Grad-Blog
An Important Annoucement
The Time Traveler ConventionMay 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)
Attention Span
I've noticed a recurring joke on the Simpsons (at least in the third and fourth seasons which I have on DVD) that Bart and Lisa have attention span and memory problems due to watching too much TV. I think the same thing is happening with the iPod and iTunes. Shuffle is the rage now. Apple even has an "iPod" that basically just does shuffle play. Now shuffle has it's uses. It kinda feels like you have your own radio station, and it's probably a great thing for parties (not that I know). But I start to wonder if people can just listen to an album straight through anymore. We need our ever changing burst of 4 minute songs. It's too boring to listen to the whole album as it was intended by the artist (of course I'm assuming that most of the album is worth listening to). Good luck actually having the attention span to listening to something like Beethoven's ninth symphony (which usually runs about an hour).
I recently bought a bookshelf stero system. The past couple years I've listened to music off of my iBook or iPod. Besides the fact the stero system sounds much better, it's been great listening to CDs as a whole. It's actually kinda surprising what I miss with iTunes/iPod playing on shuffle. I also just recently got the ultimate listen straigth through album: Pink Floyd's
Dark Side of the Moon. It's great, straight through with no pauses between songs because iTunes/iPod doesn't have gapless playback.
Group-think News-flash
During my normal geeky wasting time ritual of reading
slashdot I came across
this post. Now if you read the first (highly moderated) comments they immediatly start proclaiming Mac OS X's greatness, even though that's slightly off topic. Now, I like OS X a lot, but slashdot used to be the lair of the Linux nerd. Something like this post happens all the time. There's some story about some computer system or OS and every one starts putting on their OS X fanboy uniforms. It's true all the more when Longhorn is brought up. So the slash-group-think seems to be saying, OS X is in, Linux is sooooo 90's. Oh and all that open source / free software idealism, it's gone because shiny widgets and the iPod are so sweet.
Poor Graduate Student
I decided to file my taxes online this year, so I headed over to H&R Block's site. After entering my W2 forms they display this page with information about applying for food stamps. Man, I am a poor graduate student.
Where's the Drama?
I dropped my differential geometry course a couple of weeks ago. The subject matter was completely over my head; I couldn't do hardly any assigned problems. I couldn't do the midterm. In short it was a crisis. And I miss it.
Since I dropped, I've had plenty of time to work on my other, much easier classes. But there's no stress, no panic. There's nothing to complain about, or even talk about, when someone asks you how you're doing. I guess it's better this way though, at least for my blood pressure.
The Gmail Joke
The April Fools joke on Gmail was that they were going to have infinity+1 GB of storage space. To bad that infinity+1 equals infinity. Doesn't really buy you that much.
