Normally I’d tweet something this short, but I wanted a chance to give a SPOILER WARNING for season 1 of Dexter.  More after the “more” thing.

The “Night Stalker” bears a striking resemblance to Dexter’s “Ice Truck Killer“.

For about 8 years, I’ve kept track of my running mileage in an Excel workbook.  Before that, I was logging things in a Claris Works Spreadsheet for a couple years, and before that I had a couple years of paper logs.

The Excel workbook has worked well because it’s functionality has evolved as far as I have been willing to push it.  But for a while I’ve felt that its development has stagnated and it has grown unwieldy.

Now that I’ve been benched from running for 4 months (more on that later), I’d like to explore other exercise tracking options that are more amenable to cross training.

Features I’d like:

• Accessible anywhere (i.e. on the web).
• Can accommodate different sorts of workouts (running, biking, weight lifting, pickup frisbee, etc.).
• Exportable to spreadsheets or database files.
• Nice graphical data and meta-data summaries with easily adjustable parameters.
• Easy to track peripheral data such as gear (e.g. shoe mileage) and routes (possibly with maps).
• It would be awesome if there were some kind of API or other method that allowed me to import my running logs from the last 8 years into the system, but I think that may be asking too much.
• Social networking would be nice, but not necessary.

A couple friends (thanks Z and G) suggested Daily Mile.  I’m happy with that but it would be nice if it could track strength training as well.  Does anyone have other suggestions?

Apparently the Diesel Wi-Fi terms-of-service requires users to blog.

So here I am.

In the next six months, my three major activities are:

1. TA a “drug delivery” class (provides current income).
2. Finish and defend my thesis.
3. Find a job (provides future income and intellectual fulfillment).

TAing isn’t so hard to fit in because it’s scheduled into the academic year.  I go to class twice a week.  Immediately after class, I review the notes for the class using a codified note-taking system.  Once a week, I hold office hours.  Three times this semester, I’ll have to grade about 90 exams.  These activities fit themselves into my schedule.

It can be harder to make time for dissertation work and job searching.  Essentially, these are both full-time jobs being fit into a single set of full-time man-hours.  Overscheduling seems to be the hot business strategy in this economic downturn, however, so I’m trying to view this over-commitment as my way of cutting back (“I had to let the guy who normally applies for my jobs go — we just couldn’t justify his salary to corporate in this climate.”)

I’ll let you know how it goes.

My office desktop’s Windows partition fills up on a weekly basis (I usually notice first when CNN news videos start to quit unexpectedly), so I’m always looking for some way to search for and destroy large files or folders on Windows XP and free up disk space. Usually this involves clever guesses and manual breadth-first searches on my computer.

Enter WinDirStat. This program combs the hard drive for you and helps get detailed information about where larger files are hiding. This is not a review of the program, nor it is an endorsement, but I’m a fan of pretty pictures, so when I saw this I couldn’t help but say something.

The graphical output at the bottom visualizes all the files on your drive, as well as their relative size. With a few clicks, I cleared ~3 GB of space.  The main culprits were the “sharing folders” in MSN Messenger (a program I no longer use) and various cached installer files.

I felt like trying something new, so I wrote a Python script to plot Newton’s fractal.

This graphic shows the time to convergence for solving z^4+1 = 0 using Newton’s Method.  The solution to this equation is one of four possibilities, which are represented using the colors red, blue, green, and yellow.  The solution that Newton’s Method returns depends on the initial guess.  I plotted the final solution for initial guesses in the range 0-1 (real, horizontal axis) and 0j-0j (imaginary, vertical axis).  Color depth represents faster convergence to a particular soltion (i.e., brighter pixels represent initial guesses that converge to a solution faster).

The script is based heavily on Listing 7-1 from “Beginning Python Visualization” by Shai Vaingast. It’s a good book with other fun examples, but my code for this problem is here.

I understand that journalists need to write catchy headlines in order to trick the public into reading their stories.  Take today’s leading headline, for instance:  “Obama’s first 100: Now comes the hard part” seems to promise some kind of poignant analysis of what’s to come, when really it’s just a rehash of all the Obama news we’ve seen this year coupled with commentary on why Obama’s acknowledging his 100th day at all.

Furthermore, I understand that news outlets often use headlines to misrepresent the content of an article just to get you to click. For example,  “What I learned about my husband in bed” is not the soft-core CNN porn you’re hoping for.

I’m pretty flexible with my news and I enjoy reading a variety of news sites each day.  But given that flexibility, I do not understand why Fox News has resorted to using lol-speak in it’s titles.

(The image in it’s original context is below)

Photographs via Fox News on the Interwebz.

Update: The Fox photo is permalinked here (for now).  Also, the story in question, which doesn’t have the photo, is here.

I’m really bored of hearing Fox News and Karl Rove try to mitigate blame away from Republicans after Obama’s State of the Nation Address.

From the Fox News “Fact Check”:

OBAMA: “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn’t only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.

Emphasis mine.

Obama didn’t mention the Republicans in that particular excerpt, and the author’s defensiveness seems misplaced. But Obama does frequently make implications about who is to blame for the mess he “inherited”, and about whose beliefs we are “rejecteing”.

In his piece, Karl Rove  picks up on Obama’s implied accusations, repeatedly questioning who exactly the President is blaming.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, “I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.” Who exactly has that view? Certainly not congressional Republicans, who believe that through reasonable tax cuts, fiscal restraint, and prudent monetary policies government contributes to prosperity.

Rove is nit-picking the term “no role” here, and I understand that it’s a bit of an overstatement, but Republicans created this image for themselves.  Republicans push back on many federal fixes proposed by Democrats, and now they’re complaining about being type-cast. Yes, I believe that (in general) the GOP wants government to be all but absent from fixing society’s woes (“When my house is burning down, I want the market to decide whether the fire department should come save me”), but I have this belief because I listen to Republicans. Barack Obama does not need to plant these ideas in my head because I listen to people like Mr. Rove pushing them all the time.

But beyond that, over his entire speech, each time he did mention “Republicans” it was tightly coupled with the word  “Democrats”.  Obama is giving Republicans the opportunity to take part in what’s going to happen in his first term.  I think over the next four years we’ll see that the smart ones will take him up on it.

Rove story via The Heretik on Shakesville.

Caught on my phone on the local weather station over the weekend.  I think it has to do with lake effect snow.

A quantum of creativity and fun in an extremely busy time of life can keep me going through stress.  So, I’d like to introduce a personal project that I’ve been using as a way to keep balanced between ‘work’ and ‘other’.  It’s a website that catalogs Barack Obama’s Presidential neck ties and other neck wear.  Enjoy.

Today Shakesville asks what part of your body is most beautiful/handsome?  It’s a bit awkward to think about, and that’s why I’m forcing myself to answer here.

I think I have to follow suit with Melissa and choose my eyes.  I like their blue (though sometimes I prefer to call them grey), and I have really long eye lashes, which I make wishes on whenever they fall onto my cheeks.

Anyone else care to choose a favorite part/feature of themselves?