Hello September
Fri Sep 04, 2009 19:58 (UTC -5)Things have been going here in Gainesville. Over the summer, my friend Evan decided to get a band together with me, my former suitemate Cameron, and one of his other friends. We got together for a practice last Tuesday (except for Cameron, who was getting ready to go somewhere). We tried to decide on a song to play and picked “Hotel California.”
I brought my Epiphone hollow-body guitar, a low-end version of a Gibson. The other guitarist, the guy I don’t know too well, had an actual Gibson hollow-body. Now I think I know how a girl feels when another girl wears the same dress as her to a party. But this guy has mad guitar skillz, so it’s all good.
I haven’t been in anything that could be loosely termed a band since some of my junior-high buds and I played in public for the last time four years ago. I’ve been in some fruitless and abortive attempts to start or join bands since then, so I’d like to see things turn out differently this time.
By the way, this new group has a name: Rubber Band. Evan doesn’t care if the name is already taken, which, given my past experiences, is an admirable quality.
For one of my classes, I have to use a program called MATLAB (I guess you’re supposed to shout it). You may have heard of the program. Turns out it’s proprietary and expensive. Actually, I don’t have to use MATLAB!!! per se, but the code I write has to work with it. I know that free alternatives exist, but to be absolutely sure, I really should use Matlab. What to do?
The professor suggested going to the university’s computer labs because Matlab is installed on the computers there. But I don’t have the time for that. I wondered if it might be installed on the so-called CPU servers, which I already had remote access to. (These things come with taking computery classes, of course.) It turns out that I can log in to one of those computers and use X11 forwarding over SSH to run Matlab. In English: I can run the program on a different computer and have its window show up on my computer as if it were any other program of mine.
Running Matlab this way is slow because the remote computer has to handle a bunch of other people’s stuff at the same time, but it’s definitely better than having to go to the labs whenever I want to do my homework. And it makes use of a cool feature that will make Windows users salivate even though it’s been available on Unix-like operating systems for 20 years. To top it off, I made a launcher for Matlab in my Applications menu (the command is “ssh -CtX [my user name]@[server] matlab“) so I can access it about as easily as program I actually have installed. I am clever.
Here’s a mesmerizing video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas sky. (Via J-Walk Blog)
The New York Times has a graph showing sales of different music formats between 1973 and 2008. Looks like the music industry’s sales are down. Yes! Maybe now they’ll get some common sense. But probably not. (Via J-Walk Blog)
Do you like baseball or statistics? I like at least one of those, and I find these baseball-related graphs to be interesting. Example: How often have the Canadian MLB teams played a game with “O Canada” as the only national anthem? (Via waxy.org)
