Saturday! (Open Thread)

Today's open thread topic is...

What was the most interesting thing you worked on this week?

For me, that was tracking down one particular bug in the simulator which was causing an assertion to fail. Those familiar with C/C++ coding may recognize that assertions are things which should never fail, if your program is correct. Well, in my case it wasn't, as a particular assertion kept failing in VERY rare cases. Like, needing millions or billions of trials to get a run where it failed. This makes tracking it down very tough. However, I managed to finally figure it out! It turns out to be a case where a floating point number is exactly 0. So it wasn't > 0.0, but it also was not negative. This edge case was being checked in the wrong way, and that was causing the assertion to fail. Why was it so rare? The number was being generated by a random number generator, the chance of it actually being 0 was incredibly small. But it did happen, and I finally tracked it down.

Saturday is for... (Open Thread)

And it's time for open thread day again! Today's rough topic is your favorite music you listened to this week. :)

For me, that's a close match between many songs on _Set Yourself on Fire_ (Stars), the song _Dead On Arrival_ (Fall Out Boy), and the entire album _Black Parade_ (My Chemical Romance). I'm going to give the favorite award to the latter, because it's what got me through some tough spots this week. The first two are still great though, just didn't carry the week. :)

Open thread (open thread)

This is the open thread about open threads. So, what books have yall read lately?

Most recently here, I read:
_Glasshouse_ by Charles Stross
_Karma Girl_ and _Hot Mama_ by Jennifer Estep
_Radio Freefall_ by Matthew Jarpe

All were excellent, and I may get around to reviewing them sometime. The first is sci-fi, about a history professor (sorta) who gets his memory erased and proceeds from there. The second and third are superhero books, set in Bigtime. The author (and I think the books) I found out about via Girls Read Comics, and they are superhero action / romance / psychology. The last was a book which I spotted that had an absolutely beautiful cover. I ended up reading a chapter in the bookstore and had to get it. It's sci-fi and follows a musician named Aqualung (I caught the reference immediately! Thanks dad!), a computer programmer (sorta) and a band as they battle the evils of politics, censorship and lots of other stuff! Really tough to explain that one in a single line, but it was a good book and had some interesting ideas about artificial intelligences, communications distances and heterogeneity of society.

Addendum: So, I said it was the open thread about open threads, but it ended up being an open thread about books! Feel free to hijack it to talk about other stuff, like what open threads you've read recently that you found interesting. :)

Saturday! (Open Thread)

Ok, so this post may be a bit late, but it's open thread time anyways! How did yall's weeks go? Doing anything really cool next week?

Saturday is for... (Open Thread)

My saturday: Chilling. Oh yeah. Played some Bioshock, raided ZA, now I'm just chilling. How about you all?

Saturday! (Open Thread)

And now, the filler saturday post which will masquerade as an open thread!

In this post, Keanu Reaves will play Batman, Christian Bale will play the Human Torch, Hugh Jackman will be Cyclops, and Jean Grey will star as Emma Frost.

Whoa.

Saturday! (Open Thread)

Oops, it's sunday now though. Oh well! Hope you all had a great saturday, mine was very good. :)

So... how about them divisional championship series things they have in baseball? I haven't been actually keeping track, having sorta lost interest when 1) the Braves didn't get into the postseason and 2) the Yankees got eliminated from the postseason (yay!). I saw a quick blurb today that the Rockies are one game away from their first world series, that's pretty cool. :)

Oh yeah, this is officially a post for an Open Thread! So... if there's something you want to talk about, post! :)

Zoomp! (Open Thread)

I'm feeling a bit under the weather at the moment (cold - congestion/sore throat) so it's time for an open thread. To get things started, here's two links I found amusing:

Unitarian Jihad (via TNH's Particles on Making Light) - The Unitarian Jihad wrote in to the SF Chronicle. It actually got posted. It is awesome. I <3 Unitarians. :)

Team Fortress 2 Trailer: Demoman - An interview with TF2's Demoman. Any gamer will probably like this one, especially if you have played any FPS style games. (Also recommended are the other three TF2 trailers they have, I think I linked one a few days ago: Engineer, Soldier and Heavy)

It's a (Open Thread)!

Alas, a day late
perhaps too slow
or is it time?

One step too late
one step behind
or one step sideways?

This could be a ... (Open Thread)

Maybe it's an airplane? What do you all think?

No Content, part 2 (open thread)

Oh how I wish I
had something to say today
I'm not a poet

First Month (open thread)

So today marks the first month where I've written a post for every day. I note that while there is a post for every day, sadly there was a small break where there was a delay in the posting, which was the trip to Chicago. I still feel like I've accomplished something though, and so I'll continue writing.

I think I will list my favorite posts this month, just because I really enjoyed writing and seeing comments on some of them, and think it's important to point that out.

Restaurant Shyness and Graduation I had a tough time writing, but it was worth it when so many people added their own thoughts to them, so I liked those for that reason.

Swimmingly was similarily hard to write, but when I was done I felt a whole lot better for just being able to write it down.

Graduation Photos and Rat Guide were the most enjoyable to just write, as I liked adding my own thoughts to the photos, and the editing and arranging of the photos was also fun.

Finally, Ratatouille was my shortest post, and yet I felt that I managed to say exactly what I wanted to. Even if I did use one sentence which had a whole lot of commas.

Anyways, thanks to everyone reading, it's been encouraging. If you had favorites, or things you'd like to see, subjects you think I might like to write about, and so on, feel free to post it in the comments here. Or just use this as an open thread if there's something else you want to talk about, cause that'd be fun as well.

Short Post (Open Thread?)

Today's entry is going to be a short post. I have a bunch of pictures from Frances of Em's graduation last friday, but haven't put them in order yet, that will likely be the next post.

At the moment I've been frustrated by/at work, one of the things I've been working on has been a lot more annoying than I expected: there are two different parameter files for the energy model which contain roughly the same data, but the format for each is fairly different, up to the point where the indexing is different (one is 0-indexed, the other is 1-indexed) and the ordering of base pairs is also different. This roughly translates to it being a royal pain in the neck to have a backend data structure that can be fed data for both types on demand. So it's gone slower than I expected, but I have a meeting tomorrow which I'll need to have some demonstrable progress for, not just the hundred lines of code I've put together which only appear to work.

Another frustration has been the temperature. It's been nice and warm out here, but inside it's still a lot cooler, usually because for some reason the existence of air conditioning means that it should be kept way too freezing inside, such that one cannot be comfortable both inside a building and outside it. It has been way too cold in lab lately, and I find myself freezing when trying to work on straightforward but not really mind-intensive work, so I get distracted a lot easier. The simple solution, I suppose, is to change the thermostat, but my office mate prefers it very cold. Thus this doesn't really get anywhere as one of us will be rendered ineffective. So I've been working more from home, but I'd rather be in lab where I have other people to bounce ideas off of.

Anyways... I also thought perhaps this post would be a good one for an open thread, so if there's something anyone reading wants to start a discussion about, go for it! Or just comment on working temperatures, or whatever else suits your fancy.

And yes, I just noticed this is not really that short a post. I really admire some short posts, but I can't seem to write posts like those. Here's an example of an excellent short post which I would aspire to: Neil Gaiman's blog. Look for the entry on June 19, titled "A hundred thousand tumpty tumpties". I really like how he chooses words such that a few short sentences compose a fairly detailed picture of a moment in his life.