If anyone can fulfill this, I would be thankful. I’m looking at the code in iTerm to see if I can hack it.

is now available (with source) for download.

MemoryBank.dmg.gz

I have always learned new information particularly well through either stories or through flash cards. The former, while poetic and colorful lacks the portability and immediacy of the latter. During college you would find me reading the material, making notes, turning the notes to cards, or reviewing the cards.

It was through this method that I memorized the rules of logic (modus tollens, DeMorgan’s Theorem), Dutch Irregular verbs (zijn, was/waren, geweest), French Irregular verbs (ai, as , a, avons, avez, ont). Learning certain basic facts, fast, is something that makes synthesizing abstract things later much easier. I learned this by watching the kids learn when I was an assistant at Kumon math centers: The faster they knew the basics, the faster they could be when they reached calculus. Calculus, by way of comparison, was “What’s the technique” - -the plug and chug of factors and additions was simply a bit of rote dreariness. By having mastered that, they could unfold solutions much more quickly.

In any case, and by way of digression, I’ve created a flash card program to help people learn and review things. A few friends are testing it at present, but I should share it with the rest of the internet in DMG format once I get a few free hours ( work’s rather hectic at the moment ).

Here are some screen shots:

Enter a question…

More questions being entered

The Exam Interface: Answers randomly shuffle to prevent positional memorization (paper cards can’t touch that!)

The final result: Looks like i should study math more and 80’s cartoon references less!

Well, as I said in my previous post, I’ve been pretty busy at work and at home. While I won’t go into the great details of the former (too much background required to appreciate it) I’ve completed my first Cocoa Program: SudokuGrid.

SudokuGrid is a tool that will let you enter a grid that you find (from a book, off the internet, etc.) and will let you solve it. It’s still a very early release, but it’s such a big milestone I feel like I have to share it with the world.

Furthermore, I need to take a bit of a break from it. The next post will address the tool.

• Drive
• Read the drink menu at Ryowa in Mountain View
• Discover the time from the red LED alarm clock on the other side of the bed
• Discover that girlfriend’s expression did not mean “hey good looking” but “what are you doing now?!”

So far the real inconvenient bit is taking a bazillion eye drops every hour or so. You have to let them each absorb so by the time you finish one hour’s cycle, you’re about ready to start another. Lasik breaks down the nerves that tell your eyes to make tears, so your eyes are dry.

It’s not too fun, that bit.

The least-fun part is in the morning when I wake up with my eye-shields taped to my face (to proctect from nocturnal eye-rubbings) and the eye feels dry and sandy. I peel away the medical tape wherewith the eye-shields are held in place (you couldn’t give me a strap?) and rummage for those sweet, rejuvenating drops and plink plink regain the ability to comfortably blink.

For feeling extra-Bono-like

But we adapt. Speaking of adaptation, during my initial hours post surgery I was incredibly photosensitive and look what my brilliant (no pun intended) girlfriend made:

Is that not totally clever? Her mind isn’t the only reason to love her but it is one of the best.

As I couldn’t sleep (not tired and the pills had worn off) and watching TV / Computering was verboten I lay listening to the Bay’s NPR affiliate, KQED and was taken in by their pledge drive again (I’m easy to convince). So yet again I contributed and get to feel ever-so-slightly superior again for having ponied up the cash.

It was also really great that my girl brought me my iPod which had some great podcasts of some of my favorite NPR programming: Left, Right, and Center as well as Shields and Brooks on the NewsHour.

This weekend my sweetie and I finished off cleanining up the bedroom. It’s now beautiful and clean and I’m very happy. I suppose that’s a little spot of “OK, this is under control now” from which to work.

Incidentally, she made me this very tasty bagel.

Lately my sweetie has been talking about wanting to learn C++ and I found a very good used edition of C++ by Dietel and Dietel. It was on sale at BookBuyers in Mountain View for $15.00 so she’s been reading it.

Sunday I went over to my friend’s place to watch the SuperBowl. I didn’t have much invested in the whole thing, but it was a pretty good game with crappy officiating.

This week has been a bit busy, I’m enacting a particularly hairy change into my server ecosystem tonight and i hope that all will carry through well. I attempted it on Monday but didn’t meet my expectations for “seamlesness” so I aborted.

I’ve also really been making some great progress on my Cocoa application. It’s a Sudoku grid that you can use to play games. I’m not GENERATING puzzles or SOLVING the puzzles with this - it’s just a computerized interface for solving puzzles that you might find on websites or in the paper.

Here’s what’s new. When last I was posting you were seeing posts from beautiful Frascati, Italy.

Obviously I took the big ol’ jet-airplane back to the US and arrived just fine. The flight was long and a bit more grueling than I recall. The real cursable thing about flying west from Europe is that if you catch a morning flight, you really feel quite compelled to stay awake the duration of the flight.

Assuming you’ve gotten your body on the Continental clock, you’re feeling like “Oh, it’s 11 am, lunchtime, etc.” and the idea of “Hey sleep for 8 hours” is, for me anyway, not in the works. OK, if you stay up all night the night before this might be in the cards, but creates such a miserable experience otherwise, it’s not worth it.

So on my flight back across to NYC I finished Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto which I very much liked. It was a very interesting study of human relationship in terms of class and privilege and how, under duress, this breaks down and people truly start dealing with each other as people, come to know each others’ problems and identities, and actually start to build real community….and how quickly the machinery of modern society will lash out against real interaction.

With that book polished off and a lunch consumed I found myself about 3 hours away from Long Island so I watched some interestinf TV programs and used the last hour for some old-fashioned staring out the window.

Arriving in NYC was a breeze and customs didn’t hassle me. I guess, unlike when I returned from Holland after a year at age of 21, I don’t look like I’m carrying a tonne of ecstasy in my valises (and, for the record, I have never stuffed my valises with ecstasy).

The flight back on my now most favorite airline Song was lightly booked so I had the exit row all to myself. If you can believe this, after 1 week of coding Cocoa non-stop I actually worked on a Cocoa application some more. Eventually my (by that time quite) timezone frazzled mind started fritzing and I took the edge off with some Tostito’s and processed liquified cheese food (making, uh, a nacho) and a Heineken.

Thanks to my AWESOME APC UPB-80 battery I still had enough juice to watch a DVD (and then some), so I watched my buddy Franco’s lent copy of Dead Ringers.

This movie is totally awesome…if you like edgy movies. I feel it redundant to give pedestrian synopses of movies on the internet because anyone reading anything I wrote could read the imdb review or the Amazon review, so I’m going to save myself the effort.

I find Cronenberg’s movies very challenging and very disturbing (generally). He seems to have a very complex relationship with the modern experience of life which is mediated by technology. He frequently has the erotic be a function of technological progress or medical production of medical mutation. It’s the same sort of curious revilement that underlies 9th graders looking up “elephantitis of the testicles” in the book of medical strangeness — but Cronenberg never lets “hey look freaks!” override an intricate story full of subtlety, art, and tenderness (strange to atrtibute that!).

The real hilight of the film is THE GREATEST ACTOR ON THE PLANET, Jeremy Irons, playing two identical twins. How he, one person, can play two different personalities that, effectively, share one soul, and make both of them seem alive, vibrant, and different is absolutely staggering.

I wish he’d do more Shakespeare. He’d be such a great Iago.

So anyway, having watched that I was pretty much into the stay of overtired and couldn’t sleep. On the up side I was only about 90 minutes away from my beloved San Francisco. I watched some TV programs and then was landed.

Upon arriving my beautiful girlfriend was there at the baggage claim in a wonderful fuzzy, new, sweater. It felt very good to be holding her again after so many days away! We returned to our new house in Sunnyvale, I ate a bowl of oatmeal, and went to bed. I was out before she returned from brushing her teeth.

The next days were spent in recovery from jet-lag. While I didn’t have any troubles on the way over, I was not all that well off upon my return. We went to the mall at 10am (uh, because I was ready to) and I had a good lunch and got one of those cool Chinese massages.

The following days were spent avoiding unpacking from the trip and trying to finish off the unpacking from our move. I eventually finished by work e-mail backlog and got things rolling there again.

In the evening times, instead of TV or blogging, I’ve been working on my Cocoa program - I’m trying to make sure I use what I’ve learned instead of letting it slip away. I’ve also been trying to get the house all caught up because of my elective surgery on 02/02.

I’m getting Lasik Wavefront surgery tomorrow. I’m nearsighted and would like to snowboard / surf / etc. without this hind’rance any longer. I’m a bit apprehensive, but the surgeon is one of the most practiced in the area and the technology seems sound to me, so, here I go.

The doctors have told me no computer-ing on the day of, so I won’t be doing that. But that just about catches me up on what’s news.