Voder-Vocoder

In the future, everyone will have a millimeter-wave camera built into their smartphone. We may as not wear clothes at all then. You're going to want to get started getting in shape now.

It turns out I don't actually have class today. The classes are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday — but the Monday and Wednesday classes are every week, while the Thursday class is only the last week of the semester, to make up for the fact that the semester begins on a Thursday.

I did pick up my textbooks today. They are just as heavy and expensive as they always have been.

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What am I doing? I am considering where to apply for a master's program in computer science. In the mean time, I am taking the undergraduate classes at the local university that I would need anyway once I go to grad school. I'm still working full time at the bookstore.

* * *

I'm taking two classes: Algorithms and Digital Systems.

Digital Systems — Covers data paths, controllers, memory systems, and register transfer level design, as well as finite state machine design, classical logic design, and storage element design. Hardware and software tools for digital system analysis and synthesis are explored. Textbook: Roth & Kinney, Fundamentals of Logic Design (0495471690).

Algorithms — The design, implementation, analysis, and application of a range of computer algorithms are explored. Function order of growth and amortized analysis are used in analyzing algorithms. A review and extension of data structure topics including stacks, queues, trees, graphs, lists, sets, hash tables, and heaps are covered. Algorithm design strategies such as divide-and- conquer, the greedy method, and dynamic programming are studied. Textbook: Kleinberg & Tardos, Algorithm Design (0321295358).

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Not a bad plan, considering that I made the decision to do this three weeks ago.

I've spent a lot of time writing email the past few weeks, so this is on my mind.

1) Keep your work email separate from personal. People change jobs, your friends shouldn't lose track of you because of this.

2) Don't use the email account that comes with your ISP subscription. The next time you move or change ISP you will be forced to get a new email account. Combined with (1), this leaves two options: pay for a hosted email solution, maybe with a personal domain-name, or use one of the free email providers. I suggest Google's gmail.com, which offers IMAP connection so that you can check you mail using your favorite email client (Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple's Mail.app, Novell Evolution, Microsoft Outlook, Novell GroupWise, et cetera) as well as on the web.

3) Configure your email client to send plain-text email by default. This usually produces much smaller message sizes and can easily be read by the most email clients.

4) When replying to a email, delete most of the quoted message, leaving only enough to give your reply context. At the very least, delete the signature.

5) If you are not replying to something in a previous message, don't hit reply; instead, compose a new message. This makes a new thread in clients that organize mails into threads.

6) Don't top post.

7) If you are going to compose your message in a word processor before sending it, copy-and-paste it into the email's body instead of sending an attachment.

8) If you must send an attachment, use an open file format.

9) This is one I am very guilty of. If you don't have time to compose a proper reply to an email that requires a reply, you should shoot off a quick acknowledgement message.

10) If you are at all technically savvy, go ahead and install GnuPG (if your system didn't already have it) and configure your email client to make use of it to sign your emails.

I watched STS-128 lift from 154 miles away last night. Since it was dark, I couldn't see the cloud trail, just an orange glow on the horizon that then turned into the familiar glowing exhaust before fading to a very bright star.

Shauna and I have been landscaping the garden one bit at a time this year. The patio went in a month ago and the landscaping around it is progressing. On the left there, I'm trying to produce wildflowers.

I've resumed the practice of keeping a food journal. It's helpful to look down on today's page and see that I've already eaten all the food I wanted to eat today and don't need to keep snaking.

A few years ago, Chapman asked me "How many computers DO you have in your house?" Good question. There is (1) Sloop, the new one that I built last fall (Athlon 64 3500+) inside the old chassis from Lensman, which is now a inoperable mobo+cpu waiting to be recycled. Then there is (2) Olpc, the new netbook, which I sadly don't use often enough because I rarely leave the house. (3) Dalek is the computer I built in 2001 that still serves as my backup desktop. (4) Mazer is a P3-800 laptop I keep around because Olpc doesn't have a VGA-out socket for presentations. I've loaned Mazer to the housmate until he de-viruses his own computer (windoze user, go figure---and Steve's a computer professional!). (5) Nimrod is an ancient Pentium laptop that I forgot I had until this year's housecleaning. It still works, and I intend to get rid of it at some point. Then there's my old laptop, Hiro2, which has been broken since before I fully paid for it; but we aren't counting nonfunctional computers.

So yes, I own 5 functional computers. This weekend I found out that Dalek, even though it has a motherboard and processor from 2001 and has a Radeon 9200 GPU from 2004 and is running Linux will run World of Warcraft. Not well, mind you, but usable. Now Shauna and I can play together in my house. We're such dorks.

I've got Dalek set up on my dining room table with a giant 9-year-old CRT monitor and an ethernet cable running across the floor into my room. It's okay because it's been so long since I've had more than two people eat at my dining room table anyway. The other possibility is to squeeze both computers onto my desk. But that would be crowded. We'd bump elbows.

According to maps.google.com, my longitude is -81.803888 degrees. This puts my house 5.45359253 hours befind Greenwich, England. Call it 5 hours, 27 minutes, and almost 13 seconds. This morning I woke up at 6 AM, Eastern Daylight time, UTC-4; so I got up at 10 AM UTC. This means I got up this morning at 4:32:47 local mean solar time.

Spent the past week or two cleaning my room. The most recent spirt of activity was caused by a search for a CD-ROM I last saw floating around six months ago. It may be lost forever, becasue I never found it. I ended up carting a large box off to goodwill and filling four big trash bags.

Then last night I went through the clothes hanging on my closet. I removed over half of them becasue they were too big; I folded them up and boxed them. Even though they represent almost eighty pounds lost in the past two-and-a-half years, it's still a lot of money spent on clothes wasted. I think from now on I'm going to try to make do with a lot less clothing and try to purge the closet more often.

Wow, it feels like winter. The temperature got down to 52°F (11°C) this morning.

I went to early vote this morning. This is the first of two Saturdays that the polls are open. It seems to me that they should be open Sundays as well.

There are five early voting locations in this county, so I had to drive a bit to get there, but the convenience of being able to vote on a Saturday morning made it worth it.

I had to wait in line less than half an hour; I should have timed it. The line went out the door of the county supervisor of elections branch office and into the next door, some kind of abandoned store.

Since there were voters from all precincts there (all in different congressional districts, state senate districts, state house districts, county commission districts, fire control districts, and sub-municipalities), they printed out ballots as needed. To get our identity, they swiped the magnetic strip on our state ID (driver license).

After filling out the bubbles on the ballots, we fed them into a machine that read them. There was no feedback on whether the machine read the ballots correctly. I have to hope that somebody performs spot-checks to verify that the optical scan machines are functioning properly.