Tuesday, January 27, 2009

 

 

I am thesis proposaled

Well, it was pretty stressful and my talk went a little longer than I would have hoped, but made it to proposal land! 

Today at 9am I proposed my thesis and about two hours later learned that I passed. We had some good times. We laughed. We cried. We told stories. It was very real.

If you'd like to see my proposal document, please check it out here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nbeckman/research/proposal.pdf

You can also check out my proposal talk. However, I must warn you, it's very large. I created a PDF from my Powerpoint slides, and somehow they got very large:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nbeckman/research/nbeckman_proposal_talk.zip

Awesome dudes.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Our First Music Video

It takes a special band to make their first video before their first gig. We are just such a band.

This weekend, instead of our normal practice, Tom decided we should record our brand new song "Is it live or is it Maxwell House," and then make a video out of it using his sweet new camera. It is here:

http://vimeo.com/2874624?pg=embed&sec=2874624

You really should check it out. Not only are we pretty proud of the song, but the video is somewhat humorous and the quality amazing, due to Tom's swank new camera. Yes, we've got HD.

Also, Steelers won so that's like a double-dose of sweet.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

In the Year 2000...

 Wow, the Code2000 font really has a lot of glyphs. It takes forever just to scroll from top to bottom in the Windows Charmap.

It is one of the few fonts that has circle times, circle plus and multimap which, as the cool kids know, is necessary for writing linear logic predicates. In LaTeX this had been working just fine, although I have no idea what font I was using, but when it came to PowerPoint I had to get a new font to write them...

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Mission Failed

So the Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous concert last night did not happen. Lame.

In the end what happened was that they were unable to get confirmation from some or all of the bands before the date of the Local Artist Showcase and therefore they canceled it, but didn't really let us know or were unable to. We tried to get in touch with them in various ways, all of which failed, so we didn't actually find out this until like 7:45pm last night.

Anyway, if you went or thought about going and were disappointed by its cancellation, I am really sorry. We were disappointed too. The only thing I can say as a consolation is that we will be playing a real, live, actual, confirmed concert Saturday February 7th at the Smiling Moose (9pm, on the South Side). It's with two bands we like, Central Plains and Olympus Mons. If you come out, it would make us so happy!

Full Details

The Management

Monday, January 12, 2009

Gig I

Just a reminder, Sick Ridiculous is playing a gig tomorrow night (Tuesday)!

Full details.

Thanks

Friday, January 9, 2009

Stay in There!

Have you guys ever had this problem? The DVD drive on my computer will not stay in. Every time I push the CD tray in it immediately ejects itself. What have I done? I'm using Windows Vista. It would be very humorous if it weren't so annoying.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

TV Voice-overs

I like to think that I'm pretty good at recognizing people by voice. While it's usually considered "uncool" for major actors in the US to act in commercials, it's become increasingly common for well-known actors to do voice-overs for commercials. (In fact, I think I read this somewhere, but now I forget where.) 

Anyway, recognizing celebrity voice-overs is one of my favorite games. Here are a few of my favorite recent ones. Note that I haven't confirmed any of these, but so confident in my voice recognition abilities that I will boldly state them as fact: 

Verizon, "Blackberry Storm" Commercial: Could it be? Jim from The Office?

Applebees: I'm pretty sure this one is John Corbett. I didn't know this guy's name, but I've seen him in some annoying romantic comedies.

Home Depot: Gene Hackman! No Doubt in my mind about this one.

Dominos, "Subway 2-to-1" Commercial: I'm pretty sure that the red-haired girl from That 70s Show is doing this one.

Dominos, "You've Got 30 Minutes" Commercial: This one is done by Mike & Mike from the ESPN radio show. Actually, these guys are in all kinds of advertisements. They don't think it's uncool apparently.

You guys have any to share?

I Got the Internet!

Today the Comcast man came and turned on the cable TV and Internet at my new place. Nice! Those first few days in a new apartment without the Internet are always hard.

The only annoying thing was that I had to string the cable myself, from the side of the room where it came in to the other side of the room where my TV is. I actually did a pretty good job of this. It looks pretty good, thanks to my friends at the Home Depot.

I also have a few neat toys that I am playing with: An M-Audio recording box and Microphone to go with it, and a Korg USB keyboard (the musical kind) that Rand gave me for Christmas. I'll play around and try to post something cool in the next few days.

Woot! 

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Pee Wee

I loved this description of Pee-wee Herman from wikipedia:

A bizarre man-child, Pee-wee Herman, loves his bike more than anything else in the world and refuses to sell it to nemesis Francis Buxton, a fellow man-child and neighborhood "rich kid".

Back to School

 Today is to be my first full day back at school.

I spent a fair amount of time moving into my new apartment, but that's now mostly done. (I still need to unpack some boxes and do a ridiculous amount of laundry.) So far I'm pretty happy with my new place. I'll try to put up some pictures at some point. I at least need to show you my parking spot, which is tiny and causes my great concern every time I try squeeze my big car in.

Reading and preparing for my proposal presentation, which is now exactly three weeks away, are my primary activities.