post-season

Well, I made it through the Christmas season without hearing the damned hippopotamus song once. Christmas truly is the time of miracles. Visiting with extended family was nice except everyone wants to know what I'm going to be doing and I have no idea.

My big Christmas present was a GPS receiver, which is extremely cool and slightly devious. You see, if you just sit around being a bum all it will do is tell you where you are. However, if you get off your butt and leave the house it will tell you where you're going, track where you've been, and then there's the whole geocaching angle. Mine is even able to automatically generate routes on the fly and act like a satnav. Apparently some software will even let you look up ATMs, gas stations, hotels and restaurants.

They have quite a racket going with these GPS receivers though. The one I got isn't cheap, but you could easily spend twice as much for a unit with one or two more unnecessary bells and whistles. The preloaded maps only have main highways, so if you want to see every street you're going to have to drop $100 or so on software. If you want better reception from the satellites you can buy an external antenna. Then of course you're going to want a case to protect your investment.

The furthest I've been from the house since I got my GPS receiver is the mailbox, so I really haven't tested what it can do yet. I just figured out how to load geocache locations this afternoon (the receiver has a steep learning curve) but as soon as I did that it started getting dark out so I couldn't test it out. There is a geocache about a third of a mile from my house and I want to check it out.

primed, part II

In other news, I coded up an implementation of that Shanks factorization algorithm. So far it can do 19 digits, but I don't know how to get it to stop returning trivial solutions (e.g. factoring 51 as 1 * 51) so it only works most of the time. I was able to factor some phone numbers for people, so that was amusing. I tried to make a copy that used Java's arbitrary precision data types to work on RSA-100, but that wasn't going well. I'm also having problems with Java running out of memory.

beyond jet lag

It is just not my night to sleep. I've been trying to get over the jet lag from coming back to Michigan but tonight has been ridiculous. I went to bed around 11, got up again at 2, tried going back to bed at 3. Then I got fed up with my bed so I fixed it, and when I tried going back to sleep it was too stuffy in my room so I cracked the window open and now the fresh air is too invigorating to sleep. I can't win. So now I am writing some emails until I crash again.

primed

The code in question basically works out an integral by staggering the sum with parallel processing. I am going over it to see if it can be commandeered for other purposes. I was thinking about modular exponentiation but I already cracked that nut, so I'm thinking about factoring. I'm not going after RSA-2048 or anything, but it's an interesting problem.

I am looking up integer factoring algorithms on Wikipedia and I ran across one called "Shanks' Square Forms Factorization." I might have to take a look.

i'd rather be an exposed wire than be a cold machine

It's finals week in Corvallis. Normally I would be bouncing off the walls by now but I am still kind of doing productive work. Office hours were super slow today so I brought some parallel computing code to go over. The computational physics TA just happened to stop by and I talked with him for like an hour and a half about coding and calculating pi. The only final I have left is computational physics tomorrow morning and then I'm done with another term of classes.

I've been assigned to do two labs and a recitation next term, which is new. I'm wondering how many students there will be. When I proctored the final my room was supposed to have 119 students but I only counted 93. That's 26 drops since the beginning of the term in my room alone. And then I had a bunch of students tell me they were switching into 202 next term instead of taking 212. The joke is on them since I heard the non calc sequence is harder than the calc sequence.

dead week

I only have one more class for this term, although I do have to go in and teach a lab at 3. This morning we had crash course in parallel computing and the physics department's Beowulf cluster - apparently this is going to be a major focus of my computational physics class next term, so I'm kind of looking forward to that. The department just got a whole bunch of dual-core computers and now I'm eager to get some money and build a new desktop. When I get a real job I might be able to afford things like $500 dual-core Athlons.

weniger nights

I did some hardcore exam grading last weekend - until 2:30 AM on Friday night and midnight on Saturday. That may have been a mind-numbing waste of time, but the scary bit was that there are other grad students still there at that time of night. Who aren't grading exams. I mean, seriously - how mental do you have to be to stay in the physics building on late late Friday or Satuday night by choice? I don't hate what I do but I get the hell out of there the minute the opportunity presents itself. I guess that's one of the differences between me and the Ph.D students.

monetary policy

I (and all the other TAs) got a $250 in this month's paycheck for no reason. I suspect the grad student union has something to do with it. I don't know what to spend it on. I am so used to being miserly and poor I can't bring myself to buy anything big, or even medium. Part of it is a time issue - I could buy games, but right now I have no time to play them. And then Christmas is starting to get close so I'm not supposed to buy stuff for myself anyway. My trusty TI-30x Solar calculator is dying, so I put in a bid on eBay for three more at $1.99 each. I'm a big spender.

a different kind of sunday morning

I think I may have finally figured out how to disable the bastard auto-update on Google Toolbar. There's no option to make it not replace my nice version with their horrible new one, so I had to get clever. I have been idling in the lair of the beast (toolbar.google.com) and it still hasn't auto-updated, so maybe I am in the clear.

I made an impulse buy today. I was in Staples trying to find new red pens because grading exams used up the last of my good ones, and in the laptop accessories section they had solar chargers. They have a MSRP of $100, Staples originally had them for $80, but they were on clearance for $19.80. Solar power + 75% discount is something I can't pass up. Unfortunately it's night right now so I can't play with it. The website has pictures of people using it in weird places, like "extreme ironing" in the Himalayas. Maybe mine won't be used for that, but hey, if civilization collapses and the power grid goes down I can still listen to my iPod.

I found out last week that the Atlas Shrugged movie(s?) is finally being pulled together. Angelina Jolie has been confimed as Dagny Taggart, I think she'd be perfect. Brad Pitt as John Galt I don't buy as much. I don't know who would be better though. Michael Gambon would make a pretty good Hugh Akston, and Harrison Ford would be a good Hank Rearden if he were younger...Anyway, we'll have to wait until 2008 to see. One of the articles I saw also said a remake of The Fountainhead might also be done. I've seen the original and I've been waiting for it to come out on DVD for years, which is finally about to happen.

The movie news has sparked my interest enough to make me finally get around to my annual reading of Atlas Shrugged. This is the 5th year now. I'm not going for the speed record this time - currently set at 4 days, but I swear it can be done in 3 given nothing to do and the stamina to break through The Speech on Day 3. This time around I'm taking my time and reading a couple chapters a day. That's more than I can afford time-wise anyway.

I've had a cold all week and it's annoying the hell out of me. dHealth/dt > 0 but it's not over yet. Cute Fred Meyer Girl was also sick. We commiserated with each other briefly and she gave me a Halls.

I acquired some mp3s of the new albums by BT and Hybrid. The BT tracks aren't that great, he's gotten a little too artsy. They are spacey and ambient and the shortest one is over eight minutes long (with the longest one topping 14). The Hybrid album doesn't seem to stand out at first, but it got under my skin and I can't stop listening to it. Today's post title is stolen from one of those songs.

court trouble, part III

ACT III
Government: Well we did some checking around and decided to pay you after all, but it won't be until December.
Jon: Christmas bonus!