harpojaeger.com

I have finished my final standardized test. I will NEVER take the SAT or ACT again.
I have a bunch of homework to do this afternoon before heading up to Will’s for the rest of the weekend. I am excited to have some time off from my normal, hectic, college-laden life.
In completely random news, WordPress 2.7 is now available. WordPress is a popular blog and Content Management System; I use it for this site. The new version is still in beta, and there doesn’t appear to be a MU (multi-user) version yet. Since I use MU on this site, I am probably going to have to wait about another month, when the development team predicts it will be out of beta, but I’m very excited.
This season’s Mock Trial case comes out on Monday, which means that our school’s team (of which I am a member) is getting ready to kick into gear. We have a lot of work to do, and I am very glad I have college stuff out of the way before this all starts.

I had an excellent day at Olin, although very tiring. There were several interesting and informative presentations, and I also spent some time listening to a presentation / Q&A session with a Computer Science professor, who talked about some very interesting topics and demonstrated some fascinating programs. One of them generated random text by taking an input (he demonstrated it with the text of The Great Gatsby). The program then generated a list of all the words that appear in the text, and a corresponding list of all of the words that follow each of those words, respectively, in the original text. Then it chooses a random word, chooses a random word from the list of words that follow it, chooses a random word from the list of words that follow that one, etc., building a randomized string of text. The result is a nonsensical and non-grammatical string of random words that still sounds exactly like the book. It is awesome. I have decided I am going to write the program in PHP and post it on this site somewhere. I am also thinking that it might be very interesting to run the program on the content of the Exquisite Corpse poems.
This weekend marks the end of my college application process, or at least the brunt of it. I will be submitting my Brown application on Wednesday evening, and will then be done until I hear back from them, at which point I’ll either be completely finished, or will apply elsewhere if I don’t get in.
I am indescribably glad to have this stuff finished.

Long time passing. My brain is being severely sapped by the college application process. I am doing my best to keep up with it, but it is difficult to stay on top.
The Exquisite Corpse page is doing very well. I’ve made a few minor adjustments to the page since it was launched, and I am overall very pleased about how it’s gone so far. I’m excited to see it continue.

OK, stop everything. In the car on the way home today, I discovered the name of a town/region in Massachusetts that triumphs all others. Ever. Even ones I don’t know about yet. There is a place somewhat east of Wilbraham called Dingley Dell. This is not only a ridiculous name, but it is in a Monty Python sketch.
I am going to go there sometime soon.
I am not sure what I will do when I get there, but whatever it is will be AWESOME.
I am also thinking of trying to get a mailing address or P.O. box there, just so I can have people send me things addressed to Dingley Dell, and I can put it on my return address.
This is one of the most exciting moments of my life.
The Exquisite Corpse page has gone live, found in the projects section. So far it has had a lot of success with the help of a bunch of my friends and family who have started a whole lot of poems. I am hoping that it continues to flourish and becomes self-sufficient. It is my plan not to contribute to it at all; I am interested in the idea of my creating something that is not ultimately owned by me. Although I’ve enabled it, I want it to be more of a medium for others than a demonstration of my skills.

This week was pretty tiring. I watched the last Presidential debate on Wednesday night and went out swing dancing on Thursday night, which was excellent. I had originally planned to leave for my visit to Brown in Rhode Island this morning, but I put that off until tomorrow. I will be going for the day to the engineering open house.
Today we did not have open mic during the normally scheduled time, from 2:00 to 3:00 at the end of the day, so we had recess instead. For the last hour of school, everyone was outside playing foursquare (which me and a few other people have made extremely popular recently) or just hanging out. There were also footie pajamas involved.
I have been working on a version of the literary game Exquisite Corpse for this site for the past few weeks. I think it will be ready to go live tonight or sometime in the next few days. I am very excited to see how it works once I have it running.

I have been getting a TON of spam comments on this blog.  They never actually appear on the site, because I mark them as spam and they’re deleted, but it has been a real pain having to go on here all the time and mark them all.  Therefore, I have installed a new spam-protection device (rather Pythonesque I think; I will refer to it as an SPD).  Now, in order to write a comment, one has to prove one is not a robot by typing in letters from weird pictures.

The SPD (sounds pretty weird, huh?) that I installed is called reCAPTCHA.  It is very interesting in that it uses the input from the user to digitize books.  The database from which it generates the weird pictures contains scans of old books; type that cannot be read by computers and so cannot be digitized.  If enough people enter the same word for a given scanned image, reCAPTCHA assumes that that is the correct word.  So it is both a highly effective SPD and an effective method of harnessing existing technology to do additional useful work.  Pretty fascinating.  And of no end of usefulness to webmasters.  I highly recommend it.

If you do not understand the title of this post, watch this video.

I’ve just finished uploading the photo galleries for the Lego Car of Awesomeness, as well as migrating the blog posts over from the old system. This, I think, puts the final touches on the site. I’m also working on getting together a group of people to blog.

The transition to WordPress Mu is now complete.  Finally, I can edit my website without having to be at my home computer.  I’m still fine-tuning some things, so expect some strange things to happen every so often.  Also, I haven’t yet put up the galleries for the Lego Car of Awesomeness yet.  They should be up soon, along with the entries from the old blog and Plog.

Using the WordPress client for the iPhone, I am now able to blog from anywhere.  This means that the blog page will get a lot more interesting very soon.

I’ve reorganized the blog so that the entries pertaining to the Lego Car of Awesomeness are now contained in a separate blog in that project’s page. This should make it easier to follow the progress of the car, and easier to ignore it if you don’t care.

Hooray! It’s a new website! Designed with RapidWeaver (which is AWESOME), this site will be a lot easier to maintain and update, and hopefully easier for you to use. Still in progress, please let me know using the contact form if you’ve got comments.