Healing Hands

Dry air kills my hands--scratches and cracks, and on top of that our cats love to inflict wounds with tooth and claw.

To combat this I discovered that adding moisturizer while my hands are wet works 10x better than adding it when they're dry, sealing in the moisture.

Radio Songs

Courtesy SomaFM.com:

• Bellingham, Washington's The Pale Pacific's "Identity Theft" from their 2005 album Urgency on the SideCho Records label. Love those guitar licks.
• Orange, California's Aushua's "Sister Saves" from their unpublished music on MySpace. Great vocals. Video.
  
• Toronto, Ontario-based Broken Social Scene's "Almost Crimes" from their 2002 album "You Forgot It People" on the Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag labels. Video.
• London, U.K.-based South's "Silver Sun" from their 2003 album "With the Tides" on the Kinetic label.
• Austin, Texas-based IV Thieves' "You Can't Love What You Don't Understand" from their album "If We Can't Escape My Pretty" on the One Little Indian / New West Records labels. Video.
  

Paul Mitchell Partner School

The Winter 2007 10th Anniversary issue of Cut & Dry, some issue of Power and Motor Yacht, and W magazine (fashion)--I found them all in the waiting area of the Sacramento Paul Mitchell Partner School today.

I read a story about a guy who's trying to care about global warming even though he's candid about the fact that he puts hundreds of gallons of fossil fuels into his yacht each year. Another story featured a guy who forgot to align his gears or something and he had to run down to the lower helm but he had forgot to take off the sunscreens from his windows so he couldn't see out and by the way he's adrift and the motor's not working and he's panicking that he's going to hit some Krogen super-yacht in the bay--but he doesn't, because he regains control and makes his way to the fuel dock. The amount of luxury in the yachts for sale blew me away--even though I imagine one might get the same experience retro-fitting a hard-shell camper with luxury gear and installing a hydraulic rocker to simulate the wave-motion. Some of the multiple deck boats had helicopter landing pads--looked pretty iffy to me, landing on a bit of deck the size of a driveway, to tell the truth. They also featured a new yacht-storage facility proposal called Hercules that seemed pretty cool--park your mega-yacht in a temperature and humidity-controlled dry-storage room. I guess if one has the $27 million to spend on a yacht that big, one has enough dough to demand the best storage too.

Most of the magazines featured ads on every facing page--fine by me given I had hours of time to kill. I think the funniest ad I saw was in the yacht mag, with two people sunbathing on the back of a rushing boat--my thought was, "Who's running the boat?"

The Cut & Dry magazine is the quarterly Paul Mitchell mag shipped to Partner Schools and afiliated salons around the world. John Paul DeJoria bills himself in the back as "model philanthropist and expert in the field of helping others." I liked that.

It also listed Linda Flowers' answer to the question, "What's on your iPod's Most Played List? John Legend, The Stranglers, Talking Heads, Maroon Five, Neil Diamond, Jack Johnson and Seals & Croft, to name a few." I wasn't familiar with a few of them so I thought I'd write them down.

The final bit I noted from Cut & Dry stated, "A wise man once said, 'You don't want to die with your secret.'"

What's your secret?

Anime Runs

Dawn and I have undertaken a run through the anime series Chobits and Noir. The video store which supplied the first episodes in the series lacks the final volumes--so we have to decide whether we want to purchase the final volumes or not.

I like Noir's music--I discovered the series when a Linux installfest installer left a copy of the soundtrack on my PC. The series does suffer a bit from what I call the Airwolf-syndrome (for example, here)--that is, when the music swells, we know our heroes will face a battle and they'll eventually triumph. At least, so far.

Padding out shows happens in any enterprise, it seems--Noir handles it frequently by re-hashing scenes of Mireille's discovery of the murder of her parents. In Chobits, I haven't seen it so much--although the latest episode featured a pop single which padded out the cleaning scene.

Six Tips For Converting Regular Expressions to Minimized Deterministic Finite Automatons

Here are a few tips to make converting a

1. regular expression->
2. non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) with epsilon transitions->
3. NFA without epsilon transitions->
4. deterministic finite automaton (DFA)->
5. minimized DFA

a bit easier:

1. Back-transfer accepting states all the way back--don't overlook any epsilon transitions
2. Verify the NFA works as intended at each step of the process--if something seems amiss, it probably is.
3. Maintaining neatness and order for lines between states helps minimize confusion.
4. Grid/graph paper helps with drawing straight lines and uniform circles.
5. Remove states inaccessible from the Start state only after eliminating all epsilon transitions to and from them.
6. Use a mechanical pencil and a slab eraser to correct the mistakes
   

I made every mistake in the book this evening working through the transformation of the regular expression (a+ba)*b* to a minimized DFA--but I don't mind, because my studies represent the time I want to make the mistakes--not during my upcoming midterm.

Hope this helps in some small way.

Radio Songs

Heard this afternoon driving north on a windy, light-dappled off of towering clouds sort of day:

Franklin, Tennessee-based Paramore's "Born for This" from their 2007 album Riot! on the Fueled by Ramen and Atlantic Records label.

Huntington Beach-based The Aquabats!' "Lobster Bucket" from their 1997 album "The Fury of the Aquabats!" on the Goldenvoice Recordings.

Inter-Public Transit Google Maps

Google maps can't seem to string together public transit systems, regrettably. I keyed in a trip from downtown to IKEA to see what comes up and Google dumps me north of the Sacramento River and expects me to walk 53 minutes the rest of the way (across the river):

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=5th+%26+J+St,+Sacramento,+CA+95814&daddr=IKEA+west+sacramneto&date=3%2F6%2F08&time=9:59pm&ttype=dep&sll=38.603457,-121.520634&sspn=0.063051,0.10231&dirflg=r&ie=UTF8&ll=38.593529,-121.52441&spn=0.063059,0.10231&t=h&z=13&start=0

The thing is, both Sacramento Regional Transit and YOLOBUS post their transit data online:

http://iportal.sacrt.com/gtfs/

Without Google Transit I'd have never gotten onboard so readily with taking light rail and buses to and from school. I'm wondering who else out there (and how many) will also come to that realization. My car largely sits idle now.

The SacRT web site has a handy calculator that calculates rough costs savings. For Dawn and I, it's about $3,500 before parking fees. Including the $15/day parking, it comes out to about $7,000 in savings annually, including the cost of monthly RT passes.

Radio Songs

Tonight courtesy SomaFM's Indie Pop Rocks:

The Rakes' Strasbourg.

VIM Color Schemes

As mentioned previously I set my Putty settings to a dark green background with light green foreground.

It's a personal preference sort of thing, but my favorite default VIM color scheme at present is Koehler. Unfortunately, stock Koehler uses darkblue, making text invisible against a dark green background.

To change this, edit file (as root or equivalent):

• Backup the file: cp /usr/share/vim/vim63/colors/koehler.vim /usr/share/vim/vim63/colors/koehler.vim.bak
• vim /usr/share/vim/vim63/colors/koehler.vim
• Run vim command ":%sdarkblue/lightblue/g"

All's good.

GRE

I'll be taking the GRE this summer to qualify for grad school next spring. As it so happens, Sac State doesn't set a minimum score requirement--they use it as a comparison to the average GRE score of all applicants to determine whether or not to accept the applicant.