Ryan Morlok’s Blog

“Business is just like politics, only without all the democracy getting in the way.”

Katy has found a new project over the last month. Early January, Katy was looking up Lindsey Hulit (Katy’s best friend from high school) and encountered the web server statistics for St. Olaf (the school which Lindsey attends). This spawned an idea for Katy. She began repeatedly searching for, and clicking on St. Olaf Lindsey Hulit links, to increase her standings in the search phases portion of the web statistics. Her results have been rather impressive. “Lindsey Hulit” is now the most searched phase on the St. Olaf website (beating out the schools name “St. Olaf”) and the words Lindsey and Hulit are the most searched words for the site as well. This is rather impressive when you figure that there are over 20,000 hits for those words. Katy’s efforts have been aided by the fact that you can hit refresh on one of the relevant pages, and it continues to count as a search result (because of HTTP header information). If Katy can keep the stats up for one more day, she will have captured the monthly stat title. Check out the results here.

In other Katy-friend news, Katy’s maid of honor, Holly, was recently engaged. Congrats goes out to her and her fiance Jesse.

Well, I’m back from Madison. We ended up taking a tour of the Wisconsin capital (found out it was several feet taller than the national capital, and the largest state capital by square footage). The rest of the afternoon was spent hanging out in a microbrewery (one of the benefits of being in Wisconsin — Minnesota and Illinois just don’t have as many of those kind of places).

We weren’t able to get tickets to the Gopher game, scalpers were asking $50 per ticket, so we ended up watching the game in a local bar (gotta love the no-smoking rules, makes my life much more enjoyable). Great game, gophers managed to sweep the badgers, securing a 3-way tie for first in the WCHA conference. The yearly Madison trip is always a party.

Well, I’m now exporing the world of real time blogging. The people who would actually read this blog are sitting right in front of me. We’re trying to decide what to do today before the Gopher hockey game this evening (Gophs wont last night BTW 5-4, enduring an impressive 3 goal rally from the Badgers). The two big choices on the table are a New Glarus brewing company tour (self-guided) and going to House on The Rock. New Glarus is somewhat suspect because the self-guided nature of the tour likely lends itself to no free samples. House on the rock has received some resentment because Shoe thinks it’s “weird”. Shanley’s pushing the capital tour, we were in that part of town last year on this trip (though we didn’t actually see the capital). Who knows where this day of craziness will lead us…

Gophers completed the sweep of Colorado College 3-2 this afternoon. I didn’t get to see any of the game (heard some of it), but from what I was able to gather, they played rather poorly early in the game. Hopefully the evening will continue in a positive hockey fashion as Hill-Murray goes head-to-head with Holy Angels tonight at Aldrich. More to come on that game this evening.

I’m sitting in class right now. Some business class that’s actually attended primarily by graduate students from a variety of departments (about 40% CS). Something just happened that I haven’t seen for about 10 years. One student wrote a note, tore it from the pad of paper, and passed it up a few rows to another student. That student proceeded to read it, write a response, and pass it back. It was a message from a girl to a guy, so they may be holding hands on the playground at recess after class.

I guess I shouldn’t talk, I’m writing a note to all of cyberspace.

In response to Shoes incessant pestering me about “pulling a shoe” (creating a blog and then not posting to it) I apologize. I’ve been insanely busy this last week and will likely continue to be for the next few months. School has just started, but that really has little bearing on my schedule. I’ve begun doing some consulting work with the company for which my wife works (Kim Labs). This is putting an extra 20-30 hours a week on top of my schedule, and has me literally working on things from that, to ACM, to TAing from about 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. (the long way around). Hopefully things will lighten up a bit as we get settled into the semester. I’m actually planning on scaling back my class load to accommodate. I don’t really need the classes, and they are just getting in the way.

In hockey related news, last weekend turned into a mixed outcome. North Dakota managed to win the Saturday night game 4-2. Gophers outplayed them most of the game, but oh well. Hill Murray continues its absolute domination of the Classic suburban Conference, and remains lossless. They’ve outscored their opponents 34-0 in the last 3 games, while out shooting them 138-19. The real test comes this Saturday at 8:00 p.m. when they play first in state Holy Angels. That will be a great game to see. If Minnesota runs through your blood, you’ll be at Aldrich on Saturday night. Unfortunately for me, I’m stuck in Illinois.

Finally, I’ve secured my thesis advisor and have gotten aproval to work on my CS 105 gradebook project. At the rate things are going, I very well may not get started on it until March, but I’ve already told my advisor that I’m not expecting to complete it until the end of summer. Such is life.

Do you like classless hockey? Do you try to counterfeit money using your personal computer? Do you prefer to employ the use of overage Canadians? If so, you were sadly disappointed this evening as the Gophers smoked North Dakota 6-1.

I had to get up early this morning for the traditional semester TA kickoff meeting. This meeting isn’t so much about getting things going for TAs as it is a way for the department to make sure that everyone is back on campus a few days ahead of time so that they will be available when classes start. The net wisdom I obtained from the meeting was the TSG had changed their policies for lab printers. If I print to a non-TA resource room printer, and release the job through the online web tool, I will be billed for the printout. Wow. That couldn’t have been communicated through an email.

On the upside, it forced me to get going to get a handle on some administrative stuff I’ve been avoiding. Did a little office hopping with more on the way. I’ve also spent some time this afternoon working on a “book” I’m writing for CS 105. It’s really just a written description of what we teach in lab. I’m going to pitch it to Prof. Woodbury this afternoon, and if I can get her buy-in, we’ll have the various TAs write some more sections for it and it should be rather useful. Best case scenario, in a semester or so, this document can replace the VBA book that we’re making the kids buy. It will save them some money, and we won’t have to deal with the different coding styles presented in VBA for Dummies (you know it’s quality programming eduction when it has ‘dummies’ in the title). Then maybe we can move on to an SQL book to replace the confusing book we have now. It’s not that bad of a book, honestly, but it gets into too much detail for what we teach. All of this is quite a bit of work, but I guess that’s the burden for caring.

Well, it’s official. I’ve taken the plunge and dove head first into the realm of blogging. Setting up this blog was at least partially motivated by the fact that I really needed to update the look of my old website which reminded some of the CS 421 course page (note that the design varies by semester). I personally have never seen the resemblence, but now I’ve traded up from something I swiped to something someone else designed. Regardless, I hope my blogging experiment lasts longer than Shoe who pretty much never got past the “first post: I have a blog” stage.