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Staysopen.com January 2007 Find things to do late at night! I began this as a fun side project. It still needs a bunch of work, but the nuts and the bolts work. |
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NACBA.org January 2005 I have been doing consulting work for NACBA for quite some time now. I am responsible for just about everthing web-based, but my main tasks relate to membership management. |
Philosophy Links
| Refill |
| Posted : 2008-03-16 04:43:45 - Comments (0) |
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I am sad to say that I have come to the end of my spring break. It was so incredibly nice to be able to just relax and slow down for a few days without the worry of nasty negative consequences. Sure, I will pay the price for being a tad bit lazy these last few days, but I hardly care right now. Tomorrow I fly back to Pittsburgh and will head directly to campus for class. Back to life as usual, I suppose. So, spring break… Like I said, it was nice to an extreme. There are a couple noteworthy things to mention. First, I am out of shape, and badly so. One is quick to discover this fact when attempting to sprint from terminal C to end of terminal F (and yes they were in arranged in alphabetical order) sporting a backpack and duffle bag full of crap because the flight out of Pittsburgh is forty five minutes late and the connecting flight in Minneapolis was scheduled with a fifty minute layover. I usually chastise mildly in my head the people who are warned over the loud speaker that they are soon to miss their flight. I guess I will stop doing that. It is not so fun when you are the person about which they are making announcements. Second, I am a sucker for tea now. For some reason, I am now consuming tea in large quantities and enjoying it thoroughly. Maybe this is because I am trying to find an alternative to drinking coffee. I like coffee, but I drink the stuff in excess. I don’t drink it often, but I drink too much. I doubt it is good for me when it gives me the shakes. But, I feel bad about wasting half a pot. Dilemmas indeed. At any rate, back to tea. I had been drinking tea for a couple weeks before spring break and it had been working out for me. With spring break concluding, I am even more into it now. Muey and I found a place in the mall that sells loose leaf tea. We bought two ounces of four different flavors. Two ounces turned out to be in quantity quite a bit more than I was expecting. We also bought some yummy bagged tea from Cost Plus World Market. There is still quite a bit left even though we have been each drinking about three cups a day. One of my faults is that when I get into something, I try to do it “right.” As such, it is not enough to just buy the tea. One wants the tea to last. So, I ordered some tea canister things within which to store the tea. This is turning out to be an expensive hobby! But I’m sure there are worse things to get into. Third, I wrote my first semi-real Java program over the break. Semi-real because it is only about 600 or 700 lines of code. But, why would I do such a thing? Anyone that knows my programming biases knows that I have gone to a great deal of effort to avoid Java. Well, I did it for a directed study I am in right now. One of the things I am really trying to get into right now is machine learning. So, the central topic of the directed study is neural nets. The program takes a data file as input and then uses the data in that file to train a standard feedforward-backprop neural net based on certain parameters that can be set. I am pleased with the outcome even if the GUI is a bit trivial and the only measure of accuracy is the mean square error. I would like eventually to write some code to plot the data and boundary line in order to visually examine how well the network is training up, but I think that is a project for a different time. I also wrote a short script to generate the data file based on some definable mathematical function. The code should work for n-dimensional space, but I am only testing it with a single input. I think that is the good stuff to report. Mainly though, it has just been a really enjoyable time. I’ve decided that the whole graduate experience is dehumanizing. You give them your life, and it is your life that they take. I don’t know how things are going for the other grad students, but all I do is work. I would say that in the eight or so months that I have been here that I have not made a single friend. Friends are a luxury that I don’t seem to have the time to have. But that is OK, I guess. I am in the program for a very specific reason: to learn. Hopefully I am now refilled and have a full tank of humanity from which to draw in order to make it through to the end of the semester. |
| MacBook Pro |
| Posted : 2008-01-20 13:23:40 - Comments (0) |
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So, I've now had my MacBook Pro for a little over a month now. This is something that I had been planning on getting for quite some time. In early December I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and I bought the thing. I will say that having now had a chance to use the machine a little bit that I am thoroughly impressed with it. Now, before going any further, I would like to address the 'fan boy' stigma. I'll admit to following, at least casually, some tech websites that review new technologies as they emerge. Prevalent on these websites is the notion that anyone that complements an Apple product is a Mac fan boy and anyone that criticizes Apple is a Microsoft fan boy. The discussions where these two groups are at odds can be surprisingly vicious, often to my amusement. Mostly, though, this superficial split is annoying to an extreme. I am somewhat sad to admit, but up until now I have been mostly tied to a windows machine. I've been sad mostly because it has restricted me from exploring other technologies to the degree in which I would be fully satisfied. But I'll have to be honest too; my windows box has served me pretty well. I have designated that as my work machine and there are applications installed thereon that I just couldn't do without. Having said this, I feel I am in a better position now to laud Apple products than I ever was before, and mostly because I now have a little bit more than an insignificant empirical base from which I can draw reasonable conclusions. I also think this can be done in an entirely objective way without recourse to whimsical brand loyalties, etc. I'm sure there are a great many reasons why this conflict occurs, but I think the largest contributor is that people are not looking at the issue from an objective point of view. Sure, it is nice having the cuteness that comes along with owning a Mac, but that is hardly the point. Aesthetics play an important role in our lives, but as far as a computer goes, good looks ought to be icing on the cake, as I believe is the case here. That is, if to be able to use the computer is the purpose of its purchase. So what I have been alluding to is that I am most impressed with the usability and utility of the MacBook Pro. It is a really well engineered tool from both a hardware and software standpoint. My praise reaches little further beyond that observation. I believe fully that a product should be appreciated for its actual qualities and not some bias from which we judge. If a product is solid, respect it for that fact. However, if a product subpar, have no mercy in demanding higher quality and in pointing out the faults. Lately, I just have no sympathy for Microsoft. Vista, I am convinced, is a failure to consumers and the facts speak for themselves. As a simple example, would manufacturers go back to offering XP if they were convinced that Vista delivered the goods? I highly doubt it. This does not mean that the whole of Microsoft is bad. Indeed, I've been rather impressed with the latest releases of Office. It just means that the mainstay of the Microsoft brand is a huge disappointment. I am still unwilling to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP because the software, in my opinion, is too bloated, which in turn detrimentally effects performance. It is the same reason why, when I was building my work machine a little over a year ago, I purchased an AMD chip instead of an Intel chip. At the time, the research that I had done suggested that I would get more bang from my buck by going with AMD. If I were to build a machine today, I would absolutely get an Intel chip. The bang for the buck argument might be a hard sell for those looking at a PC, but considering a Mac. While that is not the point of the example, I think I got what was paid for. I have no problem with Microsoft. When Microsoft develops products that are competitive, I will seriously consider using them. There is no doubt that Microsoft employs many brilliant minds capable of inventing amazing things. The bottom line is that the machine I am writing this post on, the MacBook Pro, is robust and delivers, and for that reason alone do I praise Apple. If this makes me a "fan boy," so be it. I'll wear the label happily knowing that the joke is on you, not me. The main thing to get out of this blurb, if there is anything at all, is that in this case, Apple has made a very good product. If you have the two or three grand to dish out on a laptop, I would encourage you to seriously consider the MacBook Pro. It is well made, and OS X is a winner. It gets my seal of approval. |