I’m going to be playing the Handball Open at the DAC this weekend. I’m not sure what times I’m playing, but feel free to come down and cheer me on. Handball is a very cool sport to play and actually pretty fun to watch as well!
The DAC is about a mile east of the Investco Field. The exact address is:
1325 Glenarm Place
Denver, CO
80204
As we’re walking down to Woody’s, Mike has some papers that he looking over for a test he has tomorrow. Vulgar languange will ensue:
“What test you studying for?” I ask.
“Human Systems,” Mike says, slightly perplexed.
“Oh fuck!” I proclaim. “I thought our test wasn’t until after Thanksgiving Break.”
So yea, just found out I have a test in about 12 hours. As I least I caught the ball before it was pretty much too late, unlike last year when I didn’t realize I had a C++ final until about 4 hours before the test.
My day has been made! I was convinced that I had failed my calc II exam. I dreaded even going to class today. But I went anyways and to my great suprise, I got a 72! The class average is 75.
I’m happy. My day has been made.
Just about every Friday, Mines Activity Council (MAC) has a comedian come and perform. I usually try and go to the comedian, but I’ve been so busy on Friday’s that I haven’t been able to make it until now. It was well worth it and I’m going to try my best to go every week now. Here’s one of my favorite lines:
“So The Colorado School of Mines, eh? One of the most premiere engineering schools in the country. I kind of like this place. Um, what’s the building with the stacks over there? Oh, a brewery? Yea, this place will just fine. I’m just going to go set my bags down over there, ok?”
Because I know you all read my blog on a regular basis, I’m sure you know most of the details already. 🙂
In any event, this is the story of BURL, an idea that changed the way I think about the Internet (yes, I said the “I” word).
It all started on Monday, with an article on Lifehacker called Tiny URL Etiquette. For those not in the “know”, TinyURL is a website that let’s you take a long URL, such as: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fad44098-8b73-4e06-96d4-d1eb70eacb44&displaylang=en and makes it shorter, like so: http://tinyurl.com/4gdju. However, as the article pointed out, “[s]ending a shortened URL means you lose all the context that normal URLs provide.” Using the above as an example: with the long link, you immediately see microsoft.com and instantly know that it has something to do with Microsoft. But with the TinyURL, you have no idea where it points to.
“For those reasons, consider posting both the original URL as well as the tinyurled one. Let your audience know where they’re linking to. Adding both raises the level of trust and lets people decide more knowingly whether they want to follow that link or not.”
BURL was born. My idea behind a Better Universal Resource Location, BURL, was to bring back at least some of the context of the URL being linked to. I wrote the initial version in about two hours right after I got out of school. I wrote back to Lifehacker informing them of
my Proof-of-Concept and they posted a short article about it the next day!
————
Alternative Short URLs With BURL
Yesterday we talked about Tiny URL Etiquette and the fact that sometimes tiny isn’t better. Sometimes short URLs don’t contain enough information to let a person know where they’re going.
In response to that concern Lifehacker reader Andrew Ferguson
created BURL—Better URL. It shortens a URL yet leaves some context.
Nice work.
————
Yea. Waaaay cool. You see, Lifehacker is listed as one of the Top 100 Blogs by CNET. To even get mentioned on it was awesome. Within 24 hours, over 500 people had stopped by and tried out BURL. Definitely exciting. I spent a few more days tweaking it a bit and then yesterday I decided to make it way better. I learned how to implement something called AJAX (it’s a collection of several languages that provide a very cool interactive interface) and now BURL uses AJAX which is freaking awesome (at least in my book).
Yes, a very nerdy story, but that’s what your expect and hopefully enjoy from me. Have a great weekend and prepare for an awesome story
for next Thursday!
And next time you need a short URL, remember to make it a BURL
This is absolute crap and I can’t believe I’m still taking it. Our chem Prof., Brad Herrick, is a brand new teacher to Mines. I think he just received his doctorate from UT @ Austin. And no he’s moved up here to terrorize us. A lot of what he does is online. For example, we can check our grades online, we submit our homework online (yes, we have required homework), and we download forms that need to be turned in from online. So what’s the problem. He doesn’t update the website. From the front page on his site “Scantron Data up tonight.” That from Friday and two days later it’s still not up! And it’s not like this has happened just once. This happens literally every single time.
In class, he says that it will be up.
On his website, he says it will be up.
Is it up? Not a chance. I think Katie is more frustrated than I am and I’m pretty frustrated. But if that’s not enough, there’s the exams. We have exams every other week, which is actually kind of nice. However, it doesn’t leave much time to study. And when you’re relying on material from the website to be up, and it’s not up until the day before the exam, it makes it kind of hard. And then there are the rules surrounding the test. For the first two tests, we were required to have a “cheat” sheet. For the third test, he provided us with a cheat sheet and for our fourth test, which we just had on Friday, it was open book/open note. 什么æ“!
Oh, and we don’t even have our grades from our third test!
Using Gmap-Pedometer, I’ve created a map of my Wednesday route (my busiest day) that I walk to classes and back. The circuit provides a nice 2.17 km walk.
Found via Channel 9
I’m definitely going to use this on my next EPICS project:
- Wild Enthusiasm
- Total Confusion
- Utter Despair
- Search for the Guilty
- Persecution of the Innocent
- Promotion of the Incompetent
- Distribution of T-Shirts
Via Maryamie via Dean Andrews
Technorati Tags: colorado school of mines, epics
On Laura’s suggestion, I went to Circle K yesterday. Ken Melby was there and he had his IBM Lenovo ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC. My immediate impression was “way cool.” It’s a little smaller and a little lighter than my Toshiba Portege M200. Both screens are 12.1″, measured on the diagonal, however Ken’s screen resolution is 1024×768, compared to my massive 1400×1050 (my only gripe being that it’s a non-standard resolution). Lenovo gets cool points for their fingerprint scanner but looses some points for not including a Windows Key. What’s up with that? I use my Windows Key quite a bit and would definitely miss it on a Lenovo.
I’m not looking for a new computer (and I won’t be getting one for at least two or three more years), but it’s good to know that Lenovo has a good design in hand. However, I’m still waiting to see if Apple is going to join the Tablet market. And now that Apple has gone Intel, I’m even more excited to see if Intel’s codename Robson project will deliver what it claims to do: cold boot in just seconds. Now that will be awesome!
I was walking back from ouf school’s Football game on Saturday (we won 42-41 after their kicker choked and missed the extra point). Bradford Hall is sort of on the way back to my house, so I walked through so I could say “hi” to Jared. As I walk down the hall, I see his parents writing a message on his little white board. As they leave, they inform me that his phone is off the hook and they can’t get through. So I’m standing in front of his door, looking up his number on my cell phone when Jared opens the door. It’s obvious he’s been taking a nap. So I say, “Your parents just left like two seconds ago.” So Jared bounds down the stairs and I follow, although I don’t bound. He catches his parents and we start talking. After a while, his mother asks, “Are you Brian?”
“No, I’m Andrew,” I say (although the fact that my brother is named Brian is rather funny, but only to me).
“Oh, Andrew Ferguson?” his mother replies.
“Um, yea,” I say. She’s definitely piqued my interest. I know I’ve never met her before and I doubt that Jared has volunteered my last name.
“You probably don’t want to know how I know that,” she says.
I pause, “Actually, you have me kinda interested now.”
“Well,” she continues, “your the first site that comes up when I Google ‘Jared Stewart’ and ‘Colorado School of Mines’.”
I laugh. My day had been made.
Here’s the search for “jared stewart” “colorado school of mines”
Another short anticdoteanecdote.:
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from Greece.”
“I thought you looked a little Greecey (greasy)”