The blog of Matthew A. Smith and Michael Chappell, on topics from A to Z

So, yes, I just recently joined the bandwagon and enabled sms messages on my cell phone. No, I’m not “slow” or “behind the times.” My phone was, until recently, attached to my parents’ family plan - and they blocked all messages instead of paying the extra $30/month. Since I now have my own steady income, I have spun my number off to my own plan and enabled text messages in the process. Hurray for independence (and the costs of such freedom).

Shortly after beginning my own “sms revolution,” a few people began complaining that messages they received contained an “@” between each word of the message. Of course I immediately think “well obviously that’s an encoding problem.” And sure enough… here’s how you solve it:

Navigate to Options -> SMS Text and change Data Coding to 7 bit. I’m assuming it was previously set to UCS2. A quick word of warning: if you need to send messages containing some foreign characters, you must leave your encoding set to UCS2 and tell your friends to get a better phone. Another bonus is that now your messages can actually contain 160 characters instead of the 62 character limit of the extended letter set.

The more you know…

Never fear, I’m still here. I’m just busy trying to get moved into my new place and adjust to life after college. I start my new job at Robins AFB on Monday, June 23rd. Sometime after I get situated in that, I’ll be back with fresh new words for the site, so stay tuned.
Ps, you should come by the new house if you haven’t been yet. It’s pretty awesome.

It’s that time of year once again, when the last final is completed, the calculators and pencils are put away, and the books are burned (just kidding - they cost too much). However, I’m feeling a little melancholic for I have finished the last final of my undergraduate career. Five years of college, four years of high school, two years of middle school, and six years of grade school… I’ve only known school, and now that chapter of my life is done. It’s time to move on to new things, see new places, and meet new people  (but of course I’ll miss the ones I leave behind). Here’s two little lists that should sum it up.

Reasons I’m Sad

• No more staying up until 3AM
• No more sleeping ’til 12PM
• No more all night parties
• I have to pay bills

Reasons I’m Happy

• No more finals or exams
• No more school loans
• No more drama (who am I kidding)

Anyway, I’ll be around Macon (and the rest of Georgia) next year. I have accepted a job at RAFB doing some sort of engineering work and I’ll be living with another ATO alumnus who is buying a new house about ten minutes from campus. The party shall continue (but only on the weekends)!

On another note, I’m going to be around Macon from now until I start my job at the end of June (aside from a couple weeks of vacation), so be sure and look me up. I want to hang out and enjoy my last few weeks of freedom!

Some of my Facebook stalkers friends (I kid, I kid) may have noticed a lot of recent activity on the Beat House Productions page. In case you are wondering what Beat House Productions is, I am here to clarify (more or less).

Beat House Productions is the name of a group of DJs performing in and around the Macon, Georgia area. The creation and name of the group were products of one of my late night musings, but we’re now churning out awesome parties on a quite regular basis! The term “Beat House” was coined from two elements we work with: beats and house music. Of course, we work with beats a lot more than we work with house music… mostly it just sounds cool.

Beat House was originally myself and Adam Sekulow. However, my friends Wes and Brian liked the idea and have joined forces with us. Wes has been DJing parties for several years longer than I have, and has much better equipment. We now use (for a full party) 2x JBL powered cabs, 1x 18″ JBL powered sub (yes, an 18″, 500 watt subwoofer), a bevy of awesome LED lights, and a bunch of computers and control surfaces, mixers, etc. Not to mention a huge library of music!

Our next evolution in party-making will probably involve the addition of a projector and the ability to provide a visual experience along with our sound. And sometime after that, we’ll be adding virtual vinyl (or Vinyl-like controllers) for full creative potential!

If you’re interested, be sure to fan the Beat House Productions page to receive the latest updates (we also have a Purevolume and Myspace page). Currently you can find set-lists from the parties we’ve played to date (on the Facebook page only) and a few audio samples from past parties (usually short clips demonstrating song transitions).

I’ve also been kicking around the idea of adding a “party-in-a-box” section, with full 4 hour mixes that could be downloaded and played at a party… so be sure and keep an eye out!

Yea, I know… I’ve converted to the dark side.

If you’d told me two years ago that I’d be owning a Mac sometime in the future, I’d have laughed. However, over the past two years, I’ve used various Apple products at the computer store and helped friends with their Apple computers. I have become quite a fan of the construction and design that goes into these products and I finally decided to add an Apple to my extensive stable of computers.

I purchased the new laptop yesterday afternoon and I’ve been extremely happy with it so far. It’s doing everything I want or need it to do and works flawlessly with my other Windows computers. And of course OSX has plenty of nifty eye candy.

If you’re wondering about the specs, it’s a 15.4″ widescreen with a 2.5GHz Core2Duo processor, 250GB hard drive, 2GB ram (which I’ll probably upgrade to 4GB in the near future), with the nVidia 8600 GT 512MB graphics card and all the other shiny Mac goodness.

By the way, this computer is a graduation present from my grandfather.

Thanks Granddad!!!

I just finished upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress. So far, I must say that the administration back-end has received a fantastic overhaul and I’m enjoying the new features so far.

I will soon update the theme to take advantage of the new features, but until then I can’t really comment on the coding aspects (but I know they’re sound). Anyway, I’d highly recommend updating if you use Wordpress.

Read this page and you might be a little confused. Apparently the author wishes to bring monarchy to the United States enough to write a web page (in some form of what appears to be Middle English) all about it. Go read and then bring me your thoughts (in the form of comments).

I hope one of their first goals isn’t reverting to Middle English.

Good heavens, the last post I made was two weeks ago! I suppose I have a little bit of explaining to do.

Over the past two weeks, I have had spring break, done a lot of maintenance on the BMW, DJ’d two parties, gone camping, had a job interview, and just plain grown older. Hopefully that’s a decent excuse for my absence, most of which has been spent covered in grease underneath my car, which now has 100,000 miles on the odometer. Now that some preventative maintenance has been done, and a nice dent made in my wallet, I hope to get another 100,000 miles of of it.

Anyway, this week is just as crazy as the past few weeks. I have a presentation at 9 AM and a research paper due Thursday morning…

Happy St. Patrick’s day!