Google Reader

Time for some housekeeping. First of all, Google Reader feeds:

T-Rex is Lonely - spinoff of Dinosaur Comics and Garfield Minus Garfield
Calvin & Hobbes - Bill Waterson's genius, delivered daily :)
Soul Shelter - Great blog about connecting with others in the modern, technological world. Required reading: In Defense of Solitude (Part 1, Part 2)

The most significant changes have not been in new feeds, but rather in a trimming of my high volume feeds. This has freed up an insane amount of time, which I've put towards real reading (7 books in the past 6 weeks).

First Read - Super good for inside politics, but since the elections, I don't feel there's quite as much to do. We worked to hire the legislators, now it's their turn to do their job.
Five Thirty Eight - amazing analysis by Nate Silver, but it's become too dense for interest without the horserace.
GOOD transparency - despite the excellent infographs, I wasn't reading this as much as I should have.
Yahoo! News Top Stories - too much noise and time, even without reading them. The world goes on without breaking news.
LifeHacker - LifeHacker was insanely interesting, and I read nearly everything, but I feel I've got my productivity system down now.

The Master Subscription List has been updated.

Computer Science

Indiana University's Department of Computer Science has been completely absorbed by the School of Informatics (SoI). I'm not entirely comfortable with this decision, as what we do in Computer Science (theory and algorithms) is very different from Informatics (applications to other areas). Also, Computer Science students are a very different breed from Informatics students - there's a number of differences in the curriculum.

Anyways, the new SoI bulletin has completely revised the BS CS degree program. It is now much more streamlined. Core courses have been reduced from 6 to 4 and upper-level requirements have been reduced from 7 courses divided amongst various first letter and second number distinctions to 5 courses in a simplified concentration. My concentrations will be Artificial Intelligence and Programming Languages.

These changes have dramatically altered the next three years. I was 5 CS courses away from graduation. Under the new requirements I have only 3 more, which can be from a broad list of related courses. Instead of taking every undergrad CS course, I'm now going to be able to take Artificial Life, Bioinspired Computing, The Computer and Natural Language (NLP), and Search Informatics: Google Under the Hood (MapReduce). These have all been on my radar, but since they were in the Informatics program, they did not meet any CS requirements. Now I'm able to shave a semester off my graduation and take some (hopefully) more interesting courses.

There are some issues with the changes - there is a lot less emphasis on theory, which is the hallmark of the IU CS program. Since I'm staying on an extra year for the Professional Masters program I'm not concerned about my education, but it is alarming that people can get away with only 6 CS courses when the old program required 13. (I'll graduate with 10.)

At any rate, I'll be out by Fall 2011 instead of sometime in 2012, and that's awesome.

Computers

Today I got my new computer and figured I may as well brag about specs ;) Here's a list of all my networked devices, they join Carlo Angiuli's computers along with the other housemates' laptops, iPods and phones. We have a total of 14 devices on our network - egads!

UPDATE: 1/21/10 - OS upgrades for singularity and little-guy

• singularity - my new primary desktop. 8x as fast as sweetness and consumes half as much total power.
  
  

  CPU

  AMD Phenom II X4 905e - 2.5GHz, 65W energy efficient

  RAM

  4GB DDR3 1333

  Chipset

  AMD 785G

  Graphics

  AMD/ATi Radeon HD 4200 (integrated)

  Storage

  3x500GB SATA II

  Optical

  Samsung 22x DVD-RW

  Operating System

  Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" & Windows 7 Professional

  Year

  2009

  
  
  
  


• sweetness - my stalwart companion for 5 years. She's still an excellent single core system, but we live in an era of immense parallelization, so it's time to move on. Any new usage ideas?
  
  

  CPU

  AMD Athlon 64 2800+ - 1.8GHz, 89W, overclock to 2.4GHz for gaming

  RAM

  2GB DDR 400

  Chipset

  nVidia nForce 4 SLI

  Graphics

  nVidia 7900GS 256MB

  Storage

  160GB, 80GB SATA

  Optical

  18x DVD-RW, 20x DVD-ROM

  Operating System

  Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" & Windows XP Professional

  Year

  2004

  
  
  
  


• media-pc - generic name avoids over-attachment. This beautiful box drives our 37" panel upstairs and hosts our household media.
  
  

  CPU

  AMD Athlon X2 4850e - 2.4GHz, 45W energy efficient

  RAM

  4GB DDR2 800

  Chipset

  AMD 780G

  Graphics

  ATI Radeon HD 3450+3200 hybrid crossfire

  Storage

  2TB SATA II

  Optical

  22x DVD-RW

  Operating System

  Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"

  Year

  2008

  
  
  
  


• little-guy - the netbook, a Dell Mini 9 [review]
  
  

  CPU

  Intel Atom N270 - 1.6GHz

  RAM

  1GB DDR2 800

  Chipset

  Intel 945G

  Graphics

  Intel GMA 950

  Storage

  4GB Solid State

  Optical

  none

  Operating System

  Jolicloud Pre-beta

  Year

  2009

  
  
  
  

Hymn #101

Yeah I've come to know the wishlist of my father.
I've come to know the shipwrecks where he wished.
I've come to wish aloud among the overdressed crowd.
Come to witness now the sinking of the ship.
Throwing pennies from the seatop next to it.

And I've come to roam the forest past the village
With a dozen lazy horses in my cart.
I've come here to get eyed
To do more than just get by
I've come to test the timber of my heart.
Oh I've come to test the timber of my heart.

And I've come to be untroubled in my seeking.
And I've come to see that nothing is for naught.
I've come to reach out blind
To reach forward and behind
For the more I seek the more I'm sought
Yeah, the more I seek the more I'm sought.

And I've come to meet the sheriff and his posse,
To offer him the broad side of my jaw.
I've come here to get broke,
Then maybe bum a smoke.
We'll go drinking two towns over after all.
Well, we'll go drinking two towns over after all.

And I've come to meet the legendary takers.
I've only come to ask them for a lot.
Oh they say I come with less than I should rightfully possess.
I say the more I buy the more I'm bought.
And the more I'm bought the less I cost.

And I've come to take their servants and their surplus.
And I've come to take their raincoats and their speed.
I've come to get my fill
To ransack and spill.
I've come to take the harvest for the seed.
I've come to take the harvest for the seed.

And I've come to know the manger that you sleep in.
I've come to be the stranger that you keep.
I've come from down the road,
And my footsteps never slowed.
Before we met I knew we'd meet.
Before we met I knew we'd meet.

And I've come here to ignore your cries and heartaches.
I've come to closely listen to you sing.
I've come here to insist
That I leave here with a kiss.
I've come to say exactly what I mean.
And I mean so many things.

And you've come to know me stubborn as a butcher.
And you've come to know me thankless as a guest.
But will you recognize my face
When God's awful grace
Strips me of my jacket and my vest,
And reveals all the treasure in my chest?

Joe Pug - Hymn #101
Buy the EP on Amazon

Most Influential

What is your biggest influence?

It's an open question - the {noun} that most influenced your calling/work/studies/career/purpose/etc to date: book, article, movie, paper, film, photo, story, person, relative, musician, artist, website, event, gadget, activity, anything! What's the one thing that got you into what you're into?

For me it's the Towards 2020 Science Report (2.3MB PDF). The buzz I had after reading this report was incredible. We are standing literally on the precipice of scientific revolution - just as the discovery of algebra and calculus prompted the scientific revolutions of ages past, the development of computation is completely changing how we can look at the universe. Everything can be modeled. We can create "artificial scientists". This awesomeness is why I do artificial intelligence.

Right now - what is that thing? What is your biggest influence? What sparks your fire?



Edit: Had to republish and refocus on school/career/interests - in the grand scheme of things there are other influences of greater or equal stature. :)

New Feeds

The regular feed update - this one is fairly substantial with new blogs from all over the place.

Astronomy Picture of the Day - excellent images from NASA that truly inspire discovery

Humor
Apokalips - I like this comic. It is fairly new to the scene.
Overcompensating - This is a great webcomic, fairly classic, not-so-classy. I was absolutely hooked with Awkward People Island.
Thinkin Lincoln - not sure why this wasn't on my list yet - the comic is enshrined on our Internet Wall (along with xkcd and dinosaur comics). Quality has gone down lately (since the Bermuda Triangle arc), but the author just switched to a weekly format, so that should help. After all, Space Trips are only A Question of Science in the Two-Party System :) [bonus win]

Politics
Paul Krugman Blog - one of the most influential economists of our times. His daily political musings are interesting and often turn me to other cool resources.
Paul Krugman - his New York Times opeds

Tech
Wired Top News - Fills the void in tech reporting that Ars Technica doesn't cover. Great general geeky science stuff.

Cognitive Science
Neurophilosophy - good blog on the brain and philosophy from Science Blogs.

Productivity
Study Hacks - good blog on becoming a better student, following many of the principles established by the rest of my Productivity section: doing less is more (to an extent)



Unsubscibed
DailyTech - DailyTech sucks. There is little to no editorial process - every single article has at least 3 typos and just wrong information. I could write better stuff in 7th grade. They also lag behind the rest of the tech journalism world by 2 days or so. I've kept subscribed to them because they had general science news and great hardware review overviews, but now that I'm a redditor, I don't need this.
Reddits - see the reddit post



The master subscription list has been updated.

New to RSS or Google Reader? How I Do Google Reader

Reddit

This week I signed up for reddit. My Google Reader had accumulated 5 or 6 subreddits, so I was pretty much using the site already. The same thing happened with Twitter - I was following 6 or 7 people through Reader and finally decided it was time to give back.

The site is basically a much better, more filtered version of Digg. It's not as good-looking, but it's way more functional. You subscribe to different topics you are interested in and the main page aggregates all these "subreddits" on the main page, so the articles that show up should at least be relevant. You are able to vote articles up or down and comment. You can also submit new articles, or submit a general question for fellow redditors to use. There are 5 tabs on the top of each reddit: what's hot, new, controversial (voted equally up and down), top (best of), saved (your bookmarks in that reddit). These can lead to really cool hive mind things, like a list of best TED talks.

My reddit subscriptions are mostly for tech stuff: reddit.com, politics, technology, programming (proggit), science, linux, cogsci, Python, javascript, Ubuntu, hardware, compsci, cyberlaws, tedtalks, java, PHP. If you join up, I'm JaimieMurdock.

Because reddit is not responsible for lost productivity, I've set a 20 minute limit for every 6 hours in LeechBlock, which is in effect all day every day. It takes some enforced self-control not to be consumed ;)

Netbook Overview

Netbooks are a new computer form factor designed to provide extreme portability at a low price for wireless access anywhere. They achieve this through a small chassis and low-power hardware. Netbooks are secondary computers, aimed at people who already have a kickass desktop or a bulkier laptop and just want something to can bring to class, lounge with on the couch, or browse with at the coffee shop.

Six months ago I got a refurbished Dell Mini 9 netbook for $240 from Dell Outlet. The size still elicits a "wow" - at every lecture this semester neighbors have asked if they can play with it. (sometimes during the talk!) The overall netbook market has settled on a 10" standard.

General Notes
Hardware
There are dozens of netbooks and almost all of them have the exact same specs: 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM, no DVD drive, 9-10" screen, integrated graphics, 1024x600 resolution, and a webcam of some sort. Things that will vary widely are battery life and keyboard size.

The lack of a DVD drive will probably bother some people, as will the presence of integrated graphics. Both of these are non-essential to the netbook philosophy, which dictates that everything important is on the internet. If not, you need a more powerful computer anyways. nVidia's Ion platform aims to change the graphics issues, but has seen slow adoption.

Operating Systems
Windows 7 has been touted as the best choice for a Windows netbook experience. Although not formally launching until October 2009, the release candidate can be easily acquired. The redesigned task bar helps promote minimalism and new optimizations make it run smoother than previous Windows incarnations. Vista is all but impossible to use functionally. XP is offered on almost all netbooks, and is the preferred choice over Vista.

I prefer Linux, which has finally matured enough for mainstream use. Several vendors ship with Ubuntu Linux. I find that Ubuntu to be far more usable than Windows, especially the painless updates and streamlined software download and install process. I tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) which is optimized for small screens, but I wasn't a fan of the particular application launcher. My final configuration was a self-remixed version of the Desktop Edition, adding the uses the Maximus, Window Picker, and Human Netbook Theme packages.

I just got an invite for the Jolicloud alpha, which looks like a promising netbook OS with a much better app launcher. I'll update with impressions later.

Specific Models
Dell Mini 9
My netbook is the Dell Mini 9 - "little-guy". It is about the same size and weight as a standard hardcover book (see above). The display is an amazing LED backlit display with great colors and contrast - it has been favorably compared to the MacBook Pro displays. The build quality is very solid. There are no moving parts in the entire chassis due to the low-power Atom processor enabling a fanless design and the use of a solid state drive. In addition, every component is extremely easy to access - requiring only the removal of 2 screws to get to the wifi card, hard drive and RAM (see below). On the standard 4-cell battery it gets about 4 hours of battery life on full brightness with wireless enabled.

There are two caveats. First, the keyboard is wonky due to the 9" form factor. Dell decided to sacrifice the standard layout to ensure that the letters were near normal size. My typing speed is about 20% slower than on a full-size keyboard when punctuation is required. Also the solid state drive in the base model is only 4GB. Since most of my data is on the cloud, this isn't a big deal. If you need more space, there is an SD HC slot on the side and the hard drive is easily replaceable.

The base Dell install of Ubuntu 8.04 is okay, but not excellent. The OS is bundled with the Yahoo web apps suite linked everywhere, which was frustrating since I live on the Google cloud. The application launcher was very well done. Software updates were a pain since Dell used an LPIA Linux kernel instead of the more ubiquitous i386 kernel. In usage, there is no difference, but it does mean that the package manager is severely limited. You can also order the computer with Windows XP.

All in all, I think the form factor of the Mini 9 is well worth it, and doubt I would toss it around as much if it were slightly bigger. The keyboard can be overcome, especially when you recognize that it is meant to be a secondary computer. If I need to do serious work, I'll get on my desktop.




Other Reccomendations
LifeHacker has an excellent Hive Five article on netbooks: Five Best Netbooks. It focuses on 10" models, which seem to be the emerging standard. The Asus 1000HE has received much praise.

If you are interested in a 9", the Dell Vostro A90 is the same as the Mini 9. The Mini 9 has been removed from the main page, but it appears you can order it here.

Purchasing Notes
If you are an IU student looking to purchase a netbook, remember the IU Dell Partnership Program. You'll be asked to authenticate via CAS and then taken to a custom Dell page with 7-12% discounts on all items.

Everyone should look into the Dell Outlet. The prices are severely lowered and all computers come with a standard 1-year warranty. My Mini 9 came from the outlet, and I have been completely satisfied.

Recovery

Just went to Bloomington Bone and Joint for another appointment with the doctor and therapist and they declared my elbow healed, with full motion and no restrictions! I'm extremely ecstatic as this was supposed to be a 6 week process, and I've done it in 3.

deCycles 2009 seems to have gone really well - Patti/Signe, Stacey, and Andrew got back on Sunday. The prevailing sentiment is that the trip brings you to overwhelming highs and lows, but it's a completely different mental state - one of those "you have to experience it" things. They all seem to have grown through the experience, especially in "get-up-and-go"-ness.

Of course I'm bummed that I couldn't finish the trip, and it sucks that I'm in every article as "one of the two who couldn't make it". I still made something out of the past two weeks though:

• Put in over 30 hours, which turns into a lot of money.
• Earnestly started on the InPhO paper.
  
• Enjoyed some time reflecting and set two (reasonably) ambitious goals for the next year:
  1. Establish an emergency fund of $1,000 and leave debt behind by January.
  2. Publish/present at least 3 times by next May.

Also, I have to get back on the bike and get really serious about training. Sure, I put in 650 miles before deCycles, but they were sporadic - 150 miles one week, 0 the next two. In order for it to become a lifestyle, I need to be consistent. There's still 3 1/2 months before winter and next semester has a lot of free time for group rides. I'm thinking short 20-25 mile rides on MTWR (2 hours tops) and then longer 50+ mile rides over the weekend (mornings at 9). Let me know if you're interested! Company for the weekend rides would be especially awesome :)

This year's deCycles is going to nag at me for a long time. There's not much of a silver lining, but dwelling on "might-have-beens" isn't gonna do anything. There's still the Hilly Hundred, a return trip to Wisconsin (potential route - Bike 4 Trails, Great River Road, Wisconsin River Valley, Madison) and maybe deCycles 2010. Things happen, so I'll take solace in only being down for 3 weeks.

New Feeds

A few more sites to be aware of...

Humor
passive-agressive notes - Saw this site at NACAP two weeks ago during the Facebook Forum. If you like this kind of thing, you should subscribe.
Zero Punctuation - Yahtzee, the British-born Australia-based video game reviewer, is an unending source of comedy gold: Sims 3 review

Productivity
The Art of Nonconformity - This guy is awesome, and wants everyone else to be awesome too. I agree. Chris has some unconventional ideas on how to be awesome, but that's because awesomeness is unconventional. His life-manifesto "A Brief Guide for World Domination" is definitely worth reading. He also travels a bit. Start with the articles listed on his writings page, they're pretty cool.

The master subscription list has been updated.

New to RSS or Google Reader? How I Do Google Reader

Some Thoughts

So this blog is getting updated a little more frequently - hopefully, you are finding some useful tips. At this stage, I'm still a mere squidling (undergraduate), so you're getting a lot of redirects to other awesome things instead of novel ideas, but that's how life works. Hopefully I'm guiding you to the right places.

My elbow is healing up gradually - I can rotate my wrist almost entirely and my arm can almost straighten. Twisting my arm remains difficult. The progress is promising, but I still can't lift more than two pounds. Perhaps in two weeks I can meet up with deCycles in Lexington and finish the last 3 days of the ride.

It's not too bad being back in Bloomington. This weekend I started earnest work on the paper for InPhO. Right now I'm articulating how AI should be used to augment human feedback, without superseding it. I've also been working on some user interfaces and came across a really good Google Tech Talk, "Don't Make Me Click". Aza Raskin does a great job of emphasizing the importance of minimalist design and of doing as much as possible for your users. I found it worth the hour.

I've also been researching polyphasic sleep. Basically instead of sleeping 8 hours in a row, you have a shorter period of "core sleep" and then take 20 minute naps throughout the day. There are variations ranging from 6 hours of core sleep with a 30 minute nap in the day (Biphasic) to no core sleep and 6 20 minute naps throughout the day (Uberman) and a bunch of middle ground (Everyman). The less extreme versions are more pretentious ways of explaining what people do anyways, but the uberman concept is a fascinating extreme. Steve Pavlina has an interesting journal on adopting the uberman (day 30) (day 120) (going back). My roommate seems to have accidentally adopted the everyman system last year.

This month, I'm going to adopt biphasic sleep as my "thing" (although it seems this is how I naturally react to the school year). My only concern with adopting a true polyphasic sleep schedule is physical activity. No reports seem to have a regular exercise routine, and with 150+ miles of biking per week, I think core sleep may play a larger role in muscle recovery. For more findings on sleep, monitor my sleep tag on Delicious.

Some (public domain) visualizations of sleep patterns from Wikipedia:

Firefox Extension Mania!

This month I discovered Firefox extensions! I really hate bogging down my browser, but these are incredibly useful. Know any others? Link it in the comments!

LeechBlock (extension)
This is the best productivity extension ever. It allows you to list a few domains to block (twitter.com, facebook.com, youtube.com, reader.google.com, ...) and set up a time period to block them. BUT it also has an option to allow limited access. I have it set up to allow me on my sites for 10 minutes an hour. This keeps me on task, but allows reasonable distractions to clear the mind. It is important to check the "Actively block these sites" option, as that will redirect any already open tabs to these timesinks. I like redirecting to this undistraction page.

GreaseMonkey (extension)
GreaseMonkey is one plugin that I've actually stopped using, because it does tend to slow down browsing and can be used maliciously. However, some people may find FB Purity useful. It hides all the annoying quiz applications from showing up in your Facebook newsfeed!

KeyConfig (extension)
KeyConfig is a small extension that allows you to rebind and create new keyboard shortcuts. Things I have done:

• full screen to F2 - much more convenient placement
  
  
• Evernote Web Clipper to Ctrl+E - much quicker note-taking, see more on Evernote below
  Add new key with this code:
  evernote_addSelectionToEn3(null);
  
  
• bit.ly sidebar to Ctrl+B - quick distribution of cool sites through Twitter
  Add new key with this code:
  content.location = "javascript:var%20e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('language','javascript');e.setAttribute('src','http://bit.ly/bookmarklet/load.js');document.body.appendChild(e);void(0);"
  
  
• any bookmarklet can be added with:
  content.location = "(bookmarklet code)"
  

Since I got my netbook, my cloud computing presence has grown exponentially. Syncing between the Sweetness and Little-guy just takes too long to set up and introduces an administrative task I don't want to deal with. The following extensions increase the utility of the cloud exponentially.

Delicious (extension) (official site)
Delicious replaces my bookmarks menu with an easy to use tagging infrastructure and note taking system accessible through Ctrl+D. By putting my bookmarks on the cloud, I can access them from any computer (useful for continuing research projects in the library). The social networking aspect didn't seem like a big deal to me, until I started actually using it. Typically our friends share our interests, so it's not surprising that we would find their bookmarks interesting.

Finally, the Delicious plugin allows you to sync quicksearches across computers (tag things with shortcut:). I have a quicksearch setup to search my delicious bookmarks and to bring up my bookmarks by tag, dramatically increasing the utility of my bookmarks by limiting my search domain to sites I have already flagged as useful. (my quicksearches - feel free to save the interesting ones to your Delicious :) )

Evernote (extension) (official site)
OneNote is a program that Microsoft just got right. Unfortunately, it's Microsoft and I've switched to the Linux world. OneNote was integrated into every part of my computng life - anytime I would put a note into a little text file, it would get tossed into my OneNote instead (phone numbers, quotes, observations, guitar tabs, letter drafting, etc.). Win+N (new note) became my most used shortcut. It is sorely missed - but Evernote has done a respectable job of replacing it.

Evernote is like Onenote in a lot of ways, but it uses a tagging system in lieu of tabbed notebooks and is more ubiquitous, with native clients on almost every platform (Win, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Web). Unfortunately, there is no native Linux client (the Wine version works, but it's got some ugly buttons). How is it useful to have evernote on your phone? Notes on the go, recording song ideas for later use, taking pictures of receipts or things you want to reference later - the uses are legion.

Back to Firefox though - the web clipper is an awesome extension, as you can highlight any section of a site, click the elephant, and voila! it's been added to your notebook with a link to the original source. Great for compiling research.

New Feeds

Here's some new RSS feeds:

Cognitive Science
Neuroantrhopology - Fascinating articles on brain and body. The Wednesday Round-Ups are an overload of awesome articles.
TED Blog - Blog from TED Talks with more information on talks and generally cool stuff

General News
Boston Globe: The Big Picture - The best photojournalism, about 3-4 slideshows a week.

Productivity
LifeHacker - High volume blog filled with cool programs and ideas to help boost productivity
The Simple Dollar - Great blog on personal finances. Make sure to check out his free eBook - "Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on Just One Page"

For pruning, I've unsubscribed from Glenn Greenwald's excellent blog. Sometimes you have to recognize when you aren't actually reading articles. Despite the moral importance of declassifying torture memos, the articles weren't directly giving me relevant information for this point in my life. Adam should keep sharing the good ones though.

For future reference, I created a master subscription list.

New to RSS or Google Reader? Check out the newly updated How I Do Google Reader

Bike Trip Blues

On June 20th I left for deCycles - 3 weeks, 1600+ miles. no modern comforts. It was going to be my summer... that changed on Monday :(

The group was riding in a tight paceline of about 20mph to get to the last break of the day. The girl in front of me kissed wheels with the person in front of her, lost her balance and went down. I ran over her and flipped onto the pavement. The colonel fishtailed into both of us. Everyone got out of the road as quickly as possible and started washing their wounds.

With my bike out of commission, I hopped in the wussie wagon :( When I got into the van I realized my right arm had no strength and was in serious pain. Norm looked at it during the break, and diagnosed it as the radius. We tried to get me back on the bike but I couldn't stretch into a riding position.

The last 30 miles in the wagon were torture! Monday was the first day I had the right amounts of nutrition, water, and sleep. I also pulled for 10 miles. We were only 3 miles from the last break, and 30 miles from the churh. I had just gotten my second wind and was ready to go.

When I got to Portsmouth, another of the ride leaders dropped me off at the ER. After 3 1/2 hours the diagnosis was a radial head fracture. The hospital was packed, but they noticed I was bonking and got me supper - two sandwiches, a salad and a slice of cherry pie. After 80 miles of riding and no food in 7 hours, I was extremely grateful!

Mom freaked out when she heard about the accident and drove to help me. The next morning we saw a specialist in Portsmouth who said it wasn't fractured, which contradicted the earlier diagnoses. Bloomington Bone & Joint looked at it today and confirmed the radial head fracture and got me set up with physical therapy. No cast, because setting the elbow would freeze the joint and the fracture is stable.

My elbow is going to need six weeks to heal, so I would've spent the rest of the trip in the van. That wasn't going to happen - it's torture when you're well. I'm back in Bloomington for now and would love to see people. If I recover quickly, I will rejoin the ride from Lexington to Bloomington.



As for the others: The girl was bleeding a lot, and now has a really bad case of road rash down her left side. The colonel just toppled and may have done something to his wrist. Both are on their bikes and still riding.

There were 2 other wrecks on Monday. The other people look more roughed up. Cricket got run over and one of the bikes from that wreck now has a pancake wheel. Fortunately, there are two doctors traveling with us and the others seemed to be fine, aside from road rash. Not the best day for cycling...

Pictures

On Friday I got the Canon PowerShot SD780 IS (Amazon). I'm really pleased with it - the form factor is amazingly small and it feels sturdy. Despite its small size, it packs a ton of features - 12 megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom, view finder, 2.5" LCD, HDMI out and a full gamut of image options that I'll be exploring soon. Thus far, it earns high accolades.


I've been using Google Picasa to do simple photo editing (just crops and straightening so far). I like the suite's usability and the hassle-free uploading to Blogger and Picasa Web Albums (and Facebook on Windows). One strange thing about Picasa is that it doesn't actually save edits to the file directly - rather it stores the transformations in library files. This preserves the originals and saves disk space, but can be confusing when you open the file in a different program and notice your edits are gone. The Export button saves the edited pictures to your hard drive. The other export options also just send the edited picture. It's a good system, but something to be aware of if you want to move to other image software.


More can be found at my Picasa web album.

Doin Thangs

I do a lot of things. I also have some major focus issues. This combination can lead to a lot of overwhelming stress from procrastination, and for a long time I lived bouncing from one task to the other as due dates arrived.

Last semester I finally discovered how to overcome these issues by forming small habits from the Zen to Done system. The most significant tip was that time management doesn't involve rigid scheduling. Instead, time management is just smart planning. By focusing each week around a few "big rocks" and each day around a few "most important things" (MITs), my workload suddenly became manageable.

One of the key ingredients to following through with this system is tracking what we do in a day. It's easy to look back on your week and say "I didn't get anything done" without realizing the little things that were really accomplished. Joe's Goals is a simple productivity website to help record progress. You create categories for what you do in a day (work, homework, reading, cooking, housekeeping, socializing, exercising, etc...) and when you spend a chunk of time working on that goal you just click on the box to add a checkmark.

For me, a check represents about 2 hours of work - a math problem set, a lab report, a 20-mile bike ride, 2 hours of chillaxing, grocery shopping, doing laundry... I've discovered that I can accomplish 4-6 things in a typical day. Any less than 4 and I've been wasting time, any more than 6 and I'll burn out. In the morning I make a quick list of the five things I'm going to accomplish, and then do them. By recognizing I only have 5 slots in a given day I can actually accomplish everything in a week through good time management. If I have more things to do in a week than I have space for, I can prioritize and delegate before they become an issue, mitigating stress.

For inspiration, here are my categories:

• homework (math and science homework)
• reading (humanities homework)
• work-work (consulting)
• research
  
• cook
• house (cleaning, grocery shopping, etc.)
• social
• bike
• self (journaling, reflection, etc.)

I also maintain 3 LogBooks:

• wake (time I get out of bed)
  
• what I did (note on what I did to earn each check)
• sleep (time I go to bed)
  

We can also have negative categories to discourage our vices - mine is for skipping class. Each time I consider skipping the negative check makes me consider whether I am skipping out of laziness or because I really have something else to do to offset that check.

It's a simple, elegant solution. I use Joe's Goals because most of my work is online, but you can use the same system with old-school pen and paper, as Ben Franklin did. I still struggle with procrastination, and occassionally I get overloaded, but by adopting this system I've learned how to get things done.

Master Subscription List

This is a master list of my RSS subscriptions for use with Google Reader or other feed aggregators, along with some notes. Smaller text means the feed has been unsubscribed to. Links go directly to the feed, although I may change that to have just the icon point to the feed. New to RSS or Google Reader? How I Do Google Reader

General News
Boston Globe: The Big Picture - The best photojournalism, about 3-4 slideshows a week.
Astronomy Picture of the Day - excellent images from NASA that truly inspire discovery
Yahoo! News Top Stories - aggregate of AP, Reuters and AFP headlines. Feed just prints leading sentence and picture. Gives a good overview of what the mass media is talking about. High volume, low clickthrough.

Humor - mostly webcomics
Calvin & Hobbes - Bill Waterson's genius, delivered daily :)
chainsawsuit - awesome one-off jokes
Dinosaur Comics - philosophical quandries involving dinosaurs
Hark! A Vagrant! - Kate Beaton writes comics about history
Nedroid Picture Diary - reginald and beartato!!!
Overcompensating - fairly classic, not-so-classy.
PhD Comics - adventures in academia
pictures for sad children - "this comic makes me happy, but then it makes me sad"
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - often perverse one-off jokes
T-Rex is Lonely - spinoff of Dinosaur Comics and Garfield Minus Garfield
Thinkin Lincoln - the adventures of Lincoln's disembodied head. After all, Space Trips are only A Question of Science in the Two-Party System :) [bonus win]
xkcd - geeky jokes
Something Awful - good long-form humor
Apokalips - I like this comic. It is fairly new to the scene.
passive-agressive notes - Saw this site at NACAP two weeks ago during the Facebook Forum. If you like this kind of thing, you should subscribe.
Zero Punctuation - Yahtzee, the British-born Australia-based video game reviewer, is an unending source of comedy gold: Sims 3 review
Notes: For more humor blogs check out posts by my friends Banjaloupe and Carlo Angiuli.

IU - local awareness
IU General News - feed from the Indiana.edu homepage
Indiana Daily Student - mostly for lulz
IU Cognitive Science News - announcements for IU CogSci undergrads
IU Computer Science Department - funnily enough, this has very little traffic. The CS website really could use an update.
IU School of Informatics
Bloomington VeloNews - Bloomington cycling news and information
The Robin - student-run satire magazine

Politics - for the obsessed
First Read - MSNBC's political analysis blog, lots of volume. Good feel for what's going on in Washington right now.
Five Thirty Eight - amazing analysis by Nate Silver. Started as an election prediction site, but has evolved into a lot more.
David Brooks - the only sane conservative columnist
Paul Krugman Blog - one of the most influential economists of our times. His daily political musings are interesting and often turn me to other cool resources.
Paul Krugman - his New York Times opeds
The Economist: International - The Economist is one of my favorite print magazines, and the international section is the best part of it.
The Economist: The world this week - Worth subscribing to regardless of interest in politics, as it provides an excellent summary of the world each week.
GOOD transparency - great section of an online magazine with infographs (example: first 100 days of the presidency from Roosevelt to Obama )
Glenn Greenwald - great investigative reporter for Salon, currently investigating Obama's civil liberties policy. Always eye opening.

Tech
Ars Technica - moderate volume, high quality. Great articles on everything technology
AnAndTech - hardware reviews and industry reports
Wired Top News - Fills the void in tech reporting that Ars Technica doesn't cover. Great general geeky science stuff.
reddit in general

Products - these are just for updates on interesting products and companies.
Google Blog
Facebook Blog
Evernote Blog
bit.ly Blog

Weather
Atlantic Hurricanes - because hurricanes are freakin awesome
Indiana - Monroe/INZ062 - local watches and warnings
Kentucky - Calloway/KYZ009 - watches and warnings from back home
Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog - Weather articles from Dr. Jeff Masters, meteorologist and storm chaser.
Note: NOAA watch/warning information can be found by state or by county. Click on the XML button on the far right of your state's row and then find your county.

CogSci
Mind Hacks - AMAZING blog about all things to do with the mind. They have a post every other week entitled "Brain Spikes" that just link to a ton of interesting articles.
Cognitive Daily - low-volume blog on random topics in cognition.
Neuroantrhopology - Fascinating articles on brain and body. The Wednesday Round-Ups are an overload of awesome articles.
Neurophilosophy - good blog on the brain and philosophy from Science Blogs.
TED Blog - Blog from TED Talks with more information on talks and generally cool stuff

Productivity
The Art of Nonconformity - This guy is awesome, and wants everyone else to be awesome too. I agree. Chris has some unconventional ideas on how to be awesome, but that's because awesomeness is unconventional. His life-manifesto "A Brief Guide for World Domination" is definitely worth reading. He also travels a bit. Start with the articles listed on his writings page, they're pretty cool.
Soul Shelter - Great blog about connecting with others in the modern, technological world. Required reading: In Defense of Solitude (Part 1, Part 2)
The Simple Dollar - Great blog on personal finances. Make sure to check out his free eBook - "Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on Just One Page"
Study Hacks - good blog on becoming a better student, following many of the principles established by the rest of my Productivity section: doing less is more (to an extent)
Zen Habits - Excellent productivity blog which spawned the Zen to Done (ZTD) system, a more practical version of Getting Things Done (GTD). See how I've implemented part of it: Doin Thangs.
LifeHacker - High volume blog filled with cool programs and ideas to help boost productivity

Jaimie Murdock
Shared Items
The Long Cut