Productive Music

I find myself attempting to be productive on occasion. When this happens, I need some music to filter out the audible distractions usually found in my office, or at the hallway chalkboards, or even in my room. It helps if the music has a trance-like ability to blend into the background of my mind. Bands like Radiohead and Travis are good for this, since the vocalist is really acting like another instrument. I'm not distracted by words and phrases being pushed into my thoughts like I would listening to a more lyrical group, such as Taking Back Sunday or Incubus.

What music do you listen to to be productive?

Anyone reading what I read?

Is anyone actually reading my shared links? If so, leave a comment. If you tried it, and hate my taste in articles, leave a comment. If you are too apathetic to try it, leave a comment.

Battlestar Galactica: Razor

This TV event was worth the wait. I'm looking forward to watch the Admiral Kane episodes again, now that I have seen a little more about her story. However, that was not the highlight. The best part was seeing the old cylons, in their planes and also in gun fights. Everyone watching clapped when the cylon pilot said "By your command." Then, the writers had to stick a knife in us and twist right at the end, adding more questions to the end of season 3. I'm looking forward to the extras on the DVD, too. My guess to the "extended" version is that it will include the webisodes that gave a little context to Adama's flashback.

March? Can I really last that long? Also, what is up with making me wait to buy the DVDs for season 3?

One drawback to watching Razor on TV: every commercial break a Quizno's promotion would come up saying "It's been revealed!.." as if we cared for the review.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score

If you are a fan for the Futurama series, then you cannot wait to see this DVD feature. The two-hour feature is a quality episode, including call-backs to pretty much every major character and episode ever. There are a couple musical numbers which seem to fall short of the mark until Kwanzaabot raps, which makes it all worth it. The plot is over-the-top (hint: involves time travel at least once) and is satisfying, even if it is a little predictable at parts. The die-hard Futurama fan (you know who you are) will find it to be a necessity. I can't wait until it returns on a regular basis on Comedy Central.

Bonus points for Battlestar Galactica reference. Also, if you want to know the "secret" of the magic time code, here it is:

001100
010010
011110
100001
101101
110011
However, the only significant pattern I could find is that splitting it down the middle, you can see the left half being the binary digits for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the right half a mirror version. I was really looking for a code saying "BNDRSGR8" or something.

Dashboard on the Desktop

Dashboard (OS X) and Sidebar (Vista) suffer from the same problem: I cannot choose where the widgets/gadgets go. Windows especially is designed for applications to be maximized at almost all times, especially Visual Studio (my only reason to use Windows, really). When maximized, the sidebar is worthless. But the dashboard in OS X is never visible when I want it to be, and loading it up seems silly.

My hatred for it came to a close when I found a way to put widgets on the desktop. I really only care about my Weather widget (made by Brad Smith), so here's a shot of it in action:

In its current location, the widget takes minimal space, fits between my always-open applications, and is always available.

Piecosahedron

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! All I have to give you, is a Modular Pie-cosahedron:

Caturdize

Click here to see the blog lolinized by the Lolinator.

Kansas City

Katie and I are in Kansas City for the Thanksgiving, marking my first Thanksgiving away from home. The family is dealing with my absence in some way. They can deal, I'm sure.

Due to two exams this week, I have very little responsibility as far as work is concerned this weekend. That's refreshing. I'll rest up and finally kill this bug that has been getting me down.

To faithful readers: have a great Thanksgiving, travel safe, and pig out. You can lose the weight in January.

extraordinary

We present a mnemonic to memorize a constant so exciting that Euler exclaimed: '!' when first it was found, yes, loudly '!'. My students perhaps will compute e, use power or Taylor series, an easy summation formula, obvious, clear, elegant!

Read What I Read

Google Reader is probably the coolest RSS aggregator I have seen. Not only does it combine all of my feeds into nice folders, but it is universal to my machine. Since I go between laptop and desktop frequently, it helps to have these things combined. Also, the interface is quite nice, as I can step through story-by-story using simple key shortcuts.

The best part is that I can share links, creating my own mini-Digg, with a lot less work than actually going to Digg all the time (I just type SHIFT-s when viewing a link). Go ahead and watch what I'm reading. I'll probably put a link in the blog template, too.

Aperture Science Out of Beta

The narrative of Portal is incredibly unique and impossible to replicate. After completing the main mode, I can understand the love for the weighted companion cube, and understand the importance of Still Alive (warning: spoilers).

Anyway, I bought the game expecting a really good first-person puzzle game and got something else entirely (after the really good first-person puzzle game). The extra levels entice me, but I should probably stop playing while I can.

Also, it is definitely worth buying by itself (without the rest of the orange box) since I don't have the time to play through the Half Life games, nor do I have the interest in online play in Team Fortress. I have such a strange taste in video games now that I don't have extended times to play them.

Unity Rocks!

The title of this post is slightly misleading to at least my fiancée, but the "Unity" feature of VMWare is pretty sweet. I'm not running Windows Vista in a virtual machine with the windows showing up alongside my OS X windows. It's pretty sweet functionality, and is rather seamless.

The Windows-on-a-Mac stuff seems rather "dirty" but I now have a fast, portable Leopard and Vista machine. Also, rebooting would be annoying. Now, I can have my browser and IM clients in OS X, and only the "essentials" on Windows. I'm currently installing Steam so I can play Portal.

Post from a MacBook

I got my MacBook yesterday, but delayed using it until my homework was done (it feels like high school, yes). Here's a photo from my new iSight camera:



Now, I just need to get LaTeX working.

Back from the Dead

Apparently, my external hosting service did a relocation this weekend. When they did this, they had a huge problem with DNS. For instance, my domain was pointed at their domain server, which happened to be relocated at the same time. It took forever, but the new IP has filtered through. I hope I get some money back on this. It's not like it would be that much, but it would be something on the good faith that they failed to provide me with a service for a significant amount of time.

Also, several emails failed delivery due to this issue. That makes me a sad Stolee.

The Specs

Since they were requested, here are the technical specifications of my coming MacBook:

• 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 120GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
• Apple Mini-DVI to VGA Adapter
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
• Superdrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

New MacBook on the Way

Apple updated their MacBook line with the new Santa Rosa Intel chips last night. This was the update I was waiting for, and ordered my fancy new laptop right away this morning. I'm making the move to Intel macs! I'm excited, for more than one reason. One biggie is that I will have a portable Windows machine, as it is really annoying to work only from my desktop PC at home. Despite not enjoying Windows, development is rarely exclusive to Mac OS X. In fact, it will be a joy to run Office 2007 through Parallels. I may even get a Linux partition on there, as I may be doing some cross-platform development in the near future.



On a somber note, this will be replacing my 17" PowerBook G4, bought in April, 2003. That's right, over four years later. Apple makes a good product. In fact, my G5 and PC were purchased the summer of 2004. Only over the last year have I really noticed my PowerBook slowing down. However, this will be a significant upgrade in all aspects.