Well, this weekend was the KVSC Trivia Contest, an event I was aware of, but hadn’t been a part of until this year. I had meant to go starting on friday night, when it started, but some work came up which kept me busy friday night and saturday. Anyway I got my work to a usable state saturday after grappling with javascript for a while, and I went off to want_a_be’s place for game night. There I played a rousing game of illuminati, a particularly fun game, and a more simple game Bohnanza. It was good to get a load off after the working weekend. That wrapped up around midnight and I headed to superna’s place for some trivia goodness.

Trivia was an experience which is not to be missed for a man of my trivia caliber. It’s setup like some sort of super-trivia where you listen to the radio, get the questions (which are “open”, or available to answer, for a certain amount of time) and then frantically come up with the answer. Easier questions are worth less points - most 15 point questions were known off-hand or a simple Googling would reveal the answer. Harder questions either required elite internet searching skills or some knowledge of a subject. I don’t have deep knowledge of many subjects, so I had to put my searching skills to the test. One of the most interesting parts of the night was at about 7am when two of the four people awake were working on a 250 point question which took a long time, and myself and want_a_be were handling all the other questions that came up in the meantime. It was like a oiled machine where each person did their part. My big win of the night was finding a midget wrestling championship bout answer.

It’s one of the funnest times I think is possible by staying up all hours. I ended up staying until about 11am, when I went to meet my parents for brunch. I got home sleep deprived and planning to take a power nap in order to make it possible to accomplish some things later, but I ended up sleeping until 7pm. Strange, because I’m still tired at my normal time again tonight. I will probably set aside the whole weekend next time, or perhaps take a break in the middle to play some games. I’m definitely part of the team for next year.

Sleep Deprived Google Monkey, over and out.

B5 d+ t+ k s u– f o+ x+ e l+ c-

A way to make these codes more interesting to me would be to plot where most of the responses are on a scale. Also possibly some distance metric between you and another person would be nifty.

My grandfather died today. He passed peacefully.

Arnold - bells for his years.

Ladies and gentlemen, my year, in numbers:

• Took 6 classes totalling 17 credits
• Made 127 weblog posts, an average of 2 a week
• Email:
  • Received 184210 emails
  • 111749 were marked as spam - this is an average of 1 spam every 5 minutes
  • Compressed, my 2004 email takes up 620 megabytes
  • 383 megabytes of this is spam
• Garnered $16000 in income (after taxes)
• Spent nearly $8000 on rent
• Spent an average of $12.15 per day on dining out
• Was the TA for no less than 200 students
• Most importantly, found the love of my life, and spent a wonderful 8 months with her, with hopes of many more

These are of course just the numbers that I thought were important and could say off the top of my head. Lots has happened since last I wrote - classes ended with a horrendous final, I finished my project. Diana and I went to christmas with both my family, and extended family, and she gave me the greatest gift I can remember. Having her come to christmas and meet my family made me realize just how much I love her. We also drove from Iowa to Indiana in order for her family to meet me. The trip would have not been made except that my parents place is very close to about half-way between the Twin Cities and Indiana, so it was much more convenient to go see them.

The biggest change in my life is that Diana is moving into the apartment. We discussed this at length and both agreed we wanted to live together, both acknowledging that Diana could have easily moved into other apartments that she was looking at. Being together for only 8 months, we’re both a little scared about it, but it has gone swimmingly so far. The eternal pessimist in me has setup a monthly budget set-aside just in case of hard times. The process of moving her in has been stretched out over most of the month of January. We’ll probably hold a housewarming party around the middle of February. This, work, and eternally waiting for the maintenance guy at my apartment has been taking up most of my time.

As the semester draws to a close, my days get longer. The last week has been full of working on the project for computational vision, which amounts to an image manipulation library for Mathematica. The project is about halfway done I would guess, but I can see why people get paid largs sums of money to develop packages for this language - it’s incredibly hard to learn, but once you know it, you can do things very quickly. The harder problem involves coding which is acually efficient. The package I’m building’s whole point is that it is a more computationally efficient than normal algorithms - unfortunately, in Mathematica you need to do some things slightly differently. Most of the efficiency changes I need to make are due to Matrix computation being much faster than normal. The second Mathematica issue is that they are very courteous to different programming styles - the progam accomodates functional, procedural, object-oriented, and rule-based programming. You would think this is a bonus because you can program in any way you want, but some algorithms are faster in one language than others.

Of course, not everything surfaces in fun coding projects - the next thing on my list of things to do is homework for my tortuous class, Theory of Matrix Computation. The class is teaching me lots of material, but the tests seem overly complex to me - the same kinds of questions that are on the homework and take hours to do are only part of the test. The tests also seem very much weighted toward the problems which I deem impossible to solve when I glance at them normally. These problems are normal for a hard class - the big beef I am having with the class is that there never fails to be a set of questions that have never been introduced in class, practice tests or homework and are worth 20% or more of the test. I can’t complain though, because even if I completely fail the course I will have what can be consider a decent GPA.

I really want to buy myself a new bed for christmas. I really want to watch some of the DVDs I have waiting for me. I really want to start coding on the research project I’m working on. All the things I want to do, I can’t because it’s the end of the semester. Time to get back to grading.

I spent time with family at thanksgiving this year. A decent time was had by everyone, mostly eating and chatting about what was going on. I ate way too much, but it’s turkey day, what can you do? It was the first time I saw my grandfather for a very long time, actually since last christmas almost since I skipped easter this year. He seems to be doing fairly well. He’s using a walker around his apartment complex now, and he seems to be getting around very well. I’ve wanted to know him better than I actually do, and I hope I get around to it soon.

Updated my folks on about everything in my life at the same time, and spent the night at home before I drove back to the twin cities friday morning. Part of me wanted to stay there for longer. I was missing Di and had lots of work to do though - and I know I wouldn’t get it done there, it would basically just be loafing around.

After I got back Di was sick and had to call into work. I visited the library and tried to pick up her last check from her downtown workplace. Di is so wonderful, she lost her job last friday. by this friday, she had a temp job that pays more than her old job, and she got a job offer for much more than she was makign before that is actually in her field. It’s just amazing.

As for myself, I’m still trying to hanker down for the rest of the semester. Currently my top three school-related priorities:

1. Project for Computer Vision
2. Studying for Matrix Theory
3. Working on behaviors for research

Somewhere in there should be grading, but unfortunately it’s been relegated to at least priority 4.

Well today was quite the interesting day today. I had 2 meetings that I forgot about (thank god I decided to go in early to study and silvrayn was around to remind me of them) and then a test to prepare for. Of course in the two meetings I paid marginal attention. The first one was fairly inconsequential and I discovered a really cool online utility bloglines which is almost exactly what I was looking for in a RSS reader. It’s now replaced Thunderbird as my syndication reader of choice. It basically does that my Planet was doing before, but it remembers what I have read and what I haven’t read, making my life filtering out things I already know about much simpler. It has nifty firefox integration, which makes it uber-cool in my opinion. I don’t know about the staying power of it though, because it doesn’t charge for anything and has no ads that I noticed. In that meeting the group I was there to represent basically got everything it wanted without my help.

In conjunction with that, I discovered the nifty application Konfabulator which puts lots of things on my desktop (or whever I want) and informs me about the world around me even when I’m holed up my cave somewhere coding away or wasting time, as it may be. It’s nagware, but the nagging is minimal, and the application is cool enough that I just might buy it. The one thing that might stop me is that it looks like OS X Tiger (10.4) will duplicate it’s functionality with Dashboard. Makes me wonder about where the idea came from in the first place, not that it’s anything very profound. I’m just happy because now my desktop is bursting with information.

The big loss today was at the CSci 5304 test. Suffice to say I wasn’t prepared, but I am not exactly sure what I would have done to be prepared. The test had very little similarity with the practice/previous tests that were available for perusal and that the professor went over in class, and the homeworks for the class didn’t have much to do with it either. My pessimistic outlook puts me at about a 48 out of 100. This is not to say that I couldn’t have done better - there were things I could have studied and performed better. This is the first test in my life that I just got completely fed up with and left. My only consolation is that even if I completely fail the class, if I get an A in my other class (which shouldn’t be too hard) I will still have a GPA over 3.5, which means I’m still validly in grad school. It’s freaky to know that I could blow off the entire rest of the class and still be in good standing. Suffice to day that CSci 5304 is going to get a significant amoutn fo my free time for the next few weeks. If I study all that I can, and then still do horrible on the last test and homework, I will chalk the class up to a teaching style that is completely orthogonal to my learning style.

I’ve not been quite the busy blogging bee lately. This is proabbly becuase of one of five things:

• CSci 5302
• TAing CSci 1901
• Grading for CSci 4131
• Reading for new RA
• Various Business Stuff

These are of course in order of time taken. I have been to a lot of movies, and been reading a few books. The books wil get reviewed first, because generally I like to be more detailed on them, and they’re more interesting to me.

I have had some time to update my Debian packages, pushing out a new bogosort (who would have thought that package needed updating) and a new bittorrent which fixes a fair amount of bugs and represents my first multiple package source, after caving to pressure and separating the gui elements of bittorrent. I have another rant about bittorrent, but that will have to wait for another day.

Di is still being the beautiful and wonderful person she is, which makes me a happy camper most of the time. She just got laid off this friday, but she has been taking it rather well considering. It probably helps that she has interviews/tests with a handful of temp agencies next week, and other jobs.

I’ve been homeworkfull of course, and TAing taking up the rest of my time. Of course a 50+ student class who has assignments due every week takes up a large portion of my time. At least the class is on things that I do just for fun - Internet Programming. The most recent assignment was a movie database with actors, movies, directors, etc. all editable from a web interface. It would probably freak the students out to tell them that I did something much more complicated than this in my free time in order to keep track of my anime obsession. I didn’t quite get to the level of actors, but I have compiled my share of web-accessible and editable databases. Sometimes I wish I had kept them all around, even the ones that I half-completed, in order to somehow monitor my progress or something.

I had a crash of one of my computers in the last month that I haven’t been updating. After a few days of technical voodoo, I declared my firewall sisko dead to the world and recovered it’s 250GB of anime in an LVM to my main machine odo. As part of the voodoo I had acquired another 250GB drive, which was happily added to the anime volume in order to have a cool .5TB of space for anime. I reconfigured my newly acquired WRT54G in order to run linux and be a firewall and traffic shaper and it has been running swimmingly so far.

On the blogging front, other than not updating at all, the front page of my blog got a small change to it’s header which I think is slightly more pleasing to the eye, plus it allows me to put nifty pictures of stuff I see in the twin cities for all to see. I was considering a much more bland reworking, but that got scrapped because it took too much CPU and content. I will probably be adding buttons and screwing with plugins soon, as I have not been too happy with ChaitGear’s Amazon plugin. Being that Amazon’s web services aren’t that bad, I hope to write a book reader’s plugin fairly soon for wordpress. I also hope to be able to post some of my other recent hacks on the site, right after I figure out a decent place for them. For now, I’m going to get back to my reading.

Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing (Book) Authors:Frank Ackerman, Lisa Heinzerling Manufacturer:New Press Released:24 August, 2005 Rating: B+

This book takes a critical look at the policy of cost-benefit analysis, specifically with respect to environmental policies. The authors act as the sleuths for the reader, seeking out the source of some benefit guidelines, and making a big deal about the $6.1 million human life value. They also present some shady econonmic practices for the semi-layman, making it as simple as I think you could for this type of audience. At the same time, I never was tired of the analysis or decided to skip anything. Of all of the things which seem to be bad about the Bush administration, anyone who thinks they’re pro-public health should take a read.

Being Digital (Book) Authors:Nicholas Negroponte Manufacturer:Knopf Released:31 January, 1995 Rating: C-

This book presents an interesting cover design that looks snazzy. Unfortunately it’s content doesn’t age as well as it’s outside. Nicholas seems to meander throughout this book, hitting in some places and missing in others. He starts with a rant about TV, which doesn’t seem to be where someone would start with a title like Being Digital. Overall, he seems to hit on some of his predictions, and misses wildly on others. Of course I have the benefit of actually being in the future, but it seems too much like shotgun prophesy to me. If you hit everything once, you’re bound to hit something right.