Sunday, July 27, 2008
VH1 Lies: How this was not the best week ever
Ok so, Monday my car got broken into and the window got smashed. I had the company that my insurance company recommend come out and replace the window on-site. After three hours and two vans coming to my house and trying to install the window, the tech tells me that he couldn't install the window correctly and that I have to take the car into the shop to finish the installation. He then hands me a hand full of parts and said "here.... they might needs these at the shop."
After a week of having to work late at the office almost every night, I took my car in to have the window aligned correctly Saturday morning. After sitting at the shop for four hours, the inform me that the tech lost parts that they cannot install the window without, and that they've broken the window they did install and they don't have another. At this point, I was fairly mad (I actually got the supervisor to agree to pay to have a Subaru dealership replace the window and the parts, but they couldn't do it any faster). In the end, they're going to have someone come out to my work and replace the window sometime this week, and my car has got plastic covering the window. I now get to crawl into my car from the passenger side for the next few days, and park it where it got broken into with just a sheet of plastic to keep people out. I think I'm the only person that can go to a glass repair shop and leave with one less window than I started with.
And I cut my self with a butter knife this morning.
After a week of having to work late at the office almost every night, I took my car in to have the window aligned correctly Saturday morning. After sitting at the shop for four hours, the inform me that the tech lost parts that they cannot install the window without, and that they've broken the window they did install and they don't have another. At this point, I was fairly mad (I actually got the supervisor to agree to pay to have a Subaru dealership replace the window and the parts, but they couldn't do it any faster). In the end, they're going to have someone come out to my work and replace the window sometime this week, and my car has got plastic covering the window. I now get to crawl into my car from the passenger side for the next few days, and park it where it got broken into with just a sheet of plastic to keep people out. I think I'm the only person that can go to a glass repair shop and leave with one less window than I started with.
And I cut my self with a butter knife this morning.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
An Open Letter to the Guy That Smashed my Car Window and Stole my Ipod
Dear Guy,
Seriously? I mean really? You break my window, leave it sitting in my driveway to run over and you don't touch my stereo? Are you the one car burglar in Atlanta with low self esteem issues, or are you just working your way up to ripping out center consoles. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to still have my stereo, but with the value of stuff you took from me, you could have knocked on my door, woken me up and say "Hi, I'm a crackhead, give me your ipod or I'll break your car window" and I would have happily complied. More than anything this is a pain in the ass and because of all this I still haven't had any coffee this morning. If I see you sneaking around my house again, I'm going to punch you in the taint.
Trey
Seriously? I mean really? You break my window, leave it sitting in my driveway to run over and you don't touch my stereo? Are you the one car burglar in Atlanta with low self esteem issues, or are you just working your way up to ripping out center consoles. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to still have my stereo, but with the value of stuff you took from me, you could have knocked on my door, woken me up and say "Hi, I'm a crackhead, give me your ipod or I'll break your car window" and I would have happily complied. More than anything this is a pain in the ass and because of all this I still haven't had any coffee this morning. If I see you sneaking around my house again, I'm going to punch you in the taint.
Trey
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Why Tech is a love/hate relationship
From the Atlanta Best of Craigslist
... good lord
I'm a 20 yearold GA Tech student who has never kissed. I have been going out with a girl online for the last 5 years and she's finally coming down to see me on the 11th. She tells me it's a big turn-off if a guy doesn't know how to kiss, and she even dumped her last boyfriend because of this. I want to make a good first impression, but I've never kissed before! Please, I need a girl to practice kissing with, nothing else!! Just kissing lesson - nothing more nothing less!
New Bike
So, I got my new bike today and I'm really excited. It's a 19" 2008 Raleigh Detour 3.5and it's nice town. I got the bike from Intown Bicycles near Piedmont Park after shopping around some. The staff was really helpful and friendly, and I ended up test riding 3 bikes in the course of picking one out.
I also stopped by Skate Escape and Outback Bikes. Both shops were helpful, but they didn't really have a bike that fit what I was looking for. I would suggest Skate Escape for someone looking for a budget bike (they didn't have any in my price range that would fit me size-wise) or Outback if you looking for a higher end bike (they didn't really have anything in my price range). The guy at skate escape mentioned that most bike manufacturers were raising their prizes starting in August, so if you in the market I would start looking now.
I took my bike out for a spin in the neighborhood and realized how many hills I have around my house and how out of shape I am, but I'm going to start working on that. I'm really looking forward to riding my bike to school starting next month. Call me some time if you'd like to go for a ride!
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Getting a Bike Soon
So, I'm getting a bike soon (possibly tomorrow), and I'm pretty excited. Atlanta's not the best city in the world, but it will be nice not to spend so much on gas just getting back and forth between my house and campus.
Also, I definitely think I'll be putting one of these on at some point. New form of advertising WREK anyone?
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Updates
Stuff is happening... with things!
Concert Map/Calendar:
So I got a little work done on the concert google map thing I'm working on (if anyone can think of a good name let me know). You can now view the shows for 5 venues for the current day. Support for choosing date ranges will probably be the next thing I add, as well as support for new venues. Go check it out and let me know what you think (as it happens there are no shows at any of the venues tonight).
Beer:
So the beer is actually pretty good. I had some people over to try it out Saturday night and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Let me know if you want to try one, and I'll try to save some for those that requested it.
Life:
I'm going to try not to eat out any this week. Tonight I made spaghetti and it was tasty town.
Enjoy your summer!
Concert Map/Calendar:
So I got a little work done on the concert google map thing I'm working on (if anyone can think of a good name let me know). You can now view the shows for 5 venues for the current day. Support for choosing date ranges will probably be the next thing I add, as well as support for new venues. Go check it out and let me know what you think (as it happens there are no shows at any of the venues tonight).
Beer:
So the beer is actually pretty good. I had some people over to try it out Saturday night and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Let me know if you want to try one, and I'll try to save some for those that requested it.
Life:
I'm going to try not to eat out any this week. Tonight I made spaghetti and it was tasty town.
Enjoy your summer!
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Searching for something...
So one of the cooler things about my current job is to work on things that inspire me keep thinking about them after I leave the office. Over the last couple weeks I've been thinking about a php/mysql based site search engine for sites on the order of 100,000 pages and below.
Since the data for these sites is generally kept in a database to begin with no real crawling is needed like a web search engine, and since we are looking at the site in a vacuum (we don't care about inbound links) it makes more sense to rank the results by the amount of times the search query appears in the page, applying more weight for matches in the title or metadata of the page. Using this method, you can create a search feature for a site with around 1,000 pages using a simple 'LIKE' SQL query. (This code snippet is great for counting the amount of times a word shows up in a string in SQL) . Because the computer has to read through every page in the site for each search, once you get past serveral thousand pages in the site, the searches really slow down.
One idea that I came up with to remedy this is to do the same thing the big guys do and index the contents of the of the site by each word it contains. In an absloute worse case, where all of the 100,000 pages contain all 200,000 common english language words that comes out to about 20 Billion records, but if you have a site like that to search, please don't hire me. I haven't been able to compute a more likly case, but I feel like for an average site, with stop words not counted, it would be fair to estimate an index of around 20 - 50 million records (definiatley do-able for mysql on standard hardware from what I've read, but I may be wrong). So basically, you have a batch script that every morning (or whenever) reads through the site, and every time it finds a new word in a page it creates a new record that associates the page to the word and then counts the number of times the word shows up and saves it to help with the result ranking. When you go to search for somthing all you have to do is pull up the records for each word in the page, and sort by the sum of the word counts.
The only problem that comes in is for searching by phrases (like when you use quotes in google search queries). You don't want to index every combination of words because that would be really inefficent and bloat your database, but you can use your word index to shorten your query. With the word index, you only have to search the contents of the pages that contain all the words in the search phrase. This greatly narrows your search, and once it's completed you can cache the phrase and add it to your indexing script so that the engine will learn what phrases to index automatically.
I'm hoping to get an implementation of this working some time this summer, so if anyone has a giant site they need a custom search engine for let me know!
(man I'm a nerd)
Since the data for these sites is generally kept in a database to begin with no real crawling is needed like a web search engine, and since we are looking at the site in a vacuum (we don't care about inbound links) it makes more sense to rank the results by the amount of times the search query appears in the page, applying more weight for matches in the title or metadata of the page. Using this method, you can create a search feature for a site with around 1,000 pages using a simple 'LIKE' SQL query. (This code snippet is great for counting the amount of times a word shows up in a string in SQL) . Because the computer has to read through every page in the site for each search, once you get past serveral thousand pages in the site, the searches really slow down.
One idea that I came up with to remedy this is to do the same thing the big guys do and index the contents of the of the site by each word it contains. In an absloute worse case, where all of the 100,000 pages contain all 200,000 common english language words that comes out to about 20 Billion records, but if you have a site like that to search, please don't hire me. I haven't been able to compute a more likly case, but I feel like for an average site, with stop words not counted, it would be fair to estimate an index of around 20 - 50 million records (definiatley do-able for mysql on standard hardware from what I've read, but I may be wrong). So basically, you have a batch script that every morning (or whenever) reads through the site, and every time it finds a new word in a page it creates a new record that associates the page to the word and then counts the number of times the word shows up and saves it to help with the result ranking. When you go to search for somthing all you have to do is pull up the records for each word in the page, and sort by the sum of the word counts.
The only problem that comes in is for searching by phrases (like when you use quotes in google search queries). You don't want to index every combination of words because that would be really inefficent and bloat your database, but you can use your word index to shorten your query. With the word index, you only have to search the contents of the pages that contain all the words in the search phrase. This greatly narrows your search, and once it's completed you can cache the phrase and add it to your indexing script so that the engine will learn what phrases to index automatically.
I'm hoping to get an implementation of this working some time this summer, so if anyone has a giant site they need a custom search engine for let me know!
(man I'm a nerd)
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Imma goin web 2.0!
So, I didn't have a lot to do at work today, and I've come up with a new project to work on. The idea is for a concert calendar mashup with Google maps showing shows at my favorite venues. I'm using the last.fm web services api to get information about shows because it seems to have the most comprehensive list that is easily accessible (I'd love to get it from Stomp and Stammer, but they don't even have a RSS feed for their concert list).
So far, I've gotten a script to load the information about the shows into a database, and some basic work on the map done. I'll keep my progress posted on the blog and you can follow how it's going over at my site. Feel free to let me know what you think, or give me ideas for features.
So far, I've gotten a script to load the information about the shows into a database, and some basic work on the map done. I'll keep my progress posted on the blog and you can follow how it's going over at my site. Feel free to let me know what you think, or give me ideas for features.
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