codeman38's LiveJournal

After 28 (ah, off-by-one errors, the bane of programmers) 29 years of living in Georgia, I have moved to the Boston metro area for work. (Arlington, specifically.)

And even though I've only been here a few weeks, I still feel pretty confident in saying... it's like a home that I never even knew I had. The 'Camberville' area, especially. So much geekily awesome stuff out there to do!

(One of the few things I do miss from Georgia? Sweet iced tea. Sorry, but it's just not the same if you mix the sugar in after it gets cold...)

This entry was originally posted at http://codeman38.dreamwidth.org/4611.html.

I am now officially a Ph.D.

Now, to try to find stable employment...

This entry was originally posted at http://codeman38.dreamwidth.org/3725.html.

Yeah, I know, y'all are wondering what I got and gave for Christmas this year...

My big present wasn't actually delivered at Christmas-- in fact, it wasn't even a physical possession. Neither me nor my girlfriend can drive, and we're no longer even living in the same state (though at least we're in neighboring states, so it could be much worse). So my big present, three weeks ago, was for my dad to drive me up to visit my girlfriend and her family. It was enjoyable, and very much overdue; I hadn't seen her for fifteen months! And we did some gift exchanging there; I gave her several DVDs and a Bluetooth adapter to sync her phone and her computer, and in return, she gave me a huge pile of DVDs, CDs and books. And, of course, there was much cuddling, too. :) Plus, I got to meet her grandma, whom I'd never met before. So yeah, overall, it was a fun trip; I just wish it had lasted more than just a weekend!

The rest of the gifts came, in the usual fashion, on Christmas itself. From my sister, I got iTunes and GameStop gift cards; from my grandmother-in-law, a pair of University of Georgia sandals. My parents got me a new battery for my two-and-a-half-year-old MacBook (also much overdue, as it wasn't even holding two hours' worth of charge), Sonic Colors for Wii, the latest Professor Layton game for DS, and various clothes. (I'd probably have also gotten Donkey Kong Country Returns, but I'd already gotten that on my birthday several weeks ago.)

On the other end of the equation, I got my mom a 500 GB portable hard drive with automatic backup software, my dad a USB turntable to convert all of his old LPs that are sitting in the closet, and my sister and her family a gift certificate to the bowling alley.

My family also got my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew a Kinect for their Xbox 360. Having played it over at their house, I now wish I had an Xbox 360. I think that could help impressively with my poor coordination. (Hand-eye coordination? Great, from years of video games with handheld controllers. Rest of the body? Not so much...)

This entry was originally posted at http://codeman38.dreamwidth.org/3308.html.

I was just checking Zap2it's page on Doctor Who to see if that show was going to be running on anything other than BBC America, which isn't on the cable tier I have... and found out it wasn't going to be, alas. However, I did find this hilarious example of natural language processing gone horribly wrong:



(Description: A screenshot of a listing of Doctor Who-related news, in which the first story is "Elvis Presley's doctor, who was accused after the legendary singer's death of over-prescribing barbiturates, sleeping pills, hormones, narcotics to his famous patient, now says that Elvis died from chronic constipation.")

It took me a while to figure out even how this was relevant, and then I realized it was a naïve keyword-matching algorithm that even ignores punctuation. ::facepalm::

Though I do admit, an episode in which the Doctor and his companion go to visit Elvis could definitely be entertaining!

(Cross-posted from my other blog.)

This entry was originally posted at http://codeman38.dreamwidth.org/2909.html.

Finally switched to an S2 style here because the bug with color schemes on S1 styles was bugging me that much. Besides, I needed to change it; the old template was a table-based mess that was seriously deprecated by now.

(Yeah, you can tell I do web development as a side job, can't you?)

Netflix users, check out this post on my personal domain regarding how to load custom subtitles into Netflix's web player. Turns out that someone's discovered a hidden feature that allows one to load any W3C Timed Text subtitle file, and with a bit of Python scripting (which, in turn, I've ported from a Windows PowerShell script), it's possible to convert SubRip files from around the 'net into the necessary format.

I may be watching a lot more streaming movies now... ^_^

This entry was originally posted at http://codeman38.dreamwidth.org/2713.html.

1.) Go to google and type in "You know you're from [your area] when..."
2.) Cut and paste the list
3.) Bold or italicize items that apply to you.

(from this Facebook page)

( What, no mention of Peachtrees? )

This entry was originally posted at http://codeman38.dreamwidth.org/2515.html.

So Christmas has come and gone, I'm back home for the holidays. Which, of course, means the standard gift exchange with my family.

I got my dad an iPod car charger, my mom a gift certificate to Belk's, and my sister's family a gift certificate to the bowling alley. My dad and I also teamed up to get Mom a Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit board of her own-- yes, of course I have one, but I keep it on campus most of the year. I also got my girlfriend some things that she hasn't gotten yet because she hasn't gotten back from visiting her extended family yet, so I won't mention them. :)

And in exchange, I got...

( The List )

Hardly equivalent exchange (yes, you can tell I'm a Fullmetal Alchemist fan, can't you?). But then again, I'm a graduate student, with a graduate student's budget, so I suppose it's equivalent in a way...

Oh, yeah, and for my birthday (which was a couple weeks ago), I got New Super Mario Bros. for Wii. Better work on my time management for my dissertation, between all these video games!

But of course, tomorrow (well, technically, today, since it's past midnight) come the gift returns. The charger I bought for dad wasn't fully compatible with his iPhone; neither my nor dad's T-shirts were big enough; and I need to get an HDMI cable so I can actually play Blu-Ray movies in HD.

Does anyone reading my LJ have a Dreamwidth invite code they'd be willing to give out? I've found a few communities on DW that I'd really like to join... but of course, I can't actually post to them with OpenID.

Thanks to telegramsam for the invite!

I know, I know, I'm a couple days late with this, but anyway... as a former spelling bee geek (it's been 12 years, believe it or not), I have to post this...

Belated congrats to Kavya Shivashankar, winner of the 2009 National Spelling Bee— and, for that matter, to everyone else who made it into the Bee, as that alone is a major achievement. You all definitely weren't Laodicean about spelling, that's for sure!

And since I forgot to post this after the 2008 bee, extremely belated congrats to Sameer Mishra for winning a great guerdon in that year's bee.


Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot! Special thanks to the Spelling Bee staff for throwing in "blancmange" as a word this year. As a fan of Monty Python's Science Fiction Sketch, I salute you; indeed, I even suggested the word on my blog three years ago.