Older Posts
from older times

The year of my siblings.

• (09 Mar 98) La Roue steps out to post online / he's rarely active, it's about time
  
• (25 Feb 98) This computer isn't going to last forever, and one day I will have to make a swap to a new machine. In the time I've been on this one, I've undergone an enormous phase transition in how I use the computer and how I manage all of my work. In anticipation of eventually moving elsewhere, I've begun to create new, modular makefiles for my software installs. I will be slowly documenting this in a page under the tech/computer/etc tab of this site. If you need to work with any of my tools or would like to grab my setup flow for any particular software, let me know and I will make that a higher priority goal, and make an effort to document it more rigorously. I expect this to be a work in progress for many months, but a job left unstarted is a job unfinished.
  
• (13 Jan 98) Merry Christmas, happy new year, and everything in between. Yesterday it was -10 degrees outside, and now it's a sweaty 3 above zero. I'm shedding layers like a madman. I recently got my hands on a Sega CD and a working 32x, so I'm having some fun with those right now. Too bad there don't seem to be many games for either; perhaps if Sega wasn't fighting with itself they could have focused on the Saturn! But I don't even know anyone who has one of those, and haven't played one since wandering around a Blockbuster a year or two ago. Maybe I'll pick one up once it's yesterday's model, but the selection isn't so hot with the Saturn either…
  
• (10 Nov 97) Sheesh, I'm going nuts. Crazy gains lately, but that means dawn to dusk work. This is it though; either what I'm doing now pays off in six months, or that's it. I'm winning this one though.
  
• (29 Oct 97) I've removed the bloated digital index card site from this page and moved it elsewhere. The way I manage this site did not play well with hundreds of svg images in one folder, and it finally annoyed me enough that I did something about it. If, for some reason, you miss that page and want to see it again, and your life depends on it or somesuch, shoot me an email!
  
• (29 Oct 97) I don't trust these microwaves. Somehow they're making the flavor evaporate out of food. Why does everything come out crusty and clumpy? I don't want one in my life anymore. Last weekend I had my porch screen door open for fresh air, and this weekend I had to turn on the heaters. Fall is a ride.
  
• (19 Oct 97) Ack! I can't get Powell from SD3 out of my head!
  
• (17 Oct 97) Ghost projects are trying to become full papers and I can't juggle it all. I need to get some things off my back!!!
  
• (12 Oct 97) It's been a while. My head is bifurcating–I think I need to export some of this stuff to another domain. Wishlist updated. I need a long-form blog post option…
  
• (18 Jul 97) Still at the conference but I made a friend. He can confirm my continued not deadness because he is definitely real and sitting right next to me.
  
• (10 Jul 97) I'm at a conference! I'm not dead! I'm not dead!!!!!
  
• (09 May 97) I have a feeling that right now I'm learning half of the math I'll use for the rest of my life. Too bad I didn't learn all of this properly a decade ago!
  
• (21 Apr 97) Been feeling out of sorts all day, but I can't afford to get sick! There's too much to do. It's a good thing I got out of town a few weekends ago, I'm starting to burn the candle on ends I didn't know about. To what end? To what end…
  
• (11 Apr 97) Seattle weekend. A much needed break that could have been better quality controlled, but was overall refreshing. Bowdlerized write-up in progress, will post soon.
  
• (31 Mar 97) My e-lisp is growing stronger. I don't need a speech therapist though.
  
• (23 Jan 97) Just remember - if you live in a college town and are renting a home, you will be treated as a third class citizen. They have nothing to gain from being pleasant with tenants, because more insects will come to fill in the hive later, and they'll pay more. Don't let them walk over you.
  
• (19 Jan 97) My wishlist has been decimated. At the cusp of having to plan a move in the next year, I'm suddenly not keen on buying new things. And the library is mostly built.
  
• (17 Jan 97) There's a new lounge at work that I'm trying to work in. It has a WINDOW. I'm writing this as I intermittently look out a WINDOW. [My] words cannot express how demoralizing having an office without a WINDOW has been. The marquee date should finally work now.
  
• (03 Jan 97) Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Yammin' Yule and all that. I hope you, the reader, (yes, you!) enjoyed your holidays. The shadow of work never stopped lurking, dimly adumbrate behind every revelry. This is going to be a busy year. Ganbatte, watashi (that's Ancient Coptic for "do your best, me!")
  
• (17 Dec 96) Minor update: marquee date changed to long form month, per S&W. No, not that one.
  
• (16 Dec 96) Stuck in a programming hole. Can't sleep. Can't read. Only programming. Came up with an easy `sed` solution for updating the "last updated" marquee. This is its debut.
  
• (13 Dec 96) I wasted my entire night trying to make a bibtex manager work. In the end I decided the program sucks and purged it. These sorts of work nights blow.
  
• (11 Dec 96) We stopped by the new music store in town and I found a CD of Nightfly in the wild! I'll pay a premium to deal with a better search space (general thrift store vs. a specialized shop). Thanks for the tunes, Donald Fagen.
  
• (09 Dec 96) Not a lot of time for updates lately. My head has been exploding, neurons are firing at doubletime. When I work on the computer, it's to WORK. Hooby program must take the back seat.
  
• (24 Nov 96) I don't think I've ever mentioned this, but I write and publish this site with emacs. It's not straightforward and I'm not editing html files 99% of the time. This comes with pros and cons. Just a gee whiz. I shout into the void and it shouts back. We have an Understanding.
  
• (11 Nov 96) After much foot dragging I've written up quick notes to my recent pmp restoration. It's not really a useful guide, but there are lots of pictures!
  
• (10 Oct 96) This was supposed to be updated Saturday but the weekend got away from me. Gadgets is updated with an old CD player now. Apropos of nothing, I've been reading a lot about paintings.
  
• (04 Oct 96) Does anyone have an extra room and about three more bookshelves that they want to give me? I could use that.
  
• (03 Oct 96) Arduous as it was, I have logged, linked, and annotated the playlist I found on that music player. There's some S A D stuff on it. Some of it is good. That's junior high for you.
  
• (03 Oct 96) Another post, this time on my first real portable player in junior high. As with everything musical I had until college, it was an effectively brand-new handmedown. When I have a chance, I'll compile the playlist left on it so you can have a hearty laugh… or, because I remember what I listened to back then, you might find a cool tune or two. Or thirty-three (but that's a hard upper limit).
  
• (02 Oct 96) I have a button now. If you want to link to me, please use that one. I'm not in any webrings right now.
  
• (01 Oct 96) New month, new goals begin. As always, one of my big goals will be to reduce, which does not only mean physical clutter. I spent September taking care of some internal maintenance and now it's time to get aggressive. You don't need to know what I'm talking about. This is all for me.
  
• (30 Sep 96) RIP Walkie.
  
• (30 Sep 96) Flying home was the last push my body needed to get a cold. It seems to be passing quickly, but this is not helping me hit the ground running!
  
• (29 Sep 96) A few hours of my life were lost because I forgot that Emacs export doesn't intelligently handle nested #+include statements. There's a new page on gadgets that I use or have owned. It started because I caught myself looking up the model number for an old music player for the third or fourth time in a few years; I decided that's enough. Check it out.
  
• (27 Sep 96) Last weekend was the wedding for an old friend I haven't seen in a while. Not the guy I expected to get married first. With that, my adventure is over, and it's time to snap back to reality. Hard.
  
• (14 Sep 96) The first time I read Crime I was told that the epilogue was cheesy. The second time I thought it was only so-so. But I am older and wiser now. It has some problems but it is definitely NOT superfluous.
  
• (13 Sep 96) A very nicely priced copy of the Singleton Dante popped up online and I promptly made it mine. Who would have expected me to remove something from my "Stupid Expensive" list?
  
• (12 Sep 96) There haven't been any changes to the CD wishlist lately so I touched that up. This project is actually coming along.
  
• (11 Sep 96) Small updates to the wishlist, since I snagged a copy of Mario Bros. 2 at the mall by my parent's house. Otherwise, I'm still rereading Crime and Slime.
  
• (08 Sep 96) I went AWOL. Also there are closer to 1000 letters. Insert before a professional.
  
• (29 Aug 96) I've finished the first step of digitizing five volumes of a certain set of documents I want digital access to (it's Dostoyevsky's complete letters, I'm so danged mysterious). Does anyone out there have advice on building web pages out of a structured database? There are some 500 documents and they should all have the same formatting (but very different lengths). My plan is to settle on a data format and then start editing the documents, one by one… There's no way around this level of the legwork. Enough of the digitization process was automated already, and it would not have been possible 26 years ago!
  
• (27 Aug 96) Added a todo list to this page, somewhere.
  
• (26 Aug 96) Some under the hood functionality is being added for quick updating of lists, should I decide that that's something worthy of my time… This week was another major music updating spree for me and I lost track of reality for a few afternoons. I really need a strategy for version controlling the music library, or at least its changes….
  
• (16 Aug 96) It looks like I get another semester of working without teaching. I think this is the time that I begin a pet project. Last night I read what turned out to be a nasty story. Never trust a man named John Johnson Praline!!!
  
• (04 Aug 96) We had a 20 degree temperature drop in just a few days from only ~20% cloud coverage. Those guys really are helpful!
  
• (31 Jul 96) Goodbye, July. It's 100 degrees outside and thus I am not.
  
• (29 Jul 96) Quality of life updates on the wishlist, considering how to tweak other things faster. Tinkering is better than concentrated efforts.
  
• (28 Jul 96) I failed at the below.
  
• (16 Jul 96) Hmm…. Time to not spend money for a while (the library got a huuuuge boost).
  
• (11 Jul 96) Another birthday is flying by. Life after the last post was spent underground; the only real highlight is that I killed and cooked live crab for the first time. I desperately need to store some programming mana to work on a personal project soon. One of my birthday presents was this neat game from three or four years ago called Alisia Dragoon. I'll have to carve out some time to play that too!
  
• (17 Jun 96) A push towards "decentralized" internet habits has been made by adding a wishlist to the site. It's buried because I don't intend it to be a public, in-your-face feature, but I do want to be able to find it myself from devices while abroad. This also helps me have one list with things available all over the net.
  
• (30 May 96) IE3 dropped yesterday, but I missed it due to an important family event (the good kind). It looks good on some sites, but it appears to render certain html elements differently than Netscape. I'll try to keep this site compatible with both browsers but I won't make any promises. In other news, the friends who were visiting have departed on their long drive home. As always, I can't help but feel that I should be going with them.
  
• (23 May 96) With a conference right around the corner, I'm hammering out a presentation this week and drinking too much coffee. I envy professors who have so much experience in their topics that they can whip together a 30 minute talk in a few hours. This talk is only ten minutes and I've been working at it for a week. Celery.
  
• (22 May 96) Since I spend too much time in thrift stores looking at the same five unwanted CDs, I've started a list for myself of things to look for. Most is unlikely to appear in a thrift store. You can find it in the music section under CD wishlist.
  
• (18 May 96) This week was packed so I didn't get a chance to watch Tuesday's episode of Frasier. That Niles is a hoot! Next week is the season finale. Can you believe it's already been three seasons? I hope we get a few more years of this, but you never know with spinoff shows.
  
• (17 May 96) Added old notes on numerical fourier transforms to the physics tab.
  
• (27 Apr 96) I've finally migrated my links to the sidebar. The pages aren't pretty, but the content is what matters. The TOC could use an ease of use update.
  
• (16 Apr 96) As a personal milestone, I finished the final volume of Robert Caro's mammoth LBJ biography today. I hope he finishes the series… This update is mostly because I fixed a pretty embarrassing typo in the two-state system notes.
  
• (12 Apr 96) For some time I've told myself I wouldn't care about album art in my music library, and in one day I ruined that forever. Beets is a command line music manager that looks up song metadata on MusicBrainz and "fixes" your local tracks. It takes a bit of setup to do what you want, but with a few quick commands I got it to download and embed album art for ~70% of my library. Check it out if that's your thing.
  
• (07 Apr 96) Playing around with inline code cells. Don't expect anything fancy to come of this.
  
• (07 Apr 96) The week is blasting by. I'm working on lots of two state system stuff for work right now, so I went back to basics and reminded myself how to do that stuff from scratch, pen and paper. The notes I wrote up are in the Physics tab now.
  
• (03 Apr 96) Despite a spring head cold causing my eyes to burn out of my head, I spent a few hours today digging up info on the core Bemani staff and composers. I'll keep the notes up even though they're not original content, just in case someone with similar tastes wants to follow the threads I did. Next time, maybe I'll write some css to make subheaders visually indent. I've also added `touch` commands to my makefile, to circumvent org export not recompiling files that have `INCLUDE` statements in them.
  
• (28 Mar 96) I think these updates look better with a dash to show where they start.
  
• (27 Mar 96) For a day or two the front page has been totally destroyed. I've decided to go back to one line updates - there's no reason not to use them for these simple posts, and anything with a real lengthy topic can be inserted elsewhere. Once again, `make` is coming to my rescue. Since my weekend was obliterated by all of this, I reckon it's time to turn off the screen and open a book for the rest of the night.
  
• (25 Mar 96) Alright. This isn't going to be easy at all, and I've had to resort to writing e-lisp to figure out a proper command for these "blog" posts. You'd think this would be a native feature….
  
• (24 Mar 96) Quality of life update - email buttons will now actually work, instead of trying to open a new window in the main frame. I'm working on a new JS widget page, but I won't make any promises on when that will come out. Replacing `<br>` with `\par` didn't work (with or without $). I'm about out of ideas. \(\psi\).
  There's one thing I could try.
  But it would require me to break the blog.
  It's easy to back out.
  
• (21 Mar 96) SPRING. It's finally here. The last spring of this embryonic state. The last spring of whatever flatlining phantasmagoria we've been stuck in. There's no turning around, and I don't expect the way things were to return, but if they can't come back in some light capacity I will create them. \(\par\) I need to figure out how to get `org` to include multiple "line break" characters without actually breaking the line. If I could manage that, these would become full blog posts instead of little one line snippets. This is the source of the stray `\\` and `<br>` operators around this page right now. I hope to remove them and include images one day, but for now it's extremely convenient to have posts automatically fetched for the front page! \(\par\) Last night I woke up abnormally out of balance, caroming to the bathroom. My only coherent thought was "They're called plutocrats because Pluton was the Greek god of wealth. Remember this in the morning!" And hey, I was right. We really lost out big time by cutting the classics from our curriculum. Spring resolution: finally read Ovid's Metamorphoses.
  
• (20 Mar 96) Let's close out winter on a positive note. \(\par\) Deep inside this site "a few" secrets have been embedded. Most of them are/will be me playing with intrusive but not invasive JavaScript - see, for example, the 404 page that you ideally wouldn't be able to navigate to easily… but I know that right now you can. (Let me know how you get there so I can start patching up those holes!) \(\par\) With the discovery of how easy Makefiles are, I forsee having to rewrite my entire OS setup script. NB to myself for the future: have two versions, for a quick install in an emergency, and for a full install. EASY with Makefiles. Simply invoke fewer recipes.
  
• (19 Mar 96) It feels like I haven't posted in a long time but it's only been a few days. Lately I stay up well past 2am working. Baking my brain with the harsh glow of flickering monitors. A sea of ill-focused text. I need something fun to do on this machine. I don't think the things I tend to do on the computer belong on this site, which makes it tricky… How to partition work and play? The more our lives end up on the world wide web, the closer to losing all of our boundaries we are going to get… and I don't think the result is going to be a net positive.
  
• (16 Mar 96) An email button is now on my About Me page.
  
• (15 Mar 96) Quick update - someone let me know that I haven't made it possible for anyone to contact me through this site yet. That's a huge oversight. I'll fix this in the next update. Right now it's already close to 2am and I should focus on other things, such as sleeping.
  
• (14 Mar 96) I haven't posted any updates in almost two weeks, but I've been hammering tons of stuff out. I'm building a toolset of physics routines so that I stop rewriting the same code over and over, and I'm hosting them over a network connection so that I can back them up. Technology really is amazing! On the flip side, it means I have to keep the files small. Even on a modern 56kbs modem medium sized, 50kb scripts take 7.31 seconds to send, IF things are operating optimally. They usually aren't. At any rate, as I tinker I'll make some of these programs available for download here. Let me know if you see things I can improve!
  
• (02 Mar 96) Because I have nice speakers attached to my desktop, and because storage is much cheaper for a desktop, I play music off of that machine no matter where I'm working. More often than not, that's on my couch. Sometimes mediocre songs come on though, and why should I have to get up every time I want to change the song? That's why I made this script that lets me pause, play, and skip tracks through a terminal as long as I'm on the same network as it. It's not very well coded and probably only works for me, but maybe by uploading it someone will tell me something I could do better. Cheers for now.
  
• (23 Feb 96) After a long week I've finally sat back and generated some content. Will you see it? Perhaps. Not most of it. One cool thing I managed to hack together was a small JS program that does simple random walks in 1D. It's near Neptune if you want to check it out. I'll work on more soon.
  
• (18 Feb 96) Do you ever wonder if the President of the USA ever sees his secretaries thinks "hey, wanna come to the Oval Office and give me a blowjob?" Hah, that would be crazy. Good thing our country is better than that!
  
• (16 Feb 96) Added Physics homepage for public access documents. Not much content yet.
  
• (15 Feb 96) I finally got around to getting the technology tab running again. You should now be able to find my most recent Ubuntu setup flowchart. Additionally, I've added a link to qmy dotfiles, hosted elsewhere on the World Wide Web. Finally, my Emacs cheatsheet was added as a bonus. I've changed a lot in how I work with Emacs since taking those notes (which are 90% from my first week of use, long ago now). If someone is interested, I could add a section about how I use Emacs from a practical standpoint for work every day.
  
• (11 Feb 96) No visible changes today. I'm having trouble getting links imported from [this] blog file to open in a different window… I don't think external pages should open in my frames.
  
• (09 Feb 96) I'm on a roll. New buttons! New secrets! It's about time for another physics post, and I've been working with probability distributions and transforms lately, so it might be about something on that track. Ultimately my goal is to get a ton of work done and graduate ASAP, but we'll see if the mentaculus allows….
  
• (05 Feb 96) All of my hyperlinks have been moved from my malignant, datamining browser to this site, which isn't much better. You can find them somewhere, maybe… I'll pull some gems from this subterranean master list and put them in the Links section to the left soon. Some other ideas include a custom 404 page (I don't know if this is possible yet), and a page for some digital telescope astrophotography I've done.
  
• (31 Jan 96) A few more of the old pages were finally ported up. I'm having ideas faster than I can figure them out, especially since I have to balance it with work. The creative juices from both domains are feeding back into each other though, so maybe this weekend I'll have a chance to figure out my next move.
  
• (23 Jan 96) Converting this site to export in [redacted] is taking some time. One of the main problems is that every new element of the org file is converted into a new paragraph in html. I need to override this somehow… Lots of plans for new content going forward. Stay tuned, audience of [me]!
  
• (21 Jan 96) There's a terrible feeling in my bones that it's the birthday of someone important, but I can't put my finger on who… I'm working on exporting the whole site to a different framework and getting some of the visuals to match is turning out to be a source of extreme grief. Fight on…
  
• (12 Jan 96) A few more emacs commands I've been using were added to the cheat sheet.
  
• (11 Jan 96) Tired today. Added some icons to the sidebar so it's visually clear which lines are links and which lines are titles.
  
• (04 Jan 96) As usual, edits come in closely clustered bursts. I've rehauled the computing tab to be a little more useful - the old notes there were from a time I was still getting used to things.
  
• (02 Jan 96) Halfway through the decade already? Time sure is flying by! I'm working on a lot of subtle but crucial workflow edits here so that I can get to the tinkering stage. The discontinuous pushes are always hardest…
  
• (15 Dec 95) The converted LaTeX for my prelim study flashcards have been added to the physics tab. This page was converted using the latex2html package. Now that I've discovered this, I expect to use it more often.
  
• (17 Oct 95) Not the greatest I've ever been at consistent updates… but I'm still going at it. There's a new secret file on this website that links to my setup config files now, so that I can quickly install a new machine and get it workable. The "computing" tab will probably be obliterated soon and replaced with my setup configuration instructions (it's nothing but clutter in my head, but needs to be retained.)
  
• (14 Sept 95) Today's update was an under the hood rehaul, but nothing that should have been noticeable by the average visitor. Some dumb things have been removed from the computing page.
  
• (29 Aug 95) Not much is being added to the site today, but it seems like most of the terminal packages I've been playing with will be made obsolete by emacs + org mode. Perhaps I should use this mode to create a todo list and keep it here.
  
• (24 Aug 95) More functional content changes today. The links page now has a few links, with formatting for categories going forward. Now if only I could find a good icon for each link…
  
• (23 Aug 95) Today I started learning C. With some luck, I'll find inspiration on how to streamline the site as I work through basic tutorials.
  
• (21 Aug 95) After an extended period of being worn down from all angles, I have begun to transition from Vim to Emacs. My notes on basic commands have been uploaded to the computer tab, and will be updated as I become more sophisticated.
  
• (11 Aug 95) It's a medium sized update this week. Added a new page for storing the linux config files I use often. This page will probably have more helpful notes to myself in the future. Look forward to it.
  
• (06 Aug 95) Site debut! I will be working to bring you new and exciting content over the next few months. Send me any suggestions you may have!