Posts from — June 2005

By popular demand… Picture of pregnant animals.

Suddenly I feel like a productive member of society…

Slate has a good article about the President’s speech last night. I was going to write about what I thought about it, but I think the good and bad points listed in that article was what I was going to say anyway.

My room was hotter than the rest of the house at 10am this morning. I’d had my computer off for 10 hours at that point… it must just be the windows and the location. I’ll probably leave my computer off for the most part in the next few days. That’ll give me more time to focus on reading and other stuff. I wish I didn’t read so slowly.

I’m also thinking about switching around my sleep schedule and running in the morning before work. I tried to do it last night, but the change was too much and I couldn’t get to sleep early enough. Who knows where this will end up.

In other news…
Why do they call people who recently died “late”? I don’t think they’re “late”, they’re just not showing up at all.

It’s 5:20 and I can’t seem to get back to sleep, so I’m going to write a bit.

I made a few purchases yesterday and the night before that. First, I preordered the DVD set for the Daily Show’s 2004 election coverage. It’s a 3-dvd set and I’m pretty excited to get it. It should arrive sometime before July 7. The Daily Show is my favorite show on television. I also want to get the Sin City DVD when it comes out in August. Perhaps I shall invest in the Sin City 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack as well…

I also bought Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition. I bought it hardcover/new instead of getting one of the ubiquitous “International Edition” version that are so common on used book sites. I’m interested in learning more about algorithms (which is ironic considering how lazy I was in algorithms class last semester, but I did learn all the material), and this book is well know as one of the best on the subject.

Yesterday I went to B&N with Mike and picked up a couple of books with several gift cards I had accumulated. I got The Non-Designer’s Design Book after seeing it suggested for programmers. The art of design often mystifies me so hopefully I’ll be able to pick something up from this book.

On the same idea, I’ve wanted to buy the book The Zen of CSS Design for a while, so I finally got that. It’s based closely upon CSS Zen Garden‘s designs, deconstructing them and explaining their methods and motivations. CSS Zen Garden has some brilliant designs that really make me appreciate what can be done with CSS.

I’m going to finish The Devil in the White City before I get to these other books. Maybe I’ll try to read for a bit now and get back to sleep. To the Gilded Age!

I’m starting to like a 6-day (or more) work week. It lets me have more free time during the week and lets me sit in an air-conditioned room during the hottest days on the weekend. I didn’t make a huge amount of progress at work this week because of setting up the new computers and being distracted with other things. I even got some reading done at work today while I waited for some software upgrades to finished.

(beginning nerdy stuff)
I set up Xorg’s compositing with hardware acceleration today, and it’s really cool. My windows and menus have dropshadows, inactive windows become a bit transparent (darker because of the shadow), and windows do fast fade in and out as they’re created and destroyed. The system isn’t perfect but I think I like it for now. I’m really excited to see where this stuff goes in the next year.

“But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to… submit a petition.” – Karl Rove 6/22/05

Thanks, Karl, for your honorable contribution to intelligent national discourse. You might as well slander half of the country, because, hey, you’re not even elected! This administration is making more liberal every day, it seems…

At least we have the media to help:

It’s still in the oven right now, but I’m going to say that this cheesecake will be somewhat disasterous. I need to buy the correct type of pan to make it right. I tried some of the filling before the eggs got in (cream cheese + sugar), and it was really good. Because we (Humberto and I were helping Mike cook, ie we cooked while Mike slept) used the wrong pan, we had extra filling, so we’re also making “Cheese Cupcakes” which are starting to look like mushrooms. I’ll be getting up at 5am to take them out of the oven. Perhaps I’ll write an update then. Oh well, at least I’m going to be making cookies, too.

Time for sleep… some work and plenty of cooking tomorrow.

Today at work I made a diagram of all the data and programs involved in the project, and the pipeline of their interactions. You can see it here… it looks pretty good at this point. The process of having to diagram the whole thing forced me to realize where a lot of the problems remain, as well as places where the project was poorly defined. I pasted together a 4-page wide version of this, so I could take notes on it. I should find a color printer once the diagram is more finalized.

I guess this post was boring to most people, but whatever. I like diagrams.

I saw half of “The Situation With Tucker Carlson” on MSNBC tonight after I got back from work, and it actually wasn’t too bad. The discourse was reasonable and pleasant (ie not yelling and slander) and the topics were generally interesting. It wasn’t anything life-changing, but I was surprised that it wasn’t horrible like most shows of that genre. Slate makes some pretty good points about it.

In other news I’m finally adding american cheese to my (almost) nightly omelets. I had tried cheese a while ago, but folding and flipping the omelet becomes much more difficult since the cheese often comes out of the omelet, so I scrapped it. Since then, my skill has increased, and I am now up to the challenge.

So, tonight I set up my new computer at work (as well as doing OS upgrades on 4 other machines). At first I didn’t really care if I got one of the new machines, as my machine seemed ok. Since my old machine only had 256 MB of RAM, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try another one, so here’s what I now have:

19″ LCD monitor (used to have 17)
2x 3.2GHz processors
2.0 GB RAM
Dell MusicMatch JukeBox INCLUDED!!

I’ve got linux working on it now. Fedora Core 4 is pretty nice, though the yum and apt sources for Core 4 seem to be sparse. I really like some things about fedora, but it’s not good enough for me to leave debian any time soon. Package management requires too much legwork, and the whole mp3 situation gets me mad (especially since I’ve reinstalled so much).

(Originally I didn’t even know it was an SMP machine.. I was going to run `free -m ; cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep “model name”` and post the output to this entry, and I couldn’t figure out why the processor was listed twice… ding!)

I hope I didn’t get this thing via some soon-to-be-reversed clerical error…

An open letter to the Kansas School Board saying that if Intelligent Design (aka Creationism) is to be taught in schools, they should also recognize the theory that the world was created by The Flying Spaghetti Monster (picture to the right). The letter is really funny.

“It is absolutely imperative that [students] realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia.”