IKEA

I really like this song. It's called IKEA by Jonathan Coulton.

I've never heard of Jonathan Coulton before, but this song keeps coming up on Pandora, and I love it. The tune is good, the lyrics are funny and about something other than love or angst. They are about IKEA.

Pandora probably chose this song because I told her I liked TMBG. But although I like TMBG, this is different in a way. The humor is more overt, and the tongue-in-cheek comes in one layer. TMBG takes some getting used to; this doesn't.

I think

I've discovered a quick little trick that automatically makes my writing better.

Any time I catch myself writing the words "I think", I just delete them. I learned this trick in high school, when we were instructed to never write "I think", especially in an argumentative essay. You don't write it because it's implicit that this is what you think.

Nothing profound here. Just a handy little rule of thumb.

Bad Sign

There's a cool website called Midomi, where you can hum a tune and see what songs have that tune.

I tried it out on a tune that I wrote recently. I find it catchy and I like it a lot. The good news is that it doesn't appear to be a rip off of anything else, so I can go forward with it. The bad news is that the music it apparently sounds the most like is Hillary Duff and Hanna Montana.

That gets to me.

The ABCs Of My Internet (Courtesy of Google Chrome)

For those of you who still use IE or Firefox: When one types into Google Chrome's search bar, the browser automatically tries to help you find what you are looking for, based on your browsing history.  Even a single letter will prompt a suggestion.  

Here is what Google Chrome suggests for me, letter by letter.  

A is for amazon

B is for better place

C is for chicago climate index

D is for diigo

E is for ebay

F is for fdu (unclear why...)

G is for google (duh)

H is for hulu

I is for google images

J is for janglo

K is for keytar inc

L is for linkedin

M is for maalot

N is for google news

O is for online stopwatch

P is for paypal

Q is for nothing (search google for q? perhaps q tip?)
R is for rotten tomatoes

S is for sustainability index
T is for twitter

U is for UN global compact

V is for verizon

W is for weather

X is for xkcd

Y is for youtube

Z is for zipcar

Just What We Need

From the music and direction of this clip, you'd this this guy has invented a cure for cancer.

But seriously, it's about time that someone out there designed a plane that guys like me can buy!  Oh wait, I don't have 150 grand.  

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/17-01/mf_icon_air 

What's with WIRED and small sporty aircraft, anyway?  Remember the Air Wolf?

OneNote

I've been using Microsoft OneNote a lot lately; I really like it.  I like the fact that my writing automatically has the date on it.  It'd kind of like an electronic journal that takes care of the repetitive stuff for you.

And as far as a note-taking tool, it's got a lot of features and is pretty simple to navigate.  If I was still in school and taking classes, you'd bet I'd use this thing for every one. 

One drawback is that you don't have all the functionality of Word.  You can't do shortcut keys for symbols, or write equations via the equation editor (for all you science and math geeks).  On the other hand, I never really found it all that efficient to try and write equations on the computer.  I never was fast enough to keep up with the teacher.  So no great loss.  If you want them you can type them in Word and just paste it into OneNote.

Give it a shot, people!

Left, Right

I used to think that I was good with numbers - a leftbrained person (for the record, I just had to look up on Wikipedia which qualities are left brained and which are right, even though I just asked someone about this a few days ago, which only goes to further the point, I suppose).  

Not that I was every particularly bad at rightbrained stuff like art and music.  I just always thought of myself as a math and science kind of guy.

Then I got to college and started scoring lower on tests.  Math tests, chemistry tests, physics tests - I just kept getting things wrong.  I became used to red ink all over my work.  By the end of college I decided that I was, in fact, rightbrained.  That would explain why I was so bad with numbers no matter how hard I tried.

Now, as I take these MCAT preparatory tests, I'm still making those math mistakes, but I'm evaluating them more closely.  More often than making fundamental mistakes in my analytical approach to solving a numbers question, I tend to just make plain old careless mistakes.  I missed a decimal point.  I left out a constant, or a minus sign.  That kind of thing.

Can a person be strong in his leftbrainedness but still make careless errors?  Or is it part and parcel of being leftbrained to not make those errors.

More importantly, maybe I should go into engineering after all.