Author: galador

Tasty Severe Weather

For the past hour or so, the weather here’s been pretty righteous. Lots (and I mean lots of rain), sicktacular lightning, and lovely tornadoes. It’s been pretty crazy. And somewhat scary.

One of my friends lives near an area where there was a lot more damage, and he’s going to try and get some pics. I’ll see if I can get those up tomorrow or sometime.

But yeah, it’s pretty insane here.

Thoughts

There have been some things lately that have made me think as to why I keep this thing around still. This thing being my blog.

First, I get no visitors. Really. I don’t. None. I can just take a look at my stats to see that I might get 5 visitors on a good day (that takes out of consideration articles that have been submitted to StumbleUpon and get a modest page-viewing). It shows up again when I look at my web host’s control panel and see that I barely use two gigabytes of transfer in a good month, and most of that is from one-shot things that I host on files.galador.org. I realize that not much of what I have to say is that interesting, but the stats are really disheartening.

I think that leads to point number two. I don’t make updates to this thing as much as I used to. Though it is up somewhat from Fall/Winter ’07-ish, it’s still barely half of what it used to be. I don’t know. I just don’t have as much drive as I used to to update this thing. And another thing is that I haven’t really done much interesting stuff lately to write about. I haven’t had a reason to make a huge WoT (a Wall of Text, for those of you out of the know) like I used to. To quote Andrew McMahon, “My life has become a boring pop song, and everyone is singing along.”

Thirdly, as a recent comment made me realize, people are assholes on the Internet. They don’t give a fuck about your life. They’d rather sit on their ass and make fun of you. To the commenter: if you read this, then know that I actually enjoyed your comment (for various reasons) I could have easily said, “What an asshole.” and deleted the commend from the moderation queue, but I didn’t. I’ll be honest, I did give it a thought, but I decided to give a fair representation of whoever happens to read this thing. I also took the time to respond honestly, and hope you take the time to read the response.

Fourth, it makes you feel really shitty when one of your friends finds out you have a blog, and they say something like, “What, you actually write stuff on there? What do you put, ‘today I used my computer?’ in a condescending tone. Really shitty.

So yeah. This article almost sounds like it belongs more on Xanga/MySpace/et al than a self-hosted blog as it’s all self-pitying and shit, but here it is. I’m not ashamed to speak my mind and bitch. I should really learn to do it more often. I think my life would improve a lot if I weren’t so passive. But that’s a story for another place.

I Can Has Break?

Yay! School is officially over… at least for a week or so. Yup, it’s Spring Break time around these parts.

Mine’s probably going to be relatively docile, consisting of sleep, and some fishing/boating down in Louisiana. That might not sound like much, but after the hell school’s been, lately, it’s going to be like Heaven.

In other news, I upgraded WordPress to 2.5 RC1, so if you notice some weirdness, drop me a line about it.

‘Snow Beautiful

Weather in Arkansas, it’s insane. Yesterday, it was roughly sixty degrees outside. This morning, it snowed. This afternoon / evening, it was back up to sixty again. The snow had mostly melted by the time I went to lunch. Oh, silly, silly Arkansas weather.

However, I was able to take quite a few pictures while it was still in full force. Check ’em out on the full page.

Continue reading ‘Snow Beautiful

Ghosts

Normally, I wouldn’t post about Nine Inch Nails (because, to be honest, I don’t really like them all that much), but this is just too awesome.

Trent has decided that all future releases from NIN are to be made available to the public for free (and that concerts are the real way to go forward), and the first album made available for free is Ghosts I-IV.

Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I – IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I – IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Trent Reznor explains, “I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.”

They (as in NIN themselves) also distributed it via many of the famous music trackers, which is pretty awesome.

I think more bands should take notice of what NIN (and others, Saul Williams and Radiohead among the few) have been doing with their art.

“I Think I Just had Aural Sex Via Concert”

Yeah, the title’s about how I’d describe tonight (well, technically last night, now)’s Coheed and Cambria concert. More details to be edited in when I actually can form comprehensive sentences (probably tomorrow).

EDIT: OK, so I lied. I’m not actually going to edit this post. It would probably just be a lot of extra words saying that Coheed were fucking amazing, and that it’s probably one of the best concerts I’ve been to so far in my life. So yeah. Sorry if you were expecting something. ;)

Math Time! Derivatives Made Easy!

So, there I was during IRC, just chatting along, when someone asked some random calculus question, I got it right, and then they asked me to explain how to do derivatives the “easy” way. I was originally going to do this through MSN Messenger with the nifty little drawing conversation feature, but alas, the person in question didn’t support Handwriting. Instead, I’m now going to make a short little blog post about how one can easily do a derivative. This is just the easy stuff, remember, I’m not getting into derivatives of fractional functions or something like that.

Another thing, these graphical examples were done quickly in paint, so don’t make fun of me ;_;

First, we have a simple function f(x) = x^2 – 3x – 4, as displayed in the picture below:

For simple derivatives such as these, we first have to remember some properties of exponents, such as: any variable by itself (or with a coefficient) is variable^1 . If a coefficient is by itself, we can say that it the coefficient multiplied times the variable to the zeroeth power — variable^0 . We can use these properties to modify our original equation to look something like this:

Now that we have the modifications out of the way, we can get to the actual derivation. For equations like these, to get the derivative, you multiply the power by the coefficient, and then subtract one from the power, as shown in the drawing:

Then, you use a bit of simplification, and you’ll come out with f‘(x) = 2x – 2, as shown below:

See? It’s not really that hard. :)