Emacs on OS X

In the interest of helping others, I’m putting up here various little things that make life at the command-line on OS X much more pleasant. This comes with the standard online warranty, that if it breaks, you get to keep both parts.

Long time no blog

So it’s been a very long time since I’ve posted here (over two years? Oof), and that really should change. I don’t expect anything profound or incredible to emerge, but hopefully at least someone (hopefully at least me) gets some worth out of this.

I’m engaged to the woman of my dreams and our marriage is coming up very quickly. Things are crazy for the two of us, but we’re making do.

I’m now in graduate school, pushing for the Ph.D in computer science. It’s what I want to do and gosh darn it, I seem to be good enough at it.

I stand by my old opinion of what I’m going to post here: random thoughts and stuff that interests me. All one of my subscribers will hopefully enjoy it 🙂

Perfection is overrated (so why do we worry?)

I today realized that I seemingly spend more of my time deciding what the most correct course of action is rather than actually doing things.

Don’t be a jerk: an atheist’s views on morality

What rule of ethics should a modern human live by? As a non-religious man, I can’t rely on the obvious and traditional source of morality, so I constantly need to ask myself: “What is right?”

How can this be answered?

It can’t, but I still try.

It was what we made it

The election is over, and I’ve never been around a group of people happier than my friends last night.

The instant the west coast closed and the networks called the election for Obama, our campus erupted into joy. We’ve seen him more closely than most Americans have had the privilege to. I shook his hand. I still can’t believe it.

I shook the hand of the next president of the United States.

I’ve taken pictures of him that I’ve gotten published.

And yet all the joy I feel doesn’t compare to how Americans who’ve not been as fortunate as I am.

It always seemed he had a sense of charisma about him that was discernibly different than anything else we’d seen. A senator from Illinois drawing a huge crowd on a small liberal arts campus in the middle of Iowa while not even considered to have a shot at the presidency is incredible.

But on the other hand, I remember after his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, saying to my father, “I really wish I could vote for him for president.” Four years later, and in time for my first presidential election, wish granted.

Wow. We did it.

is.gd useful trick

I like is.gd, but I find their bookmarklet slightly deficient. Sometimes I’ll be on a site, I’ll want to create a url for it, but not want to navigate away from the site.

This is a painfully simple modification to their provided bookmarklet, which will instead open a new window with the is.gd shortened url. Unfortunately, WordPress won’t let me have the correct form, so this isn’t quite so easy.

The bookmarklet as given is

javascript:void(location.href='http://is.gd/create.php?longurl='+escape(location.href))

Replace the underlined portion and add in another closing paren.

javascript:void(window.open('http://is.gd/create.php?longurl='+escape(location.href)))

A similar approach works with the tinyURL bookmarklet, but is.gd is better anyway.

Drinking rules for election coverage?

Here are ideas I came up with that sound like they’d work pretty well. Add any others you can think of in the comments.

Drink every time

• A talking head says “mandate”
• A talking head says “change”
• The Bradley Effect is mentioned
• The word “irregularities” is mentioned
• (if watching CNN) They call themselves “The best political team on television.”
• 2000 elections are mentioned as a reason for not calling a state
• ACORN is mentioned
• AIP is mentioned
• “Muslim” is used as a pejorative term (or reason not to vote for someone)

What did I miss?

Math Modeling Results

A few weekends ago, I competed in the first-ever Midwest Math Modeling Competition. I was on our school’s A-team (hey, if I can’t in sports, why not in geekdom?) and we were expected to do pretty well. Luckily enough, we took first. Here’s an overview of why we did what we did and how.

If you’re not interested in math, I’ve still got pretty pictures near the end, with stories of fish genocides.

It all began with a lake and the fish that would eventually live in it…

Conscientiousness

I’ve complained about this several times before, but one thing that I personally can’t understand is how people behave toward each other.

For some reason or another, I believe that it’s important to be conscientious. I believe in doing what is right, in doing what is expected of me, and most importantly in doing what I’ve said I’d do. And I expect others to.

Me

So yeah. I figure there are enough things I have opinions about that I may a well have a place to put them. So welcome to my blog. Enjoy as you can.