A Little Back-of-the-Class Public Policy
Gays in the military:
Morale – down
Looking fabulous – up
Gays in the military:
Morale – down
Looking fabulous – up
Do you want to know how to make me care about Crossing Jordan at 2:07 AM? Knock out my cable for five seconds when a girl is about to jump out of an apartment window.
That’s how.
Seeing Carl Winslow and the guy from Sliders in the same show (still on Crossing Jordan here, sports fans) is enough to make me not want to do this late-night date again.
These kinds of quotes are why I read the Inquirer:
If you copy Craig David’s CD you get ten years, but if you punch him in the face and pummel him into a seven day coma you will only get six. You are more likely to get the respect of the prison population with your six year sentence as well.
I’ll be a little anchor tag cliche by telling you that the rest is found here.
RSS syndication for Cluster???
I like this. It seems like that kind of thing you could whip out in a bind and save the day on some video project.
According to the Inquirer, the AM2 socket release has been pushed up by two weeks, which means my gap-toothed lust for lower prices on socket 939 Opterons is two weeks closer. They may keep them up for a while (demand for a processor as sweet as this puppy) should be fairly inelastic at this point.
Well, on the school front today I trounced a lot of work, which is great for the sanity subscore as we proceed into this semester’s Hell Week, which this time directly preceeds Dead Week. We’re operating under the assumption that MIS will be able to “pop off like ‘dat” on automatic pilot, not requiring an undue insertion of extra effort.
I again vanquished the evil forces of the slow cooker today, cooking a 5 lb whole chicken to juicy, seasoned perfection in my old friend the conventional oven. They’ll never take us alive!
Graphviz is my open source project of the week, after allowing me to construct a fairly sophisticated decision tree with no more than a text file full of machine-parsable instructions describing its structure and format. Thank you, AT&T.
The plot thickens, as our ever-ticklish little red friend joins and leaves the fray in a matter of a few sentences. Very intense. I need to up my game in the next round.
The forward force on personal projects has really slacked off with increasing school intensity (not difficulty, mind you). Honestly, when I’m not working I’m wondering why I’m not asleep. Hopefully, next semester will be more engaging, or at least less intrusive. I’m thinking it will be both.
Well, I’m on a timer in terms of getting adequate sleep to face another possibly chaotic day tomorrow, so I should probably give this up. Summer beckons…
I was being an especially annoying elastic demand consumer at Wal-Mart in the music section a few days ago. I was trying to remember the Seals and Crofts song that was going to require me to buy a greatest hits CD. Walking home from a tofu burrito lunch today, it struck me all at once.
—
See the curtains hanging in the window
In the evening on a Friday night
A little light a-shining through the window
Lets me know everythings alright
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
See the paper lying on the sidewalk
A little music from the house next door
So I walk on up to the door step
Through the screen and across the floor
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Sweet days of summer, the jasmine’s in bloom
July is dressed up and playing her tune
When I come home from a hard days work
And you’re waiting there, not a care in the world
See the smile a-waiting in the kitchen
Food cooking and the plates for two
Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
In the evening when the day is through
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind
—
I think every year so far, when it gets to this point where school is the intersection of a fait d’accompli and a pressure cooker, I unwittingly select a song to, in a way, serve as a motivating theme. I am not ashamed to say that “She’s Every Woman” by Garth Brooks was the first one I chose my freshman year while doing literally hundreds of thermodynamics problems.
Now, I’m sitting in business school as a first-year graduate student. Would I rather be back there? No, absolutely not. But, there’s a charm in having continuity, not in music, but in circumstance.
In two more years I will look at this time in Spring like I view the concept of a “staff workday” or “early dismissal” now. It will be a sideshow to the flow of my life.
Music seems to wrap it all together, no matter what.
I really like this “ball” model I’m using in Cluster. I’m actually thinking about abstracting it into a “Ball API” and then re-implementing the Cluster code to use it in a clean way. You know, with storage drivers and stuff: “mysql:dbname” and “txt:/path/to/datasource” being valid paths to a storage system.
I’ve never really seen anything like Cluster on the net, and I’m thinking it fits in very well with the whole Facebook- and MySpace-influenced prominence of looking at other people’s junk all the time and writing stuff on their pages.
One of the reasons I was thinking about an API is I can see the possibility of a game using the Ball API. Same model of use as Cluster, but with a clickable image map or something. Actually, there seems to be a lot of fun stuff you could do.
One thing that could be snapped into the existing code very easily is e-mail notification of when you have the ball. While I think Cluster is small enough to make this a stupid idea, I could see a larger-scale implementation thriving with only a slightly extended feature set.
I made a little “plug-in” to show the Cluster status on the front page of the blog. Again, as dirty as PHP is, you can get stuff done quick.
I still can’t get over how finicky string handling is. Ick.