It's called, I know stuff now.

Goals for today:
1. Learn some Javascript
2. Write an interactive phonetics practice quiz for my students.

Normally, "write X" is a strong motivator for "learn Y". However, I discovered that I knew how to write an interactive quiz quickly and easily in PHP, and thus have learned no Javascript today. Oops.

1. The latest issue of Tolkien Studies is out, with my contribution, "Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of the Rings". http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tolkien_studies/toc/tks.7.htmlRead more... )

I have the sweetest advisor ever. She took me to lunch today to celebrate my PhD, and she gave me a card with a poem she had written, as well as a small gift ( Read more... )

I've spent the last week trying to build my own Linux distro via Linux From Scratch, and I just got it to boot. It doesn't do anything interesting yet, being still absolutely minimal, and it doesn't really demonstrate great proficiency on my part, just the ability to follow directions and a lot of persistence. Even doing it right straight through ( Read more... )

Well, I'm 26, I filed my dissertation today, and I now have a PhD in Indo-European Studies ( Read more... )

Well, after two years of internal debate over whether it was worth buying a Kindle or not, Amazon finally lowered the price enough that I bought one without fuss this week, just in time for my Europe trip. I can see plenty of room for improvement, but its main virtue is the battery life. Both my laptop and iPod Touch have low battery lives, and I ( Read more... )

Quoted on the back cover of my Knuth volume (ETA: yes, I only have volume 3),

It's always a pleasure when a problem is hard enough that you have to get the Knuths off the shelf. I find that merely opening one has a very useful terrorizing effect on computers.
--Jonathan Laventhol

That was too hilarious not to share.

I was flipping through Knuth's chapter on search algorithms last night while I reinstalled the OS (finally mucked around with the kernel enough that it broke), and I ran into the following fact that was really interesting.

The idea of sorting alphabetically according to the entire word, e.g. intelligence comes before intelligent, has not been ( Read more... )

Oh, and I meant to put this in my last post. I discovered that my "shutdown" bug is a user permissions bug. Somehow I lose a bunch of my user permissions, can't mount USBs, can't sudo gedit files, etc. I also don't have the user permissions to change user permissions, lol. Finally, I can't shut down or restart from the menu, have to "sudo shutdown ( Read more... )

Well, so, I have made progress on the kernel front, though I do not yet have a solution. I have at least learned many things. And yes, all of my intellectual challenges lately have been on the computer front, which may come as something of a relief to anyone who spent the past two years "listening" to me think out loud about strong verbs in this ( Read more... )