Yup. It's still summer. That means more work, Laura, and Biking but school is rapidly approaching.  I met with Dr. Clark at tech to talk aout what I will be doing for undergraduate research in the fall and it is sounding pretty cool.  The current plan is for me to do some anomaly detection on massive ammounts of status information in a database and present that to a system administrator some how.  It may build on the stuff I have done with graphing my AIM usage and in turn I might be able to use whatever sweet thing I write for research to look further into the crazyness that is my AIM usage. But that is all 3 weeks from now and first I gotta get in a proposal and get the appropriate permit for to register for research and all that. So that makes fall semester consist of that research, keeping on keepin on at The Fulcrum Group,  two public policy classes, and music theory.  Not to bad for my final semester at Georgia Tech. Other news of late,  I'm now going to be doing a lot of stuff to get BSA Troop 232's website up and running (using Drupal and Gallery2. Yay!) and I'm also setting up a site for The Lair (long story, but its like a frat but not and where a bunch of my friends from freshman year still live and party it up). It will show up at gtlair.net once all is done. Also, I had no running water in my house yesterday or the first half of today. I think our water meter exploded and it took them a while to fix it. But now all is well and I can shower and resume my normal daily activities. But back to what happened last week. Saturday I got Gallery 1.5.1-RC1 out the door, details on that when 1.5.1-final is out. I then went to Faster Movie Nite on Sunday and saw a not so hot movie called "The End of Surburbia" which was basically propaganda against using oil (or something) and had no factual basis at all.  All the people interviewd were repeated over and over and I think the movie was just to make people afraid of the end of the world. Or something. There was lots of working over the week which was mainly setting up a mail server for a company to handle hundreds of thousands of emails a day as well as some documentation on our mail filtering appliance.  But to keep with the trend of movie reviews, on Tuesday Ben and I biked through Atlantic Station and had some awesome Tofu and Pineapple pizza at Mello Mushroom and then biked over to Park Tavern at Piedmont Park to watch "Taken For a Ride" sponsored by the Citizens for Progressive Transit. Now this was a real movie.  Documentary with lots of information, a solid timeline of events that was with the timeline of the movie, and did I mention good solid information to back it all up? I'd recommend this to anyone curious about/interested in mass transit, the history of cars in America, and evil corporate schemes to take over the world. Good times.  Ben and I biked back like crazy and I headed on home. Wednesday I decided it would be a good idea to go to Florida so I worked things out with worked, packed up some things, and figured out atransportation the next day, so Thursday after work I headed to the airport and did the Airtran XFares standby thing.  It was about $70 (with all the fees and such things) which is cheaper than gas for my car to drive to Tampa, but what a painful experience it was.  Waiting in lines only to find out from the Airtran agent at the end of the line that I really needed to be in another line on the other side of the airport, waiting in line at the gate to find out I would have to wait in line starting at a later time, and then waiting in line only to find out that I didn't need to wait in this line or the previous line and would just have my name called after everyone else had boarded.  I could have eaten dinner instead of waiting in line, or read a book, or sat down even.  Ah well.  Now I know and if I can ever be convinced to fly XFares again I'll know what to do.  After some delays boarding and taking off (they changed the direction of the airport after we were already at the end of the runway about to take off and we had to taxi to the other end) the flight was short and I was greeted by Laura's smiling face in the terminal. Yay. It was another busy busy weekend with Laura, and this time highlights included running around the beach at night climbing on construction equipment, playin in the pool, eating several nice meals both home cooked and at super nice resturants with her parents, Laura building the lego guy that was part of her birthday present from me, hanging out with Jackie (one of Laura's good friends that I met when she came to vist Laura at school last fall and we all went crazy), going to the doggie beach with Riley, going to the zoo and getting to pet stingrays and get licked by giraffes, shopping for car's for Laura's brother (who just got his drivers license) with Shawn (another one of Laura's good friends from high school times). This was probably the last time I get to see Laura before school starts but then it will be much more often and all will be well.  This time there was much documentation with the camera and all the pictures of the beaches and the zoo and things can be found here.  We also saw the craziest construction sign ever that you can almost make out in this picture. The flight back to Atlanta involved sufficiently less waiting but it was at 7:30 in the morning so that probably had something to do with it, also, a note about airport security.  By flying standby last minute, you get selected for "additional security screening."  Let me describe this process for you:

• In Atlanta:  Wait in the normal security line _forever_.  Get told over and over that you have been selected by various airport officials but proceed as usual.  Once you go through the metal detectors, wait in a glass room for about 10 minutes for someone to come and do the additional check on you. When they let you out, they do the hand wand metal detector and a pat down, then they search the luggage.  This takes all of 2 seconds as they open each bag, take a cursory glance in, and close it. Not looking in all pockets or your toilitries kit.  After a total addition of 15 minutes or so to the security screening process they send you on your merry way.
• In Tampa:  Bypass the normal security line to the special enhanced security line and walk right through the metal detectors because the line is almost incomprehendably short. After this you are immediately greeted by the screener.  They do the same hand wand metal detector and pat down, and then the luggage search. They open every bag and pocket and inspect functionality of items such as digital cameras and laptops, they look in your toiliteries bag, and do checmical swabs on each bag when they run through a machine to make sure there are no explosives. But get this, all of this is completed before I would have gotten through the usual security line anyways. Total time elapsed to get through security: 10 minutes.

Both of these security times were at low traffic times, early afternoon on a Thursday and early early morning on a Monday, and after talking to several people they have had similiar experiences. Good times. I finished up Monday by helping Gabby install some new RAM in her computer, doing laundry and showering at my parents because of the lack of running water here and leaving a note for the FedEx guy who delivered my brothers iPod today. Then today after working from home for a bit and a meeting about the 232 website Mark and I had dinner at Felinis where much things Linux related were discussed, and now I'm at home working some more, figuring out living arrangements for next semester, catching up on all things Gallery (Walkah, the Drupal-G2 inegration guy is back from vacation so the Gallery on fastermustache.org will work right soon!), and emptying out my inbox.  I'm down to 2 things left I need to act on and both of them won't happen for a few weeks.  So its 11:00 and time to start thinking about going to bed so I can wake up early and work all day tomorrow.  Hopefully my skymiles American Express will get here tomorrow to. So until next week, thats that.