The thermostat here in apartment 12 has two temperature-dependent operating modes. In the first mode, which operates when ever the thermostat is set below 70°, the thermostat acts exactly as you would expect it to, holding the temperature in the apartment to within a few degrees of the desired temperature. However, the second mode, which comes into play whenever the thermostat is nudged beyond the 70° mark, reminds me of the fires of hell. The furnace will run and run, never shutting off, as our apartment grows hotter and hotter. I've let it run in mode two until the temperature got to 80° before, and the furnace showed no sign of shutting off before I shoved the indicator back down into the frigid 60s. What this means is that there is a range of temperatures from 70° to at least 80° (a range that includes normal room temperature) that our apartment can never achieve.

I would call maintenance about this, but I've weighed being slightly cold vs. having maintenance guys showing up at the apartment at 8am (as they've done on many occasions) and I've decided that I prefer cold. I mean, at least we're saving some money.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 31 October 2002 at 1:22 PM

Selected 'David Warner' googlisms:

david warner is a medical neuroscientist with his md/ phd from loma linda university and is the director of the institute for interventional informatics
david warner is great as a computer world bad guy
david warner is the mastermind behind a massive theft of information
david warner is on a mission to grow giant psychedelic mushrooms to promote happiness among britain's overworked masses
david warner is a surgeon in a small town in the midwest
david warner is the default star trek guest star

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 31 October 2002 at 1:07 AM

It's been a long time since I've mentioned siderealsystems, and I'm thinking of doing a redesign soon, so now seems like as good a time as any to make the link available. Pay close attention to the products page; the long description of Introspect v7.5 is probably the best part of the site.

Cerner sent me an email telling me I'd been selected for a second interview in KC yesterday and then called today (I was out). So I need to call them tomorrow and see if I can get that set up. Second interviews --> job offers --> job --> $$$, so this is good, I guess.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 October 2002 at 12:10 AM

maybe youve already heard, seeing as the track is so hot and all, but I just thought Id share. see, I was listening to the Q95-5 (blazin' hip-hop and r&b) this morning on the way to class, and I happened to hear the new nelly song. I had heard the song before, actually, but what surprised me is that the dj refered to it as the number one song. I dont know if he meant number one song in the nation or simply the most requested song in st louis, but regardless, it would appear the song is quite popular. why is this such a shock? afterall, with previous hits like "number one," and "hot in herre [sic]," it should come as no surprise that nelly and the st lunatics would have done it again. I suppose Ill elaborate.

the track is called "air force ones" (pronounced "err force," by the way), and it is entirely dedicated to nelly and his crew's affinity for that particular style of nike shoe. in the song nelly and each of the st lunatics go on to describe their tendency to purchase mulitple pairs in various obscure colors and, of course, to discard of said shoes once they have been worn. each also shares his individual shoe size and exactly which colors and styles of air force ones he prefers (for the friends and family of the st lunatics, this should definitely make holiday gift buying easier this year). additionally, each rapper shares his own personal shoe-related antecodes. for instance, nelly briefly recounts a time when someone touched his air force ones (this person is now dead), and murphy tells the story of the helpful if not star-struck service he received on his latest trip to foot locker.

all in all, aside from even further bluring the line between popular culture and advertising and taking us one step closer to the souless, ad-saturated dystopian future that awaits us all, its actually an okay song. I definitely didnt think it deserved heavy rotation when I first heard it, but then again, when I first heard "hot in herre" I thought it was a joke. I thought the song was so bad I was actually embarrassed for nelly. apparently I needed to put more faith in the neptunes. and Ive learned my lesson. if you need me, Ill be at footlocker.

Comments: 2 Posted by michael on 29 October 2002 at 10:59 AM

michael and Chris both need to shower me with accolades, as I have (I think) now turned on remote desktop for both of them. By that, I mean that I turned some port forwarding on on the router. What else did I do today? Well, I fixed a computer that had been described as tot* by a member of the Tucek family without ever touching the computer. By that, I mean that I told michael what keys to press (I believe the sequence was DEL, F10, y). I also participated in two ACM meetings, went on an ACM soda run, did my 455 homework, and outlined an independent study idea with michael (now we just need to find a faculty member to advise us on it).

The agenda for tomorrow? Meeting, class, class, TA, class I hate. Guess which one I might skip.

Also, I need to do some work for whirlpool, but I need a free phone line to do so, which means I might have to wait until tomorrow.

I've also been thinking some more about the senior cs survey that I want ACM to organize. I have a lot of things I want to mention to the department and I'm sure other seniors and super-seniors do as well, but they just don't have the appropriate forum for doing so. So if I manage to find a few free hours (or happen to find myself in a boring lecture) I might put together an outline of questions and start thinking about how the survey could be structured if offered online.

* German for dead.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 October 2002 at 12:02 AM

nothingtobedone: how about you write all the code and I will sleep on the couch.
Zacharoony: hey, there's an idea. i'll gladly sleep on the couch while you write code. awesome.
nothingtobedone: no, you are confused. I will be the one sleeping. well, it will look like Im sleeping, but I will actually be on a deep spiritual quest through my own psyche on a search for the optimal navigation algorithm
nothingtobedone: and when I wake, I will share my enlightenment
Zacharoony: duuude.
Zacharoony: you're the cs buddha

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 24 October 2002 at 6:58 PM

I wonder if this means I should curtail my weekly trips to the Joy Luck Chinese Buffet?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 24 October 2002 at 9:22 AM

My week is going pretty well. After about five hours of solid coding, I got the long-delayed 455 assignment done right at the deadline on Monday night. Last night I skipped out on my 513 work to see "Spirited Away" at the Tivoli. It was Japanese, but Disney produced it, so it made more sense than most (if not all) anime. Today, after a mildly useful databases group meeting, I had some lunch, did the penultimate 333 videotaping session, and then worked on 513. I didn't actually get any 513 work done, but Ron Loui didn't seem to notice that we are at the same place now that we were last week. Of course, there were a lot of tried and failed attempts at getting things working. And we managed to incorporate our terraserver project into our 513 project. It's like wugrade. We do a project we want to do and we trick the cs department into thinking that its useful.

Tonight my friend Jon Polk is driving down from Purdue. I believe he's driving back tomorrow, which makes little sense to me (10 hours in the car for 20 hours in StL?), but what do I know. Regardless, its pretty cool that he's driving down here. In fact, I'm so looking forward to it that I cleaned my room in preparation. (Or perhaps I just didn't want to look like a slob.) Anyway, Jon and his girlfriend will be here through Thursday, and then on Friday I'm driving to Evansville for the weekend. But I should be back in time for the Blast game on Sunday. I just wish I'd been able to go tonight, but groceries and friends from out-of-town prevented me.

Addendum: Chris and I followed a car to Schnucks today whose license plate read "JEDI." And there was a Pokemon hanging from the rear-view mirror. This is proof that there are people in the world much weirder than me.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 23 October 2002 at 10:01 PM

Apartment decorations are in progress. michael and I were up late last night working on a pair of Java programs that let us interface with terraserver and join a bunch of terraserver images to create one large image. Sadly, michael's image joining code doesn't seem robust enough to handle 3,072 200x200 pixel images. At least it wasn't last night. As I type this, the program, after having been told to set its heap size at 1500MB, is churning away on the images. If this works, the end product will be a 42"x32" poster of St. Louis printed at 300dpi. It's been crunching away on abstract for a few hours now (I haven't been able to check it since 2:30), so I'm hoping its done. But more likely it seems like it will have run out of memory.

Speaking of terraserver, it seems like they released a new version recently. You can search by address, which makes it easy for the navigationally-challenged among you to find your house.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 22 October 2002 at 4:51 PM

I've recently returned from the wilds of northern Illinois, where I attended a student-run conference put on by the ACM chapter of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This the third year that WashU's ACM chapter drove up for the conference, and this year we tricked 10 people into going up to hear people like Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris, and "Rasterman," the designer of the Enlightenment windows manager, speak. We also ate lots of (not so good) free food and got to play Quake in true virtual reality in UIUC's CAVE. All things considered, it was a pretty good trip.

But, as in years past, after spending some time in a CS department that is easily ten times larger than WashU's, and has an ACM chapter that puts ours to shame, I found myself wondering if I would have been better served at a larger university. In the end, I decided that I probably wouldn't be, but they really do have an impressive facility there.

What follows are a few random ideas I had after seeing the CS facilities at UIUC.

• Scattered throughout the DCL are display boxes filled with old photos and hardware from earlier eras of computing. There must be at least twenty of these display cases, all over the place. Seeing all these display cases has inspired me to do something similar here at WashU, albeit on a smaller scale. ACM has an empty display case that we aren't using for anything at the moment. I wonder if there is a collection of old ACM photographs that I can use for this? Or something else that would be cool to put on display? I'll have to look into this a bit more.
  
• ACM needs a project for its members to work on. If we pick the right project, and do a bit of initial work, this will hopefully be something that other people want to work on, thus bringing more people into ACM. The project I've been pushing for the past few days is an interactive display for the CS dept. Most of the time it would show nifty computer graphics related to work people are doing in the department, but it could also serve to direct people to professors offices or give information about the department when a user requests it (probably through a touchscreen). I think this could be a pretty cool little application, and everyone I spoke to about it seemed to think so as well, so perhaps I'll try to get something organized.
  
• Since we're on the topic of ACM, I think it would be very cool if ACM put together a questionnaire that asked seniors to give their impressions of all the CS classes that they've taken and of the entire sequence of classes as a whole. ACM could distribute the questionnaires, compile the results and share them with the department. I'd be interested in seeing what departing seniors had to think of the courses they've taken, and I would think that the department would like to get feedback like this.
  
• The consensus opinion seems to be that ACM needs a TV or projector and game system for the lounge.
  
• Somewhat related to the second bullet above, but a fishtank VR system that uses a camera to track the user's head location would be a very cool project to work on.

I'll have more to say about the conference later, but this seems like enough for now. If any of you have ideas or input on anything I've mentioned, email me or leave a comment.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 October 2002 at 5:44 PM

10 rules of e-business failure.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 October 2002 at 4:27 PM

For those of you interested, and there can't be that many of you, my interview today went fairly well. Despite other indications on their website, I didn't get asked many of the traditional interview type questions. I was asked one, but I think I did alright with it. But mostly we just talked about Cerner, Java, C#, and Kansas City. The guy I interviewed with indicated that an HR person would be calling in the next few weeks, so I guess I'll see where things go from there.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 17 October 2002 at 6:18 PM

I've recently developed an interest in P3P, the Privacy Preferences Policy. My interest is mostly pragmatic, as I want IE to accept -273 cookies on any security setting. Now, this is mostly boring to all of you, but what I found interesting is the fact that the big cheese in the P3P world is Lorrie Cranor. Now, I've never met Dr. Cranor, but when I was reading through all this P3P stuff and her name kept popping up, I knew I'd heard it before. As it turns out, she was a WashU CS student, worked with Ron Cytron, and was, I believe, a past WU|ACM president.

Anyway, there's no real point to this story. I just found that a bit weird.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 17 October 2002 at 1:55 PM

I'm not sure if this is a good ad for apple. I read it as "if you're a ditzy girl high on paint fumes, you should switch to apple."

Comments: 8 Posted by david on 16 October 2002 at 12:36 AM

Got four loads of laundry done tonight. In series, because there is only one washer and dryer on our floor and I'm too lazy to go to the laundromat a block from the apartment, where I could have gotten things done in less time for less money. Now I remember why I only do laundry as little as possible.

Free lunch tomorrow. I'm just hoping I don't sleep through it. I also need to remember to get a haircut tomorrow afternoon. And buy some food.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 October 2002 at 2:41 AM

Those of use here at -273 are looking into expanding our collection of hosted sites. So if you're interested in joining the ranks of The Chris Hill Festival, Minutia Press, Rubidium, or Mount Athos leave us a comment or send me an email. You can use movable type, blogger, or any other method you like to post.

So let us know if you'd like to start a blog or move an existing site over to -273.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 11 October 2002 at 5:02 PM

Overheard:

Jack McCoy on Law & Order:  "Never get Freudian with a man holding a pickle."

Tim McCarver on Miguel Cairo:  "Other guys are touching him to get hot."

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 October 2002 at 1:00 AM

This article from the nytimes about the Japanese "toilet wars" reads like an article out of the Onion. It's just insane.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 October 2002 at 2:03 PM

Yesterday I drove onto the WashU campus at about a quarter 'til noon. I left at about 2:30. In the morning. And although I have a nifty http proxy server that filters out words like "Oberkfell" and "CS423," I never again want to spend 15 hours in the ACM Lounge. (If you're ever implementing a proxy server in Java, I recommend taking a look at the ByteArrayOutputStream. It'll simplify your life.)

Oh, apparently phone and internet service were down in the apartment all day yesterday. michael seemed really disturbed by this, but I (possibly due to the fact that I wasn't there) handled things pretty well.

On an entirely different topic, I've decided to rearrange my room. I'm hoping that by swapping the bed and desk locations that I'll gain some desk space courtesy of the very large window sills at the far end of my room. So that, along with about ten loads of laundry, will be my project for this evening.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 October 2002 at 12:40 PM

A few days ago I decided that the best way to see Cardinals games next year was to obtain press credentials for the games. That way I could get in for free and watch the games from the press box. So my initial thinking along these lines consisted of looking for the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) website. Sadly, they don't seem to have a website. But I did find out, via the Associated Press Sports Editors site, that BBWAA dues are $50 per year, which seems very affordable, but they aren't open to Internet journalists, which kills my whole plan, as I don't plan on actually doing any extra work beyond occasionally posting things to a website.

I was initially rather sad about all of this. Even though I didn't expect anything of it, I kept doing google searches. And then I found pressbox.mlb.com. Apparently, Major League Baseball does its own credentialing of press officials. And they seem more than happy to credential Internet journalists. So now I just need to develop some baseball content, save it all on a separate page, and apply for my press credentials. Seems like an easy off-season plan.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 6 October 2002 at 12:14 PM

chris and lucas have been challenging one another with football picks the last few weeks, and since it looked like fun, I decided to get in on the action. of course, since I know nothing about football, I had to do a bit of research. specifically, I went to nfl.com and looked up the names of the teams. my detailed analysis follows:

TB at ATL: TB. I was stumped by this one at first, but it was later pointed out to me that "pirates can do anything they put their minds to," and Im inclined to agree. Ive got to go with the buccaneers.

OAK at BUF: OAK. by the same logic, I think the raiders are the clear pick in this game. besides, what the hell are "bills" anyway?

NYG at DAL: NYG. they dont really say how big of a giant were talking about here, but I think its fair to assume that a mere cowboy would almost certainly be crushed.

WAS at TEN: TEN. Im going to have to put my money on the ancient and all-powerful fathers of the gods.

CIN at IND: CIN. the colts have speed, but theyre still young. and the bengals, well known for preying upon the young, sick, or wounded, should have no trouble.

NE at MIA: MIA. under ordinary circumstances I might be inclined to pick the patriots, but this game is on the dolphins home turf, and they are going to be next to unbeatable in the water.

PIT at NO: PIT. this was pretty much a toss-up. but when you get down to it, I just couldnt picture a saint hurting anyone, and Im afraid turning the other cheek isnt going to get them anywhere on sunday.

ARI at CAR: ARI. the cardinals defense is definitely a big factor in this match-up, but they wont be able to hold out forever. if the panthers are patient theyll get their chance.

KC at NYJ: NYJ. this match-up hardly seems fair. the chiefs primitive weaponry will be of no use against the jets, who are favored to obliterate their opponents with ballistic missles.

SD at DEN: SD. this one was a tough one for me, mostly because I am not exactly sure what a "charger" is. I always thought it was a horse, which means going up against the broncos should be a fairly even match-up, but judging from the chargers logo they are some kind of lightning-based energy being, so that kind of tips the scales in their favor.

STL at SF: SF. rams are pretty strong and sure-footed animals, but in the mines they are at a distinct disadvantage. expect the 49ers to capitalize on this.

PHI at JAX: JAX. just like ARI vs CAR, this one will be about the eagles defense vs the jaguars offense. the eagles cant afford to make a mistake.

BAL at CLE: CLE. as dark and mysterious as the ravens are, Im afraid they dont stand much of a chance against the color brown.

GB at CHI: CHI. again, Im not sure what the packers are. I believe it has something to do with cheese, and this really does not bode well for them. because bears are big, and their teeth are sharp.

Comments: 2 Posted by michael on 6 October 2002 at 5:20 AM

Dogs

Dogs were invented in the 12th century by China. Since then they have spread to all corners of the globe, including but not limited to St. Louis and China. Most dogs are covered in fur; others are covered in wool. The latter are often refered to as "sheep." Some dogs are Labradors. When dogs are trained to play basketball, they are allowed to play in organized leagues alongside human competitors. When this happens, the dog often becomes a star player and gives new hope to a team of underdogs (no pun intended). Sometimes in the sequel the same dog also plays football. Such dogs are commonly known as "golden receivers." Someday there will be a dog president.

Comments: 5 Posted by michael on 4 October 2002 at 6:30 PM

I was going to write a rant about MLB having a playoff game start at 10pm (11pm on the east coast), but Bernie Miklasz of the Post-Dispatch beat me to it. And he backs up his argument with facts and figures that support what all of us were thinking when the starting time was announced: this isn't the way major League Baseball should go about trying to lure in the younger fans who've moved away from baseball to basketball and football.

If the moms and dads out there let their kids stay up for the game (and it seems unlikely that anyone except us wacky college kids were up), they got to see a great game. Matt Morris was shaky in the first few innings (as often seems to be the case for him), but he locked it in later, and supported by twelve Cardinals runs (6 against Randy Johnson) he got the win.

Morris was good, but he wasn't the story of the game. For me, the most telling fact is this: every Cardinal starter including the pitcher either scored a run, got an RBI, or both. This just help highlight the Cardinals true strength, the top-to-bottom quality of their batting order. Their eight regulars, paired with a deep bench and a quality bullpen make them next to impossible to beat when they're firing on all cylinders. And their recent record seems to bear this out. They've won 22 of 28 since September 1st, including a 3-game sweep of the Diamondbacks.

So if you have any sympathy in your heart, you should offer it to Curt Schilling. He'll be the starting pitcher on Thursday against a Cardinals offense that's at the top of their game. And Schilling is coming off of a set of starts that are, at best, sub-par and a September ERA that was over 5.

Before last night's game, I told Chris that I had picked the Cardinals to win over the Diamondbacks in four games. Clearly, I was mistaken. The Redbirds will take it in three.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 October 2002 at 1:44 PM

I'm sure everyone reading this site wants to get a free trip to Hollywood during Academy Awards week, so I'd like to point you here. Take a look at the sample problems at the bottom of the page. If you're intrigued by them, you should send an email to acm@cs.wustl.edu and express your interest in participating in the ACM programming contest. If WashU fields a winning team at regionals, that team gets to go to Hollywood and participate in the finals.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 1 October 2002 at 1:18 AM