Posts from — December 2004

A picture from the front door of my house a few days ago. I think the panorama stitching came out pretty good…

Link goes to the full size (very large) version.

Slate was sold from Microsoft to the Washington Post… I think that makes sense. I started reading Slate over the summer and I generally like it. Hopefully things will only improve… it sounds like their new owners will be giving them the same independence as before.

I went running on the treadmill again. I decided to run with some hand weights that I found in the basement. They look vaguely like this. While I was running with them, I realized that it would be really useful if I could control the treadmill with controls on the weights which would send information through a wireless connection. The way I hold the weights, each thumb is in an ideal position to control some sort of up-down mechanism, so you could have one hand adjust the incline and the other adjust the speed. This would be much easier than having to hit the controls on the treadmill itself while running. The run went well… the treadmill is a great alternative to the 5 degree outdoors.
3.5/80/60

It’s always nice to come home to presents under the Christmas tree…

First, the miracle. Apparently my philosophy paper, which I thought would be terrible due to extreme fatigue turned out to be pretty good. I got a 29/30 on that final, giving me a high A in the class. I was absolutely amazed by this, considering I was physically incapable of reading complete sentences as I finished that thing, so my proofreading was cursory at best. I had the opposite luck in operating systems, but whatever, it’s behind me now.

A little before 2am tonight, I decided I should go running. Since it’s running and rather cold out, I used the treadmill in the basement. I made a CD of running-appropriate songs for the occasion and it went pretty well. I need to try to figure out how to work the treadmill better, I was having some problems. I was surprised that I wasn’t completely out of shape, though. Definitely a good experience… I’ll have to do that again.

3.5/80/60

Last night I went to the neighborhood Christmas party with my parents. This basically consisted of me and all of the adults on the street, I was the only one from my generation there. It wasn’t too bad, though, I got to talk to a lot of neighbors who I haven’t seen in a while, and make them feel old by drinking a beer. The food was great, too. I left there to see some friends from high school… John s, Ashley, Peyton, Chris and Jen. We played poker and talked for a while. I had a good time and I hope I get to see them a lot over break. I miss my friends from Lehigh, but I need some time away, too. I tried to get to bed around 1:45 (since I was waking up at 7:15), but I was in bed awake for at least an hour, my mind racing. I hope that doesn’t become a habit.

This looks really promising…

“1) Dial the number below
2) enter the ISBN number (for books)
or UPC number (for CDs) ( use # key if you need ‘x’)
3) listen for prices, reviews, and recommendations courtesy of Amazon.com ”

I’ll try this out when I’m shopping tomorrow.

I did some coding for Muse tonight. After reading Joel’s article on Google Suggest and how web users don’t find page waits as acceptable as the used to, I decided I needed to make my web pages smarter. This meant pushing a lot of logic from PHP to javascript (server to client) so that the pages didn’t need to reload as often. Easier said than done. I used DHTML (javascript, DOM, CSS, etc) to build a rather generic table handling system that can be used throughout the site. You can see it on this page (just works in firefox now). You can sort by clicking on a column, and reverse the sort by clicking it again. Still plenty of work to be done with it, but the code needed to create this table is really slick. All you need to do is provide an array of headers, an array of data rows (2d array), and a sort function. The javascript I wrote handles all the interaction, no reloads or anything. It’s so much faster and pleasant to use than the old way, and is a whole lot easier to code.

It almost works right in IE, but I don’t really want to spend any time working on that. Muse is a closed community, and if you’re running IE, I’m not going to write software for you. Sorry.

Many thanks to my awesome DHTML book, which is awesome beyond belief. Worth every penny.

I just saw the documentary (in the Moore sense) “OutFoxed”. It was quite good and I recommend it. The film documents Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, especially Fox News, and the effects of its bias. While I believe the bulk of the movie is correct, I wish it did a better job of comparing Fox and its relatives to other news agencies. For example, it talks about the ratio of republican to democratic guests on FNC… but what ratios do the other networks have? It didn’t say. I’m not saying they’re going to be worse, but I want to know how much worse Fox is. Another thing that bothered me was something showing that people who watched Fox News were more likely to support Bush than those watching PBS or listening to NPR (I’m grossly paraphrasing this). This is more a case of the audience being self-selecting than the networks influencing their viewers. People like to watch news that reflects their attitudes, for better or for worse.

“The only way to improve the world is by treating it better than it treats you”

I can’t tell if I made up that quote or if it just popped into my head the other day while I was walking around campus. Either way, I like it.