Gate 1) Admission and Initiation: You need to get your application accepted to before anything. Once this is done you should have a WolfPaw account and a MyPackPortal thing set up.

Gate 2) Advanced enrollment fee: You pay $200 or whatever to confirm that you are indeed going to NCSU, not anywhere else. I payed through WolfPaw although there are probably redundant facilities for it in the MyPack Portal.

Gate 3) Freshman Matriculation: Now that you have entered all your accounts and stuff, the NC State needs to register them into it’s system. You have basically no control over when this happens so it’s up to the administration. Try asking someone at Admissions.

Gate 4) Transfer Credits Matriculation: Have college credits from high school or community college included in your NCSU application? Even if you had gotten your official transcripts sent to NC State quite a while ago, they won’t be associated with your account until some internal date a set time before the semester starts. Again, this is up to the administration.

Gate 5) Enrollment Date: State makes you wait until a certain date before you can enroll for classes. The day and time of this ‘enrollment date’ depend on how many credits you have. The incentive behind this is that they want to give the first choice of classes up to people who have almost completed their degree; how horrible would it be if you were a Senior with one Fresman-level class left that you couldn’t get into because it filled up? Coming in as a Freshman with no credits, you are basically the bottom feeder of all enrolling parties. Once you have passed Gate 3, you will be able to see your enrollment date on the MyPack Portal.

Gate 6) Enrollment Appointment: Besides the enrollment date, you must also get a seal of approval from your undergraduate adviser for any courses you wish to take. However unnecessary it may seem, this step is mandatory. Check on your department’s sub-website to find out who your adviser is, then set up a personal meeting with him/her. Note that this can be done before your enrollment date has passed, but not before Gate 3. The meeting will go more smoothly if you prepare a class plan ahead of time through the MyPack Portal’s ‘Plan of Work’ facilities. [You will probably want to wait until after Gate 4 to make your class plan].

Gate 7) Placement Tests: Some classes like introductory mathematics, engineering, computer science or chemistry require you to take a remedial course (Like ECE115 or CH111) to account for what knowledge may have fallen between the cracks during High School or AP classes. Thankfully, NC State offers some online Pass/Fail tests that will place you out of such classes. These exams may only be taken once, although they won’t be a source for much of your stress provided you know the material. Perhaps this is something to talk about during the meeting you have with your adviser.

I jumped through the first six hoops over the course of several months, and am now studying for a few of the tests in Gate 7.

Gmail label color palate

In my fooling around with the internet I discovered that you can specify custom colors in RGB using nothing more than some simple HTML injection.  The palate is displayed as three tables, each cell with it’s own background color. It turns out that the color sent to Google is determined by the background color as specified by the client version of the web page. There is nothing stopping you from changing these values.  Here is a demonstration of how you could perform such a change using Firefox and Firebug:

Now your inbox can be less ugly.

I am currently stuck on a Windows machine so I don’t have easy access to these fonts. In my rummaging around the internet I couldn’t find any copies of the typefaces in a format that would install on Windows so I decided to make some. I took copies of the fonts from a Linux distribution and converted them to OTF. Here is the resulting font pack:
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The tarball contains the following families:
URW Bookman
URW Century Schoolbook
URW Gothic
URW Nimbus (Sans, Mono, and Roman)
URW Palladio

Because they are all in OTF, they can be installed on Windows. They may look a little wonky in your word processor but that is most probably because of a rendering issue; if you are super anal-retentive and want to be sure, convert your document to a PDF or SVG and examine the font in that format before printing.

“All the tchotchkes of the world – the coffee mugs, the bracelets, the nose rings – would serve double duty as keys to content like music” The idea behind using physical tokens as keys to listen to music would supposedly be to bring romanticism back into the music industry. Unfortunately, I do not agree with this view.

Maybe I am the only one in this class young enough to remember playing around with ‘HitClips.’ This toy was based on the exact same premise as Mr. Lanier’s vision. Basically, they were little handheld devices that you got little cards for, and when you put a little card in, it would play the latest big pop hit or whatever. They were extremely awesome; you were basically the coolest kid in the school if you had one of these. The problem was, your HitClip set would almost overnight turn into something not unlike this:

HitClip Rats Nest

The only difference between HitClips and Mr. Lanier’s vision is that Songles would have tangiable, non-fiat value since they would be incorporated into household items. Imagine you really like Snoop Dog, so you go out to the grocery store to buy one of his songs. Snoop Dog’s music is in the form of dog-collars. You buy it, plug it in to your Songle player and enjoy your new music. Except, there’s just one problem:
You don’t own a dog.
You will eventually end up with a few dozen different Snoop-Dog-Collars among countless other cumbersome accessories you have no use for and own solely for the purpose of listening to music.

Such a form of music distribution would grow very old very fast.

I hope I have not come off as if I am unquestioningly and blindly against every sentence in this book. There are many interesting points he makes and I look forward to seeing what else he has to give. Just like Mr. Lanier, I believe drastic changes are necessary in media propagation to allow artists to unleash their full creativity. Maye not these changes, though.

The best reason I can think of that Mr. Lanier would leave this section in his book is as an excuse to use the word ‘tchotchkes.’

These cover:
Many examples of simple separable differential equations, including ones involving u substitution
Unsophisticated application of differential equations to population growth/decay (Infinite resources assumed, never levels off)

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I am sorry to say that the first few chapters of this book do not sit very well with me. After having read chapters 2-4 I found myself utterly confused with respect to what message Mr. Lanier was trying to convey so I decided to reread just chapter 2 with a fine-toothed comb. To be honest I do not feel much more in agreement.

Mr. Lanier decides to start chapter 2 with a recollection of his encounters with radical Rapture believers throughout his upbringing as a segue into a discussion on the science fiction concept of the Singularity. After this he decides to explain to us relativism by using non-sequiter statements like. “A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it.”

He goes on to tell us a few stories about Alan Turing and Kasparov getting beat at chess by a computer system because of his poker face. Admittedly, I quite enjoyed both of these although I am still not sure what he is getting at.

Near the end of the chapter he graces us with two thought experiments, the second of which is a thinly veiled carbon copy of the infinite monkey theorem. ( Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of monkeys all typing random things on an infinite amount of typewriters, given enough time and resources they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. ) He argues that if we took a big mass of data and took an infinite amount of time interpreting it in different ways we will eventually end up with a copy of our brain. Ultimately I think this experiment falls apart right when he assumes that our brains are nothing more than advanced computers. Sure, the hive mind of the internet may be capable of dwarfing the development any single person is capable of but that is only because it is backed by tens of thousands of such people. If every human being was suddenly eradicated from the face of the earth, the internet and computers would not continue to invent and discover things, as Lanier seems to imply. Not once have we gotten a computer to reproduce creative thought. This argument is more or less similar to saying ‘research labs will soon overpower humans because they are doing things n so much more rapidly than a human can.’ Humans are the ones powering the research labs…

Up until now it appears that Mr. Lanier has just strung together an absurd grab-bag of neckbeardish arguments. I do not think I have devoted enough time to this book and look forward to examining it more carefully in the coming weeks. It seems that others understood Mr. Lanier’s message better than I did so I will try to respond to their interpretation of his opinion in my responses to their posts.

Cheers

We will see how the class responds to this.

EDIT: In standard Community College fashion, it was ignored and I got a 100.

you may notice ‘matricies’ is spelled wrong throughout.

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These notes cover:
Atomic properties of Insulators and Conductors
Columbs Law formula definition & examples
Electric Fields as point and line sources
Elementary example electric fields from ring sources
How to calculate the force of an electric field on a point some distance away

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On 1.2 we used a calculator to work the problem.

These are just class notes so I know they’re not that clear without a narrative. Post a comment and I will post an explanation.

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These last few days the instructor has done little more than work problems so these notes are fairly self-explanatory. These notes record the following procedures:

How to test a solution set against a differential equation
How to derive acceleration/velocity formulas using differential equations given
How to solve a simple differential equation that describes population growth
How to get a specific solution from a general solution given some initial conditions

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Feedback is welcome; if parts of these notes aren’t clear enough, don’t hesitate to ask questions or leave suggestions on how I can take notes better.