| Partial to do list | Disclosed research | Events |
| call HSA for reimbursement | ||
| neurosurgery collaboration | ||
| begin work for PDC prototypes | ||
| attend a bike safety class | obtain VPN for UCSF network | |
| build FDA-spec saline bath | ||
| update online resume | berkeley kite festival | |
| get a haircut | (study for) and take prelims |
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GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Filled out my bracket for World Cup 2010. I’m not predicting individual outcomes in the group stage but you can derive some results from the R16 and up bracket. Specifically I call for Ivory Coast upsetting Portugal for 2nd place in Group G, Cameroon upsetting Denmark (and then Italy!) to reach the quarters, South Africa making it alive out of Group A (with France advancing instead of Uruguay and Mexico, only to get owned by South Korea in R16). Finally I call England over Argentina (at last!) for third place and Spain over Brazil (at last!) for the Cup. Looking back at it now a lot of these predictions are rather cavalier!
Nate Silver, the god of statistics, is behind ESPN’s new SPI ranking system. He is updating the odds of teams advancing daily based on 10000 simulations a day and the latest actual results. You can also observe his initial predictions (prior to any data) on his site as well. There are some interesting results from Nate’s oddsmaker as well. I had enough difficulty predicting Group A, but Nate doesn’t seem to do any better! Especially after the first round ties the odds of each team advancing are within the range 47 to 53 percent! Also Portugal and Ivory Coast both have good odds of advancing (Drogba, Ronaldo, and home continent remain the x-factors) as do Denmark and Cameroon (52 vs 48 percent). If you are a USA fan, you should be praying to whatever you believe in that we advance 1st out of Group C, so we can avoid the prospect of playing Germany in R16. (Let England deal with them, they can handle it.) The expectation is for the USA to make it out of group stage but I figure since we are favored to move on, let’s push further and get a quarterfinals berth! I don’t have the stones to back this up in my bracket, but I do call a 1-1 tie with England on Saturday… Like most things that matter this Answer only applies to a small number of people, those few enlightened souls that use MediaMonkey instead of iTunes to manage their music libraries. (For the uninitiated, MediaMonkey is just like iTunes with lower memory/CPU footprints, custom classification schemes, and uses DRM-free Amazon for a music store.) MediaMonkey does a good job of supporting iPods and other such MP3 players but the procedure for phones, especially Android phones, is a bit scant. But if you have a Motorola Droid I have found your solution for synchronization. Even after taking these steps I have one error in tag transcription (some songs have their Genre changed to ‘255′) but other than that playlists and music sync perfectly. The link is quite verbose so here I have distilled it to a few key points.
Keywords: “mediamonkey”, “droid”, “motorola”, “music”, “synchronization”, “mm droid sync”, “mm droid synchronization”, “mm droid music sync”, “mediamonkey droid sync” I have played this game since it first came out in 1996, over fifteen years ago. I have bought the game, bought the Price of Loyalty expansion pack, and I gave my original CD to a friend so instead of downloading it I bought the original game again. Many people say Heroes 3 is better and they are right (at which I was astounded when I first tried the game). However the campaigns in Heroes 2 are so much more fun to play. Heroes 3 campaigns are nothing more than story-linked regular maps with few rewards other than high-level heroes. In Heroes 2, the continuity with troop alliances are awesome and add a great twist to otherwise straightforward maps. It is time for me to move on, but before I sink my teeth too deep into Heroes 3 I figured I would speed run through the HOMM2 campaigns one last time, shooting for less than 200 days, which I was not sure if it was even possible. I was astounded at just how fast I could do them, clocking Roland at 198 days and Archibald at 148 days, far lower than any other numbers I can find on the Internet. My ten year old self would be astonished.
For Archibald, I was saved 25 days in the Gauntlet scenario by picking up 16 wandering dragons for greater glory. Not having to wait for the Dragon army to grow saved me roughly 4 weeks. (You say lucky, I say… yeah, you’re right. Even then my score would be 175 days – still really low.) Also in Country Lords, instead of killing the enemy scout stealing resources, ignore him and charge north for a free maxed out Knight castle in 8 days! I used David Mills’s guide at GameFAQs for other ideas for speed boosts but I destroyed the posted scores in the guide, leaving me a bit confused. I also realize due to the whole wandering dragons deal posting top campaign scores is a bit useless as it is highly dependent on luck. If there is still interest for this ancient game I’ll write something up for it one day (and it will also let me verify results through repeatability). Checkpoints for campaigns: It’s been over a year since I made the decision to leave my full-time high-salary cushy-benefits job in the middle of a recession and further my education in graduate school. At the time I had little to guide that decision other than instinct. Sure I had reasons but in cases like these, what more are reasons but rationalizations of instinct? Despite the obvious monetary losses the move has been hugely rewarding. I have been able to find the research I was looking for, working on wireless implantable medical devices. My current project is to design an wireless implantable pressure sensor that requires no batteries and can be used anywhere in the body, from spinal discs to retinas to brains. Pressure monitors in the eye can predict the onset of glaucoma and allow opthamologists to intervene before the patient is blinded. Sensors in the spine can monitor back profile and help surgeons be more discerning with risky back surgery operations. It took a long time to find this research, in a small group at UCSF that just started. My advisor just recently moved his lab out here to get more direct physician involvement. Lots of people are doing small-scale medical devices but no one, not even at Berkeley, are interested in developing therapeutic devices and directly interacting with patients. The research of this group is exactly that – exploiting the revolution in microfabrication for healing people rather than developing the next best computer chip. Finally come the other benefits of living up here. Stress level down, job satisfaction up, health up, public transit use up, environment up. It’s not all roses here, but it’s good to look back on a big decision and realize you made the right choice. During my senior year of college my friends and I attempted freestyle rapping on a number of occassions. None of us were particularly any good but it was a fun exercise and test of English skills and thinking on your feet. As I was falling asleep one night I came up with these few verses in my head to go along with Children’s Story, the Slick Rick song. I used Black Star’s cover beat while recording it because I like it a little better. I’m no Mos Def but it was fun. Click here to listen. I decided to try something different while writing about my iced tea recipe. I have recorded it in real-time audio format! Click here to listen. (There may be swearing in E-flat.) When I reformatted my computer and installed Windows 7 a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t think much about what I should save and what I should not. Of course I backed up all my music, documents, photos, important files, and so on, but there were a few things that got lost in the move, so to speak. So one night when I realized my Heroes of Might and Magic II saves were no longer, I set out to reinstall the venerable game. Load the CD in the CD drive and click install. Error message: 16-bit games like HOMM2 don’t work in 64-bit Windows 7. Absurd! However there seemed to be some hope: By using a mode called Windows XP Virtual, I could in theory run any software that was compatible with Windows XP (which this game was). I downloaded the appropriate updates from Microsoft and ran the installation within Windows XP again. Fail! One and a half hours of my life irrevocably taken from me, and all I am left with is an incomprehensible error message. So if you are looking for backwards compatibility with old-as-stone games, stick with the 32-bit Windows 7 (on which HOMM2 works, so there is a happy ending to this episode since my laptop runs Win7 32-bit), or dual boot with Windows XP. This virtual driver mode is nonsense. Answer: Keywords: “heroes of might and magic 2″, “windows 7″, “compatibility”, “16-bit”, “windows 7 64-bit”, “win7″, etc etc. |
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