I've Got One Hand in My Pocket... and the Other One Won't Fit

So that's what's in my pockets. My "Super Star" keys (inherited from the last person who owned my car), an albuterol inhaler (huffin' and puffin' and blowing nowhere), my Motorola MPx200 (slowly going the way of the buffalo), my iPod (longtime listener, first-time caller), and my headphones du jour, these little Sony in-ear wrap arounds (plus wires!). Oh - and my gigantic beast of a wallet that has dislocated a few of my lower ribs.

And that's the bare minimum! Sometimes I carry even more!

I think I just notice what's in my pockets more as spring creeps toward us, as happens to be the case right now. See, during winter, I don't worry about being all pocketed out. I get a couple of free ones in my jacket! But then comes the sun and my jacket goes in the closet, while all of the stuff in my jacket goes into my little pants pockets.

I begin to look like I have actually shoved cargo into my cargo pants. I know cargo pants are just trendy because they have a bunch of neat little pockety things, but I actually use mine. In fact, when it gets hot, I have some old cargo pants I made into cut-off shorts just so I have enough pockets in the summer!

So what do I plan to do about all this?

Carry ghetto headphones! Replace my phone with a giant old-school two-handed cell phone! Pack around all of the original CDs now stored in my iPod, plus a portable CD player! Buy one of those giant key rings - and add fifty keys to it! And strap a bottle of oxygen to my back! And never ever ever throw a receipt away for the rest of my life!

Or maybe I'll just wait for CargoPants 2004 to come out. I hear they have a zipper behind your knee that allows you to dump stuff in.

Moving Up In The World!

Woo Hoo! Mathcaddy.com is officially the number 1,212,941 most visited site on the Internet!!! I think we should throw a party!

Webmercials

The future of commercials? If so, count me in! I'll watch Seinfeld & Superman ads any day, especially ones as well done as these. Who cares if the ad has almost nothing to do with American Express and only mentions "The Card" once?

Oh, yes! Wyoming! Oh, yes! I'm going!

Old Fashioned CDs?

Dear Future Me,
In three years, check the results of this search against the results for this one.

And while you're at it, in ten years, compare them to this search.

Oh yeah - one more thing: You're out of milk.

Internet Archive: Music? Music!

Thanks to Chris Pirillo pointing out the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive, I'm now sitting here listening to "The Fools We Are as Men" from an incredible live performance of Ryan Adams in Paris with indescribable recording quality. There are a huge number of bands and shows available in the archive, but most of the best ones are done in "lossless" audio, so these are some big files, which is a bit of a downside. There are some MP3s, but most of them are Shorten files.

Shorten is an attempt to make high-quality lossless audio recordings available without needing a ton of bandwidth. (Just a half-ton of bandwidth.) From the little experience I have, a typical SHN file is about two to three times smaller than its counterpart WAV original.

You'll notice right away if you compare the Live Music Archive's selection of MP3s vs. its selection of Shorten files. Most of what's there is not in good ole MP3. At first, I you might feel a little disillusioned by this. But don't let a new file format keep you from enjoying a ton of wonderful live recordings from bands and artists like Ben Kweller, Spoon, Ryan Adams (21 shows), Jack Johnson (89 shows), Guster (131 shows!), Howie Day (185 shows!!), and much, much more. Plus, you'll get our exclusive collecti-- oh. Sorry. I thought I was doing an infomercial.

Anyway, if you like music, you probably enjoy (well recorded) live music. I know that I do. I have over 6 GB of MP3s of live recordings from Ben Folds /Five, Dave Matthews, Weezer, and a few others.

What you need to enjoy sonic liveness:
For playing the SHN files and/or converting them to MP3, you have two reasonable options: (1) Install ShnAmp, which will allow you to play them in Winamp upon download, or (2) [My recommendation] Download and install MKW Audio Compression Tool (mkwACT) to have a two-step drag-and-drop conversion from SHN to MP3 files. If you choose this route, note the additional installation instructions (primarily, you need to first install the binaries and not click "OK" when finished installing them until after completing the program installation, as well as check the options settings in MKWACT after you've installed it.)

Free Culture: AudioBooking

Mathcaddy readers are probably a little familiar with Lawrence Lessig. If you're not, you should be [mirror here] For those of you who have known me for some time, you know that I pursued going to law school and working in intellectual property. But my plans changed, so I get to sit and read Lessig's new book, Free Culture instead.

And it's GREAT!

And he and his publisher, Penguin Books, released it in under a Creative Commons license, as well as free download as a PDF.

Well a few people started thinking: The CC license for Lessig's book says, "You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work [and] to make derivative works." What if a group of bloggers got together and recorded this (wonderful) book as an Audiobook, chapter by chapter?

Within 48 hours, it was nearly complete. I even contributed a few chapters. Lessig was pretty excited himself about the project and said he wants to record one of the chapters.

AKMA, one of the originators of the idea, hosts the majority of the relevant conversation on this project, as well as the collection of links to each of the chapters. You can find the Audiobook project here.

Prompted by the allowance in the license for derivative works, another individual has created an eBook that's much easier to read than the PDF.

Here are my three recorded sections:
Chapter 4: Pirates [9 MB: 25 Minutes]
I highly recommend this chapter, which is also available here in a recent Wired excerpt from Lessig's book

Introduction to "Property" Section [2 MB: 4 Minutes]
I get to say "the thingness of picnic tables" here!

Chapter 6: Founders [10 MB: 29 Minutes]
Not the most thrilling chapter in the book, but it is essential to frame the historical issue of copyright and "free culture".

Neat Links

I couldnt last more than 1 tenth of what this guy does in the ever popular "Dance Dance Revolution!" And I am proud of that, very very proud of that.
One legged dancer.

Im not sure why anyone would really want an e-mail address this long, but here it is!
World's Longest E-mail addresses for free.

UPDATE!:
While looking for wizardry pictures for Eric's new honorary title of Math Wizard, I ran into this picture. It just didnt make sense to me.
Magic at the pool!

Be sure to also check out Erics Award for his new title in Photo Mojo.

BLASTED SPAMMERS!!

ARRRGH! Banning an IP incorrectly broke the comments feature for the past four or five days. Sorry about that. I didn't notice until I just attempted to comment on Steve's last post.

Blasted spammers!

Blasted me for mistyping the banned IP info!

Blasted!

Blasted? Flavor-blasted goldfish?

Thinking

I got to thinking about the Pepsi iTunes song giveaway. The codes are 10 digits long with 36 possibilities for each digit. So that makes roughly 36x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2, or 130,636,800, possibilites. Pepsi says that they are giving away 100,000,000 songs, so shouldnt there only be 30,636,800 possible invalid codes? That gives you only about a 23% chance that you will randomly pick an invalid code. I think that those are pretty good chances! The main factor affecting this is that you only had that 23% chance of getting a valid code on day 1. By now a lot of those codes have probably been taken and the chances are significantly lower. Oh well, not like I wanted super duper free songs anyways.

Please correct any errors in my math or information, its so late.

Good News, Booger Lovers!

Finally we have some medical news to rejoice about!

According to this article, picking your nose and eating it is very good for you. I'm going to start under the seat of my car!

Wooo!!

Mathcaddy Radio: Adam Sucks Edition

Steve and I were conversing this evening and he pointed out that almost all of the new and interesting music that he listens to comes from my recommendations. This is touching, but I doubt it would make for a good radio show. Unless...?

"Well," I joked, "You could just take what music I pick off of my radio session, and then add your own commentary!"

The truth is, this isn't a horrible idea. Steve is actually far more amusing than I am - and it would be additionally humorous if he were to base his entire show off of correcting my mistakes or merely putting his spin on what songs I picked. It would give each radio show two "flavors," which might be fun.

Maybe we'll try it, maybe we won't. We do seem to have a large number of listeners out there. Like six or something. And with Steve's help, we are determined to raise that number to SEVEN!

One Hour News 2 (Finally)

Well, I cant really seem to find anything in my defense or support about this edition, so without further adue. "One Hour Report 2: The Curse of the Sequel"

Update
ARRGGGH! It is acting silly. I will fix it later.

Update
ARRGGGH! It's not acting silly anymore. At least I don't think it is -- adam.b

My Morning Reverb

I picked up my copy of September 2003 issue of CMJ New Music Magazine and saw the subhead for Steve Kllinge's peice on the band "My Morning Jacket." It read: "Reverb: That's What's Happening." And so I skipped the article.

Now, what's wrong with reverb?

Everything. Almost. Well, close anyway.

Reverb is, musically speaking, an oddball concept. I already heard it the first time. What makes you think I'll like it better just because it's echoing and fading away? Are you attempting to repeatedly assail me with the sound so I like it more? It seemed to me the idea was, "if you don't like a chord or a lyric the first time, you'll catch the echo and then fall in love with it."

"No. They aren't going to get me with that," I would tell myself.

"What?" I would respond.

I always speak to myself - but I don't always listen to myself.

What I did listen to was this record. I overcame my skepticism of reverb. I don't know if I was feeling especially tolerant that day. I'm not certain why I picked up this album. Okay, it was the bear on the cover draped in confetti streamers. I'm a sucker for bears on album covers draped in confetti streamers. What can I say?

This album was nothing that I expected, which is always enjoyable. What this record does well is soar. It's not a lyrically deep album. In fact, most of the tracks have very few lyrics and some have hardly any singing. What nearly every song does has is a huge level of audible effort. The drummer doesn't just keep beat or try to do his own thing. The drums add such tremendous depth to this music it's almost hard to highlight them too much. The guitar work is impressive, but not showy. Add keyboard and occasional sax to complete a very musically tight sound.

It's amusing that I always thought of reverb as a way to help musicians cover up their inadequacies. A fatter, fuller sound can hide a lot of looseness. But this is a band playing and working in complete coordination, while maintaining a very fluid style.

I'm very impressed. And it's not just impressive. It's great music.

So, did I overcome my anti-reverb bias? Yep. And My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves provides the perfect road to recovery.

12-Steps to Overcoming Disgust of Reverb
01 - "Mahgeetah": I love the sound of the guitar on this track. I want to sound like this. But, um, what the heck is this guy saying? And who the what is a Mahgeetah? (Still a great track!)
02 - "Dancefloors": Easy to get into. The best way to describe this song is putting on a pair of very old, but very comfortable jeans. This track is quite accessible. It's straightforward, it feels good, and it just rolls. The sax adds a pretty sweet sound.
03 - "Golden": Classic country style drum beat, sweet vocals, killer harmonies, and some very nice guitar make this one of the standout tracks.
04 - "Master Plan": Builds quite a bit. Not my favorite, but a decent song.
05 - "One Big Holiday": Yeah! You can feel within 20 seconds that this is a GREAT track. Cool guitar picking leading into an amazing (mostly guitar) number. The drums feel really smooth and the bass just lets you right in the front door.
06 - "I Will Sing You Songs": Long and very sleepy - but great to listen to while reading.
07 - "Easy Morning Rebel": Welcome back to the country.
08 - "Run Thru": Turns into a thumping little track before it's over. The drums and guitar are so tight together, it's impressive. Not much singing, but if they're going to play like this, do I care?
09 - "Rollin Back": Please throw this track away. It's crap. Maybe I'll change my mind after hearing it some more, but it sure feels like it just wanders aimlessly, never finding what it's looking for.
10 - "Just One Thing": To me, this is THE track. I could listen to this for days. I did not like it until I'd heard it about five times. "And I want it so bad, it's the first thing I see when I wake!" he says - and you believe him.
11 - "Steam Engine": This is the little engine that couldn't. Couldn't get me to like it.
12 - "One in the Same": I love it when albums end like this does. The band picked a track that seems to conclude the record. "To all the people I've loved, don't think poor of me." Well, I don't think he loved me, but that's okay. I don't think poor of him anyway.

steve.mathcaddy.suck

WHOOPEE! Thanks to the kindness and generosity of Adam, I can now make my subdomain the way that I want to and get away from conforming with Bloggers layouts! Thanks Adam, you're the greatest! Now I just need some inspiration and something to actually put on the page. Oh well, I'll just wait until I hear some great ideas that I can steal. Until then check out what I have so far at the fabulous steve.mathcaddy.com

And I promise that I will put up the second edition of 1 hour news, and my first session of Mathcaddy radio.... eventually.

Mathcaddy Radio Session 3

Here's the latest Mathcaddy Radio session.

Mathcaddy Radio: Session 3

01: The Long Winters - "Carparts"

02: Scott Andrew - "Cast the Net Wide"

03: Clem Snide - "Mike Kalinsky"

04: Of Montreal - "Penelope"

05: Hayden - "Dynamite Walls"

06: My Morning Jacket - "Golden"

07: Pretty Girls Make Graves - "A Certain Cemetery"

08: Mull Historical Society - "Watching Xanadu"

[43 MB MP3 :: 47 Minutes]

Getting dumber...

I just realized that I am getting dumber. And it's bothering me. I have drawn up a small graph to illustrate the path of my intelligence over the past decade. My findings in drawing this graph startled me terribly.

It used to be that I did not make spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, punctuation mistakes, or typos. That's just who I was. But recently, I have noticed that I have made some serious errors on mathcaddy.com.

Take the posts regarding mathcaddy radio sessions one and two, for example:

Here, I wrote "addition" instead of "edition". Whew. How horrible is THAT?

And here I actually misspelled the word "welcome." Ouch.

Will someone please put my keyboard out of its misery?

Friends of the Library version 2.0

Every so often, when walking into a library, I notice signs that say, "blah blah blah blah Friends of the Library blah blah blah." I never seem to follow up this quick glance with a complete read of whatever it is these flyers say about the "Friends of the Library". And my laziness leaves me wondering.

Just who ARE the Friends of the Library? And what do they do?

When I was a kid, my friends were the ones I spent the most time around. This makes the bakery and the law firm next to the library potential friends of the library, I suppose.

Although I did spend a lot of time with kids who happened to be related to me - and I didn't call them my friends. My friends were the ones who I spent the most time with by my choice. So I guess that would mean the bakery and the law firm are probably just cousins or siblings of the library. The law firm is probably the smelly cousin.

Anyway, that still doesn't answer the question. Who the heck are the Friends of the Library? I have no idea. But let's not go there. It seems they don't want to be known and no amount of conjecture on my part is going to uncover their identities. And also I'm bored with trying to figure out who the Friends of the Library are.

So on to our next question: What do the Friends of the Library do?

Well, when I was a kid, my friends just ditched me and went to go play video games. Hmm... nah. I don't think an institution of the Library's stature would associate with people who play video games. But maybe the Library's friends just ditch him and go quote poetry! No. Also too boring to pursue as a possibility.

Hmmm... I have some friends who made fun of me behind my back. That's it! That must be what Friends of the Library do! I can see it now! They would probably say things like:

"Hey, did you see the Library this morning? He forgot to close his automatic closing doors! What a dork!"

"I can't believe the Library is still using those stupid 'click click click' things that check for stolen books! I quit using mine in, like, 1982!"

"Did you see the cover on the Library's Trapper Keeper! It's pink! What, did his MOM pick it out for him?"

"Have you seen the librarian that the Library has been hanging out with? She looks like a librarian!"

"What's up with the Library lately? He hasn't changed his clothes in eight years and he smells like mold!"

"Ha ha ha! Someone stuck this big sign on the Library this morning! And he didn't even notice!"

or...

"Look! That Library is such a push-over. He lets me borrow anything he owns and then if I don't return it, he just threatens me with mailed post-cards saying they're 'overdue'!"

Friends of the Library version 1.0

Every so often, when walking into a library, I notice signs that say, "blah blah blah blah Friends of the Library blah blah blah." I never seem to follow up this quick glance with a complete read of whatever it is these flyers say about the "Friends of the Library". And my laziness leaves me wondering.

Just who ARE the Friends of the Library? And, more importantly, why do they get their moniker capitalized? These are clearly specific Friends of the library, and judging by the capitalization of their name, they must be "Friends" that are "Important"... perhaps "Friends" in "High Places".

And if there are "Friends of the Library," it follows that there are "Enemies of the Library." You might expect me to be deathly afraid of your average Enemy of the Library.

But this is not the case. I can understand being an Enemy of the Library. Libraries are one of the most valuable fixtures in Western society. They promote the education, enlightenment, edification, and other e-words of the masses at little or no cost. And this is something which must be avoided, as it could lead to the destruction of our civilization. People getting something for nothing through collectively funded institutions backed by the government and designed for the public at large? I, for one, would feel great Fear to be found sitting near a Friend of the Library on a dark night at a lonely bus stop.

The real question is this: What would a Friend of the Library do? I shudder to think.

Boy, that sucked. I'm going to try again. (see version 2.0)

mathcaddy.com: not friendly to old browsers

It's really too bad, but this site does not play well with old browsers. I found this out while visiting Kristi's grandpa yesterday. He was running Windows ME (aaaa!!!) and I think IE5 (someone correct me if I'm mistaken). mathcaddy.com did not like his computer. It just looked beyond bizarre. Oh well. I guess I need to do a little more design research. Why am I telling you all this? I have no idea. This is probably the most boring post ever. To make up for it, dear reader, I am going to follow this up with something as random as I can possibly think of. Hopefully it's amusing, even if there's a good chance it won't be.

What the Heck?

This morning I saw a new comment posted for a post that I had never read before, you can see it here. The first strange thing about the post was that it was posted back in July of 2003. That kind of made me wonder why someone was reading and actually commenting on stuff that long ago. But the totally wierd thing was the comment.
"Online Cialis Levitra Viagra has been an eventual success in Europe since its introduction in Early 2003.Cialis will now be available in US soon. You may buy Cialis through various registered pharmacies. Also try levitra , buy levitra cheap levitra http://www.one-levitra.com/ http://www.one-cialis.com/levitra.htm/ or visit these sites for news and side effects : cheap cialis http://www.one-cialis.com/"
When did those comapanies start a campaign to post advertisments in year old blog posts? That doesnt make too much sense to me, and what does Cialis have to do with "Adventures in Time While Wearing Broken Watches and a Shirt that Says 'Welcome to the Future'?"

Johnny Depp 25

I went and saw "Johnny Depp 25: Secret Window" yesterday and I have to say that I was very dissapointed and confused. I was disappointed in the preview for Hidalgo, which I will adress later on but not now because my sister wants to leave and I have to come with her. But I was also in the movie itself. Careful, link contains spoiler.

here

The Great Thing About Sandwiches

Do you know the best thing about sandwiches? They're great! You can eat them! They're tasty! If I were to invent a sandwich, I would call it "the sandwich" because that's a good name.

I actually used to know this guy named Grandwich, but his name only RHYMES with sandwich. He did not, in fact, invent the sandwich.

What he did do (and this is something that many people are not aware of) is invent the sandwich hugger. When a sandwich is inserted into a special spot in this device, these cute little arms give it a hug. It's actually quite precious.

I remember the first time I saw a sandwich get a hug. I became very teary eyed and began to weep. What about all the other sandwiches who never had a mom and dad? What about all the orphan sandwiches? Or those sandwiches that have been abused and never shown the love that each sandwich deserves. This device could change their world. In fact, it just might affect the emotional stability of a multitude of culinary delicacies!

How many pickles could be spared? How many ostrich burgers could live well past their expiration date? How much milk could be saved from merely curdling away on a cold night in some lightless refrigerator? The number is countless, friends. Just like the little boy who failed math. I'm done. Really.

New Mariners Commercial: They SUCK

Hey, kids! Remember those great Mariners commercials of old! Well, the new ones kind of suck. I mean, they're alright. They aren't anywhere near as good as the ones from... 2001, was it? It was whatever year there was a telemarketer call to the pen with Gil Meche. I can't remember them right now, but there were some really funny ones that year. I just wish I could remember them. Justin probably would remember.

[See the 2004 Mariners Commercials.]

CyborgName

C.R.A.C.K.M.O.N.K.E.Y.: Cybernetic Robotic Android Calibrated for Killing/Mechanical Organism Normally for Killing and Efficient Yelling

Holy crap, this is funny....

Can the 1 Hour Report

Can the 1 Hour Report symbol look like this now?

And how do I get that into 1 Hour Report 2?

My Joke

I have this friend Frank. Now me and Frank are both very avid campers. I mean, we go camping every weekend. Now we usually have a pretty good time camping, but one time we did not have a good time at all! Last year around late July, me and Frank were camping up near Mt. Stevenson. Early that morning we decided to go exploring in the forest. We wandered around the forest having a grand old time, until we finally were ready to head back for lunch. The only problem with eating lunch is that we were completely lost. We had no idea where we were! We were just plan lost. So, being the super duper outdoorsmen that we are, we decided to keep wandering around the forest. Eventually, we stumbled upon a huge clearing with practically no end in sight. I mean, this field was HUGE! We sat down for a bit to relax and wish we had food. Frank wandered off to chew the bark off some trees and I tried to catch rabbits with my teeth. While I chased a rabbit up over a small hill I noticed something off in the distance. It looked like a rip in the space time continuum! It was just this huge black spot on the other side of the field. I pried Frank away from his delicious trees and drew his attention to the darkness off yonder. We both decided to get closer and check it out. After a long walk we finally arrived at what we found out was a huge hole. This was quite possibly the largest hole in the history and future of the world. No, it was quite possibly the largest hole in the SUM of the history and future of holes in the world. It was really that big. Now when you are in the presence of a hole this big, one thing tends to come to your mind. You begin to wonder how deep the hole is. So me and Frank, being the young, smart and physical men that we are, begin to throw things into the hole. We started with throwing just a handful of pebbles. Then we listened. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Nothing. Obviously, the pebbles just weren't big enough to make enough noise for us to hear when they hit the bottom. So we got something bigger. We each threw a few hand sized rocks into the hole and listened. This time we also counted! Aren't we smart? 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.... 1,164, 1165, 1166.... Nothing. We needed something bigger. I spotted a pretty nice sized boulder and we decided to throw it into the whole. We heaved and hoed and finally got it into the hole and listened and counted again. But we're not stupid, we realized that counting normally didn't work, so we decided to count in prime numbers! 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, ummmm... 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13... Wow, prime numbers are hard to count by, and also very ineffective. Anyways, we still didn't hear a thing! By this time we were getting pretty fed up, but we were also determined to find out how deep the hole was. Frank and I analyzed out situation and finally decided that we would not make the same mistakes as before. This time we would throw something that is sure to make a noise and we will not stop counting or listening until we hear something from the hole! We searched far and wide for that one thing that was sure to make a noise. Eventually we found it. A huge log. We drug it over and pushed it into the hole. We started counting. 1, 2, 3... "BAAAAAAHH!" What was that? I heard something! I kept listening. "BAAAAAAH!!!!" It was getting closer. I looked over my shoulder and saw a sheep. Now this wasn't your normal sheep. Ohhh no. This was a sheep that was traveling at least 200 mph, and did I mention that it was headed straight for us? I think that I did. Please forgive me and let me mention that. The sheep was heading right for us! I tried to get Frank's attention to show him the sheep. He shushed me and stared intently at the hole, hand cupped around his ear straining to listen. The sheep kept getting closer! "BAAAHA!! BAAAH! BAAAAAHHHH!!" The sheep had to be no less than 20 feet away and then everything went into slow motion. I jumped at Frank and threw him out of the sheep’s way while yelling "NNNNNOOOOOOOO!!! IIIII LOOOOOOOOVVVEEEE YOOOUUUUUUUU!!!" The sheep kept getting closer and closer "BAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!! BAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!" Suddenly, Frank and I both got the wind knocked out of us when we hit the ground and the sheep ran right past us, and jumped in to the hole! We both sat there recovering our breath. Frank looking at me like I was the worst person on earth and me trying to convince him without any breath that he owed me $10 for saving his life. The trees near the edge of the field started shaking. Soon, a huge lumberjack man emerged from the forest. He was no less than 8 feet tall and had a long scruffy beard that ran to his ankles full of birds, twigs and small rodents. I can't speak for Frank, but I know that I wet myself just looking at him. Seriously, he looked like he was going to eat us. We both looked at each other and hoped that he would jump in the hole as the sheep had, or anything else to just get him out of our presence. Then he walked right up to us. I was lucky that I had wet myself all out earlier, because it would have been really embarrassing to do that twice in one day. Anyways, he came right up to us and stared us each in the eyes at same time. He asked us "Have you 2 boys seen any sheep 'round these parts?" in a surprisingly friendly voice. I said yes and quickly explained to him that it had jumped into the hole behind us. He saw the pure terror in my eyes and then gave a jolly laugh and said "Oh don't worry, that couldn't have been my sheep. I tied mine up to that log over there"

Bus Story

I was riding the Transit home from track practice today and a very funny thing happened! Before I can tell you the funny thing there are a few things that you must know about the new transit buses. The new buses have poles for you to stand and hold on to while riding the bus. On the poles are handle-like things that have a button on them that you press in to signal the bus driver that you want off at the next stop. Finally, those buttons are not visible from the first 6 to 8 seats on the bus. All of this leads to my funny situation! So, I was on the bus just riding it peacefully when the bus driver pulls over and no one gets off. That was pretty silly, but not as silly as the next 4 times that he did it. He eventually figured out that people were accidentally hitting it while shifting in their seat or swinging around on the poles. This is when the funny part comes in. He told everyone on the bus to try not to press it when they didn't have to get off because he did not have time to make all the stops. THAT IS THE SILLY PART! Shouldn't a bus route include time to load and unload passengers? I am sure that he wouldn't have had a problem if people actually get off, but that makes me wonder. What if bus drivers really do have a problem when you get on or off their bus?

Calvin Ball

Ahhhh, the good old days of growing up with Calvin and Hobbes. That was and is still definitely my most favorite comic strip ever. It was simply Pure Genuis. And what better things to go along with this awesome comic than an extensive search engine and the official rulles to calvin ball? Nothing. Abosolutely nothing.

Mathcaddy Radio Session 2

Here's the next addition of Mathcaddy Radio. Enjoy. (Or else!)

Mathcaddy Radio: Session 2

01: Bright Eyes - "Bowl of Oranges"

02: Oddibe - "The Backwoods"

03: Belle & Sebastian - "Asleep on a Sunbeam"

04: Her Space Holiday - "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend"

05: Ryan Adams - "Wonderwall"

06: Evan Gross - "Waiting for a Girl Like You"

07: Grandaddy - "Now it's On"

[39 MB MP3 :: 43 Minutes]

Mathcaddy Radio Session 1.1

For anyone who was sickened within the first minute of Mathcaddy Radio Session 1 because of the poor quality of sound, I have updated Mathcaddy Radio Session 1 to Mathcaddy Radio Session 1.1 - this time with much higher quality recording equipment. Hopefully the commentary is a little better this time, but I won't give any guarantees.

You can get Session 1.1 here.

Additionally, Mathcaddy Radio Session 2 is on its way and should be released by this evening. I'm pretty excited about some of the stuff in this set. It should be fun. For me. I have no idea if it's fun for you.

Bizarre Home Depot purchase

This is unbelievable.

Cap'n Crunch's Mustache

Um, this is weird. I never noticed it until about five minutes ago, but Cap'n Crunch has the most bizarre mustache ever. It's looks like two of the ghosts ("Boo") from SNES Super Mario World without faces are squishing his nose together. .. and he has absolutely nothing actually below his nose.

I thought for a little bit about trying to grow something like that, but I decided against it after testing out the new look in Photoshop first. Maybe it's just that pretending to look thoughtful doesn't go with a Cap'n Crunch mustache. I don't know. Maybe it does.

This shame will haunt me forever.

The History of Piracy

Stanford Law professor and copyright reform leader Larry Lessig has a great new essay in Wired called"Some Like it Hot". The best thing about it is that it would have provided the perfect citation for an essay that Steve wrote a couple of months ago on the history of piracy. The short version of Lessig's point in this article is that practically every medium of entertainment was founded or built up through piracy. Interesting idea for sure.

Martha Stewart

--Guilty--

Am I surprised that she is guilty? No
Am I surprised that she was convicted? Yes

Maybe I don't have enough respect for the legal system of our country, but I expected her to get off. Sadly enough, it seems that if you are rich, powerful, and/or famous, you can usually avoid guilty verdicts. Hello, OJ!

Now, the next question will be whether or not she goes to prison. Once again, my skeptical side is quickly pulling away from the pack, so we'll see if I'm right.

It seems to me that it would be interesting to run some statistical analysis to find the correllation coefficient between wealth (in $) and receiving a guilty verdict while on trial, using 1 for guilty and 0 for other. Also, a regression model would probably tell us quite a bit about the actual relationship between wealth (independent variable) and amount of time spent in jail or prison (dependent variable), assuming a guilty verdict. Actually, we could run the regression without the assumption as well, by letting a verdict other than guilty equal zero. I would be willing to bet that the coefficient for the independent variable is negative AND statistically significant. Does anyone care to disagree with me on this one? Unfortunately, I don't have the data, or else I would test this, but that is one guy's opinion. But enough of my theoretical statistics problem.

Hooray for justice today. However, there is still more work for the courts to do in order to satisfy my sense of fairness.

The Wall!

Talking to Eric last night about the redesign of the site, he said that he liked the random (javascript) "widescreen" cropped pictures from "The Wall" at the top from the previous version. When he said this, I had already rebuilt a javascript random image generator on the right sidebar, so I was a little disheartened to hear that he missed the old version.

So what's a guy to do? Well, I guess you can already see what I did. I merged the two, giving us a nice header pic and a complete sidebar pic. Plus - and this is really cool - now the pictures are active links to the larger, complete pictures. It think this is, all around, especially nice for those who are not at all familiar with the pictures and it gives the site a pretty cool feel, I think.

Comments and thoughts on this or any other areas of redesign are appreciated.

Oh -- but don't worry. Eric doesn't get everything he wants. A fluid center column won't be coming anytime soon.

Sensory Overload!

Holy cow, I am a computer GENIUS! It turns out I can figure out how to post in Movable Type, as well as perform advanced functions, such as bold, italic, underline, and hyperlinks. Oh, wait, maybe it's italic and underline.

In fact, that was a perfect lead-in to my next point. It turns out that I'm really not that funny when I post things to the website. Adam says that I'm witty in person, but, Adam is also required to say that to make me feel better. This may also explain why I post boring pictures in the PhotoMojo section of me just standing there smiling like an idiot into the camera, or why my posts usually just resort to relying on others' creativity by posting a funny penguin flash game (please see "Friday Fun" post in the February 2004 archives). I don't even know any Japanese!

Well, I'm off to find more funny pictures of the pope.

I "Heart" CSS

CSS is my new best friend. CSS is awesome. WOW! I can't believe how easy it is to do a whole freaking redesign of this site. I think I'm going to go to bed now, because now I'm just tweaking for fun. And that could keep me up until dawn... sort of like, um, last night. G'night. I hope to see some of the "culprits" back in action now that we've moved to MT. Hopefully they are all FRICKING COMPYOOTER GENYUSES! Then they'll be able to figure it out for sure!

Woo! It's done! (Kind of.)

Okay--- I'm finally at the point where I am ready to make the site "live"... although the funny thing is that it has actually been live since about noon today, when I moved it from the temp location to the permanent address.

For contributors, I will (hopefully) be contacting you within the next hour via the email you have registered with blogger. If you'd like to be contacted another way, you will need to tell me.

Now make no mistake: Movable Type is different from blogger in a few very fundamental ways. The most significant difference is that it is more complicated. Because of this, I expect a little bit of a slower learning curve. But luckily all our regular contributors are "Computer Geniuses" as the computer illiterate call you.

I always liked that phrase by the way. I wonder why it isn't more regularly used when referring to other skills or technologies. For example: "He is a car genius!" "He is a piano genius!" "He is a drawing genius!" -- or even better - "He is a television genius!" or "He is a VCR genius!" I'm stopping now, so don't worry.

Why I Hate IE: Reason #235

Let me show you two pictures. That's all I will show you. And then you can guess why I hate IE.

First, the right way:

And now, the IE way:

Arrrgh!!

Moving to Movable Type

Okay... after messing around with Movable Type for a few weeks now, I have decided to junk Blogger and move to MT. Blogger isn't bad. It's just that MT is great. It has so much more flexibility than Blogger.

If you're totally lost, Movable Type is a weblog publishing tool that resides on the server, as opposed to someone else's server. In other words, you would log in to a location on the mathcaddy.com domain instead of at blogger.com.

Anyway, I'm excited, although it's already been a ton of work trying to get all the old stuff into the system. You can see the temporary site here. Please note that it is temporary. I will need to rework the design, for certain. It will probably not end up looking like our current site, but hopefully it will look decent when I'm done with it.

In addition to redesigning the site, a significant issue is the fact that I will have to rebuild every single comment, one by one. Because of how tedious a task that sounds to be, I plan to just rebuild the essential comments... just the ones that are the most relevant or interesting.

The other major roadblock to making the switch to MT is a pretty substantial one - because the only person who can do anything about it is you. You have to start using MT instead of blogger.

I have to set up new users for each of you and you have to start using the new system. It is very intuitive and I think if you've used blogger, you won't have any problem with it. But it does work differently. Once I'm ready to have you switch from blogger to MT, I will send an email to each of our regular contributors letting them know the next steps they need to take.