I logged in to the school’s Banner system to check on the status of my financial aid for next year. Turns out that, because I made more money last year than the year before, I’m only getting offered $500 in federal Pell grants for the next school year, whereas this year I qualified for [...]
Two sites I’ve run across that, however dull their content may be, have really excellent domain names: randomuseless.info/ and woss.name.
Found via reddit: How Experts Differ From Novices, chapter 2 of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Really fascinating reading, and I definitely want to check out the rest of the book.
This bit especially caught my attention:
The idea that experts recognize features and patterns that are not noticed by novices is [...]
Understanding Ruby blocks, procs, and methods — nice, well-laid-out explanation of what can be a moderately esoteric Ruby feature. (Though the fact that “words = %w(Jane, aara, multiko) ; upcase_words = words.map(&:upcase)” is about as obscure-and-line-noisy as Ruby gets is really, really nice.)
Next time I boot my Windows box: check out AppRocket, which might just be methadone to Quicksilver’s heroin…
Jack had been having some health problems since before Thanksgiving, and he hadn’t had any food or water since… Friday, I think? Cats can’t handle starvation like humans can; they *have* to eat. Even as his body shut down, he hung on with fierce determination, trying not to let the lights go out. [...]
Nothing says “get a faster CPU” like having to wait for a new toy before you can play with it… oh, the torture. (=
So I can close this tab: Cecil Adams (of The Straight Dope) discusses where “OK” came from.
Guess who got a sizable scholarship from the College of Engineering And Computer Science? Hopefully, I’ll get sufficient grants this year to not have to take out any more loans.
(Oh, and I have to maintain a 2.5 GPA… given that it’s currently at 3.71, I don’t think that’ll be a problem…)
Access 2003 has become the bane of my work productivity. Rather than working on the system that will replace this benighted database, I have to waste my few on-the-job hours trying to understand why the same functionality works under my login on someone’s machine, but doesn’t work under *their* login on the same damn [...]
I’m not sure what it is about Portland — something in the water, perhaps — but Portland band names tend to suck. Here’s a recent selection from the marquee at the Mt. Tabor Pub:
REIGN IN CHRIST
KISN MY ASS (note: KISN is a local radio station; dunno if there’s a connection)
PIXIE WITCH
BLACK ELK
…and something that [...]
I really, really wanted to like the Palm T|X. Alas, I’m shipping it back to Palm (which, since I bought an open box model at a discount, means it’s at least two strikes for this particular unit).
In the T|X’s defense, here’s what I liked about it:
The screen. As handhelds go, this one is [...]
100 years ago today, at 5:13am local time, an earthquake struck near the city of San Francisco. The Richter scale wasn’t around at the time, but estimates put it in the neighborhood of an 8. Damage estimates are in the range of $500 million in 1906 dollars (that’s $10 billion in [...]
Enterprise + Rails = Entrails?
My computer science class is Tuesday/Thursday 10am-11:50am. The Center for Student Health and Counseling offers a meditation class on Tuesdays from 12pm-1pm, with… and here’s the kicker: basic instruction starting at 11:45. Door to door time is about 10 minutes, meaning I get there right when the “meditation for newbies” stops.
…of course, [...]
Noticed, on my bus ride in to school this morning, that Thomas Dolby is playing at the Aladdin on Thursday. Hmm. I do have some homework, but I suppose I could bring my laptop and put it away when the show starts… (=
(Image swiped, with love, from The K Chronicles.)
And immediately after posting the previous item, I went looking for a free matrix calculator for the Palm. Behold the glory that is PDAcalc matrix (and yes, as far as I can tell, that *is* the correct capitalization).
Never mind the 7-year-old device pictured on the screen. This bit of copy particularly caught my [...]
Fantastic 3-minute video, well worth the download time: If Microsoft designed the iPod package.
Not only did they get the overall busy-ness of a Microsoft product box down, the design elements they used actually look halfway decent… as long as you don’t have anything else to compare them with. (=
(link via pragmatic programmer Andy [...]
Took delivery of a Palm Tungsten TX today… and now I can blog (slowly) from… oh. say, the bathroom. Not that I would ever do such a thing. Nope. No pottyblogging here, nosirree Bob.
“On the Internet, no one can hear you flush…”
While trying to write a script to publish my notes for a computer science class to the web, I ran across an amusing command provided by my note-taking software.
(VoodooPad, by the way, rocks. If you have a Mac, I can’t recommend it highly enough — combined with Textpander, I can now type math almost [...]