Donlon Spring 2007 Hike in Treman Park

I get a lot of emails at Cornell that I hardly ever bother to read. There are a lot of cool events going on all the time, but I very rarely ever go to one. But for this event someone personally asked me to go. I could not think of anything better to do that day other than work so I thought “Why not?” and decided to go.

The hike was in Robert H. Treman State Park, which is right near the better known Buttermilk Falls. It was a beautiful Hike and although I took some pictures that you can see in my Treman Park Photo Set, I couldn’t capture the scene very well. The sounds, the sunlight, the wind, and the atmosphere are all too difficult to describe, one has to actually experience it to properly understand. If you are curious about the area I suggest you also look at other people’s pictures of it on Flickr.

The Hike was for only my dorm, Mary Donlon, and best of all completely free. There were about fifteen people that went, most of who I did not know. After the Hike we had a nice barbecue (free of course) and hung out. I realized that there are a lot of cool and interesting people in my dorm that I haven’t even met; Mary Donlon does house near 500 students, it’s near impossible to know everyone. I really should have gone a trip like this earlier in the school year, but oh well, I still have plenty of time left in my college career to meet new people.

New Flickr Pro Account

I got a nice digital camera in the fall and since then I have taken many pictures, mostly around Cornell.  There is almost always something strange going on around campus so I thought it prudent to start carrying around my camera everywhere.  At first I was often reluctant to take pictures as it would make people look at me and think, “Who is that weirdo taking bizarre pictures?”  and sometimes people will wait for me to take a picture as if my picture taking is of extreme importance.  But now I do not mind as much since many of my pictures were well worth the awkwardness endured.  

I got a free flickr account to as to share my photos with the world, but a free flickr account will allow you to put up only so many pictures, so recently I sprung for the $25 to get a flickr pro account.   I now have almost all of my photos up (the decent ones at least).  There are also some pictures of my Lego creations up there.  Please check out my pictures; I think some of them are actually quite good for an armature like myself.  Oh, and if you also have a flickr account feel free to add me to your contacts.  You can find my flickr photos here.

Snow Came

The snow did come. I woke up to about one foot of snow and the snow would continue for 10 more hours. Getting to class wasn’t actually that difficult; main paths were mostly cleared and the snow made it feel warmer than single digit temperatures. This was this first day I have had to wear my boots so far at Cornell; if I hadn’t, my feet would have gotten very wet and then frozen off. A surprisingly large number of people skied to class and managed it well.

My classes in the morning were at about 80% the usual attendance and things were going according to schedule when at 12:15 I was walking through Duffield and heard that the University was going to close soon. This gave me an excellent opportunity to go and take lots of pictures. I have them up on my flickr account and I plan to take more today. Overall, I was little affected by the snow. Roads and Paths were well maintained and the large dinning halls stayed open. Read more about it on the Chronicle Online. A fellow freshman Matt Hintsa also has some good photos of the snow yesterday.

Snow is Coming

Finaly looks like the first snow storm is on its way. I got an email through Cornell about the coming storm titled, “City of Ithaca Snow Emergency”

“In anticipation of a heavy snowfall as predicted by the National Weather Service, Mayor Carolyn K. Peterson declared a snow emergency effective 5:00 pm on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 that will remain in effect until further notice.”

According to National Weather Service, tonight there will be 8-12 inches of snow, tomorrow there will be 12-16 inches, and on Wednesday, 4-6. All with temp lows in the single digits. It looks like I am in for a lot of fun and torment especially since tomorrow I have 6 classes to attend. I will post updates later, but until then you can enjoy the view from my room right now.

I love my trackball mouse

I can’t believe that I used to actually move my entire hand to move my mouse. It is much more comfortable to only move a finger or two, especially for a lazy person like myself. If you have never used a trackball before, I recommend trying it out.

 

I first used a trackball when it was the only available option on a very cluttered desk. Since you do not move a trackball you can use it on any kind of surface and save space. Also, if you are stuck with a very high or low surface, moving a conventional mouse can hurt after a while. When I first started, it was difficult and time consuming but after a while I forgot that I was even using a trackball and it became second nature to me. Now after using a trackball mouse frequently for half a year, I feel awkward dragging plastic on a desk with those lowly, inefficient, and antiquated pointing devices.

Right now I am using a Logitech Trackball. There is very little resistance on the ball; it feels like my fingers are floating. It has four buttons and I use the upper left click as a middle click. This is great for closing tabs in Firefox and scrolling, although I do miss my old scroll wheel. It is fun to take the ball out and play with it. My Lego alligator definitely enjoys it and you can even play pool with it if you really want to.

 

First day of classes, first day of woes

Today I had my first day of spring semester classes at Cornell.  Things didn’t go as nicely as I wanted to, but everything worked out fine in the end.  So I woke up early, ready and rearing to go.  Took a shower, eat breakfast, and had plenty of time to spare.  My first class of the day was physics and I was all excited to go to my first ever physics course at Cornell.  I was sitting in the classroom for a while until I realized that I was in the wrong room. 

New Lego Tower

Yesterday, while I was brooding over how my break is almost over, I realized that I neglected to play with my legos. Luckily I avoided disaster and managed to get some quality time in with them. Here are some facts about the new lego tower I built:

• 11 feet tall, freestanding
• Weight: 10 lbs
• 8 hours to build

Since it is so tall, I now have to write a lot about it to fill up all the extra space the picture created on this page. I’ve made many lego towers many times before; they are my favorite type of structure to build. It is very fun to to see how high I can build, constantly redesigning and trying new ideas to get a little higher. For this tower I tried to keep the design as simple and strong as possible. This is a cross section of it:

Above and below this layer would be identical layers, but rotated 90°. Doing this creates very solid connections between layers. This pattern of alternating identical layers continues for the entire length of the tower. Uniformity is important since the tower is only as strong as its weakest part. To make construction and assembly easier I split the tower up into sections, each section being a different width.

I enjoyed working on it especially since I could sit on my couch, drink soda, and watch anime at the same time. Through my intense research and experimentation I have discovered that:

Total Awesomeness = Legos + Anime + Soda

This is definitely true, I double and triple checked my calculations. Looks like I still have some more blank space. I will just fill it up with nonsense so that is cool, yes very. And then this crazy thing happened and it was terrible, I hope everything is okay I really do. Things happen, yes oh yes they do and that is alright and all but it bores me horribly. Then I went to the store and bought some crackers, but it was so ridiculous and made me angry. Oh so ANGRY!

Is that enough? Okay, good.

How wise are online communities?

 

In JR Minkel’s post in Scientific American’s blog, Most Hated Digg Comment Proves (Part of) Jaron Lanier’s Point about the Cracked Wisdom of Crowds, he discusses a recent incident on digg where a user’s comment was buried because it looked like spam. Read Chandler Kent’s post, What Happens When You Spam Digg? Updated 14x, for his experience of how horrendously digg users responded to his comment. Minkel goes on to relate this to the idea that online users increasingly believe that the collective is always wiser than the individual. Communities are now an essential part of the web, can they ever be more than just mobs?

Wayback Machine is way under appreciated

Perhaps it is just my imagination, but the Wayback Machine gets much less publicity than it deserves. It is a one of a kind tool that no one else can offer: a freely accessible archive of most websites since 1996. Records of almost every website are kept, a huge amount of data. The Wayback Machine is a service run by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. It is amazing to see websites a decade ago and marvel at what has changed (and hasn’t). For example look at this post in Slashdot in 1998. The Wayback Machine is very useful for web designers who can directly see how the design of past sites have changed over the years, such as how yahoo’s homepage evolved to what it is now.

There are however major problems with the Wayback Machine. Pages are slow, many images are missing, and sometimes entire entries are broken. Also many pages were never crawled because it was blocked by the site as specified in robots.txt. Obviously most scripts won’t work (you can’t go to amazon in 1998 and buy some books for your past self). Very strange things happen sometimes such as a mishmash of things from the past and present on the same page.

Although there are serious flaws, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable tool for geeks, web designers, and historians alike. I wonder why don’t more people use it.

Here are a couple interesting sites from the past:

• Yahoo in 1996
• Google in 1998
• Cornell in 1998
• CNN in 9/11/01

HOW TO – Watch TV

Watching Television is an art. It is easy to waste your life in front of a T.V. and still get nothing out of it (believe me, I know). One must learn how to maximize entertainment and education while minimizing mindlessness and preventing the T.V. from taking control of your life. Here are some helpful guidelines I have developed through many years of intensive television viewing: