Bits and pieces

So right now I’m entering in all the showing times of Phantom of the Opera

PHANTOM is coming to San Francisco from November 26 to January 4, and I’m trying to work out the best time to see it. To that end, I’ve been entering in all the showing times into my Google Calendar to see what works out best. But right now, there’s no easy way to enter in the same event multiple times, only changing the time. Instead what I’m doing is just taking a single event, duplicating it a gazillion times, and dragging it to the proper time slot instead.

The gist of all this is that I wish Google would improve the convenience for this use case. And a concrete suggestion would be to simply allow people to create up to 10 duplicates of an event at a time.

Google Redesigned is a nifty plugin that updates the style of Gmail and Gcal to look oh so very slick. Originally it just a style within Stylish, but now it’s moved out to its own extension. Check it out.

Here’s my Gmail page:

And here’s my Gcal page:

Stylish is still pretty cool. For example, I really love this wikipedia skin. I find articles immensely easier to read when I use it.

All in all, if you’re not using it yet, you’re missing out.

when going to the pool in my apartment complex, remember to grab keys

I just read an article by the former chief of PC World that lined up a MacBook with comparable laptops made by Dell, Sony, and HP. Basically, they are very close to being the same in terms of price. A MacBook would let me work in a true unix environment, let me use textmate, and just familiarize myself with a nice ui. But on the other hand, I’m still not sure how well it runs movies, and I’m not sure if I’m going to want to play games on it.

link to said article

So in the beginning of the summer I had a number of goals I listed out. Let’s see how I did:

• improve my guitar skills: I’ve developed some guitar chops at this point, and my calluses are finally coming back =)
• create a customer-facing component within the public web site: When a customer gets notified that an item has come available, but visits and finds that it isn’t, my code will automatically resubscribe him and tell him that he’s missed it.
• learn to cook: Not exactly, but I’m getting better all the time.
• beat Twilight Princess: nope, still haven’t gone through the mirror at the end
• play both Carcassonne and Munchkin at least once each: nope, still need to.
• hone my programming chops: somewhat. I’ve personally learned more about the other tools involved in programming than the coding itself.
• finish both Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies: GEB is AWESOME. Everyone should read it–not just computer scientists. Guns, Germs, and Steel, on the other hand, I’ve heard isn’t that good, so I might read something else instead.
• become a great handler in Ultimate Frisbee: Hells yea.
• update this blog frequently: nope, didn’t do that
• pursue the elusive six-pack: I’ll need to spend a little more time on this one.
• undisclosed side programming project: nope, *fizzle*
• undisclosed other side project: also nope, *fizzle*
• become much better at foosball: nope, besides the first few weeks

Last year, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority implemented this whole new method of doing payment for public transit in Boston. They introduced the CharlieCard, a plastic card that fits in your wallet and comes with an rfid tag to allow easy payment of tolls.

Now cue MIT students. At DefCon, a group of three MIT students working under THE Rivest (the R of RSA) identified a number of reasons why the entire system is unstable and unlimited numbers of free rides could be obtained with little trouble.

Morgan Freeman was in Men In Tights? He was awesome before–he just went up to several times that.

<edit>never mind, he was in robin hood: prince of thieves</edit>

From the end of the Rails wiki page on Routes:

If you’re really sick and twisted, you might find the Rails route tests interesting reading. http://dev.rubyonrails.com/file/trunk/actionpack/test/controller/routing_test.rb

just discovered rot13 mode in emacs. emacs really does have EVERYTHING.

Another week IN DA LYFE.

• Our a cappella group, the Funktors, rocked our first performance on Monday. And we have video evidence to prove it, with exhibits 1, 2, and 3. Then we got to touch Jon McLaughlin.
  
• The Funktors are also in the mix. We had our first recording session yesterday, and after another day of recording, we’ll have a rough cut of Nine Til Midnight ready for consumption.
• So, over the summer, we’ve had a number of Tech Talks for the interns on different projects within Amazon (think Merchant Services, or AmazonFresh). Today’s tech talk had a special guest speaker–none other than the Jeff himself. Among other things, we learned he’s cutting back on raving.
• Justice’s † (full download for a limited time) album is superb. When “Let There Be Light” comes on, it’s so addictively headbobby that I have an urge to jump on my Amazon door desk and boogie. The album’s flaws come from its forced vocals towards the end, in tracks like “The Party”. Come on guys, you didn’t need to forcibly inject additional “fun” into solid music. And for those who haven’t heard of Justice, WATCH their video for D.A.N.C.E. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.
• Ultimate on Wednesday was goodtimes. We CAUSED THE HALF. So the way Ultimate works, it’s first team to 15 wins. And then halftime occurs whenever the first team scores 8 points. We usually don’t play this well, but this time, everyone’s head was in the game, and we just brought our A-game. We actually ended up losing the game itself, but it doesn’t diminish the achievement.
• We also had the best cheer on Wednesday. So the other team was Rosetta Biosoftware, and they open their games with “DNA! RNA! GOOO TEAM!” As a team, at the end of the game, we went “You must be exothermic cause you’re SO HOT!”, licked our fingers, stuck it in their direction, and went “sssss”. It was perfect.