life
Will Faught
March 2008
This year is the first time I’ve been in charge of paying an electricity bill. Even though the bill is split four ways, I alone seem to go out of my way to turn off unused lights and electronics. I don’t go so far as patrolling the halls, but sometimes I feel like you could stand outside and see where I am in the house by the windows that go dark.
electricity bill life pay reflections
1 minute
I gave a fifty-minute lecture on the lambda calculus for a class last week. It was a topic I understood very well, but had never taught to someone else before. The length of the lecture was daunting enough, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to create a lesson plan. I could clearly see the ideas and their implications in my mind’s eye, but it was hard to impose an order and a rationale on them that would make sense from the perspective of someone new to the material.
hard lambda calculus life reflections teachers teaching
1 minute
February 2008
Your Phone Conversation Annoys Me
When I answer the phone, I usually move into another room for privacy and so I won’t distract others. This seems natural and reasonable to me. I talk in a normal tone and no one has ever complained that they couldn’t hear me. Others seem to either think differently or don’t realize they’re being obnoxious. They’ll sit right next to me and carry on their one-sided conversations at a heightened volume.
annoying conversation life phone reflections rude
1 minute
Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of the programming language PHP, came to Cal Poly yesterday to give a two-hour lecture on PHP and related web technologies. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was pleased to find he’s a very intelligent, pragmatic, and humorous person. He spoke at length about the transition of PHP into an open source project, the evolution of the language, and some security and performance topics that I found very interesting.
cal poly javascript languages life php programming rasmus lerdorf reflections web yahoo yui
1 minute
I was in Seattle last night. I had planned to fly home to San Luis Obispo at 7:20 PM and ultimately arrive at around midnight. But the fates had other plans. Katherine dropped me off at my hotel and I was already running late. I ran through the glass doors, up the stairs, and entered the elevator. The elevators there required guests to slide their room keys to operate them. Judging by the title of this post, can you guess if my key worked?
delay flight katherine life microsoft seattle slo stories
3 minutes
January 2008
It seems to me that political debates nowadays are a waste of time. Two people come together to debate an issue and wind up either talking about different things or don’t address what the other person is saying, much less provide concrete support for their arguments. There’s just too many tricks to fudge your way out of really committing to something and sticking to it. I blame the dependence of our electoral process on audio/video media.
arguments debate discourse discussion elections ideas life online politics words
2 minutes
I see backticks (`) used quite frequently as an opening quotation mark online and in program output, as in “You named it `Carl’ “. Is this some kind of quiet leet development that people don’t talk about but just pick up, like slang?
backticks latex leet life quoting reflections
1 minute
LaTeX is a tool used almost exclusively for formatting academic Computer Science papers. Instead of formatting your paper through traditional what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) means, LaTeX is a markup language that is interpreted and formatted for you. For example, instead of highlighting a word and clicking a bold button to make the font bold, e.g. bold, you embed a markup notation that is transformed into the intended formatting at the end, e.g. \textbf{bold}.
bad documents latex life reflections wysiwyg
2 minutes
James Koman recently wrote an opinion article in the Mustang Daily, the student newspaper of Cal Poly, entitled Why I hate white people. The article contains very racist and ignorant thoughts about white people, in case you couldn’t tell from the title. The newspaper was flooded with protesting letters to the editor in the following days. I just read the article and found the last sentence amusing, which is ironic since the rest of the article wasn’t:
cal poly ignorant james koman life mustang daily quotations racist reflections
1 minute
I threw my back out in class today. I sat down and felt something go. I’m writing this with only my left hand, so I’ll be brief. Ouch! How old am I? God. I can hardly move without sending a spasm of pain down my back. Okay, I just slowly and painfully and switched into a crossed-legged sitting position that feels pretty good on my back, once I settled into it, so now I can type with two hands.
back bus class life stories threw
1 minute
December 2007
Computer Science Is Not Science
Is Computer Science really a science? Computer scientists don’t apply the scientific method. Testing is currently essential for implementing software correctly, but only because we’re either too lazy or incapable of verifying correctness beforehand due to the extreme complexity of the systems and tools we use. It all boils down to manipulating an abstract machine, in most cases a register machine, which is a mathematical construct. The colors that appear on your monitor and the data written to your hard drive are merely side effects of the mathematical operations we compute.
abstract machine computer science ideas life mathematics register machine scientific method
1 minute
I’ve had an idea for a story for a while now that I think would be pretty interesting to write. In the future, a computerized virtual world would be accessible to most people like a utility, much like the internet. Users could interact with the virtual world like a virtual reality game, where your sight and hearing are tuned to the virtual world, not the real one. Its use has become so pervasive that people do many things in the virtual world that are currently done in the real world, such as playing games, meeting people, conducting business, collaborating, performing financial transactions, etc.
economics factions game ideas life story virtual world
2 minutes
It seems to me that large wildfires like that of southern California are unavoidable. I’m not an expert, but it’s my understanding that wildfires are a natural phenomenon that play a useful role in the life cycle of the environment. They can clear out thick underbrush and smaller trees that can come to choke larger trees and in doing so they enrich the soil with the ashes they leave behind. In fact, Yellowstone has a policy of letting small natural fires burn freely because its management recognizes these benefits.
california containment ideas life reflections underbrush wildfires yellowstone
2 minutes
Damn it! I was just sitting here, watching the end of Return of the Jedi on TV. You know, the party on Endor after the big climax where the music plays and they’re all dancing and hugging. They changed the ending! The music was much quieter and less energetic and they now have that dude who plays Anakin in Episodes 1-3 standing there as a ghost instead of the older version of himself.
anakin bad changed ending george lucas ghost life music reflections south park star wars
1 minute
Just In Case I Have To Kill My Dinner
I went to a shooting range several weeks ago for my friend Jose’s birthday. I had never been to a firing range before. There were about ten of us and the range was divided into five lanes. Each lane had a different pistol and boxes of ammunition that you used to reload the weapon when it was your turn. I had never fired a pistol before, but I was still surprised at how nervous I was to fire a pistol.
birthday guns jose life pistols shooting range stories
2 minutes
The Christmas card poem that didn’t make it: Greetings Bill and Maria! I had a great idea To send you my love via … I’m writing this in a pizzeria In a galleria in South Korea I hope I don’t get diarrhea In their bathroom I could get gonorrhea
bill card christmas ideas life maria poem quotations
1 minute
November 2007
I’ve been doing a lot of Java development with Eclipse this past quarter and this past summer. Eclipse has a really neat code formatting tool that you can kick off with a quick Ctrl-Shift-F or Command-F to tidy up your code. When I use Eclipse, I regularly format my code along with saving it. Now I find myself reaching for the format shortcut when I write for my fiction writing class.
eclipse format java life reflections
1 minute
I finished the game Portal a little while ago. I think it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. The game play is very original and exciting and offers many opportunities to stump us with environmental puzzles and brain teasers. But on top of that, the writers have infused it with a sense of humor I’ve never seen before in a game that totally works. At times it’s subtle and at other times it’s hilarious.
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3 minutes
October 2007
IPod Video Transcoding In Linux
I’ve cobbled together a pretty good tool for transcoding video in pretty much any format into the MPEG-4 format that iPods play. You have to have the VLC media player installed because it does the actual transcoding. So in other words, I’ve researched a program that was already out there and made an easy wrapper script. Damn I’m smart. Yay modularity! Seriously though, there aren’t a lot of guides out there that are easy to follow.
ideas ipod life linux mpeg-4 transcoding ubuntu video vlc
1 minute
Congress is concerned that peer-to-peer networks may make users susceptible to identity theft. Apparently, some users share their sensitive information with others and then get upset when their identities are stolen. That’s Darwin at his finest, in my opinion. Why does Congress have to fix things that aren’t broken? Users have to explicitly choose to publish files to the network, be it the web or a peer-to-peer network. What the peer-to-peer program shares by default is irrelevant; the burden is on the user to understand what they’re doing.
bittorrent congress identity theft internet life p2p reflections
1 minute
Wine burn is the point where you’ve drunk enough wine that your mouth feels dry and wines taste the same. I had that today. Yay wine tasting!
burn dry life reflections tasting wine
1 minute
Expressiveness In Human Languages
Programming languages vary across a spectrum of expressiveness. By expressiveness, I mean the ability and ease by which you can express something in a particular language. For example, programming languages having closures are widely considered to be more expressive, and hence more powerful, than languages that lack this feature. I wonder if natural (human) languages also vary in expressive power and if so how this affects your thinking and personality. If you grew up learning the most expressive natural language of all, would that make you smarter than those who didn’t?
expressiveness human ideas languages life predispositions programming
1 minute
September 2007
bind -> bound find -> found wind -> wound Shouldn’t it be mind -> mound?
english life mind mound reflections
1 minute
I was watching a Law and Order episode in which someone who framed an innocent person was sent to prison because the framed person was killed in prison. The prisons were so dangerous that the district attorneys considered it a heinous crime to send someone there. It’s ironic that many states do not use the death penalty but use prisons that can accomplish the same thing as well as reinforce aggressive and violent behavior.
hypocrisy irony law and order life prison reflections
1 minute
Being a computer science major, my job after graduation will most likely entail working in an office. I’ll have to attend meetings. If I’m promoted, I’ll have to attend even more meetings. If I progress higher into the ranks, I’ll lose more and more of my day to the time suck of meetings to the point where I can’t get anything useful done during normal hours. I’ll have to develop a second personality to come into the office to get something done at night while I rest up, hopefully while not starting a club at the same time.
ideas inflatable job life meetings office
1 minute
August 2007
The problems with electronic voting machines are threefold: Your votes can be changed and there’s no record if they’re changed. Pen is permanent and cannot be hidden. Your votes cannot be authenticated. It’s difficult to forge a signature and impossible to do on a large scale. The process by which votes are tabulated is not transparent. Counting by hand is understandable and easily verifiable. We should use paper ballots with ink circles to indicate our votes and ink signatures to authenticate them.
electronic ideas life problems reflections tabulation voting
1 minute
Most computer users probably assume that their computers are secure. They don’t see the complexity and brittleness of the hardware, the operating system, the network, and the applications because it’s hidden under a pretty user interface with abstracted toy operations. They never considered evaluating security when purchasing software; they assumed it would just work. It’s understandable if they get upset when something goes wrong. It annoys me, however, when lawmakers see this and decide to fix the problem from their end.
computers innovation laws life reflections security
2 minutes
Is my identity constant or variable? On the one hand, my identity could be some thing or things about me that always have and always will be unique. On the other hand, my identity could be the variable but unique combination of my characteristics at any given moment, like my location, appearance, personality, relationships, and memory. I think it is a mix of the two. I think my choices identify who I am.
babylon 5 ideas identity life philosophy quotations
2 minutes
It strikes me as ironic that some have argued that the growing prevalence of Spanish in America, or at least the west and southern states, threaten American culture while there is little effort to teach immigrants English. NPR was reporting a little while ago that in New York City, it’s almost impossible to enroll in an English class because they’re so impacted. I believe they said conditions were similar in many other places.
america classes english immigrants life new york city npr reflections spanish
1 minute
If invalid, informal, and injustice are the opposites of valid, formal, and justice, then why does inflammable mean the same as flammable? Since English is my first language, I obviously prefer it to any other language, but damn, English sucks. One thing I’ve always appreciated about Spanish is that you can look at any word and know immediately how to pronounce it correctly.
definitions english flammable inflammable life reflections
1 minute
If you haven’t done so already, check out Street View on Google Maps. Google rocks!
cool google life reflections street view
1 minute
July 2007
My roommates and I tried to cancel our TV service last week. Dish Network told us they would charge us a cancellation fee because we were apparently signed up for an 18-month service plan. That didn’t make sense because we started the TV service when we had only six or seven months left on our lease. So apparently they felt they should sign us up on our behalf. How thoughtful.
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1 minute
Patience, Monty…Climb The Ladder
I love the character Auntie Muriel in the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. She uses her age like some kind of free pass that entitles her to boss those younger than her (everyone) around. To paraphrase, “Give me your chair, I’m one hundred and seven years old.” Awesome! It’s like everyone is obligated to be her bitch. There should be more age-based benefits. I would want cuts in line.
harry potter life old reflections seniority
1 minute
March 2007
The Onion’s Article Titles Are The Best Part
Honestly, I think I enjoy the titles of The Onion articles more than the actual articles. For example: Actress’ Abortion Written Into TV Show High School Student Council Passes Nonbinding Resolution Kindergartner Being Groomed For Line-Leader Position Unreleased Jimmy Page Guitar Riff To Be Retrieved From Secret Vault To Save Rock And Roll Anchor Ad-Libs News With 97 Percent Accuracy
funny life quotations reflections the onion titles
1 minute
January 2007
If you ever have to give a 40+ minute presentation about a paper you don’t adequately understand, the following tips may help: Copy every major idea verbatim into your notes and read that to your audience. Ask your professor to explain the things you didn’t understand whenever possible. Waste time by copying every example from the paper onto the board and explaining them in detail. Have a partner and alternate talking about topics.
life paper pater landin presentation reflections stories tips
1 minute
There’s A Lobbyist For Everything These Days
The average height of Dutch men and women has increased so dramatically in the past century that being too tall for a standard-height ceiling or a standard-length bed has become a common problem. So problematic, in fact, that there is a tall person organization that lobbies on behalf of tall people for more head room: The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world.
bed dutch height length life lobbiers quotations tall
1 minute
When I was young, I wished I could write all my Christmas thank you cards using mail merge and get away with it. Good manners, bah! I think if I did do it, the electronic or printed format would give me away. Maybe if I printed using a cursive font?
christmas life manners reflections templates thank you cards
1 minute
December 2006
Happy New Year, everyone! I had a great night. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera and snap a few shots of my friends and I. I guess one of these days I’ll remember. Maybe if I get a slimmer camera. My watch was off by about half a minute from the cell phone network time again, just like last year. The people around me were counting down to my watch while everyone else was staring intently at their cell phone screens, waiting for the minutes to hit zero.
dancing life new year's eve reflections resolutions stories watch
1 minute
November 2006
I bet it’s pretty hard to express your anger as a musician if you play the harp. I just don’t see it happening. Whatever you did, it seems like it would come out cheery and sweet. Bummer.
anger expression harp life musician reflections
1 minute
October 2006
I’ve been reading an essay by Marc Laidlaw, entitled “The Hypermodern Muse“, in which he presents his experiences and reflections on writing for games. In case you don’t know, he’s the writer for Valve’s critically-acclaimed Half-Life games. When describing the essence of fusing writing with gameplay to make truly great games, he uses the game Majora’s Mask as an example. MM is one of my favorite games ever, but I’ve never been able to satisfactorily express why.
games half-life hypermodern muse life majora's mask marc laidlaw nintendo quotations writing zelda
6 minutes
I just got my first care package in the mail in years from my grandma. Mmm…cookies! I forgot how nice it is to get this stuff. Incidently, I was drinking a beer at the time, so I decided to combine the two. Not bad.
beer care package cookies grandma life reflections
1 minute
Have you ever taken a test and been stumped by the easiest thing on it? No? Er — me neither. But if that ever did happen, I would think that would suck. On a related note, it’s very satisfying to ask a prof, just before his exam, to show you how to solve some problems that turn out to be on the exam.
class life midterm nfa reflections theory of computation
1 minute
I feel like an unacceptable portion of my class experience has been learning the material on my own. Granted, being able to learn something on my own is a good skill, but that’s not what I’m paying these people for. I’m sick and tired of walking out of lectures wanting my 50 minutes back. It’s such a relief to get a prof that I can understand. When will they learn that even though you have a PhD in something, you aren’t necessarily qualified to convey that knowledge to others.
bad cal poly learn by doing life reflections teaching
1 minute
Lost is back, baby! Season three kicked off a few weeks ago, and so far it’s off to a good start. I watched seasons one and two again with my mom this summer, so I’ve got everything fresh in my mind and ready to piece it all together. I’ve been listening to a really good podcast for Lost at deltaparkproject.com/lost. Sadly, the season premiere wasn’t as good as season two’s, but oh well.
delta park project desmond dharma initiative life locke lost mom reflections season
1 minute
I’ve just found the funniest comic I’ve seen in a long time. My apologies if you don’t get this, it’s kinda nerdy. So sue me. Found here.
funny life quotations sandwich sudo xkcd
1 minute
September 2006
I was walking out of class on Tuesday and it just died. The strap of my right flip flop broke off. So I had to walk all over campus with one shoe to do my other errands. I asked in the Health Center if they had any plastic booty-thingies for feet and the X-ray technician jumped on it and fixed it for me. Such service! Thank you, Dorothy the Technician, from the bottom of my heart!
broken flip flop health center life shoe stories
1 minute