Get This Man a Doctor

Via Ze Frank, this little flash game lets you draw a 2-D figure, then animates it dancing for you in 3-D. The soundtrack’s a bit annoying, and normally I don’t go for dumb little flash games, but I always enjoy anything that involves actual creativity.

This reminds me of the One Million Masterpiece art project, especially since you can see everyone else’s figure being drawn.

Oh yeah, I made the whole crew:

It’s so cold outside my little desktop application has to use its full montage of weather icons for this week.

24 degrees with a 13 degree wind chill, and we still can’t get more than two inches of snow? Weather, I’ve done gone given up on you.

Nice application [OS X], by the way, as it’s the only one I’ve found that is: 1) Reliable, and 2) Fast.

“Jerry Orbach gave his heart and soul to acting, and the gift of sight to two New Yorkers. Jerry Orbach was a gifted actor and his greatest role was that of an eye donor. Jerry decided to donate his eyes. When he passed away, he left behind the beautiful gift of sight. It only takes a minute to sign up to be an eye donor. Do it today.”

New York really cherishes its dead celebrities, especially Jerry Orbach. You would think he not only played a New York detective on TV, but also a mayor, firefighter, school teacher, and maybe even a patron saint.

So I guess it was no surprise when these posthumous ads came out reminding New Yorkers that, like you, Jerry Orbach had eyes, and unlike you, he’s put them to good use.

What’s disturbing about the barrage of ads isn’t Jerry’s accusatory smirk berating my egoism, or even the adjacent photo of him reminding me that his eyes did not go to the grave. It’s the fact that not one, but two New Yorkers now have the gift of sight. It isn’t necessarily the case, but what this suggests to me is that the The Eye Bank of New York chooses to dole out eyes based on greatest utility—why give one person binocular vision when you can give two people monocular vision.

I wonder if I can choose what system of ethics I donate my eyes under. Can I chose to donate them to the Philosopher Kings?

Since I got all of my ten applications in on January 15, it’s interesting to see how often the different schools contact me. For example, my long shot choice Berkeley sent me one automated email when I submitted my application more than a month ago, and hasn’t sent me anything else since. U Oregon, probably smoking something, has sent me not one but two information packets about their residence halls, and nothing else.

NYU, on the other hand, has sent me a sequence of three confirmation emails, followed by a physical confirmation in the mail, followed by another email from an administrative assistant somewhere, all within two weeks of when I started my application. What’s weird is the experience I’ve had with contacting NYU in the past.

When I moved to New York in 2005, I didn’t have a job lined up, so I tried to set up some interviews for when I got here. One of the places I desperately wanted to work was NYU; since I knew was going to grad school, the free tuition benefit was a pretty sweet perk.

NYU’s HR department has something called the MATCH system. All I remember is that I applied to at least ten jobs through their site and never once received a response. I even stooped to calling someone in the HR department, and, in true stalker fashion, showed up at the IT department, stopped one of the Directors in the hall, and asked him just what had happened to my job applications. You know, now that I think about it, I’m surprised that I’ve never been detained by security.

I kept applying for every job I could find between September of 2004 and May of 2005, and finally got called into an interview at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (which, by the way, is pretty sweet). The guy who interviewed me said that I was a good fit for the job, but that they almost always hired recent NYU graduates. In fact, he claimed they were required to interview a certain number of outside candidates, but they generally never hired them. A kind euphemism for why I didn’t get the job? I sure hope so.

Since then, I have repeatedly sent emails to various people at NYU for a number of reasons. Once, I sent an email to some event coordinator about a graduate school fair they were holding. Then, I sent an email to the Courant Institute asking them to clarify blatantly contradictory information about their application process. Nothing back. I still have no evidence that any person actually saw these emails… I was pretty sure that I had been blacklisted by their mail server as a spammer for the vast number of times I’ve tried to contact someone there.

Now that I’ve paid their $80 application fee, I’m their best bud. Well guess what, NYU. It’s going to take a lot more than that to win back my heart.

Crap! Yesterday was National Pie Day and no one informed me! I forgot to send out my yearly Pie Day greeting cards. Why is this not in my national holidays in iCal? Can we have a redo?

Rest assured, today there will be a plethora of pie eating to make up for yesterday.

On a math related side note, you shouldn’t try and calculate π in binary (it starts out 11.001001…) or else fall victim to a number of lawsuits and possibly terrorist threats. Because π might or might not be normal, which means that if you calculate it you will generate every binary string, and therefore every copyrighted work, every piece of child pornography, and every secret government document. So be cool, don’t be a fool, and don’t calculate π.

* = required question

Residence Halls Buildings Survey (Prospective Resident)

1. I am a:*
(X) Prospective Resident

2. What is your impression of UO residence halls?*
If I ever visit I will go look at them.

3. Not considering room rates or the assignment process, if you could live in any residence hall building on campus, which would you choose?*
( ) Barnhart
( ) Bean
( ) Carson
(X) Earl
( ) Hamilton
( ) Living-Learning Center
( ) Riley
( ) Walton

4. What is it about this building that is attractive to you?*
I like the name Earl.

7. What would make you want to live in the residence halls your first year at the UO?*
Probably a bribe.

8. What would make you want to live in the residence halls for more than one year?*
Yearly bribes.

9. Would residence hall facilities impact your decision to attend a university or college?*
(X) No
( ) Yes

10. Did/do your parents or family members encourage you to live in the residence halls?*
(X) No
( ) Somewhat
( ) Yes

What factors influence the decision to live in the residence halls versus living off campus?
I’m not 18 anymore.

11. Demographics:*
Gender
( ) Female
(X) Male

Age
24

Just when I thought it was over and the four-digit cost for applying to schools was final, I get an email from Carnegie Mellon informing me that they never got the GRE scores I sent back in October. I don’t really know why, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fac tthat the department is “Mathematical Sciences” instead of “Mathematics” and therefore has a code of 20740799 instead of 20740703.

Total cost to get ETS to send another copy: $15. Plus $6 for the phone call. Yippee.

I have a new article up on developerWorks about CakePHP. It’s part four of a five part series, and I have nothing to do with the other parts. I have to admit that it’s not the finest article I’ve written for them—it wasn’t a great experience writing one fifth of someone else’s article. I’ve already gotten some corrections sent to me by CakePHP developers.

A while back someone alerted me to a nice little collection of free (a.i.B.) icons at Famfamfam. The set is called Silk and release under an CC attribution license. I’ve used it in projects and personally like it because it’s massive (700 icons commonly used in modern web applications) and also includes a few meta-icons that can be superimposed on other icons (plus, minus, edit, play, stop, etc.).

Anywho, I was recently startled when everyone’s favorite Firefox plugin, the web developer toolbar, started using the icon set. I swear I keep seeing it around the Web and it’s starting to give me spooky déjà vu feelings. So someone needs to come out with a few more icon sets that break the mold—I’m thinking something with fewer pastels. Maybe black and white or Technicolor.

Two days before the keynote heard round the world, a little known billionaire named Bill Gates made a similar announcement at the now outdated trade expo CES. The purpose of Bill’s keynote was to stir (scrounge) up excitement and buzz for Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista.

Okay, so let’s review. Nearly six years after the release of Mac OS X, Microsoft is dragging out its latest operating system on January 30th. It’s so massively ahead of its time, it’s going to be released in no fewer than six (6) editions, ranging in price from $200 to $400. The top edition, called Windows Ultimate and priced $100 higher than the next cheapest version, will offer a number of awesome upgrades. What exactly these will be is unknown. Instead, Microsoft announced three awesome upgrades at CES that will be part of the so-called “WaveZero” round of updates (further attack waves will occur after the January 30 release). They are:

1. A program that allows you to set your background to be a video,
2. A program which makes it easier to use an existing encryption feature of Vista, and,
3. A Texas Hold-em game.

Gnarly, right? Even more awesome than that is Microsoft’s rather tasteless attempt at a community-based/viral marketing campaign called Show us your “Wow.”

The only thing good about that site is how it makes me feel slightly less bitter about my job.