Posts from — February 2007

If you aren’t using Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, you’re probably wasting time! Some of them might seem a little strange if you aren’t a vi user, but you’ll get used to them. Google Reader shares many of the same shortcuts, as well. I learned a few more today, which prompted this post. Also, you can now register for gmail without an invite.

I started work on Monday. After being gone for 6 months, a lot seems to have changed. Most things are the same, but I feel more like I’m new there than I expected (I hadn’t eaten in the dining facility in my building before, for example). Anyway, things are going pretty well… my project, which is different from what I was working on over the summer, seems interesting and should be a good fit for me. I’m still working on the OCR team.

I haven’t really decided upon a work schedule yet. I’m trying to avoid the late schedule I got on over the summer, but I’m not sure how well that will work. I’m probably going to attend a lot of the training sessions in the next couple of weeks. I was doing some exercises for one of them (homework, basically), and was amazed by how much I had forgotten. I haven’t really been writing C++ for the last few months, too.

I got a new laptop that I’ll write about later.

Still no word on housing, but I’m confident it’ll be settled by the end of the week.

Movies from 2006 that I’ve seen:

An Inconvenient Truth *
Borat
Cars
Casino Royale
Children of Men
Firewall
Iraq for Sale *
Jesus Camp *
Little Miss Sunshine
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
Superman Returns
Talladega Nights
Thank You For Smoking
The Departed
The Good Shepherd
The Illusionist
The Last King of Scotland
The Prestige
This Film is Not Yet Rated *
Who Killed the Electric Car? *
Why We Fight *
X-Men: The Last Stand

(* documentaries, strong recommendations in bold)

I’m surprised by how long this list is, and there are still good movies from 2006 I haven’t seen (for example, I didn’t see any of Clint Eastwood’s movies).

Many of the documentaries I saw were very good, and merit more discussion, but I’ll save that discussion for a later post.

My favorite movie of the year is by far The Departed. In fact, it’s probably the best movie I’ve seen in the last few years. Top-notch directing, acting and a super-suspenseful plot. Goodfellas was probably a better mobster movie in general, but The Departed had a stronger plot.

If you’d like to post your own list (great way to procrastinate!), this page may help.

I’m finally starting work tomorrow. My efforts to repair my sleep schedule have been unsuccessful, so it might be a rough couple of days.

I had 24 unread messages in my yahoo mail inbox this morning, and 21 of them were spam, some of it rather obvious. I think it’s time to start migrating my accounts to gmail.

NYT: Cartoon Network Chief Quits Over Marketing Stunt.

So, who’s being held accountable on the government side? I mean, if they did look like bombs, and it was right to react, then someone should be answering for the two weeks in which the police did nothing while they were up. Otherwise, they should be responsible for shutting down the city. Right?

As I mentioned before, Yahoo Pipes looked interesting to me, but I didn’t have a good use for it. After some thinking, I came up with a use for it. Around here, the main place to look for real estate is craigslist, so that’s where I’ve been looking for housing. One cool feature they have is RSS feeds for searches, so I can subscribe to a certain query, and get new posts whenever they appear. In order to search in three towns, however, I needed to subscribe to three feeds. Also, when I search for 2BR, it seems to give me 2+BR, so it has a lot of stuff that I don’t need. Additionally, I had forgotten to restrict the price, so I wanted to change that. So, I decided to do this with Pipes.

Here’s what it looked like (click to see full-size):

There’s also something that can extract addresses from the posts, so it would be cool if I could restrict the items to something like “within 20 miles of Google”, but that doesn’t seem possible right now.

I like how recent Mac ads talk more about Vista’s features than Microsoft ads. The Microsoft ones seem to only showcase the Alt+tab functionality. It’s a cool feature, but I certainly wouldn’t pay that much money for something like that.

This video is a hilarious combination of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and 24. Definitely recommended.

Get the day’s news in haiku form.

I like yesterday’s:

astronaut killer?
envy drives attack on peer
Houston has problem