Archive for December, 2005

Housewarming Success

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

I’m posting this a week late, but I wanted to give a thank you to all those that came out to my housewarming party the Sunday before last. Actually, the housewarming was about 4 months late itself. There’s a theme beginning to arise here, it’s the theme of my life. Jokes aside, it was great to see so many people in one place that wasn’t a house party, club or bar.

I took a few photos before people showed up of the early guests and appetizer spread. Much thanks to Ms. Amy for helping me pull all the food together and cooking on the day of. We are now masters of the risotto.

I’m sure we can all rest easier now that Dena is learned in the ways of Scientology. Thanks for the presents, Kate, Heath, Dena and Candace. My Weber will never grow cold.

partyhard/housewarmbrook

Posted in Personal Journal | 1 Comment »

Newspaper Adviser Dismissed for Using Macs

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

From Asbury Park Press via Mac Daily News.

DOVER TOWNSHIP — Despite impassioned pleas from her supporters, the Ocean County College board of trustees voted unanimously Monday not to reappoint Karen L. Bosley as faculty adviser to the student newspaper, a post she has held for 35 years.

The reason given to the teacher for her dismissal was that the paper contained too many mistakes and that the students weren’t being taught real world skills due to her using Apple Macintosh computers. It’s a scary thought to think that if you don’t use, the implied, Windows PC, you could lose your teaching job. God forbid she use Linux. Obviously there are rumors that her dismissal was for other reasons, like she didn’t view the president of the college in good light and the editorials reflected this. Regardless, I decided to write the president an email expressing my dissatisfaction.

Subject: Apple Macintosh Use Not The Basis For Dismissal
To: jlarson@ocean.edu

Dear President Larson,

I was disappointed to hear that the board of Ocean County College voted to not reappoint faculty adviser Karen L. Bosley. The decision was based on her classroom usage of Apple Macintosh computers for the purpose of teaching newspaper journalism and production. As a former reporter on my high school newspaper, I can tell you that “Macs” are used ubiquitously in the newsroom for writing and production. This is not just one reporter’s observation either, many others will tell you the same thing. Macs, just as well as PCs running Microsoft Windows will teach you the real-world techniques of making a newspaper.

Sincerely,

Adam Kramer
Ann Arbor, Michigan

I’m such a good citizen.

Posted in Politics and Culture, Tech and Science | No Comments »

Chris Rock Loves Miami Vice

Sunday, December 11th, 2005

I’m watching an episode of Miami Vice with Chris Rock in it. He’s playing a computer nerd and he looks 14. I wish I had some TiVo action so I could post some of those screenshots. Oh damn, its got some hot dream sequences with Chris in them! To Be Continued!?!?!

Posted in Dorkery | 1 Comment »

NetBSD Beer Fridge

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

It’s not too often that a friend creates something that is impressive yet insanely dorky. But it happened.

Paul bought the first controller for his project this summer and completed the work less than a month ago. This work has converged into Der BrewMeister 0xF-Thousand. Yes, “0xF-Thousand.” Der BrewMeister is a beer brewing machine! No! Really! It’s a machine that brews beer. Simply put, it consists of a NetBSD PC, sensors, temp controllers, a beer fridge, wires and custom scheduling software written by Paul that orchestrates the virtual automation of the brewing process.

I’m sure Paul can do Der BrewMeister more justice, so check out his project page and be amazed at the BSD Beer Fridge.

Posted in Programming-CS, Tech and Science | 2 Comments »

Hunting The Headhunters

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

Oh Fate, you work in such mysterious ways.

Like this morning, when I received an email that at first looked like a job opportunity with a description attached. I quickly scanned it, and moved on to the next email. It wasn’t until after lunch that I looked at the email again. This time I noticed it was sent to other addresses than mine, and the attachment was actually someone’s resume, not a description.

Hi!

He is asking for 40$ after negotiations

Please let me know if he is a good fit for our requirement then I can talk to him and try for 37 or 38 $/hr

The job email was actually one job recruiter’s email to another recruiter. And not just that, it documented that they were planning on lowballing our poor job seeker after negotiations.

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Posted in Personal Journal, Tech and Science | No Comments »

IE Tab Makin’ My Life Easier

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005

The following advertisement was paid for by me.

I fully endorse the use of the Firefox web browser. Internet Explorer is just a malware cesspool waiting to enable the infection of your computer with popups and process-disabling gambling advertisements. No, really, it’s true. Atleast that’s the track record. Firefox offers new and progressive features too, how refreshing.

But on a PC, there are those days that Firefox just can’t reasonably load a poorly formed HTML page or load a windows media player plugin. I look to a day when this isn’t true, and I’m sure that time is in the near future. For those times though, there is the IE Tab Plugin for Firefox. It allows you to display pages with Firefox and IE in the same Firefox window. You don’t have to actually open up IE again, and this helps in the tendency to start using IE consistently out of habit as a result. It really is awesome.

Also, if you develop web sites and don’t have alot of time invested in viewing your web pages with a variety of web browsers already, the plugin is an easy way to check how they are rendered in both browsers.

Posted in Tech and Science | No Comments »

Named Parameters Not Simple Enough

Saturday, December 3rd, 2005

I recently wrote something using php. I haven’t paid much attention to the language up to this point, as my daily life calls for mostly Java-specific thinking.

To write this WordPress plugin, I’ve been faced with encapsulating display code into a function call. It got my skin crawling as soon as I started adding the ability to customize what the function actually displayed. The ideal situation for a plugin is that you provide something that requires little to no modification of actual code but rather configuration in the UI. But reliance on a function call to display HTML output is thwarting this goal pretty effectively due to the growing number of parameters in my display function.

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Posted in Programming-CS | 15 Comments »

Everlast Laptop Battery

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

For the past few days I haven’t had wireless access. I’ve been away from power supplies in presentations and meetings so I thought to disable the wireless airport on my Powerbook. This has resulted in a battery life that I formerly thought not possible. I’m getting crazy battery lengths of 5-7 hours, it’s awesome. This is a recommendation to remember to disable wireless in your laptop when given the opportunity. Yes, it’s a relatively obvious thing to say, but the results if you have a 15″ Apple Powerbook will astound you.

Posted in Tech and Science | 5 Comments »