soapbox

  

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I know everyone desperately wants to be able to use in their blog posts, so hopefully this will work. (As opposed to all of the previous attempts.)

Here are the instructions:
$$\int e^{-x^2} dx$$
gives as an inline version

$$!\int e^{-x^2} dx$$
gives

as a single line version

$$\int e^{-x^2} dx!$$
gives $$\int e^{-x^2} dx$$ as source.

The difference in the three cases is just the existence and location of the exclamation point.

  

Last night I was backing up my computers and I came to a realization that any hard drive smaller than 500 GB is a waste. I have a collection of cute little bus-powered 20, 30, and 60 GB portable drives that are too small to back up any of my computers. Even the 200 GB drive that I bought when I was finishing writing my thesis is now too small to back up all the pictures that I have.

Even worse, if I want to do fancy Time Machine backups using the features in MacOS X 10.5, I really need 3 times the space of the hard drive being backed up just to ensure that incremental backups are kept well into the future. For my iMac, this means that I need to get a 1 TB drive.

Luckily, those drives are for sale now and don’t actually cost any more than the 200 GB drive did 2 years ago.

  

I found the news that Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata interesting. An Indian company is buying the two main car companies of England. I’ll be Gandhi didn’t see that one coming.

We’ll ignore the fact that buying the two companies in the first place has turned out to be a $3.5 billion mistake. I wonder if they’re going to sell off Volvo too. Maybe Volvo is making them money though?

  

The car ahead of me at a light this morning had a license plate that was just 1394. (It was a special “Eastern Shore of Maryland” plate, not a custom plate.) It made me wonder if the car owner knew that’s the IEEE designation for Firewire.

Kind of makes me want to get a 80211 license plate. Might be kind of presumptuous though since I don’t do any EE.

  

Here’s a trivia question for people who have experience with metal: does brass get work hardened a lot?

Edit: Details and a picture after the jump
(more…)

  

ibeatyou is an upcoming social network with a focus on competitions. Here, you can compete against anybody for any reason. Cutest feet, best “open mouth” photo, ugliest dog, best tongue twister–you name it. The competitions are all user-generated, so you can start your own contest and invite your friends to join.