roguelazer's website

First, some background for the non-technical among you. A window manager is a piece of software that controls the windows on your computer. It will do things like placement, drawing, keybinding, et cetera. If you're on Windows or Mac OS X, you have a window manager built-in to your operating system and cannot easily change it. However, if you're on a more traditional *nix (Linux, Solaris), you are free to select your window manager. In this post, I'll talk a little about what I use and why it's awesome.

Well, my job search is over. As of today, I've accepted an offer from Google for a summer internship. I'll be in New York City from June 1^st through August 21^th, working at Google's 9^th Avenue office. I'm not sure where exactly I'll be living (I'm looking to apartments, student housing, etc., but haven't settled on anything yet), but I'll try to keep you, my loyal readers, up to date.

It was a hard decision (I had a few offers, including DreamHost and DirecTV, plus more interviewers interested), but, I mean, it's sort of hard to say no to working for Google. It also didn't hurt that they offered me the most money. :-)

Anyhow, whee! Now I can go back to worrying about work now, instead of three months from now. For the time being, though, it's back to spring break with me.

So, I working on my algs problem set just now; which is to say, I was browsing the web and trying very hard not to think about amortized runtime analysis. Anyhow, I found this awesome webcomic called minus. I know, I know, I'm years behind the curve, and it's a little... odd. But it has a persistently beautiful surrealism to it. Anyhow, you all should go read it. And, of course, all of the other webcomics I read are listed under "Links" above.

WordPress 2.7.1 has been released¹. And I'm sure that you, my loyal cadre of imaginary readers, will be glad to know that I've upgraded. :-)

For the past couple of weeks, I've been hearing from a number of "Fishbots". If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, there's this service called Project Upstream which runs a network of AIM bots with names like ThemedSalmon and "SweptCoho". The idea behind these bots seems to be that they collect AIM nicks and then randomly connect pairs of people. It's sort of a cool idea, if you think about it. Random, and completely anonymous, one-time contact with a person.

Today was an absolutely beautiful day. Clear blue skies, mid-70's temperature, low smog, completely perfect. So, like any other sane human being, I decided to take a walk. Specifically, I hiked up to the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park, which is a nice little place a few miles north of campus. On the way there, I was really struck by life in California. Here I was, walking along on one of the most beautiful days of the year, and I didn't see more than a half-dozen other pedestrians on the two-and-a-half mile walk up to the park. Of course, I saw several hundred cars, trucks, and SUVs. I saw people driving from their homes on Mills down the street to Vons and back again. It's so weird here — on the one hand, a lot of people seem to be "fitness freaks" and very concerned with "wellness", but on the other hand there's this overbearing car culture...

So, I picked up a copy of Andrew Bird's new album Noble Beast today. Yes, I know that today is January 18th and it's not released until January 20th. That's why this post isn't going to be published for two days.

Anyhow, the album is excellent. Everything you know and love from Bird's previous releases is here, but more polished. Some things that I thought particularly stood out:

• The instrumental beginning of Effigy. And the double-stopping soloing in the middle. Really, the whole song.
• Unfolding Fans. Makes me think of Brian Wilson, but in a more minor key

Yeah, I know, this isn't much of a review. Well, I'm not much of a reviewer. So I'll give you my bottom line -- go buy the album now.

Well, break's over. I'm back at Mudd. Hopefully, I'll keep updating as the semester goes on.

Ciao.

So, I'm currently in San Clemente for a couple of days before going back to Claremont. As usual, the trip cross-country was fun. Lots of hours in a tin can. Anyhow, something amusing happened at T.F. Green when I was leaving. TSA got confused by my backpack in the X-Ray machine (understandable, since it's got a zillion wires and such in it). So they start going through it and they find that I brought a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The guy then ignores the rest of my bag, pulls out the book, and runs it through the X-Ray while running swabs from it through the chemical analyzer. I'm not sure whether it's worse that

• they thought they'd find anything on a chemical scan/X-Ray of a book
• they were more concerned with a book than with the tangle of wires in my bag
• they were interested in a book in the first place

Isn't travel fun?

I just had a fun day. For some value of fun, at least. I spent most of the day fighting with CMSs for the Narrows Center for the Arts, which is considering moving away from their antiquated website that some guy hacked together for them. I mean, not that tables-based layouts aren't still cool and all. Oh wait, they're not. So I was playing with Joomla and Drupal to see if I could cobble together something slightly less ugly. I ended up spending most of the day withing with Drupal, the Drupal Content Construction Kit, and Contemplate. Joomla's admin interface got on my nerves too quickly. Anyhow, it takes a lot of clicks, but it seems possible to put together pretty much anything in Drupal, which is nice. Of course, I'm not sure that I want to invest the kind of time that it would take to make a decent theme/stylesheet for the Narrows. Especially not with the semester started. But I demoed a quick and dirty version to them, so hopefully their eyes are opened a bit. Of course, I didn't spend any time on the theme at all. So the odds are just as good that they'll ignore the content and focus on the mediocre presentation and just not pay any attention at all. Such is life, I suppose. You can see a screenshot of one of the pages at right.

After that, my folks decided that we should all go out to dinner. Fine with me. We went to a place called Mesa 21 in Fall River, which replaced a nice Italian restaurant called Il Piatto Semplice. Well, Mesa 21 did not live up to its predecessor. They decided to add a bar, which dominates the room in a terrible faux-stone design. They also installed a giant-screen TV behind the bar which shows loud ESPN. Basically, they turned one of the only nice non-Portuguese restaurants in the city into a loud sports bar with mediocre food and no atmosphere to speak of. *sigh*.

So then I get back and guess what I have in my inbox! A nice e-mail from Google informing me that while I have a nice shiny resume, they "do not have a position that is a strong match with [my] qualifications". I know, it was a reach to think that I could get one of the Google internships, but it's still a little depressing to get a rejection before the application deadline even hits. One less thing to look forward to, I guess.

That's it for me for now. I may or may not decide to post something else in the next couple of days. If not, well, I'll post again when I'm back in California. Ciao.