repak shawahb
dry humor for cactus farmers

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rsw@jfet.org


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Wed, 30 Mar 2005

the engineers' conceit (or is it just MIT?)

Haven't blogged in a bit, but I had a realization a few days ago that I thought I might share with y'all.

The other night, I went to TGI Friday's with a horde of friends. During dinner, I was talking with Matt Powell, a co-worker of mine who's also MIT '02, M.Eng '04. Somehow, the topic of raising children came up, at which point I asked the age, in his opinion, at which one was capable of grasping calculus and differential equations. After some discussion, we settled on 12ish as probably the earliest one would want to teach their child such things.

A couple of the people sitting near us (not engineers) overheard this and questioned why any sane person would ever do something like that. I immediately, almost instinctively, responded that a person couldn't carry on an intelligent conversation about anything technical, or even really understand much going on around him, without a grasp of calculus and diff. eq., and (in so many words) that people who didn't have such a grasp were basically worthless. Matt expressed agreement.

Then we remembered that we were in non-engineer company, and that there were maybe two or three other people at the table of fifteen who'd taken anything beyond maybe "college algebra." This apparently failed to cause Matt any discomfiture, since, well, he's Matt, and he tells it like he thinks it is no matter how unpleasant that might be. I, on the other hand, was somewhat embarrassed.

I still think I'm right, though. People who don't have at least some basic grasp of calc, diff. eq., mechanics, and E&M (the latter two being little more than the application of the former) must go through life in some sort of epic fog.


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Mon, 28 Mar 2005

spoken of in legend, it's...

brilliant! (so say the Guiness guys).


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Wed, 23 Mar 2005

no going back now

...at least not for a couple months. I'll put up a pic of my new hairdo at some point...


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Tue, 22 Mar 2005

get 'em all cut?

I'm considering going back to the clipper-number-two-in-the-bathroom approach to hair cuts. What do y'all think? Will I look like even more of a retard as a skinny guy with a buzzcut than I did as a fatass with a buzzcut?


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Mon, 21 Mar 2005

9 days of... nothing

Yeah, it's been a while, but there's honestly not been much to blog about! Yesterday it was gorgeous outside, so I woke up and ran my new 12k loop. I think my loop is hillier than the course is going to be in July (though I don't know for sure yet), so I think I'm in good shape. I need to try and get my speed up a bit, though—at the moment I'm only averaging about 6.5 MPH (shut yer ass, I know I'm slow), and I'd like to run the 12k in under an hour in July (gotta have goals, even if you can't quite hit them). I'm guessing my HIIT routine during the week will help with this...

This morning I got a call from a recruiter out of southern New Hampshire. He apparently had an old copy of my resume (well, OK, a completely up-to-date one doesn't actually exist at the moment...), and thought he was trying to hire me away from Analog Devices. I talked to him for a little while, telling him essentially nothing about myself but eventually worming out of him that he was trying to recruit me for Silicon Labs! Heh...

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go see the Ring 2 yet, but maybe I'll try and go some night this week... hmmm...

Oh yeah, by the way, the PDF I linked to on MAX-OT kind of sucks. If you want to read more about it, go to AST's site and log in with username max-ot@jfet.org and password max-ot.


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Sat, 12 Mar 2005

great things to come

Holy shit there's a lot of good stuff coming up.

Other upcoming events (dates not yet fixed): ProSLIC tapeout, me visiting Boston... have I left anything out?

Mmmmm... here's to the future.


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Fri, 11 Mar 2005

editing a URL = hacking

Wow. Sloanies are even dumber than I thought.

According to this post over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Sloan has decided to deny admissions to several people who did nothing more than edit a URL provided to them by the admissions department, discovering in the process that their admissions letter had already been posted to the webserver and reading same.

Sloan claims that they "hacked in" to their files in order to view their admissions status; meanwhile the fucking morons made the admissions letters publicly available on their webserver.

This goes to show you that stupid people should not be permitted to be aware of the existence, let alone in any way have a hand in the operation, of computers.


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a new routine

I'm a routine kind of person. Yeah, I know, this might be surprising to some of you. Honestly, though, I like to have things planned out, I like to know what's happening when, I like to feel completely in control of the forseeable future (this last part being key: I'm an unmitigated control freak; perhaps even :s/control// applies here...).

Even though I like the control afforded by having a plan, I do tire of same old, same old eventually. That's why it's time for a new routine. By this, I mean a new lifting routine. Stop reading now if you just don't give a rat's ass.

Since it's getting nice here (i.e., it's almost warm enough to ride my bike to the gym before dawn in shorts and a T-shirt), I want to start riding to the gym and back (5 miles each way) so that I'm getting a bit of cardio every day. Doing this with my current lifting schedule is nearly impossible while still getting to work at a reasonable time, though—my current split has me lifting 75 to 90 minutes four days a week. So I'm going to a new one, known as MAX-OT. The MAX-OT philosophy is that shorter sessions (30 to 40 minutes a day, leaning towards the low end of the range) with a 5-day split is much better for you. Moreover, MAX-OT claims that you should never train the same muscles within 5 days of each other, meaning that my current routine (3-day split plus full body workout on Saturday) needs a complete makeover.

Not only does this change things up, which ought to break the plateau I've been seeing lately, it gives me time to ride to the gym and back every day. Total hotness.

I start Monday. Damn, I'm excited. My only worry is that since I haven't been riding much, my ass is going to get sore. I did about 9 miles on my bike this morning (started around 6:15a or so) and I was OK (it was also a hillier course than the route to the gym), so I'm guessing all will be well.

Hooray for controlled change.


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Mon, 07 Mar 2005

scrolling hotness

One of the many things that sucks about Cadence is that it doesn't support the scroll wheel at all. The same is true of Acrobat Reader and many other programs.

Today I was thinking that I should write some code to capture button 4 and 5 events and massage them into some form that older programs could digest. Then it occurred to me that someone must already have done this, and it turns out that I was right: imwheel is a package that grabs events from mouse buttons 4 and 5 (and more, if you've got a sideways scroller as well) and translates them into keypresses. It's pretty sweet.

In addition to being compatible with X, it's apparently compatible with GPM, so you can even use your scroll wheel on a console. Now that's pretty hot.

A quick tip: it seems that imwheel will die if you have a catchall @Exclude rule, but you don't actually need one—if it doesn't have a rule in place, it'll apparently just pass the events through to the underlying window.


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Sat, 05 Mar 2005

best. game. ever.

Next time I'm in Boston, I expect to play a rousing round of the getopt game.

How was I reminded of the existence of this game? Dragonball GT just came on Cartoon Network and I misheard the name of one of the characters (Trunks) as "Trux." That got me thinking, "Hmmmm... trux... -Acdtrux... tar!"

Wow.


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don't panic

I know this isn't really new, but if you haven't yet, go see the trailer for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. I'm, like, dying of excitement. April 29, here we come...


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Fri, 04 Mar 2005

no soup for you

Looks like the ProSLIC well and truly hates me. We're in "critical crunch mode," so vacation ain't gonna happen—at least, not until we tape out. Currently that puts me in Boston around finals at the earliest.

Y'all should let me know right now what your plans are before and after finals so I know when to plan my trip.


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Wed, 02 Mar 2005

my new clock

I got the boards back from Advanced Circuits yesterday, and promptly made a mess of my kitchen table stuffing one of them. My desk at work has a new decoration, and my GOD is it hotness.

You know you want to make one for yourself...


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decisions, decisions

DAMNIT.

On May 25, Nine Inch Nails is going to be playing at Stubb's Barbequeue. Normally that would be great, except that Autechre is playing The Parish that very same night!

Why must I choose!?


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Tue, 01 Mar 2005

a young lady's illustrated primer

Generally my blog entries at least attempt to have some original content, but not this one. Reason has a good interview with Neal Stephenson that I thought y'all might enjoy.

edit

If you haven't already, go and read In the Beginning Was the Command Line. It's great.


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