Originally uploaded by nflect on 2nd July, 2009.

Some bread I baked the slow way, using a recipe from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking. No idea how they taste yet, but they look great.

As part of my efforts to increase efficiency and productivity, I've found a number of things on the Internet lately that are, in my opinion, totally awesome.

• Joule (joule.marnanel.org): This site keeps tabs of who is following/friending you on a variety of social mumblemrf sites, such as Digg, LiveJournal, and Twitter. It produces a daily summary of changes (optionally sent via Twitter direct message) as well as a handy chart showing you the lifespan of some of your more ephemeral followers.
• Hiveminder (hiveminder.com): From the makers of Request Tracker comes this web-based to-do manager. It's got plenty of features for the geek crowd, and is designed with collaboration in mind. I'm still getting used to it, but I've already moved my to-do list over with great rejoicing. Thanks to mikegrb for attending YAPC and telling me about this.
• GitHub (github.com): I am not a programmer. Well, actually, I take that back: I've written a number of tools to make my life better. I've now realized that I'm enough of a programmer that I can extract value from "real programmer tools" like revision control and online repositories. Based on the Git distributed revision coontrol system, GitHub allows programmers (and people who write code) to store stuff online and work collaboratively on it. Git's decentralized nature makes something like GitHub both essential and possible, and for that I enjoy it. You can find me on GitHub as rtucker.
• The Fucking Weather (thefuckingweather.com): Sometimes you just need to know what the weather is doing, without all that hubbly-bub and happenpants of real, professional weather people. Thanks to thefuckingweather.com, I know that it's fucking nice outside, and I may now safely remove my ball-mittens.

And, another quick reminder: as previously mentioned in this space, tomorrow is the First Annual RocWiki Picnic! If you're in the Rochester area and interested in RocWiki, swing by.

Originally uploaded by nflect on 26th June, 2009.

When will I ever learn not to fill my coffee cup all the way to the brim? Dang.

As I recently posted, I've started tracking the stats from my cable modem with Munin. Today, I looked, and I swear I can see things in the TX frequency and power charts...

(credits: Ninja Bunny, Twitter)

Originally uploaded by nflect on 15th June, 2009.

Jonas Kullhammar Quartet (from Sweden), Reformation Lutheran Church, Rochester International Jazz Festival, Rochester, New York

A couple days ago, a brief IRC discussion ensued on the topic of cable modems, oversubscription, power levels, etc. Someone mentioned that they noticed their transmit power level increasing during peak hours, perhaps due to heavier traffic. I thought this dubious, but I had no evidence to prove otherwise.

A short bit of code-pounding later, and behold: a Munin plugin (written, comfortingly, in Python) to plot essential cable modem data. This totally won't work with anything other than the exact Ambit cable modem I have here (on Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner network in Rochester, New York), but it is here to serve as inspiration: if you can get at the data, you can plot it!

I am currently plotting:

• Downstream Frequency
• Downstream Receive Power Level
• Downstream SNR
• Downstream Symbol Rate
• Upstream Frequency
• Upstream Symbol Rate
• Upstream transmit Power Level

So far, I'm noticing that the frequencies change a few times per day: as of this writing, since midnight, the downstream and upstream frequencies have both changed five times. Also, the upstream power level stays fairly constant (although it did make a big jump around 8:30am), but the downstream power level bounces around a lot. (Not too surprised.) The weird things, though, are the little "blips" in the signal to noise ratio. Time will tell, I suppose.

Originally uploaded by nflect on 10th June, 2009.

The McBane's Strawberry Wit at the Tap and Mallet. Mmm, beer.

If you're in the Rochester area (or even if you aren't), you're invited to the First Annual RocWiki Picnic! It will be held June 28, 2009 in Brighton's Buckland Park from 11am to 2pm. Bring something to grill, and perhaps a side dish. See the RocWiki page for more details.

Should be a fairly informal thing. In any case, it will be nice to get some fresh air and hopefully see some more RocWiki people in real life!

If you aren't familiar with RocWiki, it's a free and open wiki for the Rochester area, at http://rocwiki.org/. Anyone can contribute information on businesses, parks, events, roadways... you name it. As long as it's Rochester-related, it's pretty much welcome.

At the Rochester Hamfest today, Dawn and I successfully met our summer ham radio licensing goals: she now has a US technician class license (pending, of course, processing), and I now have an extra-class ham radio license.

I wasn't 100% ready for the exam, but I was... 78% ready. That's good enough. :-) I could have done better with more concerted study, but I pretty much just took it because I was there, it was free, and I wanted to show some spousal solidarity.

For the curious, the hamfest was awesome. It's exactly what a hamfest SHOULD be: big flea market, decent food, full bar, free VE testing, $5 admission, and a handful of people I actually know. I bought a SMA male to UHF female pigtail to hook the HT up to a mag mount (we're about one antenna away from being able to pull people over on the Thruway), and did a lot of wistful wandering about, wishing I had more money to buy the toys I long for.

Things I would have purchased included a Symmetricom CDMA time standard (with dead oscillator; $30), an oscilloscope or two, and... there was something else I eyed longingly but ended up passing on. Perhaps I'll remember.

Anyway... next on the credentials list: becoming a notary public!

As previously noted, I was rather concerned about my MTH175 final exam. Of course, in accordance with Murphy's Law, the timing of the grade posting did nothing to assuage my fears: the deadline for final grade posting was the Tuesday after Memorial Day at Noon.

The MTH175 grade came in about 11:30am on said Tuesday.

At that time, I found out the minimum final exam grade for passing the course with a C or better was 50%, and I knew I was well north of there. However, my actual final exam grade was 87%. Woah. That's pretty good, considering how much I had to quickly derive from scratch. Showing your work appears to be worth something. That kept the final course grade above the A threshold.

Anyway, the spring term brought A grades across the board; GPA is maintained at 4.0. Whew. Only three more semesters. I find that the longer I go with a 4.0, the more I'm motivated to keep the 4.0. This is a bit of pressure, to say the least, but I think it's a good thing. My laurels are platforms upon which I cannot rest. 'course, when I get that first A-, I'll probably be able to relax a little more ;-)