Woxidu

It's too dangerous to go alone. Take this.

Archive for April, 2007


Basic Math$

There’s something about “Cha-Ching handles the math for you” that raises my expectations for the software and increases my feeling of betrayal from the following example all the more.

BadMath

On the plus side, they did fix a bunch of annoying bugs with budget editing. All I want now is the ability to associate transactions (or accounts?) with my budgets. Exciting…

EDIT: I feel compelled to mention that these help files are brand new with the latest upgrade to version 1.1 and so are, of course, the most bug-prone of any help files they release. This is the best excuse I “coud [sic]” think of for them.

MacHeist

Goodbye, MacHeist! It’s been fun. You’ve given me challenging puzzles and great software. I’m sad to see you end, but I’m sure it couldn’t have gone on forever. Thanks MacHeist!

MacHeist

Work, Carnival, Girlfriend, and Bill Cosby

Carnival Weather

The concessions stand is up, the booths are almost done, and the weather is looking astonishingly good! CMU’s annual carnival starts tomorrow (read: tonight, once classes are over) and then ends on Saturday, giving us Sunday to tear everything down and get ready for school-as-usual on Monday. Justina gets in late tomorrow night and will be staying through until mid-day on Sunday. This means that all that stands between me and a weekend of fun is a bit more work on an essay of mine, dissecting the similarities and differences between scenes in two different Shakespeare plays. Until then… Time. Drags. On.

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So it goes

One of the greatest writers of our time is gone. Rest in peace, Kurt.

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84 – New York Times

Checking my Mail

When I check my campus mailbox, evidently, I resemble this man:

Crushing Neo

I feel the need to qualify this a bit. My mailbox is on the bottom row of a wall full of mailboxes. It’s maybe 4 inches from the floor. If I want to check it, I have to be either crouching on all fours, or in an I’m-dodging-bullets-right-now-in-The-Matrix backbend. Obviously, in a situation like this, the correct choice is the one that makes you look as cool as possible, and most men don’t look very cool when crouching on all fours. That is all, thank you.

Puzzle: Floor Tiles

A good friend from way back sent this one to me. It’s got two pretty fun solutions, one that I came up with and one that he showed me later on. Enjoy!

You’re a carpenter in a rectangular room and you have a bag of tiles, some are 2×2 and some are 1×4. Using all of the tiles in your bag the floor is completely covered (no gaps on the floor, no tiles left over). Just when you finish tiling, you drop your hammer and break one of the tiles. As you look around your supply closet, you find just one more tile, but it’s the wrong kind (if you broke a 2×2, then you found a 1×4 and vice-versa). Is it still possible to completely tile the room with this replacement? If so, under what circumstances? If not, why not?

Moving Other People’s Windows Around

To some, computers are the biggest, if not the only means of productivity in their daily lives. These people need to feel comfortable with their computer desktops in order to be their most efficient. Knowing where everything is helps a person become familiar with their desktop’s organization and then helps them avoid doing more work than necessary when they want to use a particular program or window. OS X helps you to organize your desktop by providing a shortcut for switching between Applications. Apps are then broken down into Windows for each task. I prefer yet another degree of abstraction so I’ve installed VirtueDesktops (whose development has been discontinued, sadly) in order to allow myself multiple Desktops on which I can put many Applications. Each Desktop represents a category of tasks. “Browsing” is for Safari windows, “Mail & Chat” is for just that, Mail and iChat, “Other” is for iTunes and iCal and other peripheral tasks, and “Work” is for whatever happens to count as “productive” at the moment.

Enter the outsider. The one who neither knows how to make the most of their computer, nor cares that you are trying to make the most out of yours. She asks if she can use your computer to “check her mail.” She doesn’t know that your iChat windows are placed exactly where you want them to be. She doesn’t know that your setup was designed to prevent as many windows as possible from falling off the edges of your screen. She definitely doesn’t know that there’s such a thing as multiple desktops. When you get your computer back from her, you want to cry. Everything! As out of place as possible! I half expect my menu items to be rearranged!

These people offer the classic reason for having an OS that is aware of multiple users. These people must be allowed to log-in to their own sandbox environment. They ought to be able to have their own room so they won’t want to play with my toys! Just make sure your screen locks before they get to it. If they aren’t interested in learning how multiple Desktops work, then I shudder to think about how they’d react to explaining the necessity of them using a different User name!