Mes Souhaites

As I was preparing the last post I looked up a link for my Chase Freedom credit card.

The basic idea is that you get the usual 1% cash back on most stuff, and for you top three spending categories you get a bonus 3%. In their description they say: "3% at the top 3 types of places you spend the most each month. There are 15 categories, more than any other card!"

I wonder what percentage of people will realize that the larger the number of categories the smaller the number of things in each division will be. That exclamation point threw me for a minute. It seemed like they were excited about it so surely I should be as well. I think they're just excited because they now have to give me less money. ☺

I have a Chase Freedom credit card. I use it to buy most of my stuff and the balance is automatically paid in whole from my HSBC Direct savings account. I get a bit of cashback and it keeps a larger balance in my savings account. Both of these are negligible bits of money, but who am I do turn down free money?

The one thing that has been irritating me is the huge amount of crap I get in the mail from Chase. They like those promotions which say, "Here's a check for $20 just for being you (btw, cashing this check enrolls you in our $15/month identity protection program)."

I sent them a message today saying, "Please leave me alone Chase. I'm tired of having to destroy all the things you send me that are much more attractive to thieves than they are to me."

They didn't entirely agree to it, but they said they'd leave me alone for five years or until I changed my address. Not perfect, but I reckon I'll take what I can get.

This is just a brief note to any command line users such as myself to remember the handiness of the little utility dc.

I was wandering the web and came across an estimate of basal metabolism. Now I know such thinks are affected by fitness level and whatnot, but I wanted to know quickly what the result was and I wanted to see all the numbers at once so I could know if I was copying them correctly. On the command line, this is just:

echo 195 2.2 / 11.6 \* 879 + p | dc

Where 195 is my weight, 2.2 is the pounds in a kilogram and 11.6 and 879 are the line parameters.

As I look at this I start to recognize that most people would find calculator more intuitive. ☺ This is for the geekier among you.

On the subject of grad school, I got the reviews from my teaching assistantship. Once a week I would give a recitation on some subject concerning ethics and computer science. All sorts of stuff from net neutrality to the history of hacking to the development of intellectual property law in America. I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I also had to grade an essay per week for each of the 35 students and that was less entertaining.

I felt pretty good about the recitations. I'm about as geeky as anyone I know and this was essentially geek story time for an hour. My audience was 30 Malaysian students which was a bit challenging, but over the course of the semester I saw a real improvement in their critical thinking skills and writing proficiency. In the end that's what I really enjoy about teaching.

I did wonder though about what they thought. After I'd stepped up the grading criteria on one of their essays, I asked them if they'd rather if I just saved us all some time, skipped reading the papers and just gave them all B+. All but two said "yes."

I've been wanting to play with Google's Charts API.

How helpful and responsive was the TA?

How was the TA's fairness in grading?

Did the TA communicate effectively?

What is your overall rating of the TA?

After bleeding all over their papers and making them work fairly hard, I'm pretty cool with having 80%+ giving me good or excellent. I'd really like to get to teach a class like this at some point in the future. I would really like to see what could be done with it if it were treated as a persuasive writing and critical thinking class as much as a survey of ethics issues. Many of the students weren't even really in a position to fully appreciate the issues they were introduced to and I think it would have been interesting to try and address that problem.

My dinners for the last week:

• Teriyaki pan brazed flank steak with broccoli
• Cayenne chicken medallions with squash
• Grilled flank steak with rice and scallions
• Grilled chicken breast with spinach salad
• Seared salmon stuffed with dill
• Grilled rib-eye with potatoes
• Campfire roasted corn and hot dogs with smores

New roommate loves to cook and is terribly good at it. I just show up each night and there's something tasty waiting for me. It's great.

He wants to join a farm cooperative which will theoretically get us random local food every week, so things should just keep getting better.

The Windows Verification program now has a firefox version. Maybe IE will eventually kick the bucket:

I'm getting ready to start grad school in the fall. I've been e-mailing back and forth with my adviser and discussing potential classes. I'm pretty sure I know what I want to take:

CS-352-1	Human-Computer Interaction	TR	09:35 - 10:50
An overview of human-computer interaction and problems of current interest. Human factors, GOMS, user interface design and evaluation, interaction modalities, distributed cognition, ubiquitous computing. A project involving design and evaluation will be performed.
CS-360-1	Advanced Artificial Intelligence	TR	13:10 - 14:25
Discussion of state of the art and current research issues in heuristic search, knowledge representation, deduction, and reasoning. Related application areas include: planning systems, qualitative reasoning, cognitive models of human memory, user modeling in ICAI, reasoning with uncertainty, knowledge-based system design, and language comprehension.
PSY-3100P-1	Statistical Inference	MWF	11:10 - 12:25
Introductory course designed to familiarize doctoral students with the principles and procedures of statistical inference and to prepare them for more advanced work in research design and analysis.

I had hoped to have only Tuesday/Thursday classes so I could sneak off to Baltimore for long weekends, but that doesn't really look possible. I could take a different CS class to make it work, but the psych statistics class is part of a plan to integrate some more rigorous testing methods into HCI evaluation and I like the idea.

There's a homeless fellow who lives on the block outside MPP's office. He begins each week reminding everyone to "hang in there" and as the week progresses he keeps a count of the number of days left till the weekend. Today I learned that he is also a blogger.

I went to see Shakespeare Behind Bars and it was really moving. It was one of those movies that filled in my picture of life a little bit more — the lives of criminals and life in prison — and I shifted how I see the world a bit. I just watched the trailer on the website which doesn't really give justice to the film, but knowing the story I started to tear up again. Definitely worth seeing if you get the chance.

Other activities for the day were less moving. Eggspectations had a nice bloody mary and reasonable crepes, but the hollandaise sauce tasted like mayo and butter. L'Auberge espagnole was cute and had its moments, but I was unentertained by what I saw as the protagonist's largely passionless philandering.

Then Jesus said to his disciples: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

"Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it.

Luke 12:22-29

I was just sprinting to the office and this verse came to mind. I'm panicking because I went home to check on Chris's dogs while he's in Pittsburgh, and I completely forgot that I am supposed to be meeting the electronics recyclers at 12. At the same time under the "oh my God, I'm gonna get fired" there's a part of me that's asking, "what's the last thing that didn't work out for you?"

I really do feel lucky. I talk about it sometimes how I moved back to the States and I got a job and a girlfriend without really doing anything. I've got cool friends and interesting things to do all the time. In many ways I find it unsettling because I feel like I'm sitting on a fortune I didn't earn. The idea of moving to a new town is intimidating. I recognize the role that chance has played in my life. It is a large part of why I still sometimes give a homeless guy a few bucks because I never really lose that sense of there but for the grace of God go I.

I read an article about luck one time that was interesting. They took people and gave them a survey where they ranked how lucky they are. Then in a supposedly unrelated activity, they gave them a newspaper and asked them to count the pictures in a timed trial. A couple pages in, there's a picture of someone holding a sign that says, "there are 31 pictures in this newspaper." A little while later there's a larger one that says, "the experiment is over, there are 31 pictures." Finally there's a half-page ad that says, "we will give you 25£ if you stop counting now."

What they found is that generally the luckier a person was, the more likely they were to notice these hints. Some of the unluckiest people made it all the way to the end without seeing any of them. The idea is that luck isn't something magical, it is simply that some people get into a single track of thought and will miss potentially better opportunities. Luckier people might simply be paying closer attention.

Sure enough when I get to the office an hour late after my boss called me from home, the recycling guys were given the wrong address and have been wandering around northwest for half an hour trying to find this place. They had called my phone not four minutes before I got back to the office. Had David not called though to check up on me, I'd not have run and I'd not have met them.

I certainly think I'm open to new potentials. Not so much in an observant sort of way, but moreso in a short attention span sort of way. That doesn't really explain all the synchronicity. I still like to think God's watching out for me and not being petty about such trivialities as my belief in Him.

Things topping a list of activities not to do when going through an emotionally trying period: watch Babel.

It is literally the first time that I have stopped watching a movie because it made me so sad I wanted to go stick my head in the oven.

And the problem is it wasn't really sad, it was desolate. Usually I like the movies that draw several small stories together spread out across a wider tableau. It gives me a sense of the variety of life and how there are connections all around that you never know about.

Babel was leaving me with a sense of the arbitrality of the world and how it is huge and doesn't care a whit for my insignificant little life. I felt not like one dancing little spark in an amazing pattern, but like a grain of corn to be ground into nothing by the unthinking stony weight of the world.

I'm trying to take solace in that and see that however bad I feel it will eventually pass away, but Babel was cutting at the underlying belief that whatever it changes to will be better than now. Not all of the stories were sad, but I felt myself waiting for the other shoe to drop in the one that wasn't and I just couldn't stand to see it happen.

It's starting to happen. When I first heard about Jabber years ago, I remember thinking, "An open instant messaging protocol, I bet people would come up with some interesting stuff if this got popular."

I went off and made myself an account, but no one else used it, so I lost interest. Now, I'm willing to bet that 90% of the people reading this have a Jabber account. Of those, I bet 80% don't even know it. ☺ Are you a livejournal user? If you have an IM client that isn't crappy, it probably handles Jabber (GAIM, Trillian, iChat and Meebo all do). Just go in and put in your livejournal username and livejournal.com as the server.

That one isn't all that interesting since no one is logged on. There's a chatbot that lets you post to your journal (it's how I'm posting this), but that's about it.

A more interesting account is if you happen to have to use GMail. When you log in and see the little Contacts list in the sidebar, that is actually a little Jabber client. If you go in and add your GMail account info with talk.google.com as the server, you'll see your contacts in your IM client and you'll show up as avaialable for chat through GMail even when you're not connected. It also logs any of your conversations under Chats which has come in handy for me a couple times already.

For me, my office also runs an in-house Jabber server. We use IM extensively to sort out little issues. It's also available via the internet over SSL, so across the country lots of little things that would be handled with little phone calls are handled via IM.

You know how you have different types of taste buds with different sensitivities? Well, my salt buds work really well. 17 packets of sugar did nothing to mask the half teaspoon of salt I accidentally put in my coffee. I could hardly drink it…

I've been trying to write my statement of purpose for a month now. Grad school feels right to me. That is why I want to go. Putting words to that in an expressive essay is proving difficult.

After all these weeks of wordlessness, I decided to try a new tact. My family is in Hilton Head for Thanksgiving and we're staying in a pimp palace thanks to my dad. A pimp palace complete with jacuzzi tub.

Tonight I decided to luxury that essay out of myself. So, jacuzzi, candles, Bailey's and I all got together for a sit-down. That little spark which I figured would ignite this pile of pleasures, I stole from my brother.

I cannot describe to you the rushing tingle the cascaded through my body as I first touched that pristine water. It was heaven and only enfolded my deeper as I sank into the tub.

Unfortunately the stillness of the tub seemed to incite a like stillness in my brain. I could feel myself slipping into mindlessness. Not a bad place to be, but a bad place to try and find a statement of purpose. The whiskey and cream was certainly not helping either. Hoping to offset these ill effects, I turned on the jets.

Immediately, fountains of water sprang to life covering my resting head in frothing foam. I could see, as I arose spitting, that this was an environment poorly suited for writing statements of purpose.

It was invigorating though and woke me right up. I have been using alternating periods of quiet and fervor to keep me going. To date I have produced this account of my pursuit of a statement of purpose.

Statement of purpose still forthcoming.

Geek vocabulary term for the day: spear phishing. Regular phishing (Firefox 2's spell check knows the word "phishing") are those random fake emails telling you your Paypal account needs verifying. It is just someone trying to trick you into installing something.

Spear phishing for example is the people at Dekalb Medical Center who got a forged e-mail from their human resources telling them they'd been laid off. The link that they clicked on then installed a keylogger to capture their password.

I remember reading about a third type that I can't find a reference for now. It was called something like "laser phishing" which would be something like a forged e-mail from my boss with a malicious attachment. I suppose at that point though it isn't phishing so much as social engineering.

Can you imagine a world where scammers have org charts or friendship graphs? I bet if you had something like like Google's cache you could start to reconstruct the relationships between people with the links on sites like MySpace and LiveJournal. Then you match those identities to email addresses and you have the backing for some really well tailored phishing.

I don't own a checkbook. I didn't get one because I was moving when I opened my bank account and I didn't know what my address would be. Since being here the only check I've had to write was the one for my rent. I've been doing that through my bank's online bill-pay.

I've been contemplating what to do about the check my landlord said he never received and was searching the internet. I ran across a lovely story of a guy who had his checkbook stolen and the twenty or so businesses where his checks were subsequently forged and accepted without ID. I've been trying to find something on if you had an already completed check stolen, but I am having trouble with the huge number of results for stolen checkbooks. One of my favorites is for this woman who was paid with her own check.

I got an email from my landlord a couple days ago telling me my rent was late and that I owed him a $25 late fee. At first I kicked myself for having forgotten to pay my rent then I remembered that I hadn't. Not only had I told my shitty bank to send him a check, I had seen it in the mail at the house. I went online and verified that the check wasn't a figment of my imagination. Sure enough there was a $650 debit on my account July 31st.

I emailed the bank and asked them exactly what I could do. The thing is I know the check arrived at the house. Someone in the house took it. Well, actually my landlord has had people wandering through continually for the last month trying to fill rooms. I suppose anyone could have taken it. I just need to get out of that damned flop house.

I went today to look at a place about ten blocks from my office (I currently live two blocks away). The cool bit is there are two big ol' golder retrievers who live there. I really like real dogs and not the creepy overgrown rats that are all the rage with these sissified city-slickers. The main issue is the commute. A whole fifteen minutes of walking to get to work. I dunno if I can take that. ☺

It is 21:45 on Monday and I've already worked 25 hours this week (our work week begins on Sunday). I'm going home. Fuck this.

Apparently it takes some time for a shiner to develop:

Well, it looks as though I may soon be homeless once again. As I mentioned previously, I have a place to live right now. The place is a little expensive for the space and the roommates a little more sedate than myself, but they're entertaining and it is two blocks from work.

So, I was planning on spending a couple months here and then reevaluating before moving on. It looks as though there might be a bit of an issue with that as the house is currently unraveling.

It began initially with an overflowed toilet on the first floor. The house, like many in DC, is old and the pipes are small. There was a clog and this caused large quantities of filthy water to come spilling out of the downstairs toilet when someone took a shower upstairs. This didn't really bug me, as such things are bound to happen from time to time and the landlord had a plumber in within a day to get everything snaked out. It freaked my roommates out a bit though who haven't had their poop aversion worn away by a couple years in Africa. ☺

Thus it was into an already tense situation that the revelation that the previous tenant of my room was a dipshit came to light. The house responsibilities are divided into people cleaning various and sundry things except for the occupant of my room who did the bills. Now that he is gone the bills are coming due and the discovery has been made that he was fucking around with the numbers and only paying the late fees. Thereby he reduced the cost each month, but it means that essentially no bills have been paid for several months. All the money that people have been paying has been going to the late fees and had no effect on the actual balance leaving an outstanding balance of over $1300 and the gas to soon be disconnected.

I would so want to beat someone's ass if I discovered that they'd been essentially throwing my money away every month.

The ideal solution to this situation is to go over what the bills, disregarding late fees, were for the last few months and then take the dipshit to court for all the money he wasted. If the landlord will do this though, I don't know.

My roommates are understandably displeased and are concreting plans to move out en masse. I'm not really inclined to go with them since, as I mentioned, there is a certain disparity in how sociable we are. Ideally, I'll get to stay in this house till the end of March and then I'll move somewhere else. Gonna get to see how that pans out.