Posts from — January 2007

I was watching TV tonight, and as it got late, nothing was really on. I watched a bit of some Chucky movie that was on, but then decided that it was perhaps not the best thing to get me to sleep. So I shut the TV off and went to bed to do some reading (in the same room of my studio apt). I read for about 15 minutes, then, out of nowhere, the TV turned back on (to the Chucky movie). I figured I had sat on a remote or something in the bed, but then I looked around and all the remotes were on the other side of the room.

Creepy.

About ten minutes later, I realized that I had been playing with the timing functions on the TV last night, so that was why it turned on. Scared the hell out of me for a bit, though

NBC censored the word “retarded” on Conan last night.

I just finished watching Demetri Martin’s Comedy Central special. It’s very good, definitely recommended. A lot of his material reminds me of Mitch Hedberg, but a very different delivery.

Here’s a neat feature in firefox 2 that I found today:

If you’re on a web page and need to do a quick calculation, press Ctrl+K to get to the search box (in the upper right), then type the equation you want evaluated. It’ll give you the answer as the first suggestion in the dropdown (don’t bother pressing enter), so you don’t even need to load a new web page to get it.

Of course, you can do more complex stuff like conversions:
12 furlongs per fortnight to lightyears per decade

This is the most awesome thing I have seen in a long time. If you don’t like anything in math, don’t read this post.

Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula, when plotted, produces an image of the formula itself. Here’s the output, from the wikipedia entry:

This is like the math equivalent of a quine in programming.

I’m still sorta in disbelief about this, since I haven’t graphed it myself, but there are a wide variety of sources describing it, one of which is mathworld (linked at the top).

Today I took a trip with Girts through the mountains to Santa Cruz. It was similar to a trip a bunch of us made over the Summer, though we took slightly different roads, and I don’t have any pictures. The weather was pretty fun over the mountain. It was clear and sunny at one point, so we stopped and explored a bit around a scenic vista. It started to rain, so we headed back toward the car (I was wearing shorts and short sleeves). As we started the car, it started to hail a bit. Of course, the mountain was covered with intermittent fog, though nothing as extreme as what we saw over the Summer. Once we made it to Santa Cruz, we walked around a bunch and went down to the beach to watch the surfers for a while (it was nice out, so there were a lot of them). Definitely a good trip.

Speaking of trips, I might be making some more soon. My original starting date at Google was February 5, but because of a conflict that week, training isn’t taking place. I tried to get it moved to the week before (aka “today”), but that turned out to not be possible, so now I’ve got two weeks before I start work. This isn’t the end of the world, but it would have been very nice to start early.. I’m ready to get going. So anyway, I have some time off now, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with it. It’ll be a bit easier once I get my car later this week. I’ve got plenty of stuff to catch up on in the meantime. Maybe I’ll take some sort of trip…

Courtesy of Girts:

For your viewing pleasure, I’ve compiled a list of commercials I find most enjoyable.

3. Volkswagon Cabrio - Pink Moon
2. Sony Bravia - Bouncing Balls (filmed in SF!)
1. Nike - Morning After/Y2K

These aren’t the funniest commercials I’ve seen, but these are the ones I can enjoy watching multiple times (unlike some with great punch lines).

This is pretty neat… Google book search shows a map of “places mentioned in the book” (for example, see the 9/11 Commission Report).

I made it to California, and I’m exhausted.

I was at Google for a bit and ate some Kangaroo. It’s a lot like beef. There are other parts to that story, but I think I’ll leave it at that.