[T]he period beginning September 1993. [Eternal September] encapsulate[s] the belief that an endless influx of newbies since that date [when AOL gave its users access to the Internet] has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet (and the wider Internet).
(via)
My neighbor from down the valley, with whom I ride the bus home from CMU, sent me this very interesting video of a research project being done in my home department. It's a cool implementation of a computer-screen projection with touch-screen capabilities using a Wiimote. I told KR about it and she said, "Is this interesting?" Okay, maybe it's not.
My neighbor noted that a lot of research these days is getting its biggest exposure on YouTube instead of in journals and conferences. He's right. Here's another CMU project, a robotic water strider, and Plushie, an application that... well, look for yourself.
We're all trying to do good things for ourselves and avoid the bad things. Aren't we? But it's awfully easy to forget to take that walk, and hard to know how many days since you last exercised. It's easy to eat the Trader Joe's Organic Ginger Snaps until you're ill, and to have another glass of wine just to finish off the bottle.
Joe's Goals was designed to take care of all that. It is a website where you specify the things you want to do and avoid, then each day you click off the number of times you've done them. Your totals are automatically tallied (positive or negative) and you can get yourself a graph of how you've done.
The resulting table shows your daily totals and reminds you of when the last time was that you partook of a particular activity. I can see, for example, that I last took a walk was 5 days ago.
There are a few ways in which this process makes you a better person. One is that it makes you keep track of what you've done in your day. I can now tell you at any time in my day how many 20-oz bottles of water I've had, or whether I've flossed. By keeping track, I've trained my feeble brain to keep that tally. And with that tally in mind it's surprisingly easy to stop after one bowl of ice cream or after two drinks. I have new-found will-power.
Another unexpected behavior is that I make little deals with myself. "I'll have one of those giant chocolate chip cookies from the coffee cart, but I'll have to blog to offset it."
This I like.
Occasionally I'll be keyboarding around my Mac, and get moderately perturbed that I need to go to the mouse or trackpad to get to the menus or dock. In Windows you do something involving the alt key to get access to the menu bars. When I use Windows I usually hit the alt key when I'm reaching for the command key and end up opening menus willy-nilly. That I don't like.
But, and you could see this coming, it turns out Mac users can get to the menus with the keyboard. (Found this tip at Lifehacker.) Ctrl-F2 gets you into the menus. Ctrl-F3 gets you into the dock. (On my MacBook F2 and F3 are mapped to other things, so I hit Ctrl-Fn-F2 and -F3.) Ctrl-F3 highlights the first item in your dock. Use the arrow keys to pick an icon and to open its menu. Very nice.
Here's how I remember it. My fourth grade teacher loaded four boys into his VW Rabbit and drove us to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the Montreal Expos in Three Rivers Stadium. It was 1972. We sat in the top row of seats above left field. We saw Roberto Clemente hit a home run. The Pirates won, 8-0.
Thanks to Retrosheet, I see that, on May 19, 1972, the Pirates won a game against the Expos, 8-0. Clemente hit a double, but not a home run.
On May 17, 1971, in a 6-5 Pirates win, Clemente hit a home run in the 8th inning.
The Pirates won a game against the Expos, 8-2, on September 5, 1971. But Clemente did not play in that game.
Thanks a lot, Retrosheet. So what really happened?
Thanks to Michelle, over at A Flying Leap, for linking to ImageChef, where you can put your text on just about anything. Good clean fun.
Denny sent me a video demo of the Smackbook Pro, a hacked Macbook Pro. I had to replay it a dozen times, I was so overcome by its brilliance.
Then I found a blog post that described a recent Oprah tv special featuring Elie Wiesel, holocost survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. This is how the post began: "I just saw Oprah's special w/Elie Weisel. Mr. Weisel's accent is so cute." I had to read that a dozen or so times too, I was so overcome by... not brilliance.
I'm looking for a way to peek at the usage of my wireless modem since it seems to blink a lot, even when I'm not using it. So, after finding no help at the Netgear website, I tried a web search.
Google thinks I should take on a completely different project.
Anyway, if anyone who knows how to monitor my WIFI USAGE reads this, please leave me a comment.
"Soldier Boy" by The Shirelles was the #1 song on the day I was born.
The free (or cheap) web applications available now let me do as much (or more) as the old stuff I'm still paying for. That's about all most of you need to know. You can move along. I like poking around at Flickr.
I have a bunch of old web pages that I never update or visit anymore. One of them is a page full of links. I now use del.icio.us for that. I used to create new pages for new projects to track to-dos and such. I now use PBwiki, with which I can easily create new lists and links to relevant information (though I'm not sure how it's capitalized; it's done differently through its site). (Backpack is another tool that allows the creation of lists, notes, and such, but pbWiki is more free-form and I like that.)
I use PBwiki to track my progress on job searches, to keep story ideas, and I think occasionally about what sort of public wiki I could create. And right now I am writing about this stuff because by doing so they will double my storage space.
Anyway, I bet I could cancel some of my subscriptions to the old stuff if I thought about it a bit.
