As our daughter approaches 3 years old she has begun to play some simple board games, one of which is Hi Ho! Cherry-O. While playing it recently my wife lamented that the game was taking forever to end. The analysis in the Wikipedia page is for a single player, but the majority of the time […]
A couple of weeks ago my wife mentioned an upcoming show at 924 Gilman St, a well known music venue in Berkeley California. The lineup for January 7 2017 was curious: The Mr. T Experience, Pansy Division, The Smugglers, Squirtgun, Brent’s TV, The Potatomen and Kepi Ghoulie. I thought she was joking, this was 2016 […]
A few days ago my webhost informed me that my blog may have been compromised. I did a bit of investigation and that appeared to be the case. I’ve spent some time removing the visible artifacts, upgrading the software, deleting unnecessary things etc. It also appears that most of the legitimate comments on various posts […]
This is not a post about sorting algorithms; nor is it celebratory. December 10, 2012 marked the 1 year anniversary of what seems to be the worst event in my life to date (and perhaps some of the other people involved). I have resisted writing about it in the past because I felt the need […]
As a kid I often wanted a pet [dog] that I could play with, but my parents weren’t too interested in having any (we had some freshwater fish) and I likely couldn’t handle the responsibility myself; so I went pet-less until around the age of 11. At that time, we reached an agreement that I […]
tl;dr Last month I was part of an event 6 times rarer than winning the MEGA Millions Lotto jackpot. My grandfather played poker with a core group of friends (to my knowlegde he did not play in card rooms or casinos) and taught me the basics of the game. We played Five-card draw with penny […]
My Flickr account, while public, is not something that gets many views. According to the stats, my photos have been viewed 23,710 times. 10% of those views are for one photo someone decided to link to in a comment on Digg in 2009 (original post is here and someone re-posted a link to my photo […]
When was the last time you put a coin into a parking meter and had to turn a knob in order to complete the transaction? I can’t remember when I last watched the red or yellow metal plates rise and fall, checked to see if the arrow indicated I had been credited the appropriate amount […]
On January 18, 2012 a number of websites “went dark” to protest the United States House of Representatives Stop Online Piracy Act and Senate Protect IP Act, more commonly known as SOPA and PIPA. Like many things, there are many way to go about “blacking out” one’s website. Wikipedia used JavaScript and CSS to overlay […]
Towards the end of last year I signed up for the “basic” track of the Stanford Engineering Introduction To Artificial Intelligence class, mainly out of curiosity, but also because the instructors (Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig) and I share the same employer. I intended to follow along at a leisurely pace, unsure if I would […]
