Woxidu

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

Archive for the "Nerdery" Category


Roundup


Money

I’m a poor college student. I charged a $1.50 PATH train ride to my PNC debit card two days ago and accidentally overdrew my checking account by $0.30. I still had $0.60 in my savings account, but I was charged $34.00 in overdraft fees anyway. I tried to transfer the money into the checking account online to cover the overdraft, but couldn’t because the online banking software doesn’t allow transfers of amounts less than $1.00. Evidently, transfers of this scale cannot be made over the phone either. The only way to make such a transfer is to go to an actual PNC branch and talk to a real-live-person. I could also have gotten what’s called “Overdraft Protection.” This is a service whereby money in some account A can be used to cover an overdraft in some account B. Perfect… right?

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Back in Pittsburgh

I got back to Pittsburgh yesterday and today I cleaned my room and registered for the important classes this semester. I can’t wait to finish up and get on with life in NYC!

Speaking of which… I spent the first week of 2007 at the office of my new employer, OkCupid.com. I learned how to use a system called TAME to make callback-driven programming much easier. That was cool, except they started me out working on a pretty big chunk of code (2.5k+ lines). Towards the end, I worked on the mailing system to try to improve the matches it sends to new users. It looks like it’s going to be a fun and exciting place to work.

We spend our days relatively quiet, which is one of the more bothersome things about the office. I like to talk about my ideas, and I like it when others talk about theirs. People talk a bunch on MSN, but it’s not the same to me.

In all, I’m quite excited about working at OkCupid. I’m most interested in where the company will be going from here and how it seeks to situate itself inside of a cultivating lifestyle. I’m now a bit more interested in how internet dating will continue to grow on the internet. What people does it appeal most to? How will the element of unveiled personal intimacy change the way people use social networking sites? Will it even at all?

More to come, for sure. In the meantime, if you haven’t signed up already, get to it!

Toogle

Since getting my MacBook Pro back in March, I was always slightly disappointed by how little I could actually do with its remote control using the packaged software, Front Row, and the built-in system stuff (like changing the volume, playing/pausing iTunes). When I found iAlertU, I fell in love with the party-trick novelty it gave my computer and was a bit more satisfied. I still wished I could control a more diverse range of applications with the remote. VLC/MPlayer seem to have UIs that fit the remote’s design. They should be prime candidates.
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BBoards using Mail.app

A friend of mine working closely with Carnegie Mellon’s Computing Services let me in on what appears to be a rather well-kept secret about reading the bboards sanely using Apple’s Mail.app. I say sanely because Mail.app doesn’t actually have a problem reading bboards; with your IMAP prefix set to nothing at all, Mail.app will happily download all of the bboards you want. The problem is that it can’t seem to find out exactly which bboards you want so it downloads every single one. This kills just about everything on your computer while your network usage skyrockets, your disk space shrinks rapidly, Mail.app tries to apply all of your mail filters, and Spotlight tries to catalog each message. (more…)