|
Talk about the government being slow to react; I pointed out how the verbiage in 2005's Proposition 2 would make any logician cringe four years ago. Looks like someone finally noticed. |
I've been mentoring my high school's BEST team. Today I wanted to get copies of some of the game documents (game rules, field drawings, etc), which was given to all of the teams on CD but is for whatever reason not yet on the website.- Okay, first thought, I'll just e-mail them to myself. However, the PDFs are sufficiently large enough that the Lotus Notes webmail client complains that it takes too long to upload them. So that's out.
- Next option: scp it to my home machine. I try to go to the PuTTY website to grab pscp, but surprise!
chiark.greenend.org.uk is blocked by the school's web proxy because of 'Lounge/Entertainment' or something ridiculous. Fortunately, Google isn't blocked, so I was able to find a mirror. But then I discovered that outgoing ssh connections are blocked, so that's out. - Next option: FTP it up to the UT CS Linux machines. Nope, outgoing FTP connections are blocked too.
- Eventually I was able to get the password to the wireless network and use Air Sharing to upload it to my iPhone.
The school network was nowhere near that lame and useless when I had a hand in administrating it. Sigh. |
Today I was wearing my College Puzzle Challenge shirt, which has this puzzle (PDF) on it; basically, the symbols act like gates, permuting the letters in various ways. (The answer to it is here if you don't want to give it a shot, or if you were like us and tried and just couldn't figure out what the triangle gate meant.)
Discussion with coworkers made me a bit curious as to what it would look like if it were implemented in LabVIEW, so I gave it a go. Here's a screenshot of what I ended up with. You can have the source code to it too if for some strange reason you happen to have access to LabVIEW 8.6 or higher. |
|
|
May. 16th, 2009 @ 09:07 am
|
|---|
|
I've really neglected to update my LiveJournal these days. Perhaps because Twitter is more convenient for writing quick 140-character posts. |
An update to my previous post:
So, I'm not as free to choose whenever. Because we're releasing products in August, we're asked not to take off for vacation while we're in beta... which is currently scheduled for the end of May through the end of July. So, I can take off whenever, as long as it's not sometime during the summer!
Well, okay, I could probably swing a Monday or something. On the other hand, because we are on a tight release schedule, we've also been allowed to push the 40 hours for Q2 up into Q3. So now this has become vacation planning for, like, late August/September, unless I want to swing something for late this month or April. Which I'm not sure I can really get away with, with the amount of work I still need to do. :/
That said, I still haven't made any plans. |
Because of the current economic climate, I'm required to take 40 hours of vacation (5 days) each in Q2 (Apr-Jun) and Q3 (Jul-Sep) of this year. Aside from the restriction that I can't take the last week of Q2 and first week of Q3 off (not that I'd really want to anyway), I'm pretty free to choose whenever.
Unfortunately, I'm not a big vacation-takin' guy, so I'm at a loss for what I could do while on vacation. So far, the options I've come up with are:- Sit around and play a bunch of video games! Not that I'm not already good at doing that or anything. (and just think, if a better nVIDIA-powered Mac mini comes out, I might be even better at it!)
- Take a bunch of Mondays off! Mondays suck, right? And four-day workweeks are awesome, right?
- Go somewhere! But where? Denver? Scotland? Geneva? Aiken? Maybe go out and see my family in California? I'd need to get a passport if I were to leave the country. And Nicole would probably want to tag along too, and I don't know how many plane tickets I can afford (because of the aforementioned economic climate, I'm also getting a slight pay cut. Though I'm not getting laid off, so it could be worse.)
Any other ideas? |
I've recently been recommended to play several games (for example, Fallout 3). The trouble is, plainly, that I'm a Mac user-- and while Intel Macs do have several things working in their favor when it comes to gaming these days (such as Boot Camp and Crossover Games), they can't make up for the fact that the GMA 950 in my current (but hella outdated) Mac mini and the GMA X3100 in my two-generation-old MacBook really kinda suck.
The NVidia 9400M in the new MacBooks is a major step up-- but I'm not going to go and buy a new laptop (I've not even had mine for a year!). I'd be less opposed to replacing my mini, but who knows when the 9400M will trickle down to the minis? (The X3100 and 802.11n certainly haven't!) And, while I certainly have income enough to afford it, I still think Mac Pros are way too damn expensive. And I already have a monitor, so the iMac's out.
Building my own box is certainly an option-- but then I lose OS X (unless I go the Hackintosh route, which seems like more effort/brokenness than it's worth). While I could certainly keep both my mini and a Windows box, using them both at my desk seems like it would be a pain; Keyboard/mouse switches aren't so great with a Bluetooth mouse and good KVMs that do DVI are still rather pricy. I could drop the mini entirely, but considering how much I'm used to things in OS X (at work I meta-space hoping for a command launcher, meta-n hoping for a new console window, and meta-c/meta-v hoping for copy and paste) that would be unfortunate.
I wonder if this is why people buy game consoles. |
|
|
