks
Alex Campoe

Update (12:24pm):The first stage of the script, checking which accounts have login issues, has processed 15,000 accounts. Of these 15,000, approximately 200 have to be fixed manually — the others have been recovered successfully. We also restored more mailboxes manually. It may be nessessary for you to re-subscribe to those folders we are restoring.On mailbox.acomp.usf.edu, that is done in the Folders menu.

Update (5:00 pm):Added to FAQ

Update (12/27, 9:30 am):Moved FAQ to its own section

Blogin’ it.

In God We Trust?

Eric Pierce has recovered the hardware from a catastrophic failure on 12/22. We had to retrieve backed up data from tape. Unfortunately, the tape recovery is a long processes. In order to expedite things, we did an initial, partial, recovery of a data set which included about 65,000 or the 70,000 or so accounts we maintain. That took 2 days. Eric then sent a test message to all accounts in order to pinpoint which accounts still have issues. We now started working on retrieving those accounts.

The bottom line:If you are having problems login in to the system, chances are your account is one of the many we are still retrieving. We are working as quickly as we can to restore access to all accounts but we are constrained by the speed of the recovery from the tapes. Once we believe the process is done we will post a follow up, asking those who still may be having problems to contact us directly. If I am pressed for a time frame right now I would say we will probably be done with the restores by Tuesday morning, but keep an eye on this space for further info.

Again, our apologies for the situation.

The Dart Indoors

A neat blog I found while checking out dart’s on the net.

Its such a good blog, after reading it for a few days, I was able to hit my very first ton-80:

http://alexanderstuart.blogspot.com/

some pics from the beach

Murdoch + myspace = evil (er)

cool people use real blog tools.

There is good news and bad news for users of mail.usf.edu:

Good News

• The server is back up and you can send & receive Email again!
• Any mail sent to your mail.usf.edu address during the outage should be delivered to your account in the next few hours.

Bad News

• You may be missing some mail. To expedite the recovery process, which had already taken WAY too long, I recovered the mailboxes from the FULL backup on 12/18/2005. The data from the INCREMENTAL backup which took place on 12/22/05 will be recovered, but it may be a few days before you see the new data in your account. It is not possible to recover any mail or changes to your account that were made after the backup took place on 12/22/05 (it finished around 6AM).

We’re working on getting on your Email restored as fast as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Na, not really, i was refering to a film change bag and them silly Silver Halides. I had a re-introduction to the art of film photography and purchaced 3, 35mm cameras and a few lenses. So far, 4 rolls of T-max, TMY and TMX developed at home using d-76 1:1. I am a freekn nerd here.

I’ll post pics as soon as I get either some of the negative film scanned or I get the enlarger going…

For those interested in “old school” and looking for a neat tool for finding various film development times check out http://www.freestylephoto.biz/techtips_filmdev.php you can select what film and what developer.