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Chicago Museums

Sameer — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:50:31 +0000

Via Factoids (an excellent little site at UChicago) I learnt about the MUSEUM PASSPORTS at the Chicago Public Library. You can check out a museum passport for 1 week from any of the Chicago Public Libraries. It gives you (and your immediate family) absolutely free access to 11 museums in Chicago. I shall try to see if I can get one when my family comes to visit at the end of May.

Particle Accelerator day

Sameer — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 17:37:31 +0000

(Via Cosmic Variance) Yesterday, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, declared Particle Accelerator Day, in Illinois, in recognition of the state’s federal laboratories (Fermilab and Argonne) as world leaders in accelerator technology. I wonder what other wierd days have been declared in Illinios.

Since the UofC helps to manage Fermilab and Argonne, I was hoping that someone would organize a tour of the facilities and I would get a chance to visit before I graduate. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen. On the other hand, after missing many chances, I am finally going to go to visit the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin tonight. The weather is nice for viewing the night sky, and it should be fun.

Books

Sameer — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 01:56:28 +0000

I gave up midway on A feast for Crows and started reading Sundiver by David Brin. Time to make a trip down to the Library to pick up some books for the winter break. Any recommendations?

Stop the presses

Sameer — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 23:05:34 +0000

A shell script I wrote earlier got mentioned in the December issue of Macworld. It is hard to find the mention, but it is there. I wrote the script to move my feeds from Safari RSS to Bloglines. Last month, I upgraded the shell script to an Automator action, so you do not need to open Terminal.app if you do not want to. The article is a bit incorrect about that point, but I guess it was written a while ago.

If you are looking to move to/from Bloglines and you want more freedom and would like complete control over your feed reader, I recommend the excellent, open source program : Gregarius. It is highly extensible and supports plugins and themes and has lots of Ajax goodness. If you spend a lot of time reading feeds it is important to have a feed reader that does everything just the way you want it to.

Comments

Sameer — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 01:03:15 +0000

Apoorva made me put in a preview function so that you can preview your comments before you submit them. It is so easy to add functionality to a wordpress plugin. I downloaded and installed the Live Comment Preview plugin. I also stumbled across the Get Recent Comments plugin. This one shows recent comments and trackbacks in the sidebar.

Busy Busy Busy

Sameer — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:22:10 +0000

The Fall quarter starts on Monday (26^th September) and it looks like I am going to be very, very busy. I am going to be teaching an undergraduate Calculus class (Math153), grading for a graduate class on Option Pricing, writing up my thesis and applying for jobs. The first casualty is my Netflix account. I will not be able to post to this blog as frequently as I would like, but I will continue to bookmark interesting things with del.icio.us.

I recently got a shiny new book, from Amazon, on Optimizing and designing MySQL databases so that I could implement a few ideas I had for Gregarius. I hope I atleast have some time to read it.

Domain Transfer Scam

Sameer — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 02:58:07 +0000

I got an strange email yesterday:

From: Jessy Timber
Subject: dcostanet.COM..

Are you perhaps interested in buying DCOSTANET.COM ?

The domain is for sail through Dommerce for $89.95.

If you are interested signup here:
http://www.dommerce.com/transfer/e/jh1/DCOSTANET.COM

Jessy

The first thing that went through my mind was Why?!! would anyone buy this domain and then offer to transfer it to me for 90 dollars. It usually costs about $10 a domain and this did not make any economic sense? Did more than 1 in 10 people sign up to transsfer? Where did they get my information? Then after doing a little digging, I found out that dcostanet.com was not registered and could be had for $8.95 (less than 10% of what this idiot was offering). I guess they got my information from the whois database. So basically if someone signs up for this “transfer” Jessy stands to gain $80 per transaction. Now this spam scam starts to make more economic sense.

If the author of the email ever reads this, please remember that you usually sell domains, not sail them.