Partially Ordered Thoughts

There’s now a widget specifically for WordPress, which hopefully will integrate a bit better than DashBlog does. One good point right off the bat is that I have categories when posting. Let’s see if this works.

So I went back to ND for my little brother’s high school graduation over the weekend. It was nice to see family again, but I have not been reminded how much I don’t fit in there to this extent at any time during the five years since I graduated. (Coming to the realization that it’s been five years since I graduated from high school was another rough thing.) I talked to a classmate (and second-cousin) who I haven’t seen for a few years, and it was incredibly awkward. We had very little to talk about. I guess that’s the way it goes when you’ve got someone who just finished an undergraduate communications degree from Jamestown College and someone working on a PhD in mathematics at Georgia Tech trying to have a conversation.

I did have a good time visiting with one of my favorite teachers from high school. I also got to watch Josh ride in the Dickinson high school rodeo. He took second place, which was good, but he was runner-up to the kid sitting second in the points right now, which was not good. Don’t even get me started on how he’s being screwed over by people who seem to want the other kid to win the state title. (In brief: the other kid’s dad has judged three rodeos so far this year, always placing his son above Josh.)

One thing that I did realize while driving around the countryside is how much I miss the rolling hills and open country of Western North Dakota. Here everything is covered with trees, so you can barely see anywhere when driving, even outside the city. I got some pictures of the scenery around Halliday that I’ll probably post later. I definitely should add them to the rotation of pictures for my desktop.

The other excitement is that I got my Mac Mini yesterday. I ordered it Saturday before I left to go back to ND, and it was here in record time, particularly considering that it got held up in customs in China and had to work around Memorial Day. The Mac porn, I mean pictures of the unpacking, are here. Eventually, I’ll get some pics of it on my desktop. It’s so cute and tiny. Looks like an external CD or DVD drive, honestly. For the first time in quite a while, I’ve actually enjoyed using my desktop computer. Now I just need to get the arsenal of software that I need to be productive installed. If only I could figure out why the keyboard (and only the keyboard), whose box measures 19 3/16″ by 6 1/8″ by 2 21/32″, in a 22 1/8″ by 14 1/8″ by 12 7/8″ box! (Volume-wise, that’s about 312.17 cubic inches compared to 4,023.64 cubic inches. The shipping box had nearly 13 times the volume required.) I suppose some of you will be wondering about the specs on my Mac Mini, so I’ll give them to you: 1.25 GHz G4 Processor, 512 MB RAM (ordered that way so that I didn’t break something trying to upgrade myself), 80 GB hard drive, Super Drive. I’ve christened this new addition to my computing family Turing, who joins Kuratowski (15″ G4 Aluminum PowerBook) and Erdös (homebuilt Athlon XP 1700+ with 512 MB RAM running Debian unstable).

I finally got AWStats up and working again (the server compromise last month is still having ramifications such as this one) on the Math Genealogy Project‘s website this weekend, and thought that I’d share an interesting phenomenon amongst our search terms this month. It turns out that our top search keyphrase (meaning search phrases used in major search engines that resulted in a search result that caused someone to visit our site) this month is “edgar escultura”, accounting for 565 of the 16,006 keyphrases tracked so far this month (1.7%). “escultura” also appears as the forth-highest-ranking key word (after genealogy, mathematics, and math, in that order). Escultura beat out Leonhard Euler (210) and the recently-deceased George Dantzig (110) by quite a margin.

You’re probably wondering who this Edgar Escultura is that warrants him making the top of such a distinguished list. He’s the subject of this article in the Manila Times (that has yet to be seriously picked up by any reputable news source) that claims he’s disproven Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Of course, such an idea is complete and utter bullshit, as any reasonable mathematician could tell you after reading the story. However, the story’s been all over the Internets lately, which likely has led to the popularity of searches for Edgar Escultura online. The cool part is that our site is the number one result on Google, beating out the Manila Times article Now if only someone would tell me why “marian bocea” is the number two search keyphrase for people finding our site.

I think that Comcast hates me. They seem to not want to let me actually talk to the internets. I got home from studying analysis at school around 1700, and my Internet access was not working. It’s now after 2000, and it’s still not working. This does not make Mitch a very happy boy. Is it really too much to ask that when I pay for Internet access that it actually, oh, I don’t know, work? I know it’s a novel concept, but I really don’t think that it’s too much to ask for. It took me quite awhile just to get the new post form loaded into my browser. Who knows when I’ll be able to actually click the Publish button. (Added while writing the entry: I think I’m going to start referring to the Intermittentnet, ’cause that’s about how it seems here lately.)

I probably should be using this time to be productive, but all the analysis this afternoon made my brain tired. Yesterday was a pretty good day for me, however, and I should probably tell the tale. I went to JC Penney to return the ridiculous socks that my mom’s parents gave me for Christmas, and they had big-time clearance tables out, mostly with long-sleeved things on them. I suppose this is because long-sleeved season is over here in Atlanta. I managed to find two nice long-sleeved pullovers that were 75% off, which made me happy. After much rummaging and trying on, I found a pair of cargo khakis that was also marked down, although not so drastically. Running the numbers in my head, I still had a few bucks left to spend (dad gave me a gift card and I had the return), so I headed to look for a new bathrobe, since the one that I had been using had moved with me from home to the dorm to a different room in the dorm (and that’s not counting the temporary room in the dorm when I was a Governor’s School counselor and the room I had to live in in Churchill for a couple of weeks) to the apartment in Fargo to my current apartment here in Atlanta. Also, I’d had it for several years when I still lived at home. It had gotten to be a bit ill-fitting and was kind of rough on the inside. I figured that bathrobes should be cheap, so with the $15 or so that I had left, I should be able to get a decent bathrobe. Well, when I got to the men’s sleepwear section, I first found some crappy, paper-thin St. John’s Bay bathrobes in pale shades of blue. Totally not me, and they would defeat the purpose of a bathrobe in my mind, which is at least partially to keep me warm. Then I saw a nice rack of fleece Izod bathrobes in nice colors. There were some rather bright ones, some navy and gold ones, and some black/gray/royal blue/white ones. I decided that I liked the navy and gold one, and it felt good. The price was right too, as it was marked $16.77. When I looked closer, however, I noticed that it was a clearance sticker, and that the original price was SEVENTY DOLLARS. Who the hell would pay $70 for a bathrobe that wasn’t custom-made out of some incredibly expensive fabric? I don’t know. I sure wouldn’t. However, when you mark it down to $16.77, I’ll happily buy it

Well, it looks like the Intermittentnet is working, so I’m going to post this now and start thinking about bed.