What I’ve been doing…

So I am now done with college, I have a degree and everything!! I will also be starting my job on Monday, very exciting! In my few weeks of free time between college and work, there has been a lot of video games and some side projects. There is the physics sim that you all know and love, and I have also been working on a website for my dads company.
So I have been working on it for about 4 or 5 days, learning css along the way, and I already have a fairly functioning and I think good looking site. Now I first looked around for my dad to get some legit web developers to do it, and they pretty much all wanted 6-8 weeks and ~$8000. Crazy talk. I know I learn this stuff faster then the average Joe, but damn, I clearly should do this stuff on the side. I could be making mad bank! I will link to the site once it is in a finished state so you can all tell me what you think!

new applet version

I just posted a new version of the gravity applet that lets you choose if you want to draw short tails, no tails, or draw the full line!  So now you can draw pretty pictures and all that jazz.  I think the next version will allow you to define a path for a well to follow.  On a side note, this is starting to move away from a gravity sim and move more towards an E&M sim, so if I start calling gravity wells magnets, that is why.  Although when you turn on friction it is more of a gravity sim then E&M.  Whatever, we shall see how it turns out!  Once again you can find the applet here.

update:  As my friend pointed out, I couldn’t do anti-gravity, but now I can!! Namely you can put in a negavity well power number so that it repels particles instead of attracting them.

Yay for Gravity!

So its been a while since I have posted I know, but I have something cool to show.  I made this yesterday instead of doing my homework, a spiffy physics simulation!  The basic premise is that the blue things are gravity wells and the red things are particles.  Each of the particles has a direction and speed while the wells have a magnitude.  At regular intervals each particle 1) figures out the vector between itself and each gravity well 2) calculates the distance between itself and a gravity well 3) divides the well magnitude by distance, multiplies that by the well vector, and adds that resulting vector to its current speed and direction.  So basically this means the particles get attracted to the larger wells more and to the closer wells more then the further away wells.  Makes sense to me.  You can also turn friction on and off, which simply shrinks the current direction vector by a set amount. In addition you can start and stop the simulation, add or take away gravity wells, change the number of particles, and draw a grid so you can place the wells more precisely if you please.  Hope you all have fun with it!

The Bristol

So me and my friend Sarah went out to The Bristol in Bucktown over the weekend, and damn was it tasty! So I found this place by just wandering through mertromix for a while and since it had been getting great reviews it seemed like a good idea.  The Bristol is a fairly small place, it seated about 50 people it looked liked, but there was also a private dinning area upstairs, which I assume would seat about the same amount.  We went on Sunday night so we just walked in a sat down.  Even with it being Sunday night the place was still half full, good sign.  The food is American but is done similar to tapas, as in each dish is small and you order a couple to share between people.  To begin, we where given a wine and beer menu that was something like 20 pages long.  Needless to say, they have an extensive selection of wine and bottled beer.  I settled for an imperial stout they had on tap, and Sarah got a sparkling wine.  Both were delicious.

After the drinks we ordered some “bar snacks” as they are called there.  We got an order of duck fat fries and stuffed chicken wings.  The fries were very, very good.  The only other place I have had duck fat fries is when I go to Hot Doug’s, but they do seem to be tastier at Bristol.  The fries are served with their homemade ketchup and mayo.  Both are good, but their ketchup had a distinct smoky flavor to it that made it all the more memorable.  Next we got the stuffed chicken wings.  I was not really sure what to expect when we ordered it since they are supposed to be chicken wings stuffed with chorizo and blue cheese (I had never heard of such a thing, so I was intrigued). Sadly, they turned out to be the only real disappointment of the night.  They were basically tiny nuggets what had chorizo and blue cheese in them.  While they were tasty, an order only came with three small nuggets, which cost $8. Not a very good deal.  Next came the main courses.   First we got Parmesan crusted sausage with lentils, which was my bet for the best dish of the night.  There were four good-sized chunks of the sausage and a little mound of lentils.  The sausage just feel apart when you cut it up, and tasted fantastic. Next we had grilled octopus with chickpeas.  I had never had octopus before, so this was new for me.  Turns out it tastes like calamari (big surprise) and was also very good.  They had put a citrus sauce over the dish that was quite tasty.  The chickpeas were a bit hard, but still good.

We were still a bit hungry after this, again small portions, so we put in an order of monkey bread.  It came straight from the oven in its own little cast iron pot and was served with a dill sauce.  As opposed to normal monkey bread, this was not very sweet, but it was doughy and once again, very tasty.  To finish off the meal we had some home made nutty butters and milk chocolate mouse (I don’t think it was exactly chocolate mouse but close enough). It was very creamy, not too heavy, and delicious when eaten alone or with a nutty butter.   It was all very, very, very tasty.  Also the service was very prompt and very nice.  We did not wait very long for our food, and the plates got cleared almost as soon as we finished with each dish.  The bill was around 70 for the two of us, which is not terrible considering we had drinks, five dishes, and dessert, and it was pretty much the most flavorful dinner I may have ever had. I will definitely go back.

BURN-E

if you guys have seen wall-e(or not) watch this! It is so good!

Watch Burn-E in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

mmmmmm

My heart slowed down just looking at this….

http://foodproof.com/photos/full/bacon-cheese-roll-1290

the lolcat orginal

This made my day.  Best lolcat ever.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/12/01/funny-pictures-oldest-ever-lolcat-found/

Cool toys dude!

So I stumbled onto this little video just now, and I found it incredibly fascinating. Its a time lapse shoot of a monster truck competition, with some effect thrown in to make everything look like miniatures.  I am not sure what makes me so very enthralled with this video, maybe its just my childhood love of monster trucks, but I felt like sharing.  Enjoy!

Morgan Freeman Eating Cotton Candy

Well, that was easy…

So my phone interview with Microsoft lasted all of 20 minutes?  They asked me to explain a technical challenge I have faced, asked me to do a simple coding example (was like 4 lines), and then asked me to explain how a computer network worked to someone who knew nothing about computers….and that was it.  So then I guess this round was to weed out people who know absolutely nothing about computers.  Eventually though, if they like me, they will fly me out to Redmond (all expenses paid, cha-CHING) and have me interview for like 9 straight hours… that should be fun.  On a somewhat separate note, I was supposed to download some LiveMetting software for the interview.  Its basically a chat client so that during the interview I can type code and such for the interviewer to look at.  The fun part is that when I tried to download it on my windows machine, windows was convinced this piece of software from Microsoft was a virus.  I spent about an hour turning off every security feature I could find so I could get the download to work, but to no avail.  So then I ended up using the java version through firefox on my linux box, which worked first try, no problems.  I thought it was amusing.