chrishitchcock.com

May 30

Stream Metric’s new album, Synthetica.

YOU’RE WELCOME, TUMBLR.

I’m giving this a listen now…

May 25

“Hey, corporate user of MATLAB, just put in your SMTP server information here and we’ll be happy to let you send an error report to us.

— The Mathworks”

At least I got to see this humorous dialog box on the forth time MATLAB crashed on me today.

Do most “send us an error report” services rely on SMTP?

Is Breaking Bad Season 4 on Netflix?

I made a little site called http://isbreakingbadseason4onnetflix.com. It uses python and the Netflix API to check every hour if Breaking Bad season 4 is available to stream on Netflix yet.

Yes, that is right, I still haven’t seen season 4 yet. Yes, I know you can download it from Amazon or iTunes. Yes, I know the DVDs will be out soon. I’d just rather spend $10 and wasting a few hours of my life instead of buying a copy of season 4.

May 21

“

Fundamentally the entertainment industry put out an RFP (request for proposals) for magic beans. They wanted magic beans that would make computers worse at copying. Anytime you say we have an unlimited budget to spend on magic beans, you will find magic bean vendors.

…

The War on Terror precipitated hundreds of RFPs for magic beans that would automatically detect terrorists or automatically prevent airplanes from being blown up. And lo and behold, there were hundreds of people showing up with magic beans to sell to the military-industrial complex.

”

Cory Doctrow, Creativity vs Copyright, The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

I bought this as a DRM-free ebook from PM Press. I had never heard of PM Press before learning about this book from an article over at GeekDad. PM Press has great customer support staff. They responded quickly to me when I had an issue logging into my account. I recommend buying this book through them.

True to the spirit of the essay, it looks like you can’t get this from the Kindle store or the iBookstore. If you wanted to buy if from Amazon, you’d have to get the paperback edition.

May 17

I was talking to my doctor down at the hospital

He said, “Son, it says here you’re twenty-seven, But that’s impossible you look like you could be forty-five”

May 7

Script to Delete Unconnected Lines in Simulink

I had a large model that had a dozen S-Functions and subsystems. I was getting a warning that there was an unconnected line in the model, but I couldn’t find it at all.

This script worked great and got rid of the warning.

May 3

A few weeks back a co-worker asked me to take a look at the description for a course at Oakland University. I used Google to find the course description instead of trying to navigate Oakland’s website. Now I get punished by having to look at ads for Oakland everywhere I go.

It is a good thing I use Bing when I search for Secret Life of an American Teenager fan fiction. Who knows what ads I might be seeing if I would have used Google.

May 1

Damn Kids and their Keyboards

Why all the negativity? It’s loud. It feels great, but the thing sounds like I’m playing the spoons instead of typing. Maybe I have big hands. Maybe I have anger issues. I don’t know. I just know that I prefer a friendly office environment over feeling like Hunter S. Thompson.

I feel the same way about all the recent talk about loud Mac keyboards.

Apr 26

The Fauxtopias of Detroit's Suburbs

A great post about Greenfield Village and a number of other fake old-time villages in SE Michigan. I didn’t even know all these other historic villages existed in places like Troy and Livonia.

Apr 25

T-Shaped Students at Stanford

I was reading an article in this week’s New Yorker about Stanford and ran across another mention of T-Shaped people in it:

The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise

I previously saw this term just a few days ago in Valve’s Employee Handbook. When I saw it in Valve’s handbook I thought it was a term they invented. However, Wikipedia states that the term has been around since 1991.

I really like this concept and have been thinking about how it relates to my skill-set. I’m a pretty good generalist (“jack of all trades - master of none”), but I don’t feel that I have one skill that I would say I’m an expert in. I’m at the point where I need to decide what my area of expertise should be.