Fishs  

You could almost say that [PIRSA] is a cross between [youtube] and [arXiv]. It’s an online source of physics seminars, which is expanding and will hopefully be full of awesome presentations from all over the place.

I’ve already looked up a few of my favorite professors, and got to watch some pretty good stuff. No longer are people constrained to attend only the seminars going on within the walls of their own institution.

Not sure why it only seems to have physics seminars, but I imagine those boundaries will eventually expand, as well.

I’m sure I could write more about it, but I’m also pretty sure that there are many other bloggers on top of this.

I suppose “New Favicon” is my replacement for the myspace “New Pics” post. In any case, I’m pretty happy with my favicon. For those of you who don’t know what a favicon is, it’s that thing just to the left of the url. Mine looks like this:

Anyway, I’m a big fan of the fishs favicon. However, if you want me to do a different one, I’m open to suggestions. Comment with a 10×10 image, and see if I like it.

I feel obligated to post an explanation of my status at the cafe. Several months ago, they tried to fire me, but evidently it didn’t take. I’ve been picking up one or two shifts a week now.

I’m not sure what else to say about this, except that there’s no job security like already having been fired.

Evidently google has this feature called [google alerts]. Basically, it automatically updates you when anyone on the web uses a given keyword. This is a very helpful tool for [Justin Taylor], a writer who likes to know when people are talking about him online. Occasionally someone will mention his name on a blog, and thanks to google alerts, he has the opportunity to thank them for spreading the word. I know, creepy, huh? Well, unfortunately for Justin Taylor, there’s also[Justin Taylor] the amateur musician, [Justin Taylor] the evangelist christian, and [Justin Taylor] the character on the television series “Queer as Folk”. So, mostly he gets a bunch of alerts every day about people that have his name, but are not, in fact, him.

Anyway, if you haven’t guessed yet, this post is mostly a test for Justin Taylor to see how quickly (or if at all) google alerts him about my blog. Regardless, he won’t be able to comment, since my blog is users-only, but he can always email me (my first name at my last name dot org) and let me know. If you want, Justin, you can get an account on my blog, but I don’t really know what this blog’s about, so you might just get bored with it. It wouldn’t be the first time I gave someone an account just so they could comment on one post, though.

What did I do in 2007?

Well, you could read my blog to find out, but I’ll make it lazier for you and summarize with a single post. Also, some things that weren’t in there, courtesy of my email old-messages folder and other sources:

• January — Brought a girlfriend back with me from Seattle.
• Feb 14 — Baked a cake shaped like a heart.
• Mar 12 — Alt.Coffee makes its official announcement that it will be closing and re-opening as Hopscotch Cafe. The official closing date is set to be April 8.
• Mar 14 — Pi Day.
• Mar 20 — Began getting questions from people about the Lie group E8, which is a trend that would increase dramatically over the rest of the year.
• Mar 21 — Amber Miller’s filters group at Columbia first identified a horrible spike in transmission to be nonphysical, and a problem with the code.
• Mar 28 — First spam comment on the fishs blog. Would eventually need to install annoying permissions software onto my website.
• Mar 30 — Made my very first modifications to the Miller Group simulation code. All I did was told it to append result data to a file.
• Apr 2 — Figured out how to calculate every digit of 624 to the 14th power using the command line. It’s actually really easy. The answer is,
  1,357,013,773,011,244,426,399,457,416,598,180,069,376

• Apr 4 — First heard about the reprap. This entry really belongs on Andrew’s blog, but I figure he probably won’t do one of these, so I might as well document it.
• May 14 — Andrew first gets the idea to make the game we’re currently working on.
• May 18 — Echo bought her plane ticket home.
• June 3 — Solved the first bug in the filters code. Perfect solution for freestanding, normal incidence. Several other major bugfixes would follow in the coming year.
• June 20 — Hopscotch’s official opening date. I think they opened a week later.
• Jul 24 — Seattle Vacation for a month.
• Sept 7 — My mom got a new job.
• Sept 12 — Designed a lowpass filter for the Miller Group. Put myself back on paid status.
• Sept 24 — Got fired from Hopscotch Cafe. Moved to full-time status at the lab.
• Oct 18 — My loft was shut down by the Department of Buildings. All tenants evicted.
• Nov 2 — Signed a lease on a new apartment. Moved in mid-month.
• Nov 20 — My brother left Seattle to come visit for a week, then to spend what will be an entire year in Malawi, Africa.
• Nov 30 — Began applying to Graduate School.
• December — Nothing happened.

Happy New Year. I hope you look back briefly on your past year as I did, learn a little bit, then forget everything and just enjoy life.

Paul