Now, the learning more math thing is something he has been harping on for years. Back in 2006, he wrote an article called Math for Programmers where he goes into the kinds of math that programmers need to learn (obviously) as well as his reasoning behind it. Watching the Video and then re-reading the article has made me want to bolster my own math education. (Geof had nothing to do with this). So, I am spending 30–60 minutes a day hitting the books with Concrete Mathematics and Information Theory. I do not really have any goals for my studies other than it is fun and will maybe make me a better software engineer and researcher in the long run.

Then, I started to notice that my cell phone and my PDA were bulky. I hated to carry both of them together. Plus, my address book on the PDA was always getting out of sync with the address book on the phone. I thought, “You know, if they would just put a cell phone and a PDA together, life would be good again.” And lo, I discovered the Palm Treo. It was very expensive, so I just made due with what I had and gradually the PDA got less and less use until I had been working for a few years and could afford to get a Palm Treo. Now, I had my calendar, my tasks, and my contacts all together AND I could make phone calls with the same device using the same address book that I synced to my computer! Life was good again.

Then, I started to notice that my Treo and my iPod were bulky. I hated to carry both of them together. I needed the life-line that was the Treo, but I really got used to listening to music while I worked. So, I thought, “You know, if Apple would just put a cell phone, PDA, and iPod together, life would be good again.” And lo, Apple did just that and released the iPhone. It was very expensive, so I made due with what I had. Finally, Apple came out with a version that had a lower up-front cost, so I jumped on that and purchased an iPhone 3G. Now, I had my calendar, my tasks, my contacts, my music, my email, the Internet, AND I could make phone calls with the same device. Life was good again.

Then, I started to notice that I had lost the ability to easily track my tasks using the iPhone. It took too long to interrupt my train of thought to pull out the iPhone and enter in appointments and tasks using the iPhone interface. Ideally, I really wanted to be able to just capture information quickly and come back and enter it in at my leisure. So, I signed up for Evernote and installed its iPhone application. Plus, Evernote also has Windows and Mac clients which make it even easier to stash information.

Finally, I became dis-enlightened with the iPhone task-tracking application that I was using. Once again, it just took too long to enter information into it. I could purchase an expensive Mac client that would wirelessly sync with it, but the keyword here is expensive. So, I decided to give Tasks a try. It has some warts, but it is the best solution that I have used so far. Plus, it is a web application, so I can enter information into it from my desktop, my laptop, or my iPhone.

Next time, I will go over my work-flow and explain just how all of these tools work for me.

My interests are not focused at all. While I am obsessed with computer science and engineering, I have never been able to focus. I flit from topic to topic; one day I am intensely studying the Cray-1, a super-computer from the late 70′s, with every intention of writing an emulator for the architecture (yes, just for fun). The next day, I am just as likely to be reading about Database Systems or Programming Languages. While diving in to a topic, I can come up with several interesting projects that would teach me more about my current obsession; however, I never get around to implementing any of them because the next day, my attention is diverted elsewhere.

Case in point: I spent a great deal of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas of last year reading about Ruby on Rails. I had some ideas for a web application that I wanted to write — a project and task tracking application to replace a crufty spreadsheet that I wrote and maintain at work. So, I read a lot, worked on a couple of sample applications in Rails, and have not gotten back to actually working on my project. Well, that is not entirely true. While I have not been actively writing code for the applications, I have been giving it lots of thought and trying to work out what would be the best way to approach it. For all the thought I have put in to it, though, I am still not doing it. Granted, I am doing a lot of other things. I spend a fair amount of time reading, running a Dungeons and Dragons game, watching a bit of TV, just not working on the project that I thought was important to me.

When I finished The Creative Habit a couple of weeks ago, a few keys really struck a chord with me. One, I should get over thinking that I am not creative. I always thought that being an analytical engineer really shut down that right side of my brain. To a certain extent, it does. When I am trying to solve a problem at work, I have had to train myself to ignore the leaping, scattered, right-brained thoughts and go down my checklist to figure out the cause of the problem. Usually, the solution is fairly obvious and requires no creativity. Every so often, though, I have to step perpendicular to the problem and look at it from another angle. That is the creative side coming out. So, I can do — I can be creative — whether I see it or not. Two, sometimes I just have to step off of the cliff. As an engineer, I spend a lot of time gathering data. Gathering data fits my personality well; I like to learn. Sometimes, I just need to stop gathering data, take a leap of faith, and jump into the project that I want to work on, trusting that I will figure things out as I go. My personality wants me to wait until I am sure that I will succeed before I start anything. Sometimes you just have to take a chance.

One of the biology blogs I follow is trying to get people signed up to help save the deep sea environment. I’ve already signed up and I’m hoping maybe a few of you would be interested as well. Here is the link to follow to see if you are interested. So far, it’s been easy to do.

All You Have To Do Is Just One

Also, next year is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin. To celebrate, a sailing replica of the HMS Beagle will be launched. There is a site to donate and a blog to follow if you are interested. There is even a store, where t-shirt purchases include a $10 donation to the building funds. I think it’s pretty cool and will end up with a t-shirt myself eventually.

Take a look and help us celebrate!

The Beagle Project

I mean, really, how often do you get to dress your daughter up as an 800 year old little green man?

The beauty of TiVo is that I never have to think about when TV shows come on; I set the show up to be recorded and every new episode of the show appears on my TiVo after it airs. All I have to do is define what shows I want to watch; I do not have to worry about when they come on. The TiVo model meshes perfectly with the Netflix model. With Netflix, I define what movies I want to watch and they show up at my house. Now, let us imagine that TiVo integrated the Netflix service into their set-top boxes like they did with Amazon Unbox.

1. The TiVo interface should allow me to search for a movie to add to my queue. TiVo already has an excellent interface for finding TV shows to watch; the same interface could connect in to Netflix’s Browse Movies interface. By selecting a movie, it would simply place the movie in the last space in your queue.
2. The TiVo interface should allow me to manage my queue. Once again, TiVo already has excellent queue management that it uses for its Season Pass list. The user should be able to slide movies up and down in their queue, as well as remove movies from their queue.
3. Where Netflix has the concept of a movie being At Home, TiVo should have the concept of the movie being On TiVo. So, if you are paying for the three movies at a time plan, three Netflix movies would be downloaded over broadband onto your TiVo. Here is where all of the magic happens. While the movie is On TiVo, you can watch the movie as many times as you want; it is just taking up one of your available slots. When you decide that you are done watching the movie, you simply delete it from the TiVo. This frees up one of your movies slots and the next movie in your queue begins to download. Now, movies are pretty large, so it may take a good bit of time for the movie to download. However, my broadband connect sits idle for most of the day; this would be a good use of it. I estimate that a movie could probably be downloaded in a day.
4. I really like the concept of using dedicated Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons to rate TV series that I watch. The TiVo interface should allow me to rate the movies that I watch accordingly. Then, an interface like the TiVo suggestions could hook into the Netflix recommendations system to recommend more movies for me to watch.

The appeal of this model is really the appeal of TiVo and Netflix. I have certain shows and movies that I want to watch; I really do not care when I watch them. So, the combination of TiVo and Netflix into some kind of TiVoFlix meshes with the way I consume visual media perfectly. I like the idea of setting a list of shows and movies that I want to watch and then just having them appear at some point in the future.

Of course. Christians would be taught real geometry, with the Euclidean version of the parallel postulate.

People who practice flawed religions would naturally be more comfortable studying flawed, non-Euclidean geometries. Jews could learn Riemann’s version of the parallel postulate, Muslims could learn Lobachevksy’s, and atheists could learn H. P. Lovecraft’s.

OK, so maybe it is just funny if you are an amateur mathematician and a fan of H. P. Lovecraft. However, I am both