Guess I still have this journal, which nobody ever reads.
Of course, neither do I, so it's not a big deal.

one more day before the storm
and the barricade of freedom

what a great song. just be positive for 2 hours and i'm done.

it's done. i think. i guess regina might have more revisions. but it's not going to change much more.

scheduling a defense is a pain in the ass. especially when people give you conflicting information about when they're free and not free. and considering it's largely a formality, it's even more annoying.

i am convinced the faculty pass e-mails among each other, saying "OK, now you tell him you're busy on Tuesday. That'll really make him squirm! ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Bastards. There goes my trip to Niagara Falls.

I appear to be capable of 2 hours of actual work a day.

Read "HP & the Order of the Phoenix" last night. Worst. Harry Potter. Ever. Well, a little better than Chamber of Secrets - but not much better. 850 pages to learn Harry has to kill Voldemort, or Voldemort will kill Harry. Wow. Never saw that coming.

So I'm using these 2 programs (GREG & DDASAC) to fit some experimental data I have to a very simple model. These two programs have been worked on by a professor (the "S" from "BSL" for any chemical engineering geeks out there) and a number of his students for roughly 15 years . You'd think they'd work well by this point.

My model has 2 parameters, and is basically a sigmoid curve. The program is supposed to give me the values of these 2 parameters as well as a 95% confidence interval (using some statistical methods, I imagine) in which these parameters could fall. All I have to do is feed it my data, and an initial guess for the values of the parameters.

If I enter an initial guess of "20,000" for one of the parameters, and feed it my data, the solver tells me the "best possible fit" of that parameter is 28,000, plus or minues 9,000 (to give me the 95% confidence band). If I enter an initial guess of "40,000" for the parameter, and give it the exact same data, it tells me the best possible fit is now 46,000, plus or minus 40 (again, for that 95% confidence band).

I'm 95% confident that the numbers I'm getting out of this program are bullshit.

while it seems kind of smarmy, i wish i wasn't having success with research now, when I'm trying to finish. it would have been much more preferable to have had this, oh, two or three years ago when I really cared.

i keep changing my mind on bookmark integration. go with the total itunes ripoff, just integrate what i have, something else entirely - impossible to say. impossible to work on either with frickin' experiments to run.

Websites lie. They tell you they're updated, even if they're not. I guess I could be cleverer and cache content length or something else - but for now, bookmark checking will just depend on the status code.

Oh, yea, I can check for updates now. Tee hee hee!

Now comes the integration step. This should be interesting.

just to confirm what everybody else has said - NSURLHandle isn't useful.

I really don't want to call the Necko if I can avoid it - but it seems some of the CFHTTP methods are 10.2 only. I'm tired - I'll think about it later.

I depressed myself thinking about the medical forms I've gotten from the Peace Corps. There's a chance they're going to DQ me based on my slightly-less-than-normal (ha!) emotional stability. Gee, is there a connection there? I had convinced myself it's a 99% chance, but after further reading I don't think the odds are that bad.

I have no idea what I'm going to do if they don't accept me. Of course, I have no idea what I'm going to do if they do accept me.

Tomorrow: call and get an appointment.

bookmarks can be applescripted - almost without fail. this has caused me quite a bit of consternation. Do I want to have "bookmarks" and "bookmark folders" as separately scriptable things? Do I add in a 3rd class ("folder items") which encompases both bookmarks and bookmark folders? Omniweb just has "bookmarks", which can be folders or bookmarks - I guess I could do that, too, but then I'd have lots of useless variables clinging to objects that didn't need them (ie, a bunch of NSArrays on bookmark items.) Or make a class cluster, which just seems like more trouble than it's worth.

and I'm still stuck on the "almost without fail" part. The mailing lists and cocoa dev websites have been, ahem, not particularly useful.

The first defense from my class comes tomorrow. Teeters was putting his committee together today. I have college friends with PhD's, and I guess it was a shock when the first one defended, but I had gotten used to it, I thought. Guess not.

i can undo and redo an infinite amount of bookmark deletes & undeletes. I'm pretty sure I can do the same with moves, but I don't want to mess with D&D until things are back in Camino.

i can read Camino XML, IE 5 for Mac, Netscape, and Omniweb bookmarks. I can write Netscape "traditionals" as well as to a .plist.

And it doesn't look like anything leaks :)

Now on to Applescript support.

i could spend hours reading blogs. . . so many writers whose views agree with my own. it makes me feel like there's some small patch of sanity left in this world, that 2004 will roll by and the bad, greedy men will be put out to pasture.

but i'm afraid we're all just fooling ourselves. i won't get sucked into the group think.

1 missing [retain] = 5 hours trying to find a segmentation violation. yet another reason to like languages which handle memory for you automagically.

If this crap would hurry up and react already I could go and play in the sun.

Damn.

even though it's not what I wanted to make . . . it works like what I was hoping to make would work. And one of the other side products has most interesting behavior as well.

this little fsck-up is gonna get me another paper. one that actually might be cited. more than once.

yet again, i have managed to fsck the dog.

my bold new peptide - which the undergrad spent a week purifying, and a couple days drying down - isn't what I thought it was. The g-d diiodotyrosines didn't couple.

i hate this place.

today the peace corps called me back.

they (well, simone) said they had an assignment for me to teach secondary science in sub-saharan africa with a departure date of oct 1. that's all the info i'll get until I'm basically packed and ready to leave.

i said, "sure, why the heck not."

it's real. and now i'm nervous.