philisha.net

I got my sword back from Alisha’s friend who’s a blacksmith. Not only did he sharpen it, but he made a great stand for it:

No Comments »

I got Beagle working!

This is pretty much too cool to explain in words; take a look at Nat.org’s demos and revel in the coolness. Take that, Apple!

I wrote up some instructions on how to do the same thing if you are running Ubuntu “Hoary Hedgehog”.

In closing, here are some cool pictures of lattés.

No Comments »

Steps:

1. I buy a $100 parking permit so I can store my parents’ car on Biola campus.
2. The permit either falls off or is stolen off the car.
3. 1. Campus Safety tickets me.
   2. Campus Safety tickets me again.
   3. Ten minutes pass. Campus Safety tickets me again.
   4. Campus Safety tickets me again.
   5. Campus Safety tickets me again, for a total of five times in two days.
4. I appeal the tickets and get my permit reissued.
5. A month later, I get two “Ticket reduced to a warning” notices, and one “Three Appeals denied” notice. Apparently according to Campus Safety it is the duty of any owner of a car to check every day on their car to make sure that the permit hasn’t been stolen. Final score: Campus “Safety”: $241, Phil: -$241.

I’m really not sure what to do now. In retrospect I should have registered the car in my brother’s name since he’s leaving Biola at the end of the semester, and the unpaid tickets could have lingered forever, mocking the ineptitude that issued them.

The real irony here is that last week I got what promises to be the first of many letters asking for me to donate to Biola. (Decency would dictate that these would not arrive until my diploma was at least in the mail, but no such wisdom prevails.) Nothing engenders a generous spirit like charging seven times for five tickets, zero of which were deserved, during a semester in which I should be graduated and am only still in class because of a mistake regarding which classes of mine were counted for credit.

Actually, the title of this post is somewhat misleading. It is not about genius and folly, it is pretty much just about folly.

No Comments »

People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted
Streets are uneven when you’re down

When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name
When you’re strange

People are Strange by The Doors

No Comments »

Genius: the brown hose-holding bit moves back and forth along the green bar as the hose is extended and retracted. This keeps the hose rolled up tidily.

And just in case you weren’t sure that all semblance of dignity has been squeezed from the Star Wars franchise:

No Comments »

Biola’s newspaper The Chimes published an article on Eigen, one of my many projects. They emailed me last night to get the inside scoop. My comments didn’t appear in the final article (perhaps because they emailed me twelve hours before it was printed?) so here they are for the curious:

hi phil, i am doing a story for the chimes about eigen and i was wondering
if you could answer a question for me. basically i want to know if you
are on any other websites like myspace or friendster. if you are can you
briefly compare one of them to eigen?

Sure; no problem. I’m most familiar with Orkut, so I’ll make my
comparison there. The biggest and most obvious difference we have with
Eigen is that it is Biola-only. We were very intentional about this
because I think it makes it more valuable to Biola students—everyone
on the system is a person with whom you know you have at least one
thing in common, and that is Biola itself.

The other big difference is that we specifically tried to avoid
duplicating functionality that is available elsewhere. Orkut includes
a way to send messages to people, but I honestly never check it
because I already have a very good comprehensive messaging system with
email and AIM. We want to make it so you can contact people through
Eigen using bubbs emails, not create an entirely separate system that
nobody uses because it’s simply not as good as email.

Oh, and they got the URL wrong in the article. it’s http://eigen.biola.edu.

No Comments »

In response to Joel:

Well, I suppose I should get to accounting now. sigh Have I mentioned that I hate accounting? A lot?

Your hatred for Accounting pales next to my combined hatred of Calculus, Calculus II, Linear Algebra, Numerical Analysis, and Operations Research.

Your hatred is a candle burning in a dark room. My hatred is the heat of a thousand suns.

My hatred is the trih xeem that cleanses all.

No Comments »

You know that feeling you get when you step outside and you happen to be listening to just the right song? It’s as if your life were a carefully crafted piece of cinematography, and the song that plays perfectly reflects the mood of the moment, whether in the lyrics or just the general rhythm and mood. Time slows down a bit, and you realize this is so that the beat of the music perfectly coincides with your steps.

This happened to me twice on Friday. It was awesome. (Bullet the Blue Sky and New Year’s Day. U2 is good for the soul. It doesn’t happen often. Other notables for this phenomenon are Kraftwerk and Urge Overkill.)

No Comments »