Me? Worked in the lab writing Python programs until midnight. And since I’ll probably be doing that again tonight (woo research presentation on Friday), you get this filler post.
What’s the nerdiest thing you’ve done in the past week?
I asked this to my friends over Facebook, and my personal favorite was “Flirt with a NPC.” I’m sure you guys won’t disappoint me either.
Posted orc beefcake shots on me blog.
I downloaded the html and pdf files (rules, spells, skills, bestiary, etc) from the Pathfinder System Resource Document (open source, not piracy) website and reformatted them to put on my nook e-reader.BTW, Pathfinder is D&D in case you did not know. D&D is now something else. Sorta. There’s a schism there. It’s kinda like the difference between Catholics and Protestants, or Shiites and Sunnis, except all the people who die are imaginary. They changed the alignment rules for crying out loud! The most iconic and most ignored rule in the game. Sacrilege!.edited for laughs.
Well, this morning I went through all my storage tubs looking for my favorite Christmas ornament, and found all my binders from school. I spent at least two hours poring over them. “Oooooo! Virology!” “Ooooo! Evolution!” “Ooooo! Comparative anatomy!” Oh, the memories.
Reworked my gauge and cog PHP code to make a better gauge for my Steampunk outfit to better measure the ratio of Irrational to Imaginary Aetherwaves at last Sat’s steam club.
Worked for 11 hours programming at a Playstation 3 game development company yesterday, then went home and worked for another 3 hours on my own personal Xbox 360 game :)
Looked up Jim Varney on Wikipedia because I was listening to the Complete Guide to Everything Podcast on Ikea and they talked about him.
played atari 2600 version of pitfall
The nerdiest thing I could think of involved homework, and that thought makes me sad. Thusly tonight I will start my remote server monitor program! After my homework is done, which means sometime over winter break. :|
Spent six straight hours coding in JAVA when I should have been studying for a molecular biology final.
I wrote a song about my penis size that mentions a spell from Harry Potter:she has stars over her ovariesshe’s taking pictures and she tags embehbeh please come home with mecause you know i’m using magnumsLynnwood’s not too far from hereLet’s say “accio” and make dogs appearYou know. Cause it’s sexy when the dogs show up. Right…? This song is stupid.
Do I win by doing many combinations of above? (D&D, JAVA coding, quantum mechanics…)
I’ve started scanning my old colour slides from the very earliest time of my membership in the Stockholm Tolkien Society. These are pictures from 1980 and onwards.
Delurking to comment: gave myself a crash course on excess & surplus insurance lines, non-admitted insurer brokerage/licensing, and reinsurance. Weirdly interesting. Being a grown-up is infinitely weirder than I ever imagined it would be ;)
I beta tested some
I beta tested software that the CEO of the company for which I work is developing! Also, I have watched many Tron Legacy videos this week. (Sorry for the comment spam. Disqus error.)
Totally had my assed kicked by a multithreaded .NET application. Intermittent LockRecursiousExceptions kept popping up out of nowhere.Even now I’m not entirely convinced it’s completely fixed.Feel my pain, programmers. Feel it.
Watched Newsies and reminded myself of the first time I read slash fiction.
I got really excited when my copy of The Economist – The World In 2011 showed up.
Spent hours and hours reading math textbooks (voluntarily, and not as part of any class or other requirement).That is what I’ve been doing lately.(“Flirt with a NPC” reminded me of the short story “Non-Player Character” (by the same author as “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”).)
Spent a few good hours to download and parse WordNet and some online thesaurus, helping my daughter find the most amount of words ending in -ious and -ion (about 2400 total found, after tweaking the stemming formula, for her homework. (Well, two-fold; one list she came up with herself, and my list which was done to compete with the geeky father of some other girl in her class that was doing something similar. Geek war by proxy! Yeah! They won the word-count, we won on precision and correctness. Hah!)
You would put this up on a relatively geek-free week for me… *sigh*…Let’s see… I read up on varicoceles, as a matter of personal interest… did course reading for a current module and my SDS… carried on re-reading the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (biiiiig F&SF writer in the States, I gather, relatively unknown here). No coding so far this week :(Oh, I did dig around online trying to find a vague work-alike for Atlas.ti that was free, and failed :(PS: I did flirt with NPCs when I was playing Dragon Age… it’s almost vital to the plot… but not done that for a while.
Bought a programmable microcontroller.just to play with it.
I was instrumental in killing a Kobold inside a large lobster construct as a level 10 rogue/ninja. I found the hole in the construct, turned invisible (Ghost Walk!), jumped inside, and did what I had to do. Don’t know how that ended because I had to leave for work before I killed him.And if you understood what I was talking about here, you are way too much of a nerd–which is alright with me!
Last night, I spent a few hours trying to learn how to create MODs with MilkyTracker (along with listening to a bunch of old Moby MODs). Last Saturday, I got up at the b-crack of dawn to drive clear across town in order to oogle and purchase bits of old junk (including a Z-80 based programmable controller!) from a bunch of old farts at a ham fest (then again, I’m getting to be an old fart myself)…
Had the opportunity to chill at the studio with my boyfriend’s band, who are recording an album, and spent the entire time talking to them about their individual tax situations.
I played Team Fortress 2 while listening to a remixed version of the soundtrack to Final Fantasy IV.
My life forthe past 3 weeks has been writing and editing a Preliminary Design Review document and preparing for the corresponding presentation (given today). The project is a payload that will be flying on a high altitude balloon early next fall.
I spent the morning listening to Monty Python and sifting through readings for philosophy of science.
I used Just Basic to help figure out the logistics to some late minute christmas shopping. Adding variables together is far less accident prone than 16 different numbers.
Cared about my Angry Birds ranking. I was sick.
I spent hours figuring out how to get my GPS tracker to display in degrees-minutes-decimal seconds instead of degrees-minutes-decimal minutes. End result? Accuracy improved by three feet. It’s a task of nerd love.
I read this blog. :)
I crocheted a tapestry map of the Land of Oz as my final project for my children’s literature class. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finished tonight.
Built a computer for a customer and set it up with Ubuntu and windows xp in kvm. Spent the last 2 hours on a phone call to the ms call center (India) trying to get an xp key, because I had to buy Windows 7 with the computer.
I explained why the right hand rules for physics should really be the Fonzie rule and whip-snap-pop, and cracked myself up doing it. Which of course meant I had to share my favorite joke–which has a calculus-based punchline.
Freaked out when I realized the newest issue of Wired got lost/misplaced by roomates…. played Super Nintendo…. rooted and installed a custom rom on my android phone…. /nerd
Listened to “Living after faith” while grading first year physics tests/labs and feeling guilty about not spending time on my project.
I engaged in a thought exercise that involved the possibility that humanity might one day exploit the suspected lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan, and used it to argue that most traditional schools of ethical thought are inadequate when applied both on and beyond Earth.
As long as by Newsies you mean the early 90’s movie with Bill Pullman and Christian Bale
I woke up at around 2:30 this morning when I heard a vehicle driving around with an alarm on it going off (sounded like a buzzing alert sound that most bullhorns can make). Living less than 500 m from the shore of the Pacific, I freaked and thought it was a police car driving around issuing a tsunami alert or somesuch thing, but thought “there’s not enough time!”, so instead of firing up my main computer I turned on the monitor of my 24/7 box (music/file/vpn server) and used w3m (THE BEST text browser there is) to browse the internet for tsunami warnings from the command line.Apart from that, Group Theory (W.R. Scott, Dover Publications) has been my bedside reading since last Sunday. My only complaints are the occasional grammatical error or ambiguous reference that could be either a definition or a condition from the context it appears in, and the “it is clear that”s (no it isn’t clear dammit! I demand verbosity AND rigor!)
Translated various words into Mongolian for a short story. It is not at all easy to find a good English-to-Mongolian dictionary online. Also, read about Tungus shamanism.
24 Wikipedia edits in the last three days. Broken links, rewrites, infoboxes, templates. Beautiful, beautiful code.
Had a loud theological debate with some Catholic friends at a Christmas party.or perhaps my nerdiest moment was when my son asked me why I love Star Trek, and I referred to it as an old friend.
Had something akin to a nervous breakdown regarding a paper. The counseling center got me in to see someone right away as they believed I was in crisis (which I probably was) due to the intense crying in a public place. Damn grad school.
Planned my dream super villain themed bakery: Delicious Intent. We would play Bad the The Bone, and Little Drop of Poison, and have sammiches like Death Rye.
When I got home from work today I gave a 60-second lecture to my dog about why filing L-Arginine under “L” is inconceivably, unforgivably stupid, and demanded that he explain to me how anyone claiming to be a chemist could do that. Then I waited for an answer.
Worked on an excel sheet i’ve been putting together to help me better understand the evolution of the target destinations, success rates, and aesthetics of unmanned solar system probes over the last 50 years. This morning I had to change the row for JAXA’s Akutsuki probe from “ongoing” to “failed”, as a single tear rolled down my cheek.
Early this week that I finally made the necessary connections to excise the storyline of the Baldur’s Gate 2 mod idea that exploded into what may well be a project I cannot possibly finish from the Forgotten Realms setting, with which it was heavily entangled, and set it in a moderately original Nivenien fantasy world of my own. I also made a series of critical connections and produced the mental outline of a translation of the subset of my sexual fantasies that are so bizarre I wouldn’t even be interested in trying to live-action-roleplay any of them into the outline of an original and compelling sci-fi dystopia novel.You tell me which one is nerdier. :P
Wait, if you know Python, why the heck are you learning R? I thought you were learning R because you were using Excel (*shudder*).
Today I built a functioning model of a large corporate network with VPN and multiple WAN links. I designed the IP address scheme, configured all the routers and switches (all 23 of them) with routing protocols, access lists, inter-VLAN routing, NAT & PAT, and DHCP. I then went home and installed a new clear acrylic power supply with blue LEDs in my computer while telling my g/f over the phone how to remove a trojan from her machine.Now I’m off to go write a little more story for my ongoing D&D campaign. I’m thinking about adding a lich for my PCs to fight.
I poked around on my Kaypro 4 computer.
I created a new lifeform by replacing the phosphates with cotton candy…YUM
My prof wants me to learn how to graph things in R, even though I code in Python.
Except the difference between 4E vs Pathfinder and those religious schisms is that Pathfinder is clearly in the right. ;)
Every animal I’ve seen I’ve been classifying in my head (and sometimes out loud) by phylum, class, and genus. Good thing, since I have a zoology lab practical tomorrow!:) Masha
Talked about horse and rabbit dental problems and procedures with a perfect stranger in a hotel hot tub.
I spent the weekend modding the game Dwarf Fortress into “Candyland.” I replaced all the trees with candy canes and gingerbread, sand with sugar, aquifers with ice cream, igneous rocks with various chewy candies, and metamorphic with types of pastries…… and then programmed unicorn kidneys to dissolve upon existence to really give the “candy mountain” feel.
I just finished watching a little film called The Experiment and found myself criticizing the experimental protocols, and wondering how it got past an ethics board.Spoiler alert:It didn’t.
Toss up between flirting with an NPC then jumping up and down excitedly with my girlfriend when the character appeared to be flirting back, getting into an argument with my girlfriend over whether the player character or another character was the ‘better man’, and spending an hour giggling over a fanfiction I found in my notebook from seventh grade.
…damnit. The “Any sufficiently advanced technology” thing is from Arthur C. Clarke. I feel like such a poseur. ;/
I was stuck repairing two laptops and a pc at the same time while the day was warm and sunny outside. I knew I shouldn’t have put the posters up until after x-mass.
Played Minecraft, wrote a term paper on “Mars Crossing” by Geoffrey Landis, Read “Mathematical Universe” which is an A-to-Z book on math concepts, played more Minecraft, studied trig (after the final – there were things we didn’t cover that I wanted to), and played still more Minecraft.
I made a gingerbread dinosaur nativity scene to go with my space invader cup cake bites
I checked my RSS reader when I got home from my weekly D&D game and found this post.
I researched Advent tonight because I suspected a Christmas time conspiracy. That might be more paranoid than than nerdy…
R is popular in science business and other analysis but you can’t write general purpose programs in it very well. Python is also used for science and many other things like web pages. http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
I would wonder why nobody else is playing cataclysm… :p but I guess the really nerdy WoW fans are still too busy playing to read blogs. Damn homework!
Did all the research into what’s needed to upgrade and go down a cog on my CBF1000. But I wimped out: I live on an island where the max speed is 40 mph so…making my bike go a little bit quicker off the line is just silly. (Can’t help wondering what it feels like though! Does 0-60 in 3.55 now….wonder what itcould do with that one less cog?)
I ordered 2 shiny new Rubik’s cubes, my old one is all worn out and the stickers are almost falling off.
I spent about three hours trying to find examples of Latin adverbs ending in -um that drop that -um when they form derivative words. The perfect example I found is iterare, “to do a second time,” from iterum, “again.” What I wanted to do was make new Latin words meaning “upper” and “downer.” I ended up with sursarium for “upper,” from sursum (“up”), and deorsarium for “downer,” from deorsum (“down”).
Bonam fortunam, taxonomistria!
Hmm… not sure which thing is nerdiest… read eight HP fanfics that someone wrote as Hanukkah presents for a friend, got into an argument with someone where we were trying to justify the actions of our fictional characters to each other, decided I want an Angry Birds plushie just so I can throw it at people, entered a contest where the winner gets $100 worth of Japanese items of their choice, spent hours on IRC (just being on IRC alone is nerdy, I think…) listening to my friends go on about Cataclysm, all the while remembering when the only cataclysm worth discussing in nerd-dom was in Dragonlance… re-read one of my Discworld books… there’s more, but I think I should quit while I’m behind.
This week not unusually geeky. All time geekiest? Installing gcc 3.3.3 on a linux machine at work. Building it from source. Remotely, from home (with Wifi of course). On the day it was released. 10 days before it was announced (I happened to look on the download server and saw it there). On a Saturday afternoon. Which happened to be Valentine’s day 2004. Urg.
Give me till the end of the week, and I’ll possibly have 400 Sitrus and Lum berries in HeartGold, even though growing berries (not exclusively Sitrus and Lum) is the only thing I still do with the game.I hunted six Rathians for only two pieces of Rathian Webbing (I need five more for HG Earplugs), and dressed up my NPC pet piggie as a sheep.I bookmarked the latest CreatureCast (Stomatopod! Squee!) for my sis.I watched the first season of Soul Eater.I’ve read a pop-sci mag and am halfways through a WW2 special BBC mag.I tried to help my mother with cleaning a laptop fan, but the fucking thing is constructed by a retard, and I don’t feel like voiding any guarantees by removing the entire case, which has access to the whole underside, but is FUSED over the fan specifically.In short, I don’t know.
I did some programming, bought a high end laptop at Best Buy and looked at the salesperson like they were nuts when asked if I wanted them to set it up for me. That’s about it. Nothing really nerdy. Although I guess it depends on your definition of nerdy. I did sing along to a collection of Rogers and Hammerstein songs with my wife and the 4 year old. Also, quoted Yoda.
Went to trivia night at a pizza place with the local atheist group (we won).
I made an “Anywand” in Neverwinter Nights. Basically, a wand that can potentially cast any spell in the game, configurable in the game by a GM.
nerdy? i got excited about the electric tea kettle i’m ordering my boyfriend for the holidays. that’s pretty special.
Went trampolining with Morris dancers.
If work counts, I plugged a circuit board(we developed) to my coworker’s car to read messages from its controller network, sniff the amount of fuel, the pressure on the brake pedal etc. If that doesn’t count, I wrote a python script that generates some HTML code(to test a personal project), with proper indentation so it is human readable. I did this during a regional train journey, on my cell phone.
I had the biggest nerdgasm in walmart, as I walked in the toy aisle and saw Star Wars figurines. If you bought 5 you got a free Boba Fett. I ended up only getting Han Solo, because I didn’t have $35 to spare.
I had an absolutely terrifying nightmare that my grade in Information had been reduced from an A to a C and that there were highlighted spelling and grammar mistakes all over my research paper. I wasn’t able to shake the miserable and anxious feeling until logging on to the university website to recheck my grade.
Wait, we’re in “R” now?Damn, been a long time since my class in C…
I’ve decided that I can’t stand FLASH. It’s user interface was designed by some kind of misanthrope. But I have to write something in Flash. There’s a deadline. It’s getting ugly. So I’m bypassing the problem by making up my own one-off markup language specific to the domain of the problem. And I’m writing a perl script that will convert it to actionscript. As a bonus, I’ve idly toyed with having a representation of the animation out of the time domain, so I might just make another perl script that converts it into LaTeX.
I’ve seen a number of newer cubes which have glued-on plastic color tiles instead of stickers. They fall off. And the cube itself is made of some kind of thin, brittle plastic which is prone to just shattering if the parts snag while you’re turning. Old worn one is much better. I hope the ones you ordered aren’t like that.
You attacked the weak point for massive damage.
Compared to you guys, I’m practically normal. Sigh. About the nerdiest thing I ever do is listen to classical music.However, I do listen to my music on speakers and amplifiers that I built:http://bruce.coppola.name/audi…http://bruce.coppola.name/audi…Oh, and built the music room too.http://bruce.coppola.name/audi…And no, I don’t believe in magic wire or other audio woo.Heh, I haven’t updated that site in a long time…
Hey, at least it’s an open-source language. Physicists, astronomers and engineers often get hooked into proprietary (and VERY expensive) languages like IDL, Matlab and Mathematica while they’re still young in their careers. I’m still trying to recover from my run-in with Mathematica/IDL during my undergrad, wishing I had taken the time to learn how to use Plotlib/graphviz.
Read as “Aynrand”.
Not much this week so far, but I did get far, far too exited about a pc case that looked like it came from mass effect.
10 days after your post, so not exactly the past week: check to find name for my new macbook
Gave up a shopping trip to buy hot black heels with a friend so I could go look through Government Archives for a literature project. And actually had fun ;)
I raised my fists in the air in front of a large painted Batman symbol and mimed shouting to the sky as my friends took a picture. It’s my new favorite profile picture on Facebook.