Browsing around this morning, I stumbled across the following picture: Math bored me throughout elementary school. Frankly, it bored me until I started calculus, and I think I've pinpointed why . Assuming for a minute that the story behind this rather humorous picture is true, with what (purely speculative) methods or misc...

Language Log has an interesting account and analysis of the buzz surrounding a comment made by Joseph Biden , a Senator from Delaware. What power the comma has! Its presence, absence, and position can cause the same series of words to mean either of the following ideas: Barack Obama is the first African-American presidenti...

Remember the joyful glee of discovering that Strong Bad had purchased a new laptop? I am experiencing such glee right now--I have a new laptop of my own. I bought a Sony VAIO VGN-C190P this evening; it's already running a copy of Ubuntu flawlessly. Some specifications: Core 2 Duo T7200 (that's the one with the 4 MB L2 Cach...

This morning, while I was cooking breakfast, my wife confronted me about a few things she found in the sink. "Is this chocolate syrup? Have you been eating ice cream?" , she cries. I sheepishly admitted my guilt, explaining that ice cream with chocolate syrup has an invigorating quality that aids the brain when it's trying...

The first week of my trial-by-fire Ruby on Rails development has come to a close. And, I still love Rails. I love the concept of Rails more, now having worked with it for a little--all development should be this easy! I think by far the most effective principle espoused by the Rails community is DRY : Don't Repeat Yourself...

I've been particularly impressed with the Dia diagram drawing program that is part of Gnome . Today, I used it to create the wonderful figure below. It's a high-level overview of my proposed architecture for TomeTracker, my capstone project. Now, if I could only pull off all of these ambitious components in the next 6 week...

I've been meaning to write about this since Jessica and I arrived home from Texas, and I'm finally taking a minute to do so. While we were there, Whitney taught us a really fun game that everyone needs to know about; the name, as you may have guessed, is Take Two. Take Two is played with a bag of Scrabble letters. It can b...