from the desk of stinkpot

proctored + graded my first midterm today.

i had no idea how much work it was for TAs to help organize a midterm: preparing review sessions, answering last minute questions, helping to draft an exam. strangely enough, i thoroughly enjoyed most of it – i haven’t tutored anything in some time and i had forgotten how gratifying it was to help someone finally understand a new concept. must resist temptation to join academia …

grading tests was a bit upsetting, however, as well as terribly time-consuming. each time i took points off, i pictured the students’ plaintive face, hoping i could find a little more extra credit. painful, really. now i understand why professors would say, “i hope everyone gets a 100.”

i actually wrote a piece of useful code today.
it’s a little program that monitors the amount of time each application is at the forefront of your desktop (sorry, only for mac os x). this way, you’ll know how long you’ve actually spent doing work on your computer. it was inspired by a yet-to-be-built application called blossom.
it’s already changed the way i’m working – i find that i’m much more focused when i can tell how much of the past half hour i’ve blown surfing the web.

go check it out over here (includes a download link!).

(yes, yes i’m starting another desperate attempt to get my server dugg to death.  i’m really curious to see what server logs look like when the digg effect hits.)

i came across this hysterical example of how to shoot yourself in the foot today, in unix:

% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

hooray for geekery!

two more photos i came across today.  i love juxtaposing them.  i think i’ll try and frame them side-by-side.

ah, today i came across this picture i snapped a couple of months ago while visiting friends in new york.

funny how even without a single landmark building in it, a new yorker would still instantly recognize that this photo was taken in manhattan.

i miss new york – boston is damn lucky they’ve got such a good science and engineering school here.  because beyond that, we’ve got no real reason to be here: most of our friends are still home in new york.

both christina and i can’t wait to finish up here and get gone.

yet, i’ve been worried lately that i’m starting to become too future-oriented.  i’ve been putting in such long hours lately and coding through much of the weekends, in the hopes that the work will actually get me out faster.  but even if that goes according to plan, is that what i really want? grad school is supposed to be one of the most enjoyable periods of my life.  i mean, i get paid to work on what i want and i’ve got no real responsibilities.   why am i in such a hurry to get this over with?

actually, i lie like a rug. this site isn’t finished – but it’s much closer to where it’ll end up.

it took a bit of wrangling, but my tricks and calendar pages now play well with the rest of the site’s theme. i think i’ve also finally migrated all of my blogger posts over to wordpress as well as successfully set up redirects from the old blogs.
a former adviser of mine would ask after i’d devoted more than 1 hour to something: what have i learned from this?

i learned that php is a really ugly language; i.e. it was beaten with the ugly stick crafted from the ugly tree. it’s got all of these brackets and question marks everywhere. it’s so hard to read the code and so easy to miss something syntactically.

god only knows why i’ve invested so much time in this.  frankly, about a year ago, i thought the whole blogging / maintaining a webserver thing was childish – a bizarre way of making the anti-social internet look social.  now, when interesting things happen during my day, i look forward to blogging about them.  in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if subconsciously, i’ve done things lately simply so that i could blog about them. it’s crazy how things that start off as innocuous hobbies morph into awesome time-gobstop-gobblers.

i have setup a linux-based music server that is wired to speakers throughout our apartment. it even feeds into the speakers in our shower (this has been a lifelong dream of mine). if you’ve got an account, you can choose what music plays in there!and, if you’d like to build a music server yourself that has a web-interface, i’ve made some quick notes here, on how to do so.

the inner online stalker in me craves the ability to surf the web anonymously.

unfortunately, most of the free proxy surfers out there either cost money or have very limited bandwidth.

finally though, i’ve come across a free, super-fast proxy browser: google!

simply go to their online webpage translator, select “translate a webpage” and choose to translate from a language that the webpage of interest is not written in.

hit translate and off you go – anonymous surfing!

do you digg?

finally, i’ve scrapped the boring-bright default wordpress theme in favor of something more pleasing. hopefully, i’ll figure out how to embed the rest of this site in it.

it’d be nice to also figure out how to automatically constrain the sizes of photos in posts, so that they don’t ruin this pages’ formatting …

an e-mail signature i came across today that made the biomedical engineer in me smile:

“noise is principally due to the presence of the patient” — r.f. farr