Last night I finished The Stars My Destination, which Elliot gave me for Christmas. I really enjoyed it, and will likely purchase The Demolished Man at some point.
Next up is either Perdido Street Station or Count Zero.
If there was a better way to go then it would find me
So I've always found it annoying that I can't connect my second generation iPod to a computer and play music at the same time. The iPod shows the "OK to disconnect" screen while connected, which prevents you from using it. (Apple supposedly fixed this in the newer iPods.)
This has become more of a problem recently as my iPod's battery life is on the decline: while I used to get a good work day of listening in, it's down to 4 or 5 hours now.
I can hear you asking, "Why don't you bring your power brick?" Well, I could. But that would mean remembering to pack one more item in my backpack every morning before heading to campus, and I'm not very good at remembering what I need to do in the morning. I might be able to buy another power brick from Apple and keep one at work, but Apple usually charges insane prices for items like that (*ahem*).
So what I've been thinking about is building my own 1394 cable. The cable would have a standard 6-pin connector on each end. I could either leave the data pins disconnected, or (as Mark suggested) have a switch which disconnects the data pins when in the off position.
Before spending time and money doing this, does anyone know if this is a solved problem? I've searched around but can't find much.
I recently started using Bloglines to read all my blogs, Planets, and news sites. Bloglines has its issues, but it lets me access my feeds from anywhere, so I'm happy.
But neither of my local newspapers offer feeds. The Alligator seems to have plans to offer one, as evidenced by the following line in their source:
<!-- define rss URI <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss.xml" /> -->
Unfortunately, the file doesn't exist.
The Gainesville Sun has a feed on NewsIsFree, which I'm currently subscribed to. But why can't they offer it themselves? Third-party feeds make me feel dirty.
One more point: I don't read these publications in print form, or through their Web sites. I would, however, read them in Bloglines.
So I've been keeping various Food Network programs, like Everyday Italian and Good Eats, on in the background while I'm working at home. Mostly I'm just trying to soak up some cooking know-how, but eventually I'd like to get more serious about it. The only way to do that is to try, and luckily I've got a great mentor: my mom.
On Sunday, we made a recipe I saw on Everyday Italian, Linguine with Chicken Ragu. Sooo tasty.
If things look worse than they normally do, make sure you force reload the page. I updated the CSS recently.
I received my Wonderfalls DVD set from Amazon only two days after the set was released - rather quickly considering I went for free shipping. I don't need Amazon Prime with this kind of service.
Wonderfalls is currently ranked eighth on Amazon's DVD top sellers list; buy the set to show Fox what a mistake they made in canceling the series!
I still recall the taste of your tears
It's easy to tell when the career fair is going on: double or triple the usual amount of traffic, hundreds of students dressed in suits, and an overwhelming sense of arrogance.
This is what always turned me off about the career fair - all of a sudden, I would see people in my classes that I had NEVER seen before, not even on the first day. Maybe my memory was fuzzy, maybe I was having trouble matching the mental image with the showered, gelled, and sharply dressed dickhead sitting next to me. (Oh, and I don't like your cologne. Neither do the other 30 people in this room.)
Do these people really have hopes of landing a job with IBM, Microsoft, or Apple? Classes certainly aren't everything, but there is some correlation here.
If there's one thing I regret about my dislike of the career fair, it's not making more of an effort to get a summer internship. This is one thing Joel on Software has touched on recently. Granted, I worked at a programming job all through college, but I don't think it brought the same opportunities an internship would have.