As for Christmas, I flew back into Virginia on Wednesday. On Thursday I attended a friend of the family’s funeral and raked some leaves. Today I caught up with some high school friends from the Systems Lab, which I almost missed since I thought today was Thursday (I guess flying cross country will do that to you). Finally, the first external contributor contributed to iFuse today. I didn’t understand the directory listing commands and this contributor was able to figure it out pretty quickly (less than 24 hours after I posted the data). I am so excited about getting iFuse to a point where I can get my data off of my iPhone.

I really fell in love with one of his tracks unfortunately he isn’t ready to release it just yet. However, he has some other cool stuff on his myspace page. You should check it out.

I had my first performance review at work on Friday. It was good to hear feedback as well as give it. I have a few things to work on over the next few months but for the most part it was a glowing review. I enjoy the fact that employee feedback is such an integrated part of the company culture. It’s time consuming but totally worth it.

Today I am volunteering at the Graduate student orientation. Polina was a co-organizer, I am just the manual labor.

And finally Apple. GAH. So I didn’t realize until today that Apple prevents you from copying music off your iPod onto an authorized computer if it wasn’t purchased from the iTunes store. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I read on Slashdot that they have now added a cryptographic key to the iTunes database such that Linux can no longer upload music onto the iPod. Great. All of my personal music collection is in Linux and it’s now entirely unaccessible to my portable devices. Thanks guys you really rock.

Additionally I have hit a road block on implementing a filesystem driver for Linux on the iPhone. It turns out that it uses SSL to encrypt a critical part of the communication making impossible to determine what it’s saying. I am not sure what I am going to do about that.

And one more last annoyance about Apple. Why can’t I manually sync songs (you know good ole drag and drop) on to my iPhone in iTunes (like EVERY OTHER iPod)? Right now Apple is not on my good side (also where is my $100 check).

So now that means a few big changes for me. First of all I will be taking a leave of absence next semester from Olin. The question I get following telling people this is, will you graduate with 2007? Well it depends on what you mean by graduate and how well the company does. I can tell you if things don’t work out I will be here in the Fall and Spring of next year and I will be a “pretend senior”. I will do SCOPE, AHS capstone and all that jazz. However in the spring I will not have enough credits to graduate. I don’t know if I will walk the stage or not but to me its not important. Being there is. Following that I will need to complete one more semester of school which I plan to do in Australia. So for all intents and purposes it will be like I graduated from Olin with 2007 as I won’t be returning to the campus in the fall.

So this last week totally rocked. I had an awesome interview, cinched the funding and got a free ticket to the MLS semifinals. How much better can it get?

It appears that it can be even better. I ran across this a article, which gives me hope for my digital future. A large swathe of young Americans use the web to create and share content as well as use other people’s content for their own creations, says a report. Long live rip, remix, burn.