So…I would be writing this yesterday, but we kinda had some…issues…getting home yesterday. Let’s just say that we got to the Orlando airport at 6 AM Eastern, and arrived at O’Hare at 11 PM Central.

In the interest of brevity (I may expand later), TEAM ILLINOIS WON!

I now have $2500 more in scholarship money, a shiny new digital camera, and soon, a custom-fitted championship ring.

Yeah, so this afternoon I’m leaving for the land of the orange, mockingbird, sabal palm, porpoise, key lime pie, and West Indian manatee. Yes, I mean Florida. (Wikipedia tells me those are all official symbols of Florida. Wait, West Indian manatee?!)

Ah, the Panasonic Academic Challenge. Such a misunderstood tournament. See, at Panasonic, it’s not really about top-notch quizbowl. It’s about decent quizbowl against the best players in the country, spending time between matches in the Magic Kingdom, and getting a lot of free meals courtesy of Panasonic. See, everyone gets all upset about the quizbowl itself not being ideal. But honestly, it should be thought of as a TV game show, minus the TV show part. Yes, it’s a national championship, and I even think that becoming champion reflects upon the strength of each state’s top players. For the most part. (Caveat: due to having six teams in the finals, and all the matches being drawn randomly, some good teams don’t do so well, and some bad teams do better than they should.)

But really, it ain’t so bad. It’s Panasonic trying to do something good for high school academics (and perhaps more importantly, to show they’re doing something good for high school academics). This year is the twentieth anniversary of the tournament, so they’ve been around since about the beginning of many high school quizbowl circuits nationally.

Well, off to Panasonic! May Team Illinois do as well as we can, and may that be to win! Twenty-nine states…

For posterity and any interested parties, here is what I have installed on my computer so far, and perhaps some rationale behind each choice. Time to open up Add or Remove Programs and see what’s there… (I’m skipping preinstalled drivers, etc.)

7-Zip: It’s the best compression software I have found so far, works with practically every format, is free, and goes a LOT faster than Windows’ built-in shell decompression.

ActivePerl: I program in Perl. I need a copy of Perl.

Adobe Flash Player 9: I use the Internet. ‘Nuff said.

CutePDF Writer: Virtual PDF printers are really nice. They’re good when you don’t want a physical copy of something, but you need to capture a program’s output for some reason or another. Good for saving things for digital posterity.

Foxit Reader: I’ve mentioned this on my blog before. The best PDF software I’ve used. Vastly superior to Adobe Reader: it’s fast, small, and loads instantly.

Frets on Fire: A free Guitar Hero clone for computer. I need to improve my skillz so I can take on Nick.

Launchy: Great software that Jonah introduced me to. I can access any program or song on my computer (or more: it’s fully customizable) by hitting Ctrl+Space, typing in a few letters of its name, and hitting Enter. It’s really easy, and makes the Start Menu practically obsolete.

MS Office Enterprise 2007: I was warned against Office 2007, but decided to try it out anyway. (The first non-free software on this list, it’s actually a legal copy! IU has a group licensing agreement or something; I could download it right from their website.) I rather like Office 2007. The interface is drastically changed (no menus! just buttons!) but they did a great job of maintaining keyboard shortcuts. Beware, though, they have changed their default file format. Save in compatibility mode if you want people using Office 97-2003 to be able to read your files without a plugin. Oh, also, I rather like OneNote as an organization tool for all my random notes-to-self and data. But more on that some other time.

Mozilla Firefox: Because I use the Internet, and IE is terrible. I upgraded to IE 7, which I do think is a big step up from IE 6, but I still love me some Firefox. Plus, I get to use my favorite extensions, like BugMeNot and FireFTP. I haven’t installed my gesture extension, because I still don’t have a notebook mouse, so I’m only using the touchpad and clit mouse (not my term, xkcd’s).

Mp3tag: While I kinda prefer Winamp for actually changing tags, Mp3tag is a small program that’s good at what I use it for, which is primarily mass-renaming mp3 files to conform to their tags.

Pidgin: Because Pidgin (the IM client formerly known as Gaim) is the best IM client I’ve used. It’s full of features, but still manages to feel pretty slim and easy to use.

QuickTime: See “Adobe Flash Player.”

Ruckus Player: At orientation, they suggested that we use our free subscriptions to Ruckus to download music. It has a library most the size of iTunes’s (but not as big…) and downloads songs right to your computer. The downside is that it downloads WMAs with DRM on them. However, there are programs that can strip PlaysForSure DRM from WMA files. I mean, err, I didn’t say anything!

SciTE: I don’t like programming in big IDEs, but for things like Perl, I like having some basic syntax highlighting to catch silly mistakes. SciTE is a really small free lexing engine with a pretty good interface for editing scripts. Perl highlighting is built in, as are most languages anybody uses, and even a few they don’t. SciTE is the best syntax highlighter I’ve come across, and I’m sticking with it.

Steam/HL1 Anthology: Because I want to keep my copies of Half Life, Half Life: Blue Shift, and Half Life: Opposing Force. Steam ain’t that bad, really, and I did get a (legal!) copy of the HL1 Anthology for $5.

Winamp: Because it’s the best music player I’ve found. I like its library management, and I can’t live without global shortcuts.

Well, there you have it, folks! Top software that Carlo needs for maximizing productivity! (OK, maybe HL1 isn’t for “maximizing productivity,” but most of it is!) Plus, it shows you don’t need to pirate software to have lots of great software for free! The only non-free things on that list are Office and Half Life, and I have legitimate copies of both. If you see anything on the list above that sounds interesting, I encourage you to check it out; everything there is really great software, and vastly superior to the usual substitutes (Pidgin over AIM, Firefox over IE, Foxit over Adobe). So enjoy, and until next time, keep on softwarin’!

I manage to mess up a lot of things when I tinker with my own computers. The nice thing is that I somehow manage to figure out how to fix them again.

On that note, I’ve been securing Windows on my laptop; does anyone have any suggestions?

Yeah, I don’t really feel like writing a lot about orientation. I had a good time, so call me a bad blogger or something, but I’m not sure what there is to say. Very quick summary: Randomly ran into CJ on Monday. Hung out with Wells Scholars much of the time. Had a good meeting with my adviser on Wednesday morning, then a very nice talk with the math department about what math courses to take, and then a decent talk with the chem department about taking organic chem first semester.

My first semester courses are:

Mathematics S343 – Honors Differential Equations I
Chemistry C341 – Organic Chemistry I
Honors H205 – Origins and History of the Universe
History and Philosophy of Science X102 – Science Revolutions: From Plato to Nato
Telecommunications T160 – Videogames: Historical & Social Impact

Yeah, you read that last one right.

In terms of my schedule:

Monday: 11:15 CHEM, 2:30 CHEM
Tuesday: 9:30 HPSC, 11:15 MATH, 4:00 HON, 5:45 TEL
Wednesday: 11:15 CHEM
Thursday: 9:30 HPSC, 11:15 MATH, 4:00 HON, 5:45 TEL
Friday: 11:15 CHEM

Yes, my days are kinda lopsided… >_<

Male singular: Alumnus
Male plural: Alumni
Female singular: Alumna
Female plural: Alumnae

YOU ARE NOT AN ALUMNI.

But while we’re on that subject, congratulations to the New Trier Class of 2007!