Spam - The Other Pink Gelatinous Substance

I just received a spam (regarding lifestyle medication) with the following as its filter-avoidance random text...

I like the word 'indolence.' it makes my laziness seem classy.
Gossip is sometimes referred to as halitosis of the mind
What's another word for Thesaurus?
Money is good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life.

Perhaps spam is turning over a new leaf and attempting to contribute something back to the Internet, even if it is a few bad jokes that only a person such as myself would find amusing.

Tomb of Thomas Sutton

Tomb of Thomas Sutton

I like finding interesting things about my name.

Well that was interesting...

I've just been poking at my iPod mini's innards (in the software sense) and had a bit of a scare. It started when my quitting iTunes somehow managed to knacker something or other causing iTunes to crash on start-up, without fail. After a few attempts to fix it (including nuking my playlists, damn it!), I unplugged my iPod, and iTunes started working again.

Mystified, I started poking around in the iPod volume on the shell and, let me tell you, it is a lot more interesting from the command line. In Finder, all you can see are the Calendars, Contacts and Notes folders. From the command line, you get all sorts of junk ('Desktop DB' and 'Desktop DF', the spotlight index, .Trashes, etc) including a folder called iPod_Control. In iPod_Control, there is all sorts of interesting stuff including the music files themselves (in 'iPod_Control/Music/') and some miscellaneous data (in 'iPod_Control/iTunes/').

Nuking 'iPod_Control/iTunes/' had the effect of fixing my problem, with the side effect of making iTunes (and perhaps the iPod, I didn't check) unaware of the music on my iPod. I won't have time for a while, but I'm going to have to poke around in there some more...

Work for Idle Hands

After a meeting with my supervisor, I've decided that this week is the last straw - if I can't manage to get a handle on my pile of assignments this week, then I obviously don't want to be here right now. I had a bit of a go at some of it last night and seemed to get on all right.

If I can finish my report on neural networks by tonight, read the Google papers (the original paper and that on map-reduce) and get a good way through the first algorithms assignment tomorrow, I think I'll get there.

Procrastination...

I can't help but wonder if my current bout of procrastination is self sabotage. Perhaps, deep down, I don't want to be a computer scientist?

Speaking

It's 2152 on Saturday, and I've just spoken my fourth word for the weekend (In case anyone cares, the were two 'hello's, a 'thanks' and a 'cheers'). One day, I'm going to see just how long I can go without speaking (to another person, as I can't help but speak to myself).

Mac OS X Tiger

Apple - Mac OS X

I've just installed Tiger on my iBook and, I must say, some of the new features are great. The RSS support in Safari is very nice (now I don't need a separate news aggregator), Dashboard is quite nice and Spotlight has already been useful. I'm not sure I like all of the changes to Mail (when you "wrap" to the next most recent message when paging through them with spacebar, it remembers the old position in the next message instead of going to the top), but I think I can get used to them.

All in all, I feel that it was well worth the investment, and I've only been playing with it for an hour or two. I'll get some more fiddling done when Monolingual finishes removing all the useless translation data from the newly installed stuff. With Panther, I saved about 750MB by removing all the languages I don't need (i.e. all of them but the various English variants), with Tiger it was just over 1GB.

(On the down side, it looks like I'm going to have to get some more RAM. Dashboard, spotlight and everything else can't be cheap to keep in memory.)

Problems, problems, problems...

I had a meeting with my supervisor today and thought that I'd better raise some of the issues I've been having. Basically, what it all boils down to is motivation, or rather a lack there of. If one took all of the time I've spent working on my honours project, my coursework and attending lectures, labs and tutorials over the last 2 months or so, it would not amount to a full week.

After a long talk with my supervisor, we've come up with a plan to, hopefully, get me back on track. I've unsubscribed from the mailing lists and turned off my email notifications on the sites that have been distracting me lately, we're considering a new project (one that I started hacking on during the mid-semester break to avoid working on my official project) and I'm going to see the honours convenor about an extension on the big assignment due this Friday that I haven't started yet.

It would be better not to be in this position at all, but I am and I feel a lot better about it now that I've spoken to someone, and have a plan of attack.

Thanks R! (Who doesn't read this, as far as I'm aware.)