I’ve been keep headphones on more and more often while I’m working. I have a moderately eclectic playlist, and some of its contents include soundtracks from Lord of the Rings and Star Wars.
I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising, given how greatly music can affect atmosphere and emotions, but I’ve found it moderately inspiring (in an ironic sort of way) to begin new tasks by listening to a few bars of The Bridge to Khazad-Dum or The Imperial March.
The rest of the day is mostly fueled by a playlist consisting primarily of the Beach Boys, Children 18:3, the Offspring, Matisyahu, and a smattering of other things. I have a lot of other stuff in the (iTunes) playlist, but I found I was just skipping over it, so I unchecked it.
What’s your theme music?
Good math, bad math is an interesting blog about mathematics that I just discovered via a post about someone’s complaint that the Calculus is not “Christian”. Some of the comments are pretty interesting, and I added a bit to the conversation, in which I hope I didn’t embarrass myself too much.
For the mathematically inclined, there is a post about a number (or family of numbers) called Ω. Despite having been in Computer Science for a few years, this is a concept to which I hadn’t been formally introduced, and it’s fascinating. Ω represents an idea to do with the halting problem, which is the problem that there is no way to answer the question of whether a program, with a given input, will ever stop. I’m not going to attempt to paraphrase the article, as it’s a thorny concept to begin with, but if you like that sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy trying to follow the article.
Gadget afficionadoes may be turning up their noses at me even now, that I have only just now discovered the OQO Model 1+, uh, computer.
Wow. Now that’s a tempting little gadget. The only question to be answered, of course, (other than “do I want to spend $1600 on this?”) is: will it run Linux? ;-)
I’m downloading the most recent stable version of Arch Linux, and getting ready to install it.
Why, when I’ve been extolling the wonders of Suse 10, and how this and that it is? Why indeed. That “why” might be that I’ve just spent an unproductive hour or more trying to get a usable DVD player working, without success. I’ve been reminded of why I abandoned rpm-based distributions in the first place.
The worst part is, I’m sure I could do it — I’m just no longer interested. I don’t want to spend the time to install all the dependencies properly and make it work.
So I’m going back to one of the Linux distros that have sane package management, and hope for the best. We’ll see; I may even wind up installing Gentoo again.
Blegh.
…I missed this when it was new, so if you missed it also you might get a chuckle out of Loud Thinking’s Emo Programmer post.
From the post:
This is a unique chance to escape such silly constraints as “the best tool for the job” or simply be about “getting things done”. As an Emo Programmer™, you’re free to use arguments such as:
- …because I feel like it
- …because it makes me special
- …because I get to feel warm and fuzzy inside
Are you an emo programmer? You know who you are… Personally, I’m still waiting for the definitive book on the Klingon programming methodology…
