What's happened in 6 months - Happy New Year!

Well, I didn't have school over the summer session but instead of writing I was reading and journaling, which is writing just not for the world. I didn't think that anyone would mind sense since I'm not read all that much and unlike some other great bloggers I have no coherent voice. It's the New Year and its time to change that. My posts are going to start being geared towards interesting science, some horrible short fiction that I write for no other reason that I have a teenage dream of being a writer, and my true experiences of school. And maybe some posts on the classes I'm taking.

Regarding the classes I'm taking or took, Calculus I - well, I have struggled with the class during an illness and dropped it. Then I thought I didn't have to pay so much attention to it and passed by it with a low grade (nothing that allows you to move on), and on my last outing I have this to report: CALCULUS IS FUN! Now, I'm sure that anyone passing that remark is doing a Scooby double take but this last semester I took the course with the objective to get an A. I didn't get an A but I'll live receiving a B. And I can only tell you it was because I choked on the final - I don't know why but I've a couple of tips for that too.

If you are taking Calculus this spring here our my steps for getting a good grade:

1. Read the entire chapter before the lecture.
2. In the lecture, take notes but leave space between concepts for text notes.
3. Ask the instructor questions (if you can).
4. Re-read the chapter and take notes alongside your lecture notes. 
5. Solve the examples in the book. Don't just copy.
6. Do the proofs (which probably are the examples) writing them down helps you understand the questions.
7. Don't do the assigned questions - DO THEM ALL! It'll help your understanding.
8. Ask questions on the homework — but only on the ones you have attempted. If you haven't done a question and you let the instructor do it then you won't get much out of it.
9. Re-read the chapter and your lecture/study notes.
10. Ask questions!!!!!

Those ten things helped me almost get an A. My problem with the final had less to do with the work and more to do with these couple of tips.

1. When the test is given — give yourself 3 minutes to read the entire test.
2. Take note of any questions that you know how to answer and don't seem difficult.
3. Complete the easy question, first. If you spend more than a couple of minutes on the question move onto the next easy question. 
4. Return to questions not answered.
5. Attempt to do all other questions.

What happened during my final was that I bogged myself down on what I thought was an easy question but I spent way - WAY - too much time on it. That left less time for the rest of the final and I didn't do too well on it.

Thats it for this New Year's post. I won't post anything about Calculus in the fall since I'm not taking Calculus II till then. I have a new role at my full-time job so and I have training in the morning and they don't offer evening Calculus Classes here.

I will post a stupid idea of a short story I can't get out of my head — so far it's titled: Earth Movers Universal, Inc.  (which is odd because I usually don't title till a story until I've completed it).

Where have you been?

Well, it's not like I have a ton of subscribers reading this blog. It seems to be more for my vanity than anything else. Of course, if I would update this on a more regular basis maybe I'd generate more interest. Nonetheless, I was reading up on some news in my RSS reader when I came across this little tidbit over at techdirt. It seems that Obama is falling into the same trap as everyone else, mainly, that video games are making our children obese and that we should encourage them to put down the controllers and play outside. Well, someone over at techdirt found and interesting article stating that Chess was doing the same thing to our poor kids. Of course it was written in July 1859 issue of Scientific American. I found this to be entertaining to say the least. Also, in a similar vein. Go over and listen to PRI's the World Tech Podcast, they have a interesting report regarding today's kids being dubbed Generation Google. Unlike Generation-X'ers, of whom I'm a part of this group, kids aren't watching more TV but are using the Internet more, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Why? Because they are learning to collaborate more, are doing their homework, and know how to find information better than the previous generation of kids. All very interesting tidbits.

Hypersonic Sound

You don't get to hear anything but this is the guy that came up with Hypersonic sound. It was mentioned in an awesome book called, The Daemon, that I just finished. It sounded Sci-Fi but it the end it is a real technology.

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41 years old and I want to play with Legos

Okay, I never had the Legos Mindstorm Kit but man does this post over at boingboing.net really makes want to go out and build Lego robotic devices.

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The Banned Book Library

There is a great post over at BoingBoing.net, about a kid who started keeping banned books in his locker. I think that it's awesome that he has started to encourage others to read the classics. Whenever I hear of anyone banning a book all I can think about is a great book by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, it is the reason why the moment a society bans one book or censors speech that society finds objectionable it starts the ride down the slippery slope towards a police state.

Books should be read, not burned.

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Data Overload

I found this on the New York Times Technology page. It is an interesting article about the government and the data that it has collected. The Unites States has been publishing this data for years electronically, and on paper. The CTO for the government is now putting more data on the web and even asking citizens to rate how useful the data was that found. This small blurb I found interesting. By rating the data, the government can create data about what is useful and what isn't. The opens it up for a couple of questions that I have: If most people don't find a particular data set useful will the government stop collecting it? Or will it stop offering the data at all?

Either way just because some piece of data may not seem relevant right now doesn't mean that it won't be relevant at some future time. I don't mind that the government is rating their data but what will it do with the metadata (data about the data)? Will that be for our consumption? What purpose would there be to major waterfowl flyways? Doesn't seem all that interesting, until you decide that you want to build an airport. With the airplane accident in New York last year, that seems to be incredibly interesting data to look at if your building a new airport.

Data is interesting but it might not be interesting to everyone. Rating is a really good idea because it lets you know what people find useful. My biggest fear though is stopping to collect certain data sets that my appear to be not useful. And the reason to stop collecting the data is to save money on the budget. This is congress constant push regarding the budget. Members question throwing money at science research projects like the life cycle of the fruit fly. So they stop funding the research, and just increase the use of pesticides on orange trees to kill them. Twenty years later the incidence of cancer goes up and no one know why. That is an extreme thought experiment but that is really the entire concept of collecting data sets in the first place. We may not know what it means now but I can bet that given enough time something relates to that data set. And it can probably help us in the future.

Removing data sets or stop collecting data on particular data sets can be harmful. We just don't know. So again I ask a simple question, what is the government going to do with data that is considered not useful?

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Star Trek, Calculus, Finals Week, SCHOOL'S OUT FOR SUMMER!!! What next?

I have not been blogging for a while. A lot has happened and I've been working on finishing up school this week. Everything will be done this Tuesday; I will then be working on this blog and making it more interesting. But first up...

STAR TREK PREMIERED THIS WEEK

Bear and I went to this Thursday night. All I can say is that it was pretty darn good. I was very happy. J.J Abrams did do something that I thought was completely unexpected. Without generating any spoilers I was very surprised that they did not resolve the issue. There is a time travel involved but the solution did not involve time travel to resolve it. In fact, it was never resolved - this was a completely welcome surprise. I will like to say that this Kirk was very fresh and more cocky then William Shatners Kirk, considering the age differences between both Kirks it makes perfect sense. The minute they showed Dr. McCoy I thought I was watching a younger DeForrest Kelly. Not that Karl Urban looked like DeForrest Kelly, because Karl Urban is very hot (not in this movie) but he was really channelling DeForrest Kellys' Bones. Uhuru was extremely hot and surprised the heck out me. Chekov was brilliantly funny, reminding us of Star Trek IV looking for Nuclear Wessels. John Cho didn't have a huge role as Sulu but overall he was great with the sword. Simon Pegg stole every scene that he was in period. He was beyond the original Scotty and it was great. Lastly, Leonard Nimoy reprising his role as Spock and confronting a young Spock was very good. Both actors picked up on each others take of Spock and incorporated both perfectly. Zachary Quinto can fill those big shoes.

All in all, I love Star Trek and this movie has taken Star Trek into a whole new universe which means that instead of rehashing old storylines we will see entirely new story lines. And what happens in this new Star Trek doesn't change the canonical universe of Star Trek:TOS - it is completely a different reality which makes me love it.

FINALS WEEK

I have been studying for finals week but I'm still nervous. It will always come down to this final.

SCHOOL'S PIT FOR SUMMER!!! What next?

Ok, it turns out that I couldn't have any of my classes for school this summer. So I'm taking the summer off. What I will be doing is refreshing myself with perl. I really liked last semester and taking a course in Python. What I liked about Python though was really IDLE. It's a GUI IDE for Python but it also has a console that allows you to load files and write one-liners as wells as entire subroutines. And I thought it would be great to have something similar for perl. I want something like a shell - it can access files within the filesystem. I also want to be able to write one-liners to check out ideas. I want to create modules that can be retained in memory and utilized. Also, I want to wrap everything into a GUI that runs within Cocoa. This means that I will have to refresh my memory on working with perl (5.10 to be exact), have Cocoa bindings so that I can write graphics to run in a separate window. (This will be much later.) And, possibly, incorporating some aspect of Parrot. This is extremely ambitious of me. I keep stating that I will do this but I never do. Now, I have an entire summer to work on one part of it. The shell. I know that there is a perl shell project and Zoidberg, which is the same thing to the perl shell project. But I want this to be a learning experience for me. I don't want to take those ideas and use them for mine I want to learn more about perl/cocoa/parrot. The only way I learn really well about and language is to have a project. So this will be mine. If I have something that I think will be worth others playing with I'll post it here.

Also, I want to blog about something that really has people coming to my site. I figure if I blog about perl and my project then people will be interested to see what I've accomplished. If it really works out maybe after summer I put it on either Google Code or Sourceforge. Anyways, that is the plan. So after finals, and school it's time to work on the blog.

Another Fox Reporter thinks the 'Daily Show' is a real news program

Over at breitbart.tv there is this crazy guy. And here is my take on the whole thing from a comment I posted on Digg.com.

Definition of Fascism is not big business and government getting into bed with each other. The definition of fascism according to the New Oxford American dictionary is:

"an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
• (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice."

I didn't know giving out money to buy companies is fascism. I always thought that was more like Socialism then fascism. Why can't the Wingnuts get their -isms straight?

Still, throwing money at a problem doesn't solve the problem. As a Libertarian, I believe that a true capitalist economy would allow any company that is failing to fail. Why? Because there would be less intellectual property protections, ie patents, copyright, for big business. A business either succeeds or fails. But it seems not in America, here big business and government have always been in bed together. In fact, it's the government that has allowed big business to become big business and help create monopolies.

It is the governments job to invest in infrastructure and to instigate competition. But all our government has done was been to allow the creation of monopolies and invested in nothing. Education sucks, manufacturing is practically dead in this country, and we have loss our edge as a first world nation. So what is the prescription that the Democrats and Republicans come up with? Lets give failing businesses more money to reward them for their ineptness. Hey, we do it all the time for the politicians by continuing to elect them time and time again when they make bad decisions.

So, the Daily Show edited another Wingnut. Big surprise, but I didn't realize that Fox News considered it a real news program, now that's scary!

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National Broadband Policy

There is a post over at techdirt.com about the possibility of US government to create a policy that is similar to the one that was created to build roads and highways. The proposal is very interesting because the government would form a department that would lay out all the fiberoptic cable thorough out the nation. The problem is think about how the DOT (Department of Transportation) works, right now. All interstate highways, I believe, were created by the Federal government but the state highways are maintained by the states via Federal dollars. And to continue, the states shove money to the local government to improve those roads. It sounds like a not a big problem but it is if you think about it the problem. Most of the money tends to be spent creating all these different departments, and maintaining the personnel for them, before a dime is spent on the roads. What would make you think that it wouldn't happen again?

AT&T was one huge company that created smaller, or actually swallowed up smaller, companies in regions of the United States. They controlled the entire phone system. Since they were a monopoly, and some of their practices were shady, the gave the appearance to stop other companies from forming. One of the reasons were that they created the network of phone lines and switches that made up the phone system. They were, eventually, tried and found guilty of barring other companiesfrom entering the market using that monopolistic power. Thus, they were broken up into smaller bits and the government ruled that they had to lease the lines out to long distance companies. And that smaller local companies could come about and take care of the "last mile" line to the actual home. This allowed for competition. Until 1996, when Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In which, not only did he sell of federal control of the Internet to private companies. But he allowed telephone companies the ability to offer cable television services and cable companies to offer phone services. This supposedly created more competition. Of course, AT&T wasn't forced to charge fair market price but a price they wanted. So small phone companies started offering services but quickly started to lose money because AT&T jacked up that price. Soon they would go out of business. Where is MCI these days? There is less of a fear that if AT&T becomes a behomonth again that they will be the monopoly they once were. Why? Because local monopolistic cable companies exist and offer the same services.

What does this AT&T have to do with a National Broadband Policy? Well, think about how current cable broadband companies operate. They are not a huge cable company that owns entire regions of the cabled United States. They've done a great job of laying most of the infrastructure but in a local setting. And rather then dominate and entire county. Two or three companies tend to carve up the market between city/county lines. Or in some areas right down the middle of a county. This gives them not a monopoly but a duopoly with each side owned by a different company. It becomes harder for the US government to break them up stating that there is no competition, even though there is no real competition. Company A claims that Company B is their direct competitor. Even better are Satellite companies because they offer a "third" alternative. But there is no real competition because A and B have already decided not to play in each others backyard.

The US government wants more home wired and I applaud that. But creating an another bueacracy to acheive that goal is not the way to do it. We have already seen that in other places in the world that broadband speeds are higher than what the cable companies want to roll out. And that the cost of doing so will not be as expensive as the cable companies might say it would be. I even applaud the fact that at least someone is recognizing the "last mile" issue needs to be either home owners issue rather than the cable companies. What I would like to see happen is that a National Broadband policy recognize this but state to the cable companies, thanks for wiring most of the homes but it's time to go in a different direction.

Here's my list:

1. The broadband pipes do belong to the companies that laid them but they have, not should, to charge a fair price for access to them.
   
2. The "last mile" belongs to the homeowner. If they need to be updated then a homeowner should receive some kind of tax credit to update them if needed since this will help the re-sell value of the home.
3. Smaller local companies should be able to lease access to the broadband pipes. They would then re-sell this to the homeowner, at rate that is above the fair price so they can make money off of them. This could also spark competition between companies.
4. Address the issue of all the dark fiber laying around unused that could be used to boost speed. This fiber was laid out but never used. Since the government gave tax credits to lay out the infrastructure then they should force the companies to use them at a fair price.

The policy itself needs to do something that protects the consumer. For far too long the government has created agencies that end up being used to protect the businesses. They have received all the tax credits and breaks to operate and build infrastructue but they have taken advantage of the consumer. That should be reversed. My ideas are not perfect anyone can read this and think that there are problems with it. I agree. But we are losing lost our technical edge in the wider community. The policy needs to be able a) spark true competition, b) create jobs (new companies), and c) make America the best in broadband penetration. But it needs to do this in such a way so that anti-competitive practices that have caused monopolies to be broken up don't exist at the cost expense of the taxpayer. Creating another beaucratic mess it not the way to do that.

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Web Apps

Over at InforWorlds channel there is an interesting post about web applications. Neil McAllister gave five reasons for businesses and developers to not use web applications. Cloud computing is a very hot topic. On the one hand you have Microsoft just now stepping their toe in the cloud filled waters; Google has been pushing the cloud to every their users for years now. I have vascilated between using web applications and full-fledged applications. But lately, I've moved all my Google Docs back to my system. Even though my poor G4 PowerMac is quickly losing space, I should be able to purchase a new harddrive at about 500GB for about $100.00. And in some stores, a 1TB harddrive for about $50.00 more. I even downgraded my Gmail account to exclude all but the most basic of features.

Why the change of heart, again? Well, this post by Richard Stallman, the father of the free software movement. And some other concerns that I have had. Mainly, if a company closes their doors then what happens to my data? I don't want to produce a ton of information never to have access to it again. I still use Gmail but I just like Apple Mail more. I use to love using Google Notebook but they let that go. Evernote is now my main note-taking application. Why? Because there is a stand-alone application that I can use to access and store my notes. Now, my notes are still stored in the cloud. But if I'm that concerned about the information then I store it on my system and encrypt it with gpg.

In the long run, the cloud is great for some things but not for everything. Also, I would rather create my own personal cloud on a home server and make it accessible to only my household. And that is something that I can do on my own and makes me feel a bit more secure.

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Hackerspaces - Can anyone direct me to closest one?

While I was reading boingboing I came across a wonderful post. It was about a new concept coming into its own called hackerspaces. The idea is very simple. A group of do-it-yourselfers (DIYers), also know as hackers, come together and rent a loft space. They then stock it full the items that they made need and tools that they have. They share everything with that space and help each other with projects. A perusal of their wiki and I also discovered that some of them hold classes and even charge membership dues.

The lofts are all over America, and the World. Even in my old <sniff> hometown of San Diego has a hackerspace. I think that the concept is great. I even have decided that I want to rid myself of cable tv and internet. So, in order to do that I need to build a media center with a DVR. It would be great if I could join a hackerspace so that I could get the benefit of someone elses knowledge. I've built machines before but a) it has been a long while and b) I would like to build mine own case, which I've never done before. I never took shop in high school so I never learned how to build basic things with my hands out of wood or metal. I would benefit from a hackerspace but, alas, there is nothing here in Charlotte, NC. There is one in Durham but that's a bit far to go just to build a couple of DVRs.

Still, if I had the time I would definitely try to open one myself.

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Testing a new Blog Editor

I've been using Google Docs but recently I've been wanting to try different ways of blogging. This is a test post for ScribeFire via Firefox.

Twouble with Twitters

Okay, one of the reasons that I haven't been blogging has been this very reason. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/macshaggy.