Maybe you science people can help me figure this out. The Daily Mail recently posted a news story titled “Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand, pictured for the first time”. My question is: what the hell does that mean?

How can something be “one million times smaller” than anything? Is small a measurement?  What is twice as small as I am? Or twelve times as small as a planet? Is it a redneck term for mass? Are they saying it is a percentage of another object? As far as I know, small is a descriptive and relational term that has zero scientific meaning.  Maybe I’ve gone crazy, but it just doesn’t make any sense.

At this time I would like to say that I’m 3.6 times smaller than Darth Vader, but I smell twice as nice.

(Please note that time speeds up and slows down in this article I started writing on the 18th of April)

As I sit in The Greene Turtle at BWI, I realize that the moderately sporty theme and full bar may give me an interesting possibility for introspection. So, with great resolve I start in on a fairly tasty, avocado burger and ponder the recent events of my life.

(Well, that was as far as I got before I was tempted with a piece of Macademia Nut Cheesecake, but that’s how writing works. At this point I’ve finished off my tasty meal and traveled a few hundred miles to find myself suspended in the air somewhere over Missouri.)

The most taxing part of my life, lately, has been the quest to get an internship for this summer. Being a grad student is apparently not difficult task enough to satisfy the gods, I also have to fill out loads of paperwork and fly to the east coast a few times.

I don’t like to complain too much, and the reality of the matter is that I’ve really benefited from the experience. Through interviewing with several different government agencies on more than one occasion I now feel a sense of immunity to the stinging barbs of the interviewing panel. It’s not that there are any shattered glass ceilings (for the 20-something, white male in America), but after your 20th interview in 6 months you start to place less and less stake in each one. I think half the battle is just realizing that you are wanted in this big ol’ world. Nearly everyone has the right to feel that way, but I think I didn’t let myself do it for a long time.

I’ve also become more comfortable in saying no to people. There are, literally, hundreds of places that are easily accessible to a person in computer science right now: everything from application development to taking a hammer to a hard drive. Personally, I’m just not the kind of guy that likes to track down criminals, plug small boxes into other boxes, or build robots. After everything I’ve been through I now can tell those employers that we just don’t have any chemistry and not fee. Once you realize that you’re wanted somewhere, it becomes a lot easier to do this. If I were to give any advice to a person nearing graduation at any level it would be to not accept offers just because you got them.

I’ve started to focus my knowledge of core computer organization and process flow into the field of information management and data visualization across systems. Most of my closer friends know what it’s like when I get a “topic-crush”, and right now its for data collection and aggregation. I’ll buy the drinks if you want to chat about this topic.[I'll probably leave your part of the tip for some older crushes like telecommuting, web development education, economics, or the possible existence of a Bizarro-Groucho Marx]

This new passion is partially enforced by my current research on network-based intrusion detection systems. Part of my groups task has been to create a testable out of band network for managing and sniffing traffic across large, distributed networks.

My biggest contribution thus far has been a redesign of the processing server and the way data is being handled in the short and long term. This sort of architecture really got me excited about my career because of the way I could see my knowledge and input change the process. I wasn’t always right in the choices I made, but the team was able to correct the misinterpretations or detect flaws in the design fairly quickly.

All-in-all, the solution we arrived at was fairly satisfactory, and I’m already seeing ways of improving our model. Additionally, I was also able to create a web-based GUI for accessing the new information and rendering a rather crude network visualization graph. It’s a non-trivial problem for two weeks time, especially since I still struggle with graph theory.

(This has been forgotten on my phone for over a month and a half, and now the author finds himself sitting on the couch. Feeling the red-afterglow of a Netflix-hosted episode of Outer Limits…I journey forth.)

This summer…well, I guess I don’t know what my goals are. I think I might stay cool on the personal technology side of life. I’m living with two good friends within minutes one of the most fascinating cities in the world. I think that the next 3 months will be devoted to seeing, smelling, and tasting as much of the East coast as possible. As friends may attest, I seem to have a lot more time for things “next month” than I do “this month”.

Sometimes it’s good to have a moment of reflection and take stock of your position in life. I’ve heard that it is when you are at your busiest moments when you need to stop, if only for a moment, and consider all the things in your life. Well, I’m busy. Too busy, in fact, to look at all the things in my life, so I’ll just hit a few of recent technology moves that I’ve made. (Read on…)

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Whenever I desire to know the nerd quantity in a room I use a fairly simple test that I perform:

1. Start a conversation with a nearby ‘normal’ about something interesting that isn’t solved easily (This also works if you’re mid-lecture and you’re instructing on some problem)
2. Begin to say: “Well, that’s an interesting problem. It’s kind of like an episode of MythBuster’s where they <insert some myth here>.”
3. Start the timer.

In any case, shortly after you complete step 3 you should notice that someone has turned around and said the following words to you “I SAW THAT EPISODE!!! THEY …..”.

At this point, two things happen. First, you roll your eyes or breathe in loudly and try to continue your conversation with the normal. Second, if you’re lucky, you’ll notice immediate exponential growth and the expansion of the conversation into a third or fourth person who say “Hey, are you talking about MYTHBUSTERS?!? I saw that episode, they….”. If you are not lucky, the first nerd will sense a lack of social protection, realize there’s no outlet for the feelings and words he needs to express and it will instinctively latch onto your skull and scream into your eardrum about dummies and explosives.

(That’s why I always start each test with a zeroth step: 0. pray silently to the goddess of probability that every room’s nerd quantity is x where x > 2)

You see, this test operates on the well known fact that most nerds are annoying. Contrary to popular culture, however,  this is not a cute, fun, innocent annoying. This is the kind of annoying that causes eye bleeding and blackouts. I know because I get them on a daily basis. If you don’t understand this problem, I’ll let you review the thousands of dollars in unnecessary medical bills resulting from annoyance-related accidents.

For all you nerds out there:

Please stop freaking out about MythBusters. I say this for the sake of my health and your image in society. I don’t think anyone truly dislikes the show, but please stop making it something that you salivate over. It’s just television…just television. Normal people don’t even react like that to the birth of a child, and, to be perfectly honest, it’s kind of freaking the rest of us out.  Especially since it happens once a week.

A while back I found there was a rather gaping void of creativity in my life and I needed to fill it with some sort of right brain activity. I had been doing things like some elementary web design and page layout stuff, but it was more about numbers than nuances when you program CSS stuff. So I decided I’d take up photography.

The main driver for this was that I was no longer “supporting” a second person in my life. So at this point I could actually afford to perform a little “me spending”.  Nothing extravagant, just something to get me started and wouldn’t make me feel like a photography neophyte every time I took pictures in public. The Fujifilm S700 seemed pretty perfect for that. It was also right in my price range as a college student ( $$ < 200 ).

The camera actually wound up being fairly impressive, but a little outside my abilities at first. The round knob on the top was daunting enough with it’s 11 shooting modes. That number turned out to be 8 with the manual shooting modes out.  You can also forget about any configuration menus as those would be too far.

After a month or so of “point and shoot” stuff, I began eying up that manual mode.  I still didn’t have the knowledge, but I decided it was time to read up. I then found that there were 3 basic controls that would allow for varied shots, and I could mess with them from there.  Here’s a quick summary.

Shutter Speed – The amount of time the lens is exposed to the light. These are commonly notated as an amount of seconds ( e.g 1/120 sec[ave], 1/1000 sec[short], 4 sec[very long] ). Too little and the light will be too dim, to much and the motion will be blurred.

Aperture - The size of the window that exposes the world to your lens.  These are represented as F-stops (e.g F-3.5[large], F-13[small]).  If the size is too small, the picture will be too dark but if the size is too big then your field of focus is very small.

ISO - The sensitivity of the camera’s sensor to light.  These are usually factors of 100 (some exceptions) between 100 and the thousands (ISO 100 [normal], ISO 1600 [very sensitive]). Again, too little and you’ll not see anything, but too much means the image will be grainy.

As I said, these were unfamiliar to me so I experimented a bit. Since I normally shoot scenary I took a lesson from a quick tips guide for landscape shots. I started to shoot manually and shrink my aperture for distances. Sure enough, I could now pick up distant details that I was missing with my previous shots. I was also able to

My biggest issue now is the fact that my camera is designed to be a point and shoot camera. When I’m out shooting it takes time to switch between all three settings. ISO is the worst as it’s in a menu and requires about 4 button clicks to alter it and get back to the action. Adding in the fact that manual focus dissallows alteration of settings while you’re shooting you can see why I’m considering getting an SLR soon.

I do really enjoy my camera and I’ve taken about 6000 shots this year with it. The hardest part for me is getting through the editing and removal of these shots.  After any 20o+ photo shoot I find that it takes me about an hour to an hour and a half in Picasa3 to find redundancies, delete bad shots, GeoTag, and do some light (as in amount) editing. That’s not bad, but getting around to those 1000+ photos from my trip to Colorado is looking particularly daunting.

Has this ever happened to you?

Hey, I have this thing you have to see! I’ll send ti via email, it’s 10MBs.
No wait, my email service can’t handle anything that size. It’ll have to go a different way.
Okay, I’ll send it over the IM client. Wait, it says you’re using a different client than me.
Yeah, I’m using Pidgin (read: stupid Pidgin, seeming all helpful)
Okay, log into Skype and I’ll send it as a file.
Okay. Wait why is it only going at 500 bytes a second?!?!? Are you running Windows 3.2? (read: or Linux, har har, but seriously why do Skype file transfers blow?)
Man, I’m going to have to upload it to my FTP server and send you a link. It’ll be faster. Click, click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,clickity-clickity-click. Okay, here’s the link.
Man…..that sucked so bad.

I can imagine you, the reader, sitting in your seat and sobbing into a pillow at this point, “Yes, yes I was there….I had to send him a burnnn….a burrnnn…a burned cd!!!” Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad.

So in my own way I fixed it for myself. ShareItNow is a python script that you drag files onto and it will automatically upload said files to the FTP site of your choice and give you a URL to give to your friends and family. It’s simple, but it’s not bad. You do need Python, an FTP server, and a Webserver, but that’s what I have so too bad if you don’t.

Just edit the script to change the value of your server location, credentials, and a web folder the server points to and you will be golden. Once you drag a file or files onto the script it will ask you if each file is binary before uploading. Once it’s done with an upload it will print you a URL that you can use and go on to repeat the process for any additional files.

One last thing, to make Python scripts “Droppable” (meaning you can drag-and-drop a file onto a script to get some magical result) you need to enable a little switch in the registry. I added a .reg file to the project zip using the code in a tutorial on how to make droppable Pyscripts. The funny thing is that this guy wanted to do the same thing I did, but he didn’t share his code. Great minds think alike, I guess.

But I share my code  (Download ShareItNow)   ;D

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Most people I know would same I’m a pretty nice guy. I can be trouble at times, but by-and-large I’m a nice dude. Especially when I comes to customer service representatives. Man, those people have it rough. I get really frustrated when I hear people ragging on offshore call reps or anybody else that deal with moronic customers who demand perfection. But there’s a point at which I stop being a nice guy.

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With the Thanksgiving break finally upon me I now realize that I need to be a better behaved blogger. The nice thing about having the blog on my website is that I’m pretty committed to keeping it going despite my occasional/frequent droughts.

It’s been busy for me at school and elsewhere. I’ve started regaining my social life in the midst of my more intense studying aspects in the hopes of finally becoming the well-rounded individual. Also, I’ve finally returned to the developer stage with some interesting projects.

I’ve pretty much abandoned my trivial web projects in favor of a few more serious research and other projects in Python and C++. This is the third time I’ve been programming in C++ and the first real exposure to Python. It’s been fun dealing with interface/facade ideas in these languages instead of using the familiar Java concepts. It’s also interesting to try plugging in these tools into some fun new libraries.

I must say that I don’t despise C++ as I used to. It’s really not much different from Java except for the exaggerated power you feel from managing your own memory.  When I switched over the first time I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt with the lack of the amazing Java library and documentation, but you can overcome that.  The code can obviously be much more elegant at times as the magical pointer garbage can be pretty interesting. The biggest concern is that your code doesn’t start looking like something written by Escher.

Python is fun and different, but I’m not sure that I’m used to it yet. When working with C++ and Python at the same time you start to realize how uncomfortable that void of high level management is. I really have no idea how long it’s going to take me to get really comfortable with the language. You know what I’m talking about; there’s that point where you feel like you’re working on a code assembly line and the code colors and connecting shapes are all in arm’s reach.

The current situation with Python is a lot like that episode of Futurama where Bender is floating through space. A small species of people form on his body and evolve into a fully civilized species and he plays god for a little while. Then he screws up and causes a nuclear war, killing off his little world.  He then meets up with a god-like galaxy and they start talking and figuring stuff out. I think I just encountered god after playing around and blowing up my own mini-universe. Soon I should a good approach for creating life, but right now the options are just blowing my mind.

I’ll keep you up to date and I hope to have some descriptions of my tools and projects soon. Until then, I guess I hope that you’re staying healthy and looking forward to a happy Thanksgiving.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a portable MP3 player….too long. Rather than bearing with the burden for years and years before I die due to lack of soothing tunes, I decided to satisfy that need. The object of my aural delight is a 2GB Creative Zen.

To all of you technophiles out there, “no, it’s not a Zune or an iPod”. I can’t justify spending over $100 bucks on a device, especially if it has software dependencies. I respect the options out there, particularly the proper potential of Wi-Fi synchronization in the Zune. If I were going to switch to a main player, it would probably be the Zune. That is, of course, if I didn’t get an option to pick up an iPhone first.  There’s no contest there.

But anyways, here’s a quick rundown…nothing to earth shattering.

What do I like:

• Physical Size (near credit-card HxW and just large enough for 3/8in plug deep)
• Expandable Storage using Secure Digital Cards
• Drivers compatible with all Windows installs so far (no pc software needed)
• Great WAV Recording Filtering for Clarity and Good Stream Rates
• Loads of standard video support (Even my weirdly formatted videos look great)
• Nice 2.5″ Display
• FM Radio Displat
• Simple Menu Interfaces
• Photo Support (fantastic images)
• Price ($80 new)

What don’t I like:

• No “Play by Folder” Options (I’m an addict)
• No support for Ogg Vorbis formats
• No Soft key buttons (Starting/Stopping recordings is a pain)
• Apparently they don’t use iCal format for calendar
• Integrated Battery (It may be a must for size, but I don’t have to like it)
• Poor earbuds included

But it’s a great product over all. I’ve been more inclined to record meetings now that I have it on my body so I can review discussions after the fact. And the WAV sampling is great, so fair quality speech at the 10 foot range is coming out at about 15 minutes per 2.5 megs. Not to mention everyone who has seen it has asked what it is; it’s very sleek.

If you’re looking for something fairly inexpensive but still sexy I’d advise you to check out the Creative Zen.

Important Note: I have a hard time talking about portable players without saying this but all the MP3′s on my Zen are legal.  I know just about everyone might have carryover stuff that may be of questionable legal background from your childhood (when you had no money and didn’t know any better), but it’s no excuse to keep taking money from people who earn it. 99 cents a song isn’t bad. And if you play 100+ hours of that video game, isn’t it worth $40-50?

I also like to take issue with the anachronism that is the modern day music conglomorate and DRM licensing. If I can purchase a player that can just let me use my music the way I need to use it. When I buy it, I should be able to put it on any device that I need without paying more royalties. I’m not advocating sharing and reselling, but the rights of use are there when it comes to entertainment.

Consumers Unite! Please buy your music, software, and movies and buy players that let you use them the way you want. It’s irresponsible to steal from artists and developers, but it’s not time to give money to these companies by locking into a software use nightmare or DRM fiascos.  Buy and use freely, respect and enjoy.

It’s hard to say when it was that I left UW-Superior. I guess it was probably some time early in my last semester. If you don’t believe me, you can look at my transcript. Like most seniors, chomping at the proverbial, graduation bit, my interest had been gone for a while before the actual graduation ceremony. Whether it was true or not, I felt like I had taken the most from my undergraduate teaching and needed to seek out something more.

I have always been a very dedicated student, but over a series of poor decisions by myself and faculty, I became largely disinfranchised with the idea of finishing my last semester. While I still remain personally attached to some of the faculty and staff, there was a lot that I needed to get away from in order to be happy with my future.

A large portion of what I left in Superior revolved around a very long and very painful relationship. It was one that I tried to solidify and ground but, instead and much too late, wound up destroying there. Most of the relatively small city carried some bad memories and it was time for me to move up and move on.

One professor, call him V (purely random letter), actually recommended the program in Tulsa to me in late November. He talked about the reputation that our school had with the advisor and how my performance as an undergrad would make me a possible competitor for a slot. Probably the most interesting thing about this suggestion professor was that he and I had a rather complicated past. During several occasions, in courses, the students ran into “issues” with the way things were proceeding. At the time, we got in to some very tense situations, but I realize that he was fantastically professional and understanding through each situation. Any lack of respect that I may or may not have had in the man has vanished over the years, and I can now say that he was one of the best people I’ve been able to work under as a student.

After a whirlwind, and somewhat last-minute, romance with the graduate program, I was accepted and I began preparing to leave. Friends and family were fairly pleased with my decision to start my graduate degree in Tulsa. But that is not to say they were pushing me out of the door with a stick, they were civil despite the opportunity to be rid of me. Some of my closer friends that I wound up with at the end of my college career were friends that I had made years before in high school and with whom I had renewed relationships. They had it worst of all as I’ve learned that my charm is much like an exploding star: certainly striking but you better not pay to close attention or you’ll blind yourself and gain lasting, nagging burns whose intensity depends on the exposure to the radiation. Despite all this,  I confess that I will miss their support and friendly faces in the coming years (though we’ve continued phone conversations already).

We did much to part ways, and the move out process was slow and awkward. Still, by seeing them frequently and still knowing my exodus was emminent allowed us to sort of ease into the prospect of being apart. I am glad to say that it was not painful to leave, and it has not and will not be painful to be apart. To be honest…I think that without the leave, there would be a lot of fishbowl inertia keeping us all in place. It’s not exactly poetic, but it is nice to think that perhaps splitting up will give each of us enough fin room to make escape velocity and jump into the open air. Now it only remains to see if each of us will be able to survive out of the water.

Good thing this garbage is purely metaphor, and an obnoxiously contrived one at that. I like my neck without gills, and my life to be more than a monochromatic, two-dimensional etching of a three-year-old. On that note, I’ll wish myself luck and luck to my friends (Godspeed, SHRELM).  In the words of a tragically misunderstood dogsledder but wonderful librarian, “Love you, miss you, bye.”