Posts from — March 2006

I wonder what the colbert report would be like if there were a democratic president.

From Chris Mansley:
“We attempted to crack passwords using a new technique on the Windows machine in the lab. All the passwords were cracked in under 21 seconds, except for yours. We could NOT crack it in a reasonable amount of time. Congratulations on being extreme in your password selection.”

IDEA:
Make a single feed that aggregates my del.icio.us bookmarks along with my shared Google Reader items. I’ve heard rumors of Google social bookmarking coming sometime, so maybe this sort of thing is on the way anyway. Regardless, it seems silly to have two separate sites and feeds for what is essentially the same thing.

Time to get back to reading. Estimated bed time is 3:30, which is much better than I expected.

I realized while walking back from Packard:
Were it not for illegal piracy of TV shows, I never would have seen Arrested Development, nor would I have bought two full seasons on DVD.

I try to keep these rare, but here’s a general-purpose update-like thing.

This week has been good. I can’t put my finger on a specific thing that has been particularly good about it, nor has it been extremely relaxing, it just has a good feeling to it. I didn’t even mind sitting though my 3hr class on Monday. Maybe it’s because I’m actually accomplishing stuff that I’ve wanted to accomplish for a while. It’s not like I’m getting ahead or anything, the deadlines and meetings are fast approaching, but they’re still accomplishments. Tomorrow is by far the most stressful day of the month, with a weekly thesis meeting in the afternoon, weekly search engine meeting thursday morning, and a 3-week project for semantic web due thursday morning (definitely should have started that before tonight). This sort of pressure is what gets me to schedule everything and make it happen in shorter amounts of time, though, so it’s probably for the best.

Runstoppable is going pretty well. We had about 75 signups today, which was a huge jump. This came from a discussion thread on the Runner’s World forums. The people who tried it on there had a lot of good things to say. We now have over 230 users. The new version (released last week) gives users the subtle option to donate to the site to cover our hosting costs. I’m confident I’ll be able to stop spending my money on it in the short term, at least, with this. We’ll also be investigating affiliate programs, like allowing users to buy running products (e.g. a gym bag) on another site with part of the proceeds returning to us.

Positive feedback on the site sometimes surprises me, because I’m always thinking of the site that’ll exist three versions from now, and compared to that, the current one isn’t very exciting. There are maybe two running logs on the web that I know of that can compete at this point, I think, and as far as I can tell, our elevation graphs are the best out there (because of their interactivity).

I’m excited for this weekend… not entirely sure what I’ll be doing, but I’m sure it’ll be reasonably good. I’ll be past the work stuck in the middle of the week, regardless. I’m hoping to have an Arrested Development Season 3 marathon at some point… perhaps this weekend there will be a chance.

This article describes how Bush is using the straw man fallacy with increasing frequency. He’s certainly not the first to do this, but does seem to use it a lot. The quotes in the article are pretty good.

Note to self:
Do not watch documentaries that include childbirth while trying to eat lunch.

On the other hand, I did learn that:
- Newborn babies can swim underwater, before being able to crawl. They stick out their tongues in order to prevent from drowning, which makes it funny to watch.
- Russian babies in swaddling clothes make me laugh, and Russian nurses seem to wear chef hats, which is disturbing.

In other news, babies are stupid.

The Washington Post has an interesting article about culinary illiteracy and the dumbing-down of cookbooks. I especially like the quote:
“At a conference last December, Stephen W. Sanger, chairman and chief executive of General Mills Inc., noted the sad state of culinary affairs and described the kind of e-mails and calls the company gets asking for cooking advice: the person who didn’t have any eggs for baking and asked if a peach would do instead, for example; and the man who railed about the fire that resulted when he thought he was following instructions to grease the bottom of the pan — the outside of the pan.”

Yahoo! Mindset is a neat search engine that lets you specify if you’re interested in shopping or research on a given query. For example, if I search for “running shoes”, I might be interesting in buying shoes or I might be interested in learning about different types of running shoes. Mindset worked pretty well on that query. I tried the same query on Yahoo and Google. Google returned a mix of shopping and research links, while Yahoo returned mostly shopping links.

(via Lessig)