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. ;)
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. :)
Being sicks sucks.
Woke up this morning with a headache, sore throat; all that good stuff. Skipped classes (which I probably shouldn’t have done, but meh).
Hope I feel better in the morning.
Holy shit, what is this!?! Like four updates in less than two weeks? OMGOMGOMGOMG.
Microeconomics test (possibly) mentioned earlier was head-assploding. But that is not the topic of this entry.
The true meaning of this post is to show everyone who stumbles upon this place F@NB0Y$, quite possibly one of the best webcomics in recent memory (the other is Sinfest, which I’m nowhere near caught up with). I have spent nearly the entire afternoon perusing the comic archive of said site. It’s a relatively new webcomic (April 2006), and only has 261 strips up, but it’s really well done. Too bad the author is currently on “break” (he’s not releasing another entry until sometime in March, from what I gather [damn you, writer’s strike… oh wait, wrong medium. Move along.])
But either way, you should read the comic. GOGOGO. Srsly.
Blarg. Today was a really bad day for me. I woke up, felt like shit, and almost fell asleep in every one of my classes.
If that was the end of it, that would be a regular Monday / Wednesday / Friday for me. As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, that’s not all. First, I learned that a project in my “Desktop Decisions Support Technology” class (which roughly translates to English as “How to use Microsoft Excel and Access”) that I thought was due next week is actually due on Wednesday. It’s not that bad (actually, it probably only took me about an hour to get to where I am now, which is one step from completing it; however, to complete that step, I have to wait for someone to message me back on Facebook to tell me how to do that, because our instructor is a douchebag who is shit at explaining things), but I wish I had known about that before this morning (I should have, but I never really looked at the syllabus :|).
Secondly, in my Microeconomics class, I learned our next test is on Friday, which I also though wasn’t until much later. This also means that a ton of homework is going to be due on Aplia (an online homework thing). Looking now, there’s five problem sets due. Last time, I had three due, and it took me about 4 hours. >_< I also have the regular homework that I have to do for Accounting this week, as well. In other news, I'm going to be really busy this week. =/
I suppose it was inevitable, really. Once I got away from all teh overhead that is Drupal, it was only a short time before I came back to the de-facto blog software out on the internets, Word Press. The reason is simple, really. Textpattern (the software I used for maybe a month) was just too… labyrinthine. To write a post, I had to open two pages, and refresh one of them at least once to get it right. Though, this wasn’t the only reason. I found out that Word Press has a nifty Importer from Textpattern, which made the switch rather tempting.
I did have to do some “hacking” to get it to work. First, I had to start out with an older version of Word Press because the default importer is rather borked. So, I found a blog post detailing how to correctly import the old DB. The reason that I had to have an old version (2.1, to be exact), is because the import mechanism changed between 2.1.x and 2.2.x. So, I got the old version, imported the database, and then installed the newest version and updated the schema. Not too hard.
I picked out a theme (I think it’s pretty sweet), and installed a few plugins, and I’m on my way to making posts and stuff on a new “medium.” Hope you guys enjoy the new stuff. Maybe this will give me a reason to actually update every once in a while now. :P
In case you’re wondering, I had a Philosophy (NOT psychology >_>) test on Friday. This is the result.
So, a little while ago, I got un-lazy and made it where that my iTunes would hold all of the music I have on my hard drive, and still automatically update my iPod with the music I want (through some Playlist Magick and other stuff).
Now, after doing so, I’ve been listening to the music I recently re-added, and I have to say, the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City soundtrack is quite possibly the best soundtrack ever compiled for a Video Game (that’s saying music licensed from mainstream artists, not original works).
Agree? No? Why?
If you were trying to access the site roughly 20 minutes prior to this post, you most certainly would have noticed that the site was down for upgrades on the software.
However, this time, it’s not an upgrade on the software, but instead, a complete changeover to a new one. Previously, I was using Drupal, which is certainly a fine software product. The problem that I found with Drupal, however was that for the purpose I was using it for (a personal blog), it was both too encumbering and had too few features specific to a blog (I had to install about 10 modules to the base Drupal install to get it how I wanted it, and how it appeared before I took it down.)
The new software I am using is Textpattern. It’s amazingly light, and I love how it handles styles and presentation. So far, it’s been amazing just setting it up, so I’m ready to do some nitty-gritty writing with this bad puppy. :p
There are a few problems presented with the new software though. If you have any bookmarks from here, they will no longer work. The SEO scheme is different than it was on Drupal. The articles still exist, but the links won’t. You’ll just have to search some. :P Secondly, I didn’t import any of the comments. To do so would have taken a lot of my time, and honestly, most of the comments we’re absolutely critical to enjoy the blog. I did save the comments from the “Epic Band Lulz” post, however, as it had a lot of user input on what Bands / Albums they made. You can find the link in that post.
Other than that, not much’ll change around here. It’ll still look basically the same as before (except for new styles, obviously) and I’ll still make posts, and you guys can still comment. The only difference is the backend, which should hopefully make things a lot easier on me.
I saw this on a random forum, and thought it was pretty neat, so, I wanted to see how it goes here.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result as a comment in this post. If desired, you may “mess with” the image itself.
5. http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml
Use the subtitle of the journal you go to. This will be your #1 hit single from the album. In order to view the subtitle you have to click on the “info” link, and the subtitle will be the italicized text under the title (bold text), which is under the user name. If the subtitle is in a different language and you don’t care to use it, or if its not there, you just click the link again and you’ll find one eventually.
Mine:
Band: Complete Adventurer
Album: Make This Society Work
#1 Single: “Something will Eventually Give”
EDIT: Because of the new blog engine (and my laziness), all of the comments were deleted from all of the posts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as most of them were spam, and the actual content ones were few and far between, unfortunately. However, this post originally did have quite a few comments, so they were archived (in plain text format) for you here.