Just got this spam message sent to me. It was trying to get me to buy best man gifts. I couldn’t make something this creative up if I tried!

As a man, you tally to take, you most belike someone never been neat at shopping, or symmetrical liked shopping for that thing. Now that you’re achievement to be married, you’ll feat that choosing gifts for your primo man change beautify effort of your to-do move. It’s a provocative strain, but if you cognise where to perception, you’ll be competent to conceive the perfect heritage in no case.

Since I finally starting working and now have a salary, I thought it was a good time to start contributing to my retirement account. I set up a Roth IRA at Schwab, where I also have my checking, savings, brokerage, and credit card. I do have some medical school debt but have decided to try and contribute the max to the IRA each year regardless. The reason is that if you miss a contribution you forever lose out on that compounding in the future.

Since I don’t have much money to invest, I’m looking for an investment that I can contribute into monthly. Individual stocks are out at this point because the commissions would run too high. I’m also hoping to diversify. An option without commissions and the possibility of diversity is a mutual fund. Schwab has a bunch of great no-load mutual funds. However, there is a small management fee with any mutual fund. Another option for diversification are Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). You can buy and sell them like stocks, but each share is a representation into a diverse holding of companies like a mutual fund. (And like mutual funds they have a small % fee as well but one that is typically less.) Since ETFs trade like stocks, the regular commission applies to each transaction and, thus, they aren’t really the best for small regular contributions. However, upon doing some research tonight, I found that Schwab has a great deal for clients with a Schwab brokerage account: ETFs with the lowest expense ratios in their categories plus commission-free online trading. This means I can invest a small amount monthly into Schwab’s ETFs without wasting any money with commissions!! It’s going to look pretty small for awhile, but it will be fun to see it grow over the years.

Here’s some amazing photos. They were going at least 40+mph at that point during the crash.

I had some time today so I was able to get through editing a bunch of RAW photos. I’m including the brand new galleries as well as photos from recent trips that I’ve been on.

Loew Lake Unit – Southern Kettles

Home in May/June 2010

Pike Lake Unit

Riveria Maya, Mexico

Boulder, Colorado

Sylvania Wilderness Area Canoe Trip

I’m living in Des Moines now for internship. I had call on Saturday (delivered my first baby!) but was able to attend the rainy Sunday show at 80/35, a mostly rock/indie concert. I got there too late to warrant paying the extra money for the main stage ticket, but there were some great musicians at the free stages too. Dar Williams was especially good. I had missed Sara Watkins‘ performance early in the day so it was great to have her come on the stage with her fiddle and join Dar Williams. I love that blue grass/ folk music.

Between Dar Williams and The Heavy, there was a Middle Eastern bellydancing show. I got my iPhone out to take a video of some of it.

Later in the night we were able to watch the big TV screen from the free section where Modest Mouse was playing on the main stage. Not too long later they opened the main stage up for everyone. We also randomly met up with some other residents that we had met at our ACLS training.

I just updated the MCW Cycling Club site. Previously, it ran completely from my own hosting service. This worked okay, but required a lot of work to add new pages since I was literally doing the HTML coding by hand. My experiences using the WYSIWUG editors are that they add a bunch of code that destroys the readability. Anyway, I was looking for something simple and went ahead with transferring the data to Google Sites. In the past, Google Sites didn’t offer much ability to customize, however, a lot has now changed. After switching the CNAME to point to Google, the switch was seamless. It looks pretty good and will be much easier to update. I can even add collaborators to help me with posting club events and updating the bike routes. This will be tremendous as I will be leaving for a year. The only thing still running on my hosting package is the punBB forum. It would be terrific if there would be a way to host that within Google Sites as well.

Check out the new site: MCW Cycling Club

I’m typing this from the new Opera Mini browser for the iPhone that was just released today. It definitely is fast. It gets that speed by doing the rendering on a outside server and then sending a compressed picture with an image map of some sort to allow you to still click on things. For simply viewing the news, it works great. I also really like the tab implementation. But, it will not come close to replacing Safari quite yet for a few reasons. For starters, the autocorrect for textboxes like this is not working. It also defaults to the mobile versions of some webpages, and I can’t figure out how to stop that. For websites that do load the full version, Opera Mini displays a scaled back version that allows you to see in general what the site’s layout is but is too blurry or zoomed out to actually read any of the text in that mode. The  pinch-to-zoom feature is also broken. There is no granulation in the zoom. Also, the formatting for some sites is broken.

However, this is the very first version and some of these complaints can be fixed. It would be great if you were stuck with EDGE, but it just isn’t astheticallly pleasing enough to replace Safari.

Update: The above post was typed in Opera Mini but then it got deleted when I clicked the “Save Draft” button. Fortunately, I had saved it to clipboard. So, there are still a lot of bugs. Moral of the story is to make sure to save whatever long post or comment you type in case it gets lost. 

So I haven’t been updating this blog much, but I’ll begin again soon once I’m less busy. My update for today is that I’ve begun carrying my iPhone with me during runs. Not to listen to music, but for mapping my routes using the builtin GPS. I’ve tried iMapMyRun and RunKeeper so far. Both have free and paid versions for the iPhone. (I’m carrying the iPhone in my hand, which isn’t exactly the greatest solution compared to having it attached to my arm). I had used mapmyride (same company and website) before to look for bike rides in the area. It used to be really nice for biking because you could look for routes or create your own and then print out the maps with turn cue sheets. It worked great. However, it has now gotten quite commercial and lost a lot of the initial ease of use and charm that the original site had. It has, though, grown into a much larger fitness community. Many of the good features now are only available with a monthly subscription. And the free version includes a ton of advertising. RunKeeper looks much simplier, but is just as powerful. It doesn’t yet have cue sheets (most likely because it started off just for running). On the activities page you get a google maps view of the route; below that you get a graph showing a overlay of how speed varied with elevation over the course of the route. And below that there is a section for notes and mileage splits with elevation gained or lost. Both apps allow “live” tweets during the run, however only imapmyrun allows you to customize these tweets from within the app. RunKeeper will tweet automatically for you but you cannot yet add your own comments or include the pace. It does, though, provide a shortened URL link to your RunKeeper public profile (see below), which displays the route and other info that you choose to make public.

Link to MapMyRun route.

Link to RunKeeper route.

I think I’m going to stay with RunKeeper because of how well the app works and because of the simplicity of the website.

Update: As of 10/13 17:05 Central Time, I’m out of Google Wave invites.

Please only request an invite from one location. That way there will be more invites to go around. I doubt that accumulating invite requests would get you one any quicker.

Hey guys,

I have 7 Google Wave invites left. Just leave a comment and fill your email in on the email section. I’ll then send you one right away. First seven people that reply. It may take awhile for Google to send you one. Don’t know if this means hours or days…

Here’s the disclaimer that Google gives:
“Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!”

I read about a tweet from a Google Wave engineer who said that invites might take a couple of days to go out. Just so you know.

Scott

PS For you iPhone users out there, this is kind of cool.

Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.

Take the “scientific” papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking” was rejected.

Graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo had doubts about the standards of some conference organizers, who they say “spam people with e-mail.”

“We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them,” said Stribling. All three of the students are doing research in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The paper’s acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using “context-free grammar” and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don’t make sense together…

Source: Prank research paper makes the grade

Here’s the group’s website: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, including links to the two papers that they submitted to the WMSCI 2005. Their first computer-generated paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was actually accepted. Their second submission, The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking, was rejected for some reason. I don’t understand a lot of the titles of the real papers that are presented at these computer science conferences so these seemed to fit right in.

The grad students raised enough money to attend and present their paper at the conference. They were actually going to have their program generate a Powerpoint presentation for their talk. Unfortunately, the conference heard about this plan and rejected the paper. So, they decided to hold their own “technical” session in the very same hotel that the WMSCI used for its conference. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The grad students presented three randomly-generated computer science papers using randomly-generated Powerpoint presentations that they had not seen prior to standing up and presenting it. The resulting talks were pretty hilarious and are available to watch as a video called Near Science. The website is a little old, but the first high quality AVI still works.

Here’s a SCIgen created computer science paper that my brother and I “wrote”: NAWL: A Methodology for the Visualization of Consistent Hashing