i prefer pi

Ow, my stomach lining… Now I remember why I’d been avoiding Vanilla Coke all summer.

It’s bad enough that I stayed up until nearly 3 A.M. (again) last night working on a page, but it’s even worse that it’s not even my page.

In case you haven’t been clicking a lot of links, I’m growing increasingly fond of a site called Wikipedia, which aims to create a free, open-licensed, volunteer-compiled encyclopedia. It’s set up as a wiki, meaning that anyone can add or edit content in any of the articles. The notion is a bit anarchic, but at the moment there’s a peaceable balance achieved — someone with an interest in a subject can create an article page or a “stub” placeholder, link it up to other articles of interest, and other people who are concerned about the particular topic can peer edit it and add it to their “watch list” so that they’re notified when the article is updated. Abuse is tenuously monitored by people who have an interest in the topic, and all revisions of an article are available so that reverting to an “unspoiled” version is possible. I admit that it’s still a very idealistic atmosphere and that they haven’t yet attained the status that would make them a target for serious trolling or insidious updates, and their “free and open” mantra will likely prove to be a serious barrier to being accepted as a legitimate academic resource. I think that if they could somehow “freeze” the content each year and then perform a fact-checking pass, they could issue an annual edition that could be taken as seriously as Encarta or the like.

So last night, I was checking out the Texas A&M University page and noticed that there were no articles about our current President, did a bit of research (actually, it was close to two hours of research) and put together Wikipedia’s first article about Dr. Robert Gates. It’s a bit sparse on content that you’d actually like to read at the moment; after reading through a few dozen pages, I realized that I’m not really qualified to discuss his actions as Deputy National Security Adviser or Director of Central Intelligence, but I was able to get enough reputable sources to fill out some basic biographical details. It was actually a lot of fun — I got to research a topic simply for the sake of learning, and I feel like I found out quite a bit more about Dr. Gates himself. Now someone reading about the Monroe Doctrine, perusing a list of the former Directors of the CIA, or checking out Texas A&M University can follow a link to find out more.

What does it take to contribute? Not a whole lot, as it turns out. You can make contributions as an anonymous user, but you’ll probably want to register an account (painless) and read their content, style, and editorial guidelines if you don’t want to find yourself inadvertently banned. Know a lot about Leninist Russia (I found out that Gates got his PhD in Russian and Soviet History), George MacDonald, cloth simulation, drag coefficients, or Reformed theology? Spot an error in my write-up? Feel like doing something other than playing video games? Jump right in.

Less than a week ago, I got to meet Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and Chief Software Architect. There’s only one man higher than he on the totem pole, and that’s the CEO, Steve Ballmer, who I had the great pleasure of listening to today. Steve is — Hmm, how should I phrase this? — a very passionate guy. A few days ago, we were not-too-subtlely reminded that as interns, we’re under NDAs, but I think that it’s safe to say that he believes very strongly that Microsoft is the greatest company on earth, that he’s committed to maintaining that status, that he is adamant about the fact that people are Microsoft’s greatest resource, and that his enthusiasm is quite contagious.

Microsoft really is an awesome company and has an excellent work environment, but in working here, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the momentum, the Microsoft mindset, and most of all, the materialism. Microsoft isn’t the “evil empire” that I’d been lead to believe by the media, Slashdot, and common opinion, but I lead a constant personal battle to keep my desire to aquire in check, and it’s made more difficult by the highly-successful culture surrounding this company. A big thanks to everyone who prays for me, e-mails, writes cards, and keeps me in mind.

Falafel pita sandwich topped with tahini, and tabbouleh salad on the side. So maybe “My Big Fat Syrian Lunch” would be more accurate, but what is in a name? That which we call a risotto by any other name would taste as sweet.

A few weeks ago, I started to realize that not eating breakfast and only buying soup and salad (the most cost-effective option) for lunch was leaving me with the munchies by about 4:00. Since I don’t usually have supper until eight, nine, sometimes ten o’clock at night, something had to be done, and the Twizzlers in the vending machine weren’t cutting it:)

Therefore, I set out to forge a food that was worthy of breakfast, lunch and dinner, a treat that was both snackable and packable, a foodstuff that would power my late-night coding marathons and become the very staple of my diet. After googling around for a bit, I settled on Müesli — if you’re looking for a healthful cereal/snack that won’t set you back, it’s just the thing. I think that this was the recipe that I used:

• 6 cups of rolled oats
• 2 cups of wheat germ
• 1 cup of brown sugar
• 1/4 cup of coconut flakes
• 4 to 8 tablespoons of chopped nuts
• 2 to 4 tablespoons of seeds
• 1/2 to 1/4 of a cup of chopped dried fruit

This makes a lot of the stuff — I was unprepared and had to go out to buy a disposable Glad tub to keep it all fresh because one batch lasted about two weeks. I was going for cheap and healthful, so instead of nuts and seeds, I threw in 1/4 cup of red wheat berries (they were ~$0.28/pound). I was also a bit too generous on the brown sugar and coconut, because the batch came out rather sweet, and there was a lot of the sugar and germ “sediment” left over after all of the oats were gone. I threw in some unpreserved, unsweetened dried apricots in the beginning, and then I mixed in dates and raisins when the mix started to get a bit sparse. In the future, I think that I’ll toast it a bit before mixing in the fruit so that it clumps together (otherwise, it’s just a dry mix and doesn’t work that well for snacking, but it’s great as a breakfast cereal with a sliced-up banana).

I figured that for a 1/4 cup serving (this stuff tanks you down if you eat too much) the recipe above makes about 14 servings, which come out to only ~$0.35 each. If you cut out the coconut, you can get a mix wholly without saturated fats and cholesterol, but with all of those oats, wheat germ, wheat berries and fruit, it’s a carb-counter’s nightmare. I’ll assume that, like me, you have to walk and bike everywhere you go, so it won’t be a problem. Come on, you know you want to try it. Besides, how often is it that you get to eat foods with an umlaut in the title? (Sean, Drake, Dimitri, and all of the rest of you jet-setting foreign exchange students can keep your mouths shut).
So just in case anyone was wondering, I have been eating my breakfast.

After a nearly Herculean effort, I do believe that every blog-related page on my website validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Who is XHTML? What does it mean!? Why should you care??? These questions (and more!) to be answered in an up-coming up-date

Okay; not really, but I do grow increasingly frustrated with Internet Explorer’s idiosyncrasies. It’s bad enough that it doesn’t render plain HTML correctly — now I realize that it’s not even consistent in displaying icon files. Submitted for your perusal:

The images that you see are all taken from the same .ico icon file, downloaded from LiveJournal.com. The images were grabbed using a straight .bmp screen capture, then 3x enlarged using The Gimp v2 and cubic filtering, then saved to a high-quality .jpeg (the point being that the loss of color information between the screen and the image above is minimal).

On the left is what I see when I load this page in IE. In the center is how Firefox renders the same icon. On the right I’ve included the Explorer shell’s “thumbnail” preview of the saved icon file (it displays the 32×32 version scaled up using a linear filter, so it’s not quite as blurry). Couldn’t they at least get it consistent between the shell and the browser? Is it possible that they’re loading the 32×32 version and then downsampling to 16×16? I don’t have size attributes on the image tags, so I don’t think that’s the case (it would just use the 32×32 version if it were). What’s going on here???

Edit: I was working on getting all of my icon files to fit into single TCP/IP packets and noticed that the icon that I was moaning about actually contains four different images, a high-color and a low-color version for both 16×16 and 32×32 sizes. For some reason, IE was choosing the low-color version. At any rate, almost all of the .ico files have been replaced by .gifs, so it shouldn’t be an issue any longer.

I added a links section to the sidebar of the main page down near the bottom.

• If I’ve linked to you, and you’d prefer that I didn’t, I’ll be happy to remove the offending link.
• If I haven’t linked to you, don’t take offense. It’s not finished yet, and if you’d like a link, just send me your url and a 16×16 icon that I can use (if you don’t have one, you’ll get the default like Luke).
• I’d sort of prefer to put names in there (first names only) instead of handles because it would look cleaner, but I’m not going to do so without your express written consent (actually, implied verbal consent will also do).
• Most of the icons are the site’s favicon, with the exception of a few that were either too large or didn’t exist. If you’ve never seen these before, they show up in your Bookmarks list in most browsers when you bookmark a page (IE “loses” them after a while for some reason) and tabbed-browsers usually show them to visually distinguish tabs.
• Right now the list is too spread out because I forgot to take the effects of the stylesheet into consideration, and I forgot my alt and size tags, so the page is temporarily non-XHTML compliant. Other than that, what do you think?

Last night I had the rare and supercool opportunity to attend a BBQ for interns at Bill Gates’ house. Security was very tight: everyone took buses from the campus to a church near his house, then you went through metal detectors (you were instructed to leave absolutely everything other than your badge and your keys at home) and were put on smaller shuttles that could make it down the one-lane twisty driveway to his house. We passed one of his garages, nicknamed “The Batcave” for good reason (click on the drawing for a closeup), but it only held an SUV and some sort of sedan — no sign of the F1 or the 911. The landscaping of the property is, in a word, pristine; everything is immaculately planned, and the construction of the house, the decks, the bridge all looks as though it happened to grow there on the side of the hill. We arrived at the top of the Grand Staircase and walked down through his glass, wood and stone mansion, admiring the tapestries, paintings and dozen or so digital photo frames along the 84-step descent.

The BBQ was set on his lawn above the beach and docks, and in addition to the hundred or so interns, most of the executive VPs and division leaders were there, along with a few general managers and a lot of people from recruiting. Sebastian, Chris, Ian, and I arrived around 7:20, just a few minutes before Bill nonchalantly stepped down onto the lawn and the “intern donut” formed around him. I took my plate over and tried to stand, eat and listen at the same time, but I wasn’t doing such a great job so I walked off after listening to a few questions. I was really taken by how engaging and friendly he was toward everyone and how he was never at a loss in answering a question or tossing in a joke; I suppose that having been in his position for as long as he’s been, there are very few new or unexpected questions, though.

I wandered around for a while, talking to some other VIPs who were more accessible, and then I got the tip-off from my recruiter as to where I should stand if I wanted to have a chance to ask him a question Around 8:00, someone took the stage and did quick introductions and then Bill gave a few words, talked about what a great job it was to be involved at Microsoft and in creating software, and thanked us all for coming. After he stepped off the stage, the donut reformed, with me on the inside this time — I didn’t get the chance to shake his hand like a few other interns did, but I did ask him what he thought of software patents in the European Union and if he thought they would change the way that software was developed in Europe. His answer was along the lines of what I was expecting, but he was definitely more passionate and animated in answering it than other questions — “If we don’t have patents, if ideas aren’t protected, then Russia was right all along; we might as well go and reconstruct the Berlin Wall! The difference between Russia and China, the reason that Russia (for all of its planning) failed, is incentive systems. The Chinese understand incentive systems and intellectual property better than anyone, better than the U.S. and definitely better than Europe; Europe says that it wants to attract more businesses and to grow its economy, but it has all of these vestiges of communism laying about.” (I’m seriously paraphrasing). Some of the most interesting questions weren’t tech or world-events related; people asked about whether he’d send his kids to public or private school (private), why (because they could get a better education and because he went to private school), what it’s like being in his position (it puts the rest of the family at risk, he says that he receives frequent threats against his children, and that it’s annoying to be stopped everytime they go out, but that since society has granted him such resources, he’s compelled to redistribute them in some socially responsible manner), about his acquisition of da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, and about his 8 year-old daughter Sydney who was mingling with the rest of the party guests.

I walked around the bit of the property that we were allowed to explore and saw his pool, dock and estuary, and (like most other people) gawked at the 8-foot–tall digital frames that ran the length of one of his rooms. $50 million sure buys a lot of house. Around 8:30, they started shooing us back up to the drop-off area, and we headed back home.

It was an awesome experience and probably a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. It’s certainly generous for he and his family to invite 400-odd college students to their house every summer, and it will probably be the thing that I remember most about being an intern a Microsoft; even if I go back to work for them at some point in the future, the BBQs are an intern-only event. I have a few more thoughts about the evening, and about Microsoft in general, but I’ll probably save them for an end-of-summer wrap-up of some kind — I’m far too tired at the moment to be a high-minded idealist.

I have a long day ahead of me. First of all, I just got back from a grueling meet-and-greet with the other interns, our third- and fourth-level supervisors, and a big box of donuts. From noon to five, I’ll be at a strenuous morale event BBQ where I’ll be forced to celebrate the coming release of our products by eating and parasailing and throwing a frisbee around. At 5:30, I’m going to be bussed to Billg’s house for another BBQ where hob-nobbing with executives and the big guy himself will be imposed upon me. And to top it all off, someone had the nerve to invite me to her birthday party tonight! Don’t these people know that I have to get some work done around here?!

(;))