Lee’s blog! Yayyyy
I just realized that I have to be awake for 24 hours. I woke up for an early early flight and will have to stay awake for the party, maybe until about 2am mountain time. Hopefully I can take a nap on each of the flights.
Also hopefully the bed and breakfast owner won’t hate me for introducing myself at 2am.
I have been enjoying icanhascheezburger.com for some time now but the ads and all the extra stuff that they put on the page makes it annoying. I took it upon myself to make a lean cheez machine, and well, I think it’s a great alternative to their site. I estimate that my site is about 10 times faster than theirs.
I think it’s all legitimate because I only use the text from their site labeled as “Add this to your blog: (Copy & paste code).” If it gets popular, I’ll have to start caching the images, but that’s about it.
http://cheezburgerlite.com/public.php
Georgia Tech email stinks for a variety of reasons including bad spam filters. I won’t get into the myriad of the other problems here, but suffice to say, I haven’t used their email for about 3 years and have been using Gmail instead. Ok, I double checked and it looks like I made the switch March 2005. Anyway, this will be the best thing you’ll ever do with your email once you get it all done.
I want to outline how to use Gmail while still using your school email. This includes forwarding your email to Gmail, sending messages through Gmail but from what looks like your school address, and importing your address book. For you see, there is no good reason to check your email on the gatech website when compared to the awesomeness of Gmail.
Ok, I don’t really know how to export from Zimbra but maybe someone reading this could tell us how?
To import (but you can only do this after you export your contacts), click the contacts link on the left side of Gmail. Then, click the import link towards the top right. You should be able to follow the instructions from there.
For more information on this whole migration to Gmail and other ways to get this done, see lifehacker.
I specifically wanted to make sure my name was “Lee S. Katz” on pubmed so that I wouldn’t be grouped with the weirdo who writes about sexuality and farm animals. However, on Pubmed they just use my initials and so I am grouped together with that person.
Forever now, if you search my name on Pubmed, you’ll see both of us.
Eddie, Meryl, and I published! My first paper! Not that it has anything to do with my thesis, but still, a publication is pretty nifty. I’m on my way to science stardom…
http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/R113
Base Brands, the company I work for, is now promoting this really cool new product called, WaterWeek.
It is a 5 pack of water bottles that places emphasis on reducing the number of disposable bottles sold. The idea is that instead of bringing a disposable bottle to school or work every day, you can just bring one of these reusable bottles, and at the end of the week, all you do is toss them in the dishwasher like any other cup or dish. They have a particular appeal over other water bottles because they have more of a mature feel to them, allowing the consumer to bring them into meetings and a more professional atmosphere.
If you’re interested in WaterWeek, here’s a website to find out more about it: http://www.ireducebottles.com/.
I’m making up a slang phrase for you masses out there: Text Message Chicken. It describes the game of text messaging back and forth between you and your friend until one of you gets tired of texting and simply calls the other person. The loser of the game might call because their thumbs hurt, because their eyes are getting tired, or maybe because they don’t want to lose any more money texting.
I almost always lose the game of text message chicken because my friends always want to have a whole conversation with their thumbs. Don’t get me wrong though. Texting is real keen at certain times like when you want to send a simple message to ten people. But it doesn’t really replace a vocal conversation.
I decided to define my term at urbandictionary. Thumbs crossed that they approve it!!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=text+message+chicken
One of the best games on Wii sports is Wii Bowling, and on top of that, there is a special kind of bowling that they let you play. The setup is the same as in regular bowling except that
I was playing with Jeff and we got curious about what the max score is, and I calculated it on a spreadsheet. It’s 890. There, now you all know.
For the first time in maybe ten years I put pepper willingly on my peas. I never have liked pepper much but I realize now that just a little is good. Could it be that as I get older my tastes are still changing? I am pretty sure that a lot of pepper will still taste nasty to me but I am unwilling to try.
They say that many people buy from Woot just to sell off the product at a higher rate. Well, I finally decided to try it out myself. I bought an air mouse, and if this whole middle man thing doesn’t work out, I will enjoy the mouse myself.
Looking back, I realize that I have been searching for probably more than two years for a product like this, and so I will not be entirely upset if I have to keep it.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120280214460
In the past I have been against using Flash for many reasons. However one reason that I have always hated it from a developer’s point of view was that it was invisible to search engines. For instance, if I had a Flash site with the words “Interesting Flash Site,” you could not type “Interesting Flash Site” into Google and find it. However, Adobe finally fixed it after 10 years of complaints.
Still, only text and links will be searchable. Graphics and video, including FLV files, still won’t be able to be indexed properly, and there’s no capability to search and index metadata embedded in Flash files (even though, Adobe says, SWF and FLV files have metadata fields) or to allow people to link to specific content within a Flash file in order to make search results more relevant.
I am impressed, but not that impressed. It would help if every bit of the metadata were searchable. Also, another idea that Adobe should be made aware of is that if a movie has subtitles, those should be searchable. That way, a movie could be searched by the dialog itself.
Javascript still seems to be king for client-side programming, especially with frameworks like prototype. Anyway, I feel like I am about to go into a nerdy Flash vs Javascript rant, so I’ll stop here.