For those of you out that that love babes (the under 2yr variety) check out the pictures from the Morlok Thanksgiving. Those of you who aren’t cutout for all 215 pictures over a 3 day span might want to just check out the highlights.
Archive for November, 2006
Thanksgiving Pictures
Monday, November 27th, 2006I don’t know how some companies survive
Monday, November 27th, 2006Maybe everyone doesn’t need a website, but if you’re going to have one, don’t have your two-year-old design it. I’m hoping for their sake that the site just isn’t Firefox compatible, because otherwise they have no descriptions of their navigations other than some hover pictures on the left side of the screen. When I’m looking to buy products that will be used to make life and death decisions, I look for the company that is totally ineffective at communication…
Analogy Quotes from High School English
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006Since Shanley isn’t keeping up the quote collection, I guess I need to post this. Analogies collected from High School English classes.
Some of my favorites:
- His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
- She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
- The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
Champaign -> Chicago -> Atlanta -> Dallas -> Miami -> Chicago -> South Bend -> Champaign
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006If you think the title is long, you should have been on the trip.
I traveled to Miami this last week to attend the ASHA annual convention. Things went well, but it was a lot of traveling. My flight left Chicago at 9:45 a.m., and I wasn’t sure how bad traffic would be getting to O’hare, so I left at 4 a.m. Things went well, but in Atlanta (originally the only stop on my flight) the plane was overbooked, so I said I’d be willing to take a $300 voucher to take a different plane a few hours later. Not a big deal, I wasn’t going to be doing anything in Miami until the following day anyway.
Unfortunately, the plane I was supposed to take from Atlanta to Miami was having mechanical problems, so after about an hour waiting in Atlanta, then sent me off to Dallas to catch a flight to Miami. Thankfully, they were nice enough to bump my voucher to $500. I made $500 on a $160 round-trip flight. Not bad.
The big annoyance came in Dallas, where my flight was running 3 hours late. It was 2:30 a.m. by the time I got to my hotel in Miami.
I attended the ASHA conference the next day, and I that evening I flew out of Miami back to Chicago (nonstop). My hotel didn’t have an airport shuttle, so rather than spend more money on a taxi fare ($37+tip) I decided to take the city buses to the airport. I had plenty of time, but it took me an hour where the taxi would have been 15 minutes. At least I saved $35.50+tip.
The flight from Miami to Chicago was uneventful, and from there I headed to South Bend to meet up with my family. We watched a Notre Dame game the following day, and Sunday afternoon I drove home. It was a long traveling stretch. I changed timezones 6 times (if you count all the airport hopping I did). My traveling stretch continues, as I’m currently in a hotel in Iowa, and we leave for Hawaii in a week.
Smack!
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006I just downloaded the release canidate for .NET 3.0 and less than a week later, Microsoft goes and releases the final version. Back to the downloading board…
I must say though, the new version is pretty slick. The new Windows Presentation Framework is awesome, I’m just starting to learn the ins and outs of it.
Multi-point touch user interface
Saturday, November 4th, 2006I want my entire desk to be made of this stuff. Awesome.
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han&flashEnabled=1&
No need for junk email accounts
Friday, November 3rd, 2006Ever run into one of those websites that requires you to enter your email address before they’ll let you download what they’re giving away? Very annoying, especially when they send you something to address to confirm that it’s real before they let you proceed. Most people keep junk email addresses that they use specifically for these situations, lest their real inboxes be deluged with spam.
Thankfully, now there is a simplar solution. For those of you who follow diggnation, I’m sure you already know about this. You can just sign up with these sites using the email address anything@dodgeit.com (where anything is replaced with something random you make up) and you will still be able to receive the email. No setup is necessary, you can just go to the dodgeit website (http://www.dodgeit.com/), enter the email address you made up, and check the mail. No password, no setup, nothing. Just check the mail. All email addresses are valid ad dodgeit.com, and anyone can log in and check it. The downside of this, of course, is that that anyone could view your confirmation email, so don’t use this system if you’re entering person information in a form. On the whole, though, a very convenient system.
Two-way syncing between iCal and Google Calendar
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006These guys have apparently solved the problem: http://www.spanningsync.com/
When that comes out I might actually start using Google calendar. If I get over the idea of Google knowing what I’m doing 24/7. What would be really cool is if someone would offer the same feature for iScrybe, when that comes out. That would be money.
Open Source MATLAB Alternatives
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006As I mentioned previously, I recently graduated from the University of Illinois. Unfortunately, I also graduated from academic discounts. Specifically, I was looking to pick up a copy of MATLAB for some data analysis problems I need to hammer on for work, only to find that Mathworks does a remarkably good job at checking if you are currently a student (we’re talking send us proof of your current enrollment here).
Anyway, I don’t have “grips” to drop on this (thanks Mike and Ben) so I went in search of Open Source MATLAB alternatives. The following is a list of the major players out there:
Of these, Octave or Scilab is probably the most complete as solution to the problem (though it’s not 100% compatible with MATLAB). Scilab was written by INRIA (who also brought you OCAML), so they know what they’re doing over there. Octave also a great alternative available on many platforms. I wasn’t able to get it via fink, and I didn’t want to manually install it, so I set up a separate Debian machine to run it. I’ve been pleased.
I also gave Freemat a try on my Mac. I was pleased that it provides a visual environment and installs easily on both OSX and Windows. I found it somewhat limited in its graphing capabilities. Octave has been working well for me. Octave actually defers to gnuplot for its graphing, so it’s very full featured. There are a few quirks, but it works fairly well.
Sage was mentioned on Slashdot a while back. I haven’t had a chance to to try it out yet, but it looks like it could be the new forerunner. It aims to bring together other Mathmatics software and lets you program in Python rather than some obscure proprietary language. Definitely something worth checking out.
JMathLib is a Java clone of the above implementations. Again, I haven’t really had a chance to take it out for a spin yet, but it does have the advantage of being runnable in applet form which makes it a nice choice for quick computations.
For a more complete listing of MATLAB alternatives, visit http://www.maths.lth.se/matstat/stixbox/matlabfaq.html. See the section on “Are there many Matlab-type environments?” Another site listing possible open source math programs can be found here.