September 21st, 2009
Lately when I look at my account history for my Citibank card, there are inline ads that appear below some entries. If you like gas at Chevron, you’ll LOVE gas at Texaco. Yes, this is pretty annoying.
They’re still trying to convince me to Go Paperless. I guess these ads are yet another of the great benefits I will experience if I agree to get only online statements. Where do I sign up?
Today I found a particularly humorous combination of ads. Pay attention to the line above each ad. Barnes & Noble should be thrilled to see they’re getting what they paid for! And no, I have not been buying Twilight journals.
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November 7th, 2007
Last Friday, I received my recently purchased copy of Rosetta Stone v3 Russian Levels 1-3. (Cheaper at Amazon.) I’ve gone through about half of Level 1 in the last four days.
Version Three is new and much fancier than Version Two, which I’d used at the library in Newton, Massachusetts a dozen times over the last year. Version Two is a one-trick pony. It shows you four pictures and a word, phrase, or sentence, and you pick which of the pictures match. It gives you three more, and you match them to the other three. There are different modes - with or without sound, or where it listens to your pronunciation, but the same basic idea. Let me say that Version Two is still very good, and probably available cheaper now, and when I’m done with Version Three I still might go back and buy Version Two. I can hardly put a price tag on easy, fun ways to pick up more Russian.
Version Three has a wide variety of activities, still centered around the same basic concept. It can show from 1-8 pictures on any given screen, for different purposes. I am very impressed that the different activities really do help you with different goals such as reading, writing (spelling/typing really), speaking, and listening. The variety also makes it more interesting.
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October 23rd, 2007
This morning I was daydreaming about the time my server got hacked into a couple years ago. I didn’t notice for a few days, and luckily it was a spammer who wasn’t a genius and left a lot of junk lying around my server for me to figure out what was going on.
It occurred to me that normally only maybe 100 email messages get sent from my server on a given day. If that number skyrockets to 10,000 or 10,000,000 it’s pretty obvious something’s going on. Similarly, if I never log into IRC servers and suddenly I have ten open connections to IRC servers, this is another indication. I think both of these things were true the day my box became a spambot.
I could pretty easily detect this by having a very simple, separate firewall system that monitors how many packets go out on each port each day and reports oddities by emailing or paging me. I guess I could even set up something like this on my server itself, although if the server got hacked into I couldn’t rely on those measures to keep working.
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May 15th, 2007
Updated 11/7/2007
I will update this post as my list of reviewed tools grows and my thoughts change. The rating before the title is bold if I have seen the benefit for myself, and italic if I expect this rating but haven’t used it enough yet to be sure.
Useful at All Levels
[5] - English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary, Kenneth Katzner
Beginner
[5] - Pimsleur Audio Program
[4] - Oxford Picture Dictionary, E. C. Parnwell
[4] - Russian: Graded Readers 1-5, Bond/Bobrinskoy
Intermediate
[5] - Schaum’s Outlines: Russian Grammar, James S. Levine
[5] - Rosetta Stone software
[4] - Russian Learner’s Dictionary, Nicholas J. Brown
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May 15th, 2007
I have been studying the Russian language since the spring of 2004. I was planning to travel to Kazakhstan in August and wanted to prepare for the trip, so I took two classes at The Boston Language Institute. I had seen their “Guaranteed Swahili!” signs in the Boston subway cars since my college days. The classes were good, but you definitely get out what you have time to put into them.
Then I went to Kazakhstan and met some wonderful people. I was able to barely get along when there wasn’t a translator, although very laboriously. I picked up many new words. When I returned, I don’t think I did much studying until six months later when I decided I was going back again. I stumbled on language CDs at the local library, and tried a short Pimsleur course. I had heard from a fellow student from my language classes that they were good, but I didn’t consider myself an aural learner so I hadn’t tried them. I was blown away by the simplicity and power of the program, and quickly found the complete courses.
After completing the first full course and half of the second, I visited Kazakhstan again. I was much more successful in communicating this time and again learned a lot while I was there. I also happened to meet a lovely woman, with whom I began to speak on the telephone when I returned, averaging perhaps an hour a day ever since! Needless to say, since returning I’ve been much more serious about studying Russian.
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March 31st, 2006
In a moment of clarity on #ipw2100, I just realized that every base is base 10 from its own point of view.
I guess “base ten” is safe enough, but base 0Ah and 0xA have a nice cryptic look to them.
Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »
October 27th, 2005
Warning: Use this advice at your own risk. I am not a financial professional.
When I first received employee stock options, it was 1996 or so, and it looked like stock prices would just go up and up forever. Under that model, clearly no great strategy was required; one simply needed to wait until the last possible moment, and therefore the highest possible price, and exercise the options. Well, if you were going to have so ridiculously many that it would bump you up to the 39.6% tax bracket all of a sudden, maybe you’d want to unload some earlier to spread it out. It was a nice problem to imagine having.
Then came the dot com bust. Except for a few lucky souls at Google and the like, most of us no longer view our stock as something that will go up forever. For many, it has already come crashing down and only occasionally shows signs of growth. So how should you approach the problem of when to sell, now that your mind has sobered up?
I haven’t consulted any financial advisors on the topic, and for all I know I may be missing some very obvious theory on the subject. But here are the conclusions I’ve come to on my own, for what they’re worth.
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Posted in Finance | 2 Comments »
October 27th, 2005
There is no X in espresso. It is pronounced ess-PREH-soh.
There is no X in etcetera. It is pronounced et-SET-ur-uh. If you insist on mixing it up, you can say et-SEH-truh.
Before I had my first espresso, I must admit I thought I would be having an expresso. Luckily I think the rise of the latte has led more than half of our citizenry to pronounce it correctly these days. But there are still a few stragglers out there. You know who you are. Practice in front of the mirror.
So what is it about E-words that bring out the X in folks? I expect there are other E-words that people have trouble with. Expecially kids. Can you think of any more?
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September 13th, 2005
Last Saturday, I coined a new phrase. At least I think I did.
I occasionally think about a sentence I’ve just spoken and wonder if anyone has ever spoken that combination of words before. So I have a little experience running internal debates as to the likelihood a given phrase has been previously uttered. These days, though, it doesn’t have to be all conjecture. Google provides a powerful way to test your theory out, to some degree. You can at least ask the simpler question of whether anyone has written it on a web page yet.
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May 23rd, 2005
There are only two valid reasons to refinance your mortgage: to lower your interest rate or to lower your monthly payment (preferably both).
The only great reason to refinance is to lower your interest rate. If you pay closing costs, however, you have to make sure that you are going to recoup your costs. You should determine the crossover point: how many months do you need to pay at the new rate before it pays for the closing costs? Then consider how likely you are to have the mortgage that long.
The other reason to refinance is to lower your monthly payment. This isn’t a great idea, especially if you have to pay a higher interest rate. However, if you’re in a difficult financial situation it may make sense to alleviate your short term burden at the expense of costing more in the long run. Consider what you’re doing very carefully.
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February 24th, 2005
If there’s one thing I know about women, it’s that it’s not pronounced the same as woman. Women rhymes with “dimmin’”, as in “dimmin’ the lights”. Woman rhymes with - well, I don’t know what. But everyone seems to get that part right.
I was inspired to this topic after hearing a caller on a radio talk-show last night, who referred to “those woman” a few times. I can’t think where I’ve typically heard this before. It’s not common, but I hear it a few times a year. If I remember correctly, I heard Kevin Nealon make this mistake multiple times when he did some stand-up for the live audience of Saturday Night Live, the one time I attended.
Why is it that some segment of the American population does not make this distinction in pronunciation? And what segment is that exactly? When I first got upset by this topic in college, I wondered if it was some feminist thing, since I had heard of spelling women ‘womyn’ or other wackiness to try to get rid of that evil “man” root word. But I never really found any evidence to support that theory.
I call as a witness m-w.com, which seems to have only one pronunciation clip for ‘women’. Furthermore, I have noticed this phenomenon very infrequently on Television, that most definitive source of proper behavior.
Can anyone out there shed light on this?
If I come to any other definitive knowledge about women, I’ll let you know.
Posted in English | 2 Comments »
February 1st, 2005
Step 1) Clearly identify your two favorite films of all time.
Step 2) Write about why you really like each film.
Step 3) If there is overlap between your list and another’s, let the negotiations begin, which may rely on…
Step 4) Identify any other films that didn’t make your top two that you care to identify, and write about why you really like them.
Alternatively, just talk about movies and stuff and what you like about them and stuff like that.
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
November 18th, 2004
I found myself reflecting this morning — which thumb do I use to type a space character? It turns out that I use my right thumb 100% of the time I believe. I wonder if later in life I will have a misshapen thumb because of it. Looking closely now, I think I may see an extra wrinkle or two forming on the side of that thumb. I also notice that I press space with the side of my thumb; I guess that’s all you can do, but I had never really thought about it before.
When I was in about sixth grade, I typed with two fingers of each hand. I knew where all the keys were and was quite fast, so I guess I at least had little ‘hunt’ in my hunting and pecking. But I still had to watch my fingers because they would drift to the wrong keys if I didn’t. It’s much faster to not have to look at the keyboard. Somewhere around freshman year of high school, I decided I better learn how to touch type. I pretty much just forced myself to type with my hands on the right keys, for a couple weeks maybe, and then I was already faster than I had been.
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October 26th, 2004
One day, in high school I believe, I caught myself saying “a whole nother”. Where did I get this craziness? Well, clearly by splitting ‘another’ into two words. I realized that “a whole other” or “an entirely other” or “a completely different” or “another thing entirely” were adequate substitutes that avoid grammatical suicide, and began to reform my speech.
Soon I noticed that this was not my own concoction, but something said quite commonly. It began grating on me and soon became a pet peeve.
Obviously, most people are going to catch this one before they go to write it; it’s more of a verbal anomaly. But consulting Google, I find 35.7k uses of “a whole nother” versus 154k uses of “a whole other”; the admittedly awkward “an entirely other” gets 2.55k votes, “a completely different” is used 643k times, and there are 14.4k uses of the elegant “another thing entirely”.
There isn’t too much more to say on this one, but please, for the love of all that is good, stop yourself from saying this!
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July 3rd, 2004
My favorite restaurant on the planet thus far is Legal Sea Foods, or as we know it affectionately, Legal’s. There’s one right by the Kendall Square T stop adjacent to the MIT campus, and some 20-30 more along the East Coast, mostly in the Boston area. It was certainly expensive for a college student, so I only made it there about once a semester.
Well, now I’m back in Boston, and gainfully employed. It’s still a bit expensive, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep up my current 2-week trend of visiting once a week. But I figured I could log my iteration through the menu items, and help myself remember what was fabulous and what was merely good. Step three: Mankind derives value (*1).
Restaurant Theory
Many restaurants have extensive menus. When you go to a restaurant for the first time, you can’t really help the fact that you’re going to judge the restaurant by that one dish you choose. I suppose we use hints like “Specialties of the House” or “Our Famous XYZ” to get something that should really be representative of the peak of their art. Or maybe a friend or food critic has recommended something to try. Still, there are obviously going to be places out there where you don’t like the first thing you try, and thus never come back, and thereby miss out on something else that you would have returned for again and again. C’est la vie.
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June 9th, 2004
At MIT, everything is done a little differently, and everything, of course, is numbered:
GPA - Grade point average is calculated on a 5-point scale. A = 5, B = 4, C = 3, D = 2, F = 0. Thus it’s the same as a 4-point scale, plus one, unless you get an F, in which case you’re penalized a bit more.
Buildings - The buildings are numbered, roughly 1-56. Only “the Green building” manages to be called by name on a regular basis. Some major classrooms are 26-100 and 10-250 (twenty-six one hundred and ten two-fifty).
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June 9th, 2004
This is a “bin” list of undefined terms that’ll deserve their own posts, but which need to be captured as quickly as possible so as to prevent the (admittedly fairly easy) act of posting from becoming a “barrier to entry”.
See comments for the binlist.
Posted in Wichage | 10 Comments »
June 8th, 2004
It is an interesting phenomenon that we use the word several frequently, but people have widely different interpretations of what it means. So before you go on, consider for a moment how many you think several is.
If I say I had several friends over last night, how many do you picture? If I did something several years ago, how long has it been? If I picked several apples, how many were there?
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June 8th, 2004
“The marathon in Africa … I’m halfway out and barely chugging. Mountain coming! Liquid needed! What’s around? Water’s bitter! Beer’s flat! Gator, Blah Blah! … Fading fast. Then a vision — sweet Joanna! — tempting me with pale gold nectar … lemon is it? Yes, by golly! Lemonade? No, Lemon Aid! … Power added! Asphalt churning … Cruising home to victory! Hail Joanna! Filched the nectar (shameless hustler!) — In the market — Newman’s Own!”
– Paul Newman
Posted in Wichage | 3 Comments »
May 25th, 2004
wich’ age, n., Etymology : Wes’s room, East Campus, MIT, circa 1993, from a discussion surrounding nounification suffixes in the English language. A shortened form of nesslihooditudewichage.
- archaic : meaningless noun representing all nouns
- A collection of large, hard pretzels; in particular, those produced by the Snyder’s of Hanover company. Usage : X-Files at your place, 9:00pm? I’ll bring the wichage !
- That which is sought after; the good stuff. Usage : Pizza - that’s the wichage !
wich’ age, adj.
- Great; desirable; capable of being coveted. Usage : That car’s wichage !
wich’ age, exclamatory adv.
- Yes; affirmative. Usage : Wichage.
- This situation pleases me. Usage : Wichage.
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