Useful Nerdy Keyboard Shortcuts

My laptop at work has 2 quirks which really bug me: 1) there is no Windows key, so any time I want to view the desktop, I’ve had to move the mouse down to my quick launch, where the first option is a “Show Desktop” shortcut (I hate unnecessarily using the mouse.); 2) my keyboard shortcuts are not persistent.  I don’t know why is wrong with them, but I simply cannot get them to stay work from one minute to the next.

Today, I stumbled upon a few shortcuts that I was previously unaware of. First, for the keyboards without a Windows key, you can bring up the Start Menu by holding Alt and pressing Escape. So now I have my Show Desktop there and I “just” have to press Alt+Esc Ctrl+Esc (Thanks Vince!) -> D (to select “Desktop Show”) -> Enter! That just shows how lazy I am (but I think that actually might be a little more work than simply moving the cursor with the touch-pad…

The next sweet shortcut I figured out by myself accidentally.  A couple weeks ago I figured out that in Firefox Ctrl+E shifts the focus to the search engine box in the upper right hand corner (if you don’t use that – you should.  It’s awesome and customizable and you can select which search engine to use by holding control and moving up or down through the list).  So that was an awesome find, but I couldn’t figure out a way to go to the address bar…  Until now!  Alt+D shifts focus to the Awesome Bar in Firefox!  That’s so handy!!!

Also Alt+Esc will Alt+Tab you to the most recently used previous window not Alt+Escaped from!  (That’s terribly worded.. but just try it out and you’ll see what it does…)

And in case you didn’t know, Ctrl+Shift+T undies a close tab in Firefox (also really handy).

My New Lifestyle

At the beginning of this internship, I would wake up at 5:30, commute, work, commute, and get home around 5:30.  After that, I’d sit around relaxing, watching TV or playing Rock Band.  Since then, however, I have completely changed my lifestyle!  The whole 5:30->5:30 part is the same, but I am no longer being a couch potato!  The past couple work weeks, I have been playing tennis 3 or 4 of the weeknights (and at the very minimum once per weekend) and instead of Rock Banding, I have typically been Wii Fitting (though the addiction has definitely died down, I’m still doing my daily Body Test, but that’s about it…).  The one other main change is that instead of watching TV, I have been doing a lot of reading (if you couldn’t tell by all my book reviews).  And the TV that I have been watching has been about 95% movies (I love movies.. and TV these days is pretty much crap.).

I’ve got to say, I’m really enjoying this lifestyle much more than the sedentary one I was living at the beginning of the internship.  Hopefully when I get back up to State College I’ll be able to continue to play tennis 5+ times a week (if you want to work out a schedule with me, let me know!!) and hopefully I’ll still want to read instead of TV (maybe I can convince my roommates to get NetFlix instead of cable… that’d be a big money saver…).

And in case you were wondering – no, I didn’t rock the Google Code Jam.  I’m going to blame it on A) lack of TI-83 calculator (M$’s calculator.exe sucks.), B) fireworks going off right outside my window, C) the whole “being at the beach for a week, not really being in the computery mindset”, and D) one poorly written problem (I’m not sure if I’m allowed to discuss it or not.. I’ll have to read over the rules… if I can, I’ll most likely blog about what my issue was with it).  Anywho – I’m bummed about that, but will definitely win it next summer.

Also in case you were wondering – I’m home from the beach – the return trip was a fiasco, but we made it home alive.

Google Code Jam

Back in the middle of June, I received an email from some CompSci person at Penn State (and Adventurous Alex forwarded it to me as well, just to make sure I heard about it) that Google was having a programming competition this summer. Called the Google Code Jam, this competition is very similar to the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC), hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which I participate in.  Naturally, I signed up as soon as I read through the rules and was really excited to get to compete with other nerds.

Last Wednesday into last Thursday, the initial qualification round took place.  There were three problems up for grabs, and solving any one of those three moved you into the first official round.  I started right at 7:00 last Wednesday working on the first (easiest) problem.  I got it working for the initial sample input and downloaded a submission input to run it on, only to find out that I hadn’t considered all the boundary cases.  After dinner and tennis (there was no rush – I had 24 hours…), I worked through it again, and attempted another submission, only to find a new border situation which I hadn’t thought of.  Long story short – after rewriting my solution from the ground up, I got a correct solution, and qualified for round one.

In just under 2 hours, I will be participating in round 1A, seeing if I can get one of the top 840 positions, in order to qualify for online round 2.  If I’m not one of the top 840 tonight, I get to try again tomorrow at noon in round 1B.  But after that, if I don’t make it, all my hopes and dreams will be shattered.  It would be really nice if I could move on through all of the rounds to win this competition, because that would be really awesome to get to check out the Google offices.  But at the very least, I’d like to show Google just some of what I can do, in hopes of landing my dream job.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Last summer, mom heard about this book, Who Moved My Cheese?, at a real estate convention that she was at.  She absolutely had to read it, so I hunted it down at our Cranberry Township library.  She read it and raved about it, but I didn’t get around to reading it before it was due back.  For Christmas, she apparently gave a copy to each of my older siblings, and thought that she had given one to me, but had not.  So when I was asking for good reading material at the beginning of my internship, she said that this should be at the top of my list.  My priorities were a little different from hers, but I told her that I’d at least put it on my list.  When I finished up Feed this morning, Who Moved My Cheese? was at the top of my To Read list.

I think my favorite part about this book was that I literally did not need a bookmark.  Weighing in at 94 pages (including the title page, table of contents, and several other blank pages), this book was the quickest read I can remember since One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.  The bulk of the book is this story about two mice (Sniff and Scurry) and two Littlepeople (Hem and Haw) who lived in a maze looking for cheese.  They all find a stash of cheese (or Cheese to the Littlepeople) at one station, but when it runs out, that is when you learn the difference between each of the characters – how they deal with the removal of this cheese.

It’s really interesting to think about which of the four characters you are when it comes to dealing with change.  I used to be a Hem – avoiding change at all costs and denying that it happens when it does; but I am definitely working towards becoming a Haw – realizing that change happens and adjusting to it to roll with the punches and find new cheese.  And so reading the discussion after the story was told about who the class reunion characters relate to was interesting to see how they applied it to their lives.

The one thing that really intrigued me about this book was the way the words were on the pages.  Every page started with a new paragraph and ended with a paragraph, so there was never any flipping of a page in between words or even sentences.  That’s a really interesting technique, which made it much easier to follow (I never once had to flip back a page), but since I’m a perfectionist, it kind of irritated me that every page had a different vertical length (and they were each centered vertically, so both the top and the bottom of adjacent pages would be off).  That coupled with the perfectly placed cheese pictures (always on the next page, so you’d have to flip the page to see the next message) really showed me just how much time and effort was put into rewording or reordering things so they would fit together flawlessly.

If you want an extremely quick read (I’m a terribly slow reader and it took me less than an hour and a half — including a half hour lunch break.) which will get you to analyze yourself (and potentially change your life… several reviews tell about how this book has changed the reviewer’s life or their company), then this book is most definitely for you.  And if you do give it a chance, let me know which character you are, or let’s have a discussion!

Feed

From January 1, 2007 through December 31, 2007, John and Hank Green (an author and an eco-activist, respectively) communicated with each other primarily through daily (alternating between each other every weekday) three-to-four minute YouTube vlogs (video logs).  I didn’t find out about this Brotherhood 2.0 experiment until July 18th’s Accio Deathly Hallows song was featured.  After that, I went and watched all of the earlier videos and all of the rest of them (and they’ve continued doing them about weekly through 2008 so far).

Since John and Hank are each big readers, they have discussed and suggested a bunch of books in the past year and a half.  The first two books of theirs that they suggested and I read were Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines.  Each of these was written by John Green, and they were both absolutely awesome reads (you should all check them out!).  One other book which they off-handedly mentioned and which really stood out to me was M.T. Anderson’s Feed.  The context in which they mentioned this book was about having Wikipedia in your head, and being able to get any information you want at any time – but that it could be modified by anyone (John was saying that he wouldn’t want someone to change the article in his head about the Yeti (his wife)…).

That seemed like a really interesting concept to me, so this book sounded like something I’d enjoy – I put it on my to do list (with Wanted, The Wizard (which I’ve seen, but really want to see again), and my idea for an awesome Flash game… more to come at some point in my life), and have been staring it down daily ever since.  When I got on my reading kick this summer, I was overjoyed to see that the Cranberry Township library had a copy, so I picked that up when I got all of my other recommended reading.

When I couldn’t sleep in on Monday morning here at the beach, I thought a great idea would be to jump right into Feed.  So I did.  And I loved it.  Feed is such an interesting concept and I think it is absolutely 100% where the world is heading (which I’m all right with in some sense, but not entirely all right with in others).  The idea is that just about everyone has a chip wired all throughout their brain, and this chip enables them to be connected to everything (it’s basically a super-internet).

With this chip, you can communicate with the universe (sending text messages to anyone, anywhere, any time), you can find any information you want (if your friend uses an archaic term or new slang that you don’t know, you can look it up), and you can find whatever entertainment you want (TV shows, radio broadcasts, whatever music you want, etc).  In those three huge categories of usage, I’m all for it!  That would be awesome to be connected like that to make my life that much easier.

But problems with this chip include privacy (your mom can tell where you are, what you’re doing, and what you’ve been “feed”ing on) and advertising.  We’ve all seen where advertising has been heading with ads personalized based on your Google searches, or Facebook ads which supposedly target you (though they’re not always perfect).

So that’s the concept of the book – as for the actual story, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  At first, it was tough for me to get used to the language that was used (on the cover sleeve, I later read that M.T. Anderson read lots of popular and teen magazines and listened to conversations in malls in order to write this), but eventually, I started to want to talk like “Unit, this mal is so meg sweet!” (“unit” is like “dude”, “mal” is short for malfunctioning, so it’s like the effects of alcohol or drugs, and “meg” is like “freaking”…. I think…).  There really weren’t any slow parts at all – something is always happening, or you’re always learning something new about a relationship or the concept.  The fact that no chapter is longer than maybe 7 pages made it so tough to put it down.  Dinner would be ready, and so I’d say that I’d need to just finish that chapter – but when I saw that the next chapter was 2 pages, I would finish that too… and maybe one more.

My favorite line in the book was a nerd joke that happens on page 53-54.  Violet is talking about how her dad teaches dead languages at a university, and when Titus asks what dead languages are, she described them and said “You know, Fortran. Basic.”  That was just so awesome to me.  The whole book was a fun read, and it really took me no time at all (I started just two days ago, and by no means spent any large amount of time on it).  If you’re looking for a fun, quick, futuristic story, this one is a great one to get you thinking about what might happen in the near future.

Vacation Time!

Sunday morning, Julie and Wade picked me up to head down to Wildwood, New Jersey.  After a productive 7-hour trip (productive because I not only got a nice 2 hour nap, but I also finished up nearly all of Good Omens), we made it to the beach!  Since then, I’ve been doing all sorts of chilling and have been loving it.

I finished up Good Omens, read the majority of Feed (by M.T. Anderson — suggested to me by John and Hank Green), played on the beach for a couple hours (getting burnt in under 4 hours), and fixed up some Pass System stuff (I can’t wait to finish the whole system so I can show it off to everyone!).  It’s been so nice to be doing whatever I want, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the week of chilling!  The only real thing that I need to get done is some preparation for the Google Code Jam (come back tomorrow for some details on that!), and even that’s fun for me.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

When I blogged about not being illiterate last month, I had asked for recommendations on what I should read.  After finishing up Bringing Down the House, I picked up Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.  Both Blue and Michael had suggested Neil Gaiman, so I decided to give Good Omens a shot.

Starting last Monday on the bus ride into work and finishing yesterday on the car ride to the beach, it was another book that I flew right through (maybe it’s not the books, maybe I’m just getting better at reading!).  It started off a little slow for my liking, allowing me to drift off each of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings on the bus.  I don’t know if this was simply because the previous weekend I got a total of 5 hours of sleep over a 60 hour span or it if it was the book, but either way, the start wasn’t gripping enough to keep me wide awake.  After getting some background on what all was going on, I definitely found myself getting more and more into it and not being able to put it down.

The story, in a nutshell, is that the time has come for Armageddon.  The Anti-Christ is brought into the world, and he is mixed up at the hospital (he ended up with the wrong family).  And so the story covers a four (three?) day period, eleven years later, setting up the Apocalypse.  The main gripe I have with the book is the combination of the number of characters and the way their stories run parallel.  There are at least 5 major groups with their own story lines (you’ve got the angel and the demon, the antichrist and his gang, a witch-hunter and the witch he’s after, the witch-hunter’s mentor and his neighbor, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse (not to mention other random tangents on a few other characters)).  Since the story is chronological, putting these 5 different stories together gets a little confusing, having a couple pages about one group, and then completely switching contexts to a different one abruprtly.  Other than that making it a little harder for me to follow, it really was a good read.

The thing that I am really wondering about this book is how the collaboration took place between Gaiman and Pratchett.  I wonder if one was in charge of a few characters while the other took the rest… or if they went through and one wrote one section and the other wrote the next… or if they alternated words (that would be pretty insane…).  But however they did it, I’m really interested in each of their individual styles.  So now I’m going to have to read a book by each of them to see what their separate styles are (quite possibly Blue’s suggestion of American Gods for Gaiman, and anybody have any good Pratchett suggestions?).

Now it’s time to hit the beach and start M.T. Anderson’s Feed!

Bringing Down the House

As mentioned previously, when I saw American Gangster in the theatre last November, I saw a preview for 21, and made special note of it.  When I heard that it was based off of a true story which was documented in Bringing Down the House, I decided that I wanted to read the book before watching the movie.  Lucky for me, the Cranberry public library had a copy, so I picked it up and started reading it two Mondays ago.  By that Friday (Arts Fest Friday), I was finishing up the epilogue when I caught my ride up to State College.  That alone speaks volumes for this book (if you know me, you know I’m a terrible reader).

I thoroughly enjoyed Bringing Down the House.  It’s about the MIT card-counting team which made millions before Las Vegas caught on to what they were doing and cracked down on them.  The book is written by Ben Mezrich who wasn’t a part of the team, but who worked really closely with Kevin Lewis who was a vital part of the team.  The book describes everything about their operation – from the basics of card-counting (a way to gain an advantage against the dealer in black jack) to the intricacies of the team play (the acting, the communication, even the details of how they smuggle the money into Vegas), this book touches on all aspects of the double life that Kevin Lewis lived while playing on the team.

The story moves so quickly and was just a really solid read.  The writing style made it really easy to just go and go and go, and so that’s exactly what I did.  I’ve always enjoyed playing cards (from 500 Rummy with my grandpa and cousins from the age of 5 to my poker addiction from Governor’s School through freshman year at Penn State), and so that may have made it easier for me to get into it, but I think that this is a book that anyone could pick up and enjoy.  Now that I’ve read the book, I get to see the movie!  But since I’m an awesome friend, I’m waiting until I get back to State College to watch it with Adventurous Alex.  If you’d care to join us, just let me know!  We’ve got a month to plan this one out!

(PS – yeah – I’m at the beach!!!  I’ll most likely blog about that either tomorrow or Tuesday, once I actually do something…)

Vacation!

Tomorrow, I’m leaving with the family for a week-long vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey!  It’s going to be great to be at the beach, but what’s going to be even greater is the fact that I won’t have to work (and therefore won’t have to wake up at 5:30).  While I’m at there, I plan on tanning my feet (I’ve got quite a horrendous shirtless-tennis-player tan), finishing two books (I’ll probably finish Good Omens on the trip down and then I’m not sure which of the other 10 books on my to-read list I’ll take), blogging (about Bringing Down the House, Dark Knight (seeing it tonight!), Google Code Jam, and more), working on Pass2.0 (I need to fix the CSS for IE :-\ ), and hopefully having a creative/artistic spurt and designing a new look for a new dannyiachini.com…

If anybody is bored between tomorrow (Sunday), and next Sunday, feel free to give me a call and pop on down to Wildwood!  I’ll totally even sleep on the couch for ya!

Mitch Hedberg Reference

Friday morning when I got off the subway (yeah, I’ve reached the epitome of lazy, I don’t even walk the 12 blocks from the bus stop to Mellon Four any more…), I was following everyone towards the stairs and escalator, when I noticed that everyone on the escalator was moving much slower than usual.  When I was just about to the bottom of it, I noticed that it wasn’t moving, and dodged left to go up the stairs.  It was absolutely hilarious watching everyone get on the “escalator” and listening to their reactions.  Several people kind of stumbled backwards expecting the need to change their momentum to adjust to the escalator, and just about everyone gave an “Oh my!” or “Oh, the escalator is broken!”

But in reality, “an escalator can never break — it can just become stairs.”  (Thanks Mitch Hedberg!!!  I’ll always remember you!  (HERE are some of his jokes listed.. but it’s really the delivery that counts)