Cubicle Hermit

I tried Cuil today, and was generally unimpressed - Google still does a much better job of finding the relevant pages, whatever the index size. Further, in the absolutely critical job of ego-googling myself, Google has a lot more of my personal web pages indexed… as opposed to LinkedIn or various index sites referencing my pair of grad school papers, or the one annoying of all, sites mirroring various USENET groups and old mailing lists I post or posted on.

The one very amusing thing that Cuil DID find was a recent LJ/blog post critiquing a graph in the first of my two grad school papers: Your Graph is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

As an aside, there is a rather lame blogmeme sitting in my lifejournal (cubicle_hermit) which will probably be erased, but for those interested, you might look now.

Heh. At least we got mentioned:

The Public Elites
Some schools didn’t make our list because their students are too good. The best of the best.

NEWSWEEK’s Challenge Index is designed to recognize schools that challenge average students, and not magnet or charter schools that draw only the best students in their areas. These top performers, listed below in alphabetical order, were excluded from the list of top high schools because, despite their exceptional quality, their sky-high SAT and ACT scores indicate they have few or no average students.

[snippage to lower on the page]

Hunter College High School, New York City: College prep school that serves grades 7-12 and is tied to the City University of New York system.

Oddly enough, Bronx Science got better sounding coverage than Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech wasn’t mentioned at all.

(This was accidentally set as a Page, rather than a Post. It was originally posted on May 19th)

From Recent Miscel…

Marie said it would make me look like an egg. It sort of did, although this photo (taken after about 60 hours’ re-growth) doesn’t really show it.

The Acura being paid off recent, and the Van getting on my nerves significantly, we’ve ended up getting a new car. We picked it up today; it’s a very nice Subaru Outback.

(click for full size)

Check out my Amazon wish list:

(there’s also a not-terribly-visible link on the far right side at the bottom of the sidebar)

PS, for family in NYC - if you get me the Mr. Beer, please have it shipped directly

97f today. Forecast on Yahoo was for a 93f high. Rather weak AC here in the office has it barely controlled to the lower 80s.

Gah. I hope my air conditioner works at home.

For lack of a better place to write about them:

1) As I was scootering on Hillsdale between Edgewater and El Camino a helicopter went coverhead. This, in itself is not that unusual; we get traffic, police and occasionally executive helicopters a lot - Hillsdale is between (probably roughly halfway, in fact) between SFO and the San Carlos airport.

What WAS unusual is this was VERY obviously not a civilian helicopter. It went by quickly, but it was the narror profile and shape (especially the front and back cockpit) of an attack helicopter. I’m pretty sure it was some sort of Cobra, not an Apache, as it was not angular enough for the latter - though this much is on looking at photos online and not an instant recognition.

Interesting. I’d have needed a much better camera than the one in my phone to get it.

2) We had a fire alarm malfunction at work today. They were supposed to be doing some kind of checking on the sprinkler system, and apparantly they set it off. Annoying.

• First, I discover this afternoon that my server has rebooted on an older Kernel and the SATA drives aren’t being recognized. No wonder it’s going so slow; the RAID is running in degraded mode (not inherently slower for RAID0/mirroring, but in practice it’s going to mean that the system does everything much more carefully wrt flushing buffers and stuff.) So I had to rebuild that tonight; the Linux mdadm tool made that surprisingly easy.
• Second, the phone line has gone tonight. No DSL, no nuttin’ - I host my own server, so I can post this now, but who knows when y’all are going to get to see it. And I think I’m going into some minor case of internet-access withdrawal (no dialup backup, since the voice phone is down too, but at least I have my PDA thing… slow though it is at home.)

This one from Gareth’s LJ (it’s long, sorry):

30 Things You’d Never Think to Ask

1. Have you ever been searched by the cops?
Nope, nor ever arrested. Stopped in traffic a few times, usually for something boneheaded whether I got a ticket or not.

2. Do you close your eyes on roller coaster?
Usually. I’ve got a touch of acrophobia, though the sensations are fun either way.

3. When’s the last time you’ve been sledding?
I’m not sure I’ve ever been sledding. Not even using cafeteria trays, while in college.

4. Would you rather sleep with someone else, or alone?
Depends on with whom, but in general with the right company I’d rather not sleep alone.

5. Do you believe in ghosts?
Nope. Nor souls, nor reincarnation, nor any other sort of life after death.

6. Do you consider yourself creative?
No, and it frustrates me to no end since I’d very strongly LIKE to be.

7. Do you think O.J. killed his wife?
I have no idea, and thanks to the folks who put him on trial screwing up so badly, there’s no way anyone but OJ will ever know for sure.

8. Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie
Jennifer Aniston by default; I find Angelina Jolie to be one of the least sexy famous women this side of Tipper Gore. (As an aside, this same question came up in Russ Lieberman’s recent Interview in GQ -

Okay. Real quick: Jennifer or Angelina?

Jennifer? Jennifer who?

Oh, come on, Senator! Jennifer or Angelina?
Jennifer who?

Aniston. [silence] Oh, God. You don’t read the tabloids, do you?
Can I have a third choice? Can I pick Sharon Stone?

…and my own thought was “put as just Jennifer or Angelina I wouldn’t have gotten the question either.” Sharon Stone would not be my pick over Jennifer Aniston, personally but then my tastes run more to Kate Winslet or Roselyn Sanchez.

Much more after the break…
Continue reading “30 Things You’d Never Think to Ask (Another silly blogmeme…)”

Have you ever seen the film “Johnny Dangerously”? Not a tremendous film, but a funny one… and the villain in it has this schtick where if someone does something that angers him he says, “You better not [whatever] me, [whoever]! My [family member] [whatever]ed me! …once!”

Right now my back/legs/lungs are telling me “You better not ride to work again, Nate! You rode to the old Kana! …once!” The scary part is I feel about equally beat up now after ~3.5-4 miles (home in Foster City to Guidewire) as I did then after ~10 miles (home in Mountain view to the old Kana building on Woodside in Redwood city.

And therein, I suppose, lies the difference in being 25 and being 30. F–k. I will definitely have to work up to this before doing it again, but I really really am going to try to do it again and repeat until it’s relatively routine.

While the news that Samsung announces PCs with Flash instead of a real HD is itself interesting, further down they note that:

As we reported last week, Samsung will also start shipping NAND-hard drive combos with 128MB and 256MB of NAND during the third quarter.

The authors go on to note that Intel is releasing it’s own Flash-caching technology, called Robson.

This is very much related to the MRAMFS work I did; I mean, I doubt they read my compression papers, but it’s all based on the same underlying concept. Very cool.

Inspired by a thread on RASFF (I think, might have been RASFC) here are the first in a set of reminiscences about computers I’ve owned. The lengthy bit will follow breaks, so that those of you who are here for humor and/or politics can ignore them.

I got my first computer, a Commodore 64 with tape drive, on Saturday 10/22/1983. My memory for a long time was ‘82, but I distinctly remember it being a Saturday - earlier on the day of my birthday party, which was always on a weekend either before or after my birthday - and I eventually found the receipt in my father’s old papers.

Continues following the break…
Continue reading “Reminiscences about old computers… part 1″