Scott Caplan’s blog

Yes, that’s right. Wimbledon started today (though NBC coverage doesn’t start until Saturday). I have strawberries. I have cream. I have tea. Heck, I even have Pimms. Life is good.

On the whole coding front, it seems that in my excitement to learn how to code by picking a project and diving right in, I’ve forgotten how inadequate my familiarity with MySQL, and the structure of internet apps in general, is. After spending far too much time trying to figure out why I can’t access MySQL from the command line on my local machine (or the simpler problem of what’s wrong with my sidebar), I’ve decided that I’m going to stop coding for at least a week, maybe two (to fully enjoy Wimbledon, perhaps). To avoid the temptation even, I’m going to stay away from any kind of personal computer in the meantime. When I come back, hopefully I’ll have a fresh mind and more patience to start from the very beginning.

So how do I plan on occupying myself in my copious spare time (besides watching Wimbledon)? Well, perhaps this is a good time to read Les Misérables (in English, despite the italics and accent mark), as per Max and Palmyra’s suggestion. I’ll also be trying to work on German (without the Tagesschau podcasts), and getting myself into a decent sleep schedule. I’ve also got some papers that I want to go through, and some health forms to fill out for HUHS. So I’ll see you, my nonexistent readers, in a couple of weeks!

So, I’ve posted a small roadmap at this page on Dan’s/everybody’s wiki, and am now in the process of installing Ruby on Rails locally on OSX, using the guide linked to from the Ruby on Rails homepage.

Anyway, the guide recommends having a tasty beverage to drink while waiting for things to compile. In that vein, I checked the fridge only to find that the Diet Coke still had ice in it from my mother’s putting it in the freezer. However, our fridge is always stocked with Diet Mountain Dew (some of you can see where this is going) since my father’s as addicted to the stuff as I am to Diet Coke (or rum, for that matter). So now I have two things to keep me occupied: Diet Mountain Dew, and a some thoughts I’ve been wanting to write up on this blog, while I’m waiting for things to compile.

Codemonkey like Tab and Mountain Dew. (NB: Jonathan Coulton is a Whiff.)

All that said, Xcode is done installing, so back I go.

This is why the Boylston Chess Club’s blog rocks. Hopefully, I’ll have enough time to hang out there once in a while in the fall (it’s in the Boston area).

Just looked at my site with Safari, and realized that something is messed up. It still loads in Camino, which makes me figure that Camino is being more generous to my HTML. This will be a good excuse to look under the hood of Wordpress for a while. Pardon my dust while I do this (especially if you’re viewing on Safari).

England prevails,
Scott

Just testing out Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin for Wordpress. If I can’t get something like Performancing for Camino or Safari, and I’m not terribly interested in trying out Flock for a second time after seeing how fast Camino and Safari are, I decided to make tagging easy to do straight from the post-writing page. Now if only I could get a bookmarklet to take the place of Performancing’s magic F8 button. Hmm…..

OK, after a lot of stress, I’ve finally managed to create an openID identity with the help of myopenID.com. I’d like to be able to get avatars in there, but that’ll be for another day.

I’m also not crazy about the fact that all of my pages on this blog have the appropriate text in the section so that I could use any one of them, but maybe that’s not actually a bad thing….

Too lazy to put in Technorati tags manually for this.

So I, idiot that I am, just figured out that comments need to be moderated first. I just changed the settings so that the blog will only block your comment pending moderation the first time you comment with a given combination of name and email address. I may change that later to be more liberal. We’ll see if comment spam becomes a problem (I doubt it will).

Quick note to those who may be looking at this from a trackback: this post is probably not really a comment on the conversation you were reading. I mostly only include the trackback URLs so that people know when I’m linking to their stuff.

That said, I finished my new morning routine and started writing this post (which I started today). While this won’t usually be what I post about (nor will my posts usually be so long), I’ve decided that I need to start getting used to the sleep schedule of the rest of the world, and so I’ve got a new routine, and want to share it with the world!

NB on more typical posts: I still owe some posts about the last month or so of dear old Yale, chess in Oak Brook, as well as the obligatory “What am I doing with my life” post, math vs. business vs. law post, the post about the whole “identity crisis” brought on by going for law school to a university carrying an unhealthy obsession with cantabs of all things, and the Latin on my college diploma (Collegii Saybrugiensi, non Timothei Dwight).

NB on my previous efforts to force some discipline on my life. I’ve often been upset with some habit of mine or lack thereof (I would be more apathetic if I weren’t so lethargic). So I’ll start an exercise routine or something, expecting that this time I will finally buckle down and get into shape, only to find out that dis aliter visum. This time is different, though (the band’s going to make it), ’cause I’ve got two things going for me: 1) I did manage somehow to lose 25 pounds last semester (though graduation and Chicago have put on the last 5 of those), and 2) I really, really want to learn German this summer.

No more notes. Onto my routine. I looked up last year’s class schedule for HLS and found out that it’s much easier than I thought. It still seemed like a good idea, though to be ready for 8:30.

1. Went to bed early last night (read two chapters of V for Vendetta Book 1, comments some other time).
2. Woke up at 7:00. Now, this is where most of you who know me start wondering if somebody else got a hold of the username and password for my WordPress account, or if I happen to be travelling in a different time zone and decided not to tell anybody. I assure you, ’tis I. Nobody pulled a Jon on me (at least not on this post).
3. Brushed my teeth, got dressed for a walk, saw a dead raccoon on the street, some people waiting at bus stops, walked back.
4. Shower, Shave, etc.
5. Drank a morning cup of coffee while listening to my first German lesson.

The exercise is only for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday I get another 30 minutes of time (I’m still going to wake up at 7, though). I let myself sleep in Saturday and Sunday. If I can manage to keep it up for three weeks, I should be set.

Note on the shave: I’ve added something new to my shave (this is where Vlad gets curious and Max starts rolling his eyes). I’ve started using Jojoba oil as an aftershave. It’s really just a moisturizer. As with most of my nutty (and bad, according to my father) ideas about shaving, it did come from this shaveblog.

And now just a bunch of quick notes and links:

• Gapingvoid has this cartoon to summarize our post-graduation state (by our, I mean my and most of the people reading this post).
• Since I made Max roll his eyes, here’s an interesting link for him on commemorating the anniversary of Tiananmen in the Chinese blogoshpere.
• This will be probably be my last post for a long time made from a machine running Windows, since today is the day I will be going to the Apple store near Boca to get a not-so-shiny new black Macbook!
• I’ve got an ICC account. My old handle used to be boardsilly. It is now scottc229, which means I need to build up a rating. Please don’t look at my blitz rating, please don’t look at my blitz rating, “Hey Morris, I just looked at that guy’s blitz rating!” Well, as long as you don’t look at the actual games- doh!
• Food for thought: I could kill two birds with one stone in my morning routine by listening to the German lesson during my walk. The only problem, since I think Max would forgive the isolationism, is that the lessons require that I repeat everything, usually three times, so that I’d be walking past McDonald’s saying “Deutsch, (pause) Deutsch, (pause) Deutsch.” Then again, FL doesn’t have pedestrians who would hear me and report me to the authorities, so maybe I should give it a try!
• There was probably something else I wanted to mention but it must not be that important, so I’ll end this post now.

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