I should be doing homework

But here I am, blogging.

If you're having trouble with the MacUpdate bundle, try putting a space in front of your name that you registered with. I know that's really unintuitive, but I spoke with Tech Support today and that's how my license was. I read of a few other people having problems with that, so hopefully this helps.

Over the weekend I got to drive a Pontiac Grand Prix. I think that my car (S2000) has probably significantly changed my perspective on cars, because now normal, reasonable cars seem like luxury automobiles to me. Their comfy seats, great visibility, and quietness are all very appreciated. One issue became apparent when driving this car that has also shown up in a number of other American cars, especially Pontiacs from the 90s and early 2000s. As such, I'm dubbing it the "Pontiac Problem," although it could definitely show up in other cars, particularly other GMs or other American cars. The problem is that you easily end up going faster than you intended.

A number of factors contribute to this.

First is the noise. GMs from this era tend to be very quiet, both in terms of road and engine noise. Especially to someone like me, used to driving a loud car, this cue that I'm going too fast is mostly gone. Comparatively, also, there isn't much more noise at say 90mph than at 60. Part of the reason for this is insulation and general attempts to make things quieter, and part of it is related to another factor, the long gearing.
Thanks to the torque present in the engine, many Pontiacs from this era have very high gears to maximize gas milage and make for a much more refined drive. Thus, the engine doesn't revolve as high at high speeds. Again, this may mean that the difference between 60 and 90, 50%, may only be, say, 800 rpm. In may cars this would be far more, but trying to detect the difference between 1600rpm and 2400rpm in a car that we already established had a rather quiet exhaust can be quite hard. As a side note, I'm really fond of the smooth and fast shifting transmission it had.
I mentioned torque, and that matters a significant amount also. Low-end torque allows you to accelerate well at low RPMs.

Technical note: Torque figures that manufacturers quote are technically one measurement, of peak torque. In general, what we (car people) mean when we say engines have a lot of torque is that they have a lot of torque across the power band, especially down low. That can make things confusing, as simply having a high peak torque number does not mean an engine has a lot of low end torque, although those numbers are *often* correlated.

This means that if you're not driving with cruise control, if your foot is just a bit too far down, you will be accelerating at a rate significantly more than in cars with less torquey engines. Note that it won't really sound different, other than the quicker increase in RPMs. As noted above, though, you're in the lower RPM range and in a quiet car.

Nice radios help too. Many Pontiac sedans from this era have nice sound systems. The upgraded version are pretty awesome, but even the base sound is a pretty good system. Turn on the radio, and already quiet cues are now overwhelmed.

The final cause I'll note here is a soft but solid suspension. This contributes to the quiet, and it also creates a general lack of bumpiness and roughness. In cars with stiffer suspensions, speed is more noticeable, as it makes bumps pronounced. For example, there is one road around Tech that makes it clear when I'm speeding as the bumps will get *very* noticeable. In a Grand Prix, however, the bumps may still get stronger, but they're still very subtle and dampened. Unless you're paying attention to it, you may miss this cue. Add to it that the suspension is still solid. Some cars with a soft suspension do not handle particularly well, which can makes excess speed noticeable in town, if not on the highway. However, Pontiacs seem to handle themselves surprisingly well given their rather soft (to me, anyway) suspensions, lessening this cue also.

You'll note that most of this "Pontiac Problem" comes from features that are beneficial. Maybe it's not a "problem" after all. I find it endearing :D. However, it is something to make note of, as I don't think police will accept this as an excuse.

Life and stuff

So after about 100 meetings (ok, 8 is probably an accurate estimate) taking place across an entire semester and the first week of this one, I think we've finally gotten a good situation with GTACM again. The college changed the rules for corporate interactions, but I think today finally got us back to a point where we can be creative and really do some of our cool ideas. It's happy and great :D.

In other news, I was reading an article and came upon this gem:
""Right now we're working on the first step of the activation of this receptor. Downstream, there are still lots of things to understand," said Li, who added that his favorite umami-containing food is lobster. "

Really? Haha I love that they included that. I wonder if I ever make news if they'll ask me what my favorite computer-containing device is.

Saturday Night Improv

We went to see a show at Dad's Garage tonight - it was my first time being out there. "Bob Frapple's Psychiatry" - basically they had the audience ask questions, performed a completely unrelated skit, and had the "doctor" try to extract meaning to answer the question. I got picked to do a typical improv performers provide the dialog, audience members try to act out the scene type of sketch. It ended up with me being the boss trying to pick up a coworker during a fire drill. They supplied all of my dialog and I had to try to go along with it. The guy introduced me as "I'm Chris, I like ... science." which was pretty excellent. It was a great time all in all, and we might even go back sometime...maybe even for another one of this show. Dim Sum is coming up, too, which we tried to see in the fall but was sold out. We'll see, but either way, it was great fun.

Roomba lols

Our roomba fell down the stairs last night. It was pretty epic. The first time it fell only one stair, and I figured it was no big deal - their sensors are supposed to prevent them from falling, after all. The next time, though, apparently it got a bit too far over before the sensors realized, because I was sitting in my room and heard KATHUNKA THUNKA BAM BAM. I knew immediately what it was, and the Roomba soon chipped in with it's vaguely sad error/stuck tones. I literally laughed for about 60 seconds. Fortunately, it's still in operating order.

In other news, I flew back earlier today - I'm at Tech trying to be productive...hopefully that will go well.

Griffin Support

Woo hoo long time no post! We'll see if I ever get any better, but don't get your hopes up - I'll probably spend most of my free time working on ideas for podcasts or businesses.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to Griffin Technology support. Their product the SmartTalk has some durability issues, but they've always been great about giving replacements (at least to me) - they're clearly aware of the issue and willing to help.

I've contacted their support 3 times total (ironically all of these were cable durability problems, though only 2 related to the SmartTalk), and each time it's been a 5 minute, pleasant affair. No burning questions, long holds, or anything like that - simple, fast, helpful customer service.

Actually, most companies I've had to do warranty repair through have been at least nice about it. Maybe that reflects what kinds of companies I shop with. The only real problem I've had has been with Sony Ericsson - while I loved the product and their staff was nice, I've had to send in my phone twice now and they sent me back my same phone both times. That meant at least a notable delay (doubly unacceptable for cell phones), and unfortunately, not all of the issues were fixed. I'd say SE should be sending out refurbished phones to customers and requesting that they send the broken ones back. Many manufacturers do this; you just charge the customer for the new one if they don't return it. That way the customer never goes without a phone and you know the one they receive does not have issues.

Random thing

Here's a random link I found to interesting research on facial expressions in avatars. It's not that fantastic or new, but it seems like it would be amusing to see my friends sneeze when they sneeze.
Of course, what would be more interesting would be to see this tie in somehow with built-in isights on macs --- or some sort of manually operated version. I remember WAAAY back on the Daily Show they had that happen with a correspondent that was on e phone -his pic on the map changed according to the emotions, which was indeed pretty hilarious.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14299-sneezesensing-software-gives-avatars-a-good-laugh.html

Auto-generate comments in C# .NET / Visual Studio

Apologies for not posting in a long time. I have a lot I would like to say, but as always, there's so little time to do it. Anyway, I knew I should post this before I forget about it.

So, I've been looking everywhere for how to do this, and I finally figured out how to do it. Hopefully some people searching for how to do this will find this , and it will be helpful.

If you've learned how to do .NET with an official curriculum, you may already know how to do this, but a lot of people, me included, have had to learn .NET sort of "by fire," without as much official instruction, since they were already familiar with similar languages, such as Java. When you learn by doing, sometimes you miss simple tips like this, and the .NET programmers probably already assumed everyone knows how to do this, because it's not even in the help files as far as I can tell.

I wanted to auto-generate comment blocks for my code like I have for quite some time in Eclipse. I believe the combination is alt-shift-J or something similar, and it's very useful to make sure that you properly document functions, classes, etc. However, I couldn't find any way to do that in .NET. Fortunately, I discovered that the correct way to do function comments in .NET is with three slashes - '///' - and that if you do that above a function, it will automatically generate a comment with the appropriate areas to fill in, etc.

I had assumed that the right way to comment was using "/**" blocks, and .NET happily created those blocks, complete with automatic *s at the beginning of every line. However, it never gave me the place to put things like parameters and output, much to my dismay. However, if you use '///' instead, it generates the kind of headers I'd expect. They're formatted in XML syntax, which is fitting with .NET's methodology. Anyway, I'm now living in a happy world of comment blocks with auto-generated formatting and names, which is a great change. I just wish it had been a bit easier to find this information-I already documented one of my projects by hand, and I'm sure I forgot some parameters or something along the way.