Now here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. I started going to salsa dancing lessons fairly regularly this fall, but am having a hard time remembering the long sequences of complex moves that I learn in the MIT lessons (which are great, by the way). Even when I can remember them, it’s hard to do them on the dance floor with a girl who doesn’t also know what is coming, while staying on the beat, etc. etc. So, at some point this fall, I thought to myself that there must be a better way to learn enough sequences of moves not to bore a good follower to tears. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the 'personal' Category
Dancing for Engineers
January 6, 2008Wow, another post!
January 6, 2008So, I’ve been thinking about this blog since New Year’s – Nicola told me that I need to write down my travel horror stories for everyone to read… However, the story is so long that I’ve been putting it off (and I’m going to continue to put it off for a while more; right now it’s way too late).
Now that I’m here, though, I noticed that I really haven’t written in an incredibly long time; I thought I wrote more than that. Anyway, I guess history proves that I can’t promise anything on here – so, no promises of posts, etc. You get what you get.
I have had a few thoughts of things I could write about, though, so I think I’ll write another short post tonight before I go to sleep (I hate mixing topics, so I’m not going to put it in this one).
The Results Are In – makeyourownjeans.com
August 23, 2007UPDATE – May 30, 2010 – anti-spam reaction
In the almost three years since I wrote this post, it’s constantly been either the first or second most popular page on my whole blog. I haven’t ordered from makeyourownjeans.com again, though I still wear their jeans almost every day. The shirts eventually wore out and I had better ones, so they’re long gone.
However, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with their sketchy business practices, and I can therefore no longer endorse them. They’ve tried to spam this page with positive comments numerous times, they used my pictures below without my permission, and just today I searched Google for ‘blog.mpdaugherty.com’ and found out they’ve been using my review when spamming other websites. The last one is the last straw for me, because not only do I have no control over it, but it also hurts my reputation. I would never add comment spam to someone’s blog or website, and I don’t want them (or Google) to think I do. If you’ve come here through one of those links, I apologize.
On the other hand, if you really just want to read the review I wrote so long ago, go ahead. It’s unedited below.
—- Original Post —-
A while ago, I wrote about makeyourownjeans.com, a website that sells custom-made clothing, that I thought might be the answer to the tall (or short) person’s dilemma. It’s been a long time, but on August 6, I finally went ahead and placed an order with them for two items – a pair of jeans, and a formal shirt.
Check Flickr
June 23, 2007Hi guys,
Just wanted to write a note that you should check my flickr site for photos. I don’t always have time to fully edit these posts and include everything, so there are a lot there that you may not have seen.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdaugherty
-Mike
New Photos
May 30, 2007
Today I looked at two apartments up in Davis Square with Erin. Unfortunately, neither of them was really great, so I think we have to keep looking. On the way back to the dorm, however, I did get some stuff done. I had my camera with me, so I decided to just walk around campus a little and take some pictures. You can see the results on Flickr.
A Post Free-Web-Hosting World
May 30, 2007I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my online presence after graduation for a while now. I had a few choices about what I could do once my MIT hosting disappeared:
- I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
- I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
- I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.
New Theme
May 28, 2007As some of your may have noticed, I have a new theme for my blog. This one is basically Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner. Thankfully for me, he released the theme for free for people to use. All I had to do was make new versions of the header graphics and slightly modify the sidebar (I didn’t like how the links displayed), and I was off.
Unfortunately, soon after changing the theme, I noticed a sharp drop in visitors on my Google Analytics reports. Since my readership is so low anyway, I first attributed this just to people being busy and/or not noticing anything. However, after three days of zero visitors showing up (even when I tried to make visitors show up by visiting myself), i realized something was wrong. Turns out, I forgot that the display of WordPress blogs is entirely decided by the theme, and the way I had gotten Analytics working before was to put the javascript code into the theme footer. So, when I changed the theme, I also eliminated all the tracking code from my website. It’s back in there again (you can check), so everything should be back to normal.
So, in conclusion, let me know if you like the new theme. I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to keep it over the summer when I will probably host my blog on wordpress.com for free, but I guess I’ll figure that out when it’s absolutely necessary.
I’m done!
May 27, 2007
Last night, a number of my senior friends and I had a huge party. Everyone’s finals were finally over, and we are going to graduate! The party was fun and all, but personally, I didn’t feel 100% done yet because I hadn’t actually seen confirmation that my finals went well enough for me to graduate. This morning, I received that confirmation.
After I woke up (late, of course), I decided to check my degree audit online again to see if anything new had been posted, and there it was… I had enough credits! The only piece still missing is the credit for my UAP, but since I personally turned in the UAP grade report and saw the “A” written on it, I feel ok. In 13 days, I will be an MIT Grad. I can finally turn my ring around and move on with my life. I can’t wait.
MIT Undergraduate Advanced Project
May 20, 2007As of Friday, I am done with every requirement for an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT, except for one not-too-troublesome final! I had quite a time trying to get my UAP (senior project and write-up) finished on time… Which didn’t quite happen. However, I talked to Anne Hunter (course administrator) and received permission to turn it in one day late, which gave me just enough time to go through another revision with my great adviser, Barbara Barry.
My project ended up being some work in story-analysis using common sense (provided by ConceptNet, another Media Lab project) as well as trying a new approach to anaphora resolution (basically determining antecedents for pronouns), which didn’t rely so much on common sense.
If you’re really interested, you can download the paper I wrote. I also am planning on releasing the source code to my project by the end of the month, though I want to get through my linear-algebra final first before I clean it up and put it on a webpage somewhere.
Apartments and KML
May 19, 2007I’ve been looking for apartments lately, so I’m constantly looking at Craigslist postings, finding the addresses, putting them in Google Maps, and trying to estimate how far they are from the T-Stop, whether it’s a good location or not, etc.. However, this morning I realized that Google Earth is a great tool for this. You can add more than one address, check distances, etc.
So, I decided to play around with KML a little bit and make a map of where I want my apartment to be. Now, I can just put the address in Google Earth and see if it makes it into my desired area quickly. Check it out:
