Facebook and Contra, together at last

Ok Seriously, This Works...THE FACEBOOK KONAMI TRICK---
While on facebook:
On your keyboard - up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, Enter key,
Next: On your mouse = Right click, Left click

Next: On your keyboard press up and down and magic crcles will appear. After you follow all the steps scroll up or down...then the circles will appear. The only way to get rid of them is to refresh the page.

How cool is that?

Give Your Simple Trigonometry problems a (sin) Wave Goodbye

Kate Nowak: mild mannered high school math teacher, or genius extrordinaire? You decide (I hate suspense: she's both).

As I've been bludgeoning my way through calculus, I've been discovering that trigonometry (or as students refer to it: flippin' ghey math) is becoming more and more important. While googling trigonometric mnemonic devices this evening, my buddy Max came across this gem in the rough on Kate's blog f(t):



I won't paraphrase her description since she pretty much nailed it, so let's use some quotes...

"Flip down the finger that corresponds to the angle whose sine and cosine you need.
The number of fingers to the left gives you the sine, and the number of fingers to the right gives you the cosine.

So if you flip down your index finger which corresponds to 30 degrees...
there is one finger to the left.
and there are three fingers to the right.

Try it for the fingers that correspond to the other reference angles. For example, if you flip down your pinky, there are four fingers to the left (sin(90) = radical 4 over 2 = 1) and zero fingers to the right (cos 90 = radical 0 over 2 = 0.) It works!

It's just another way of organizing the cofunction behavior of sine and cosine to remember the values of five reference angles, but adults and kids both flip out when I show them. Kids especially feel that they "don't have to memorize" if they know this method."

Hey Gents, I don't see a ring on that left hand. Hats off to Kate, trigonometry superhero.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (oh my!)

My salute today goes out to my favorite web comic - XKCD. I can't imagine that anyone with a shred of nerd in them doesn't check this site out every Mon, Wed, and Fri, but incase you haven't heard of it, now you have. It's safe for work 99.99% of the time.

Starwars Uncut - Create your own scenes and submit!

Hats off to Gizmodo for unearthing this Gem. Casey Pugh, a lead Flash and senior app developer at Vimeo has started something called "Star Wars Uncut." This project challenges anyone who wants to pitch in to recreate 15 seconds of their favorite "Star Wars: A New Hope" scenes any way they see fit and submit it to the collective (http://www.starwarsuncut.com/).

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Obligatory Win7 post (Update)

It's awesome. Why am I losing internet connectivity when I put my computer in tablet mode? Still pretty awesome though.

Customer "Care" (and using hangups to solve hang-ups)

I scream, you scream, We've all screamed for better customer care when we finally admit (after hours of fiddling) that we might not be able to fix that faulty piece of gear. Now, we all know in our hearts that when we dial that 800 number-of-shame that we're going to have to endure a battery of choose-your-own adventure choices before a tech graces us with their know-how... and that's not a quick and painless process; god help you if you misdial. Then you sit on hold (though tonight, I actually had no queue in front of me, so boo-yah!). While they connect you, even before getting the actual help you called for, the most important part of the process begins.

I don't know how it's done, but some cosmic lottery assigns you either 1.) the guy who takes his help-manuals home with him, and reads them to his children at night, or 2.) a total douchebag. There really is no grey area here, because when you've fiddled for hours, battled with a voice recording that asks you to input the binary equivalent of what your problem is, and waited on hold, if that person isn't so excited about solving your problem they can barely contain themselves, you kinda want to punch them in the kidneys.

I upgraded to Windows 7 (it's awesome), but I've had some compatibility issues that I've tried to solve on my own for the last couple of weeks. Finally I gave in, called Lenovo, suffered through the shenanigans mentioned above, and finally got Frank on the line. Frank... is a douchebag. Now, if I was still new at the "getting help" game, this story would go a lot further, but I'm a little older, a little wiser, so *click*.

Trust me folks, it's easier to wait on hold for another 45 min than deal with Frank the douchebag. Needless to say Matt was a lot more helpful, my new drivers are downloaded, my problems are solved, and I have time to go grab that Choco Taco I've been thinking about since noon.

Building good habits

As a born-again student chasing my geek dreams, I've had to make some adjustments. Math, for starters... totally awesome, the basis of most of the stuff you spend hours drooling over as you surf your favorite tech blogs, and as it would turn out, really really hard to learn if you've taken a 10 year hiatus from it. (I'm taking a 30 minute hiatus from it now as I write this).

I've found that there's an important connection between learning calculus, getting good at Halo, growing muscle, or accomplishing pretty much anything you set out to do. You probably instinctively know that connection is practice. I didn't just wake up good at Halo (actually, I'm still not all that great); I had a 7 year old (not a typo) wipe the floor with me and taunt me in his sweet, childlike, rotten little voice... and then I practiced and practiced until finally I beat him. Same story with derivatives, finishing a marathon, etc.

What I didn't expect, and what may or may not take you by surprise, is that stuff we don't do is practice too: Not studying. Not going to the gym. Not consistently writing in your blog that only your mom reads. I think the analogy that might strike home the quickest is the dirty laundry corollary. I have a hamper... at least I think I do, but instead, I practice daily carefully using my dirty laundry as an impromptu carpet covering. My room isn't a war-zone right away, but after a week or so, it really starts to build up... that's how I've started viewing the other foibles (did I use that right?) in my life... incrementally not all that bad, but after a while, I have to spend an entire Saturday washing and folding my bad habits.

The beauty for you and I? There are TONS of systems for improving the way we do stuff... my favorite places to look are Lifehacker and instructables.com. If you've got something you want fixed, give 'em a whirl. I'll probably refer to these sites a lot... and very likely point out favorite posts there. I also plan to start posting my own instructables as I progress through my Bio-Electrical engineering/Comp Sci degree. Speaking of breaking bad habits, it's time to get back to the books.

Not a great first post, but not the worst one out there... :)

Post 0

So, if I'm going to start a blog (vice a web-journal), I need to lay down a foundation. I don't expect this to go totally smoothly, but my idea is to get some attention, and more importantly get some feedback... Yeah, the last thing the intertubes need is another tech blog, but I've got long term goals here, and I set them high [Wired, Engadget, Geekdad (one day)].

People that might find something in common with me... new engineering/comp sci students, tech geeks, and DIYers. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my only follower will be my mom. I guess we'll just have to see.

So without further Ado, onto my 1st post.