Beware of Leopard (256)

Brian Bilbrey

Productivity

Well, that's summer session done. By noon this morning, I'd taken both finals, come back home and mowed the lawns front and back. Then I replaced Marcia's broken fan/light in the sewing area. A productive day. I should have grades in a few days, but I think I did well enough to get the A in both courses. Eight more classes and I'll be done (unless I've counted/calculated wrong - hard to know until I file for graduation in late Fall, 2012). Anyway, slept badly last night (pre-test jitters, weird), and busy today: very tired now. Ciao!

Continue reading...
Brian Bilbrey

Culture Shock

Left over from yesterday: A bit of link-love for MIT's OpenCourseware. 'Cause they're totally worth it. I was told that using my Xoom to watch MIT Chemistry courses while working out on the elliptical was a bit ... nerdy. SRSLY? Oh, yeah, and bonus link for people wondering how homeopathy works: http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/. I promise that's no Rick-roll. * * * So, Culture shock. How, you ask? More specifically (since the topic even needs disambiguation at Wikipedia), I'm talking about The Culture - the pre-Sublimation galaxy-spanning "civilization" spawned from the mind of Iain M. Banks. I've read eight books from the Culture…

Continue reading...
Brian Bilbrey

Another use for the Xoom

It turns out that the Xoom fits right nicely in the book-holder slot on the elliptical machine. But I really can't read while I'm exercising ... and I've never gotten the knack of listening to audio books. But hey! There's a lot of video lectures out of MIT and elsewhere. That's one of my biggest problems with exercise - I get bored. This has possibilities! No, there's no woman with improbably blue contacts and a glass of some liquid fiber product lurking just outside of the frame. Multi-tasking has its advantages, though.

Continue reading...
Brian Bilbrey

Passages

Thursday: Oh, right, you heard from me on Thursday, at least to show you the yummy chili. Friday: Work, then I wrote that 600 word paper that came out to 840 or so words, and turned it in. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that the instructions didn't just say must be 600 words, but also included the "must not be over 800 words" category. Really? The prose that described the topic to be addressed was 534 words. Why can't I use as many words as I want? F#@(*U&. So I pulled the paper back, then edited down to 783 words, by…

Continue reading...
Brian Bilbrey

Ownage

Apologies - work and schoolwork have owned my days and nights. Project 3 is now in for the database class, and work remains busy. But here's the project that required slots cut into wood: A framed cork board to substitute for someone who wanted to stick cork tiles onto the gorgeous book-matched veneer on that desk you'll see when I can upload pictures again (/tmp is full on the server we're on). * * * Later: I executed an end-run by putting the picture on the static Orb site, then linking to it here.

Continue reading...