As an undergrad, I did my time. I took my gen-eds, my westerns and non-western cultural classes. I took my physics classes, although at the time I compared computer science more with expressive art than physical sciences. (To some extent, I still do.) I had the choice of taking thermodynamic physics or quantum/light/nuclear physics (in the 1xx classes,) and because of my distrust of all things quanta, I went with thermo.

My view on education has changed in ten years, and I know I’m a better learner now — but at the time, I *struggled* in thermo. I understood the abstract, hand-waving, “consider this” elements, but when it came to digging down and understanding the science of thermodynamics (the math, the work, the thought,) I folded. I could have forced myself to learn it, but I didn’t really care — I was already so distracted with other classes (ones in my discipline, ones that had future higher level courses that depended on their prerequisite knowledge, ones that were more fun.) I distinctly remember my thermo lab TA “pleading” with us (”You’re here, you might as well try to learn it.”) I’m not proud of that position, but at the time, it was a survival decision. And hey, I survived.

Today, things go full cycle as MSI puts a Stirling engine on a CPU as a heatsink fan. (Get it, full cycle…. Physics humor. I crack myself up.) Damn you physics… following me everywhere I go.

Mobo maker builds ‘powerless’ processor cooling fan

I finished watching season two of Weeds and I’m disappointed that it’s over. It had one of those “oh fuck,” cliffhangers and I’m pouty season 3 isn’t out on DVD yet.

Right now, Extras and the Wire are next on my TV to see queue.

decision-making for dummies

Originally uploaded by petit hiboux.

I wonder whose balls taste better. (I know, for the record, Nano picked Clinton.)

Marc shared me this article, and it’s great. Well worth posting yet again today.

I guess when you get fired, and are trying to figure out where to go next with your life, you fall back on what you know best.

Sampson texts players after win (IndyStar.com)

Just minutes after Indiana held on for an 85-82 victory over Northwestern on Saturday night, the text messages started arriving on the players’ phones.

They were sent by former IU coach Kelvin Sampson.

For my wireless class, we’re interested in creating a wireless spectrum policy metablog (or aggregate blog, more commonly seem to be called planet blogs.) I’m trying to find the best way to post/support/run this metablog. Assume I can do anything (webhosting with perl/php/python/whatever support) — but what I’m really looking for is a way to leverage hosted tools (blogger, digg, *ici.us.)

I think we’d want blogroll capabilities, where the blogroll blogs’ syndicated content is loaded into this blog. (That’s kinda how we’re defining a metablog.) Even better would be categorization and tagging, but that’s not necessarily required.

So, my web weary friends — any software/hosting recommendations?

In the make-me-laugh-outloud category. In this order,

1) Reading about today’s xkcd at the xkcd blag (before seeing the comic)
2) Viewing the discussed xkcd comic
3) Reading the title of the comic

Genius.

I give it 72 hours before someone does a flash app to let you place your own fruit choices on the map, compare with others, find soul mates that both think pomegranates are overrated, etc.

The Champaign county pet organizations are planning a “Cat Nip/Tuck Day” (www.cuhumane.org) that will spay or neuter your cat for only $10. I think that’s great, and I’m all for encouraging responsible pet ownership, especially for lower-income families that have (or want) pets but can’t really afford their vet care.* I don’t like the name (Nip/Tuck) because I’m pretty sure having your balls cut off is more than a “nip,” but I can play along. Also, when the pet is under they can do other things, like vaccinate, micro-chip, dental care, etc.

Obviously, they’re subsidizing the surgery with volunteer veterinarians and donated supplies. One of the listservs I’m on solicited us for supply donations for the events, including:

o Bleach
o Large garbage bags
o Paper towels
o Distilled water
o Duct tape or masking tape
o Used Towels (clean please)
o Rubbing alcohol
o Hydrogen Peroxide
o Q-tips
o Cotton balls

It’s kinda gross to think how masking tape, bleach, and large garbage bags helps spay your kitties, but I guess every little bit helps. I just read that list and wondered how MacGyver would neuter cats with only used towels, duct tape, and an endless supply of Q-tips.

* Yes, yes, yes… I know. “Pets are expensive and poor people shouldn’t have them”**. But assume they do, and need to take care of them cheaply. It happens.
** I don’t really feel that way… Pets are theraputic and everyone should have them. But they are a burden.

I thought it was funny that the local HiFi store (Good Vibes) bought scrolling banner ad space at the bottom of tonight’s Academy Awards (Oscars.) The GV spot came on after the commercial breaks, and reminded/alerted people that if they weren’t watching tonight’s program in HD, they should call Good Vibes to get setup with HD channels with no monthly fee (they do satellite and OTA installations.)

The ironic part is WICD apparently does not have HD scrolling text overlay support, so during the ad they down sampled the Oscars to SD. So even if I was watching it in HD, I wasn’t during the commercial/overlay where they told me I should be watching it in HD.

Oops.

Note the letterboxing and SD quality during the ad. Yeah, thanks guys. I *was* watching it in HD before your ad came on.

(BTW, best dress yet? Rene Zellweger.)

Warning, I geek out again. If that’s not your thing, ponder this. They tail-gate for the Puppy Bowl. (And they sell DVDs of the Puppy Bowl. Lookout Netflix queue.)

Today I made a newsgroup post about the Computing Habitat Programming Competition inviting students to identify some bug/shortcoming/nuisance in their environment, and propose a programming project to fix it.

That inspired me to finally do some AJAX learning and coding to improve some of the web interfaces I deal with several times a day. While I don’t have a final product yet, I have a small framework and two CGI scripts that work with a simple form to do asynchronous lookups. After about an hour’s worth of experimenting, wow. I can see why sysadmins would like AJAX. It has this dirty, kludgy feel that, when applied properly is extremely effective. I’m scared what to think would happen if I learned YUI.

I’m also seeing, from tailing the logs, why people tend to put AJAX traffic on independent virtualhosts. This could get noisey. This also sounds like a good candidate for FastCGI, or some sort of already-running-process-hand-off because I’m sure the work to build the CGI environment, setup perl and DBI, and do the query is way longer than what I need. Maybe I should be doing this in PHP.

I think I plan on implementing these as greasemonkey scripts, so I have a little more work to do before things are “ready.” The first script, when I’m registering a new system in our DNS/DHCP/system database, does a OUI lookup on the MAC address and tells me (in place) who the vendor of the MAC is. (This is useful for several reasons — such as identifying VMware “machine” requests versus real ones, OR knowing when Professor Soandso just got a new Mac versus a PC, OR knowing ahead of time the MAC the grad student gave me wasn’t Ethernet (for example, I got one today for 02:00:54:…. I’m fairly sure that’s not Ethernet. Maybe Bluetooth.)

The second script searches our existing MAC address database, and tells me right away if I try to register a MAC address that’s already in the system.

I can’t wait to put these to use, and learn more AJAX. I hope the students are as productive with the CHPC as I am!

From the “It shouldn’t be this hard” department, today I scanned a document in to send to someone, and realized it had some sensitive identification numbers on it. I opened the PDF to find a way to redact that information. I poked around Acrobat. I searched around the web.

I found, not to my surprise, to do it right you need to export the PDF to a graphic, mark it out in graphics tools, and reimport to PDF. That’s the “cheap” way. The “easy” way is to purchase Acrobat plugins that pretty much do that for you. Ick. Given how much data is in PDFs these days, there’s really nothing we can do to make this process easier?

I wound up rescanning the document with a blacked out post-it over the UIN field. Because walking back to the scanner (which is a good 100 steps or so from my office,) and rescanning was easier than figuring out how to do that in software. (And that too was one of the top recommendations for redacting a PDF, if you have the hardcopy.)

Yay progress. Things like this make me afraid of becoming a digital librarian.