October 31, 2008

Boom De Yada

I think I’ve already told most of my friends about this… but it’s just way too awesome to not have documented somewhere. Doubly-pronged awesomeness, actually: - The Discovery Channel’s Boom De Yada video. - XKCD’s Boom De Yada comic strip always makes my day that much better.

October 28, 2008

Happy Birthday to Me, Pt. 2

As always, a picture’s worth a thousand words:

October 26, 2008

Getting an AMATH Minor at the University of Washington

One of the secret gems at the University of Washington is the minor in applied math option. At least I think it’s somewhat secret. Most of the people I tell about it haven’t really heard of it. But yeah, here’s the deal: You only need to get through calculus and four more classes to get this minor! And a lot of programs require calculus anyways. I’ve taken most of the undergrad AMATH courses, so I figured I’d write something up about which ones I recommend the most.

October 26, 2008

Happy Birthday To Me

I should have written this up sooner, but I guess it worked out well because the last of it didn’t happen until just recently. My friends did a fantastic job of throwing me one hell of a birthday this year. Beals made it up a little bit early to begin the celebrations with food and manly stuff. Then Katie and I had a joint birthday dinner at Boca de Beppos. Tuesday Sharvil and I made it out for a while.

October 26, 2008

Smart People Shows

Sharvil and I started watching Numb3rs today, from the pilot episode. We both basically decided that it’s really nice to watch shows that are sortof motivational in a way. Admittedly, they’re mostly designed to motivate you to watch more shows… but I think Numb3rs has been an important show for me, if for no reason other than motivating me to keep working on stuff when I’d rather not or when I’m nearly too frustrated to keep going.

October 22, 2008

A few more exotic uses for older hardware

There are tons of posts on the internet about what to do with older computers. In general, they say some of the same things: Linux/Firewall, Media Server, and ‘BitTorrent Box’. (Incidentally, the lattermost somewhat confuses me. I guess people want to download files on a separate machine in case it has viruses or whatever… but if you’re using bit torrent so much that it’s worth having a separate box for, you’re probably still gonna be upset if a virus takes it out.

October 20, 2008

Ubuntu Hacks -- Flash, Java, e17

This must be about the 1 millionth time someone’s written a blog post about this, because I waded through a ton of them to get ones that worked. Which means someday, someone will be wading through 10 million websites trying to get their Flash, Java, and e17 working. For the browser issues, I found this thread on the Ubuntu forums. In short, you download the first file listed(the Browser Install Script), untar it, and run it.

October 19, 2008

Minor OS X Shell Shortcomings

In spite of the fact that a lot of people seem to loathe the colorized ls functionality, I sortof grew up on it(so to speak). OS X, by default, does not have this functionality(well, at least, GNU’s –color option never works). I figured the quick and easy way to solve this was to install coreutils, but I found another option. It appears OSX included a version of ls that works with ls -G.

October 15, 2008

Themes!

In all of my time with wordpress, I’ve pretty much stuck to the default themes, figuring that what I had to say was a bit more important than what I was doing with it. But then I came across one with some fluid dynamics going on… and I couldn’t pass it up. Maybe someday I’ll get around to throwing some of my own graphics up there, hehe. Enjoy!

October 14, 2008

Backposts Galore!

Like I said in ‘~traviscj/ lives!’, I was stupid and forgot the hard drives with my websites on them at home. But….. Google Cache came through and I just pulled all my posts from that. The big downside is that there’s now definitely going to be some weirdness with overlapping posts and soforth, which is a pain, but I’m not really sure how to get around it, other than just waiting until I can get the data off the disks again.