1min's Blog

-- Sent from my phone. Please excuse brevity of tone or any tacos. Thank you! The above is my current phone email signature. It gets attached to the end of any email I write on my phone . Is it okay that I have such a signature? Is it professional? Should I change it? Agree? Disagree? Reasoning : I really like how the word "tacos" symbolizes "typos," and it in self is also a typo. This kind of cute, laid-back joke are my favorite types of jokes. Previously, it said: -- Sent from my phone. Please excuse brevity of tone or any typos. Thank you! I've also messed around with a parody of the iPhone signatures. -- Sent from my rooted Android phone. Freedom to choose is always better. But that sounded way too arrogant for my tastes and I chucked it after a few days. Which sounds best to you? What email signature do you use on your smartphones? On a side note, I wish Providence weather would just make up its mind and be a bit more consistent.

Peaceful night sky So it's currently Spring Break over here in Brown. I didn't go anywhere, but instead elected to stay on the campus. It's really peaceful as everybody already left for warmer locations. I decided to try an experiment for the duration of the break--I decided to go nocturnal . Why you ask? No particular reason. It's just something that I naturally tend towards anyway. I get most of my work done at night. I play with my friends at night. I sleep really late and wake up even later. My life has always been on the nocturnal side. I am no morning person. So this break, I decided to fully embrace it and go 100% nocturnal--sleeping at 8AM and waking up past 6PM. Or sleeping at sunrise and waking at sunset. I don't really know what biological effects this experiment has had on my body ( Vitamin D ). But so far, I feel perfectly fine. Adjusting my sleep cycle took a few days where I progressively slept later and later. First 6AM, then 7AM, then 8AM, a...

Car / Pedestrian and directions of travel Imagine this scenario, I'm sure it's already happened to you many a times. You're walking down the street, when a car is coming at you from your right. What do you do? The car could stop and wait until you cross the street, then continue on its way. On the other hand, you could also stop and wait for the car to pass by and then continue on your way (Assume there are no stop signs, traffic lights, or police officers). Either way, somebody must stop. One person must necessarily wait for the other in order to proceed. If we assume that time saved is a normal good and that waiting is an inferior good , then obviously, a rational individual would want to minimize their waiting time and maximize the amount of time saved. We can show the results in a payoff matrix. Both Go Suppose that both the pedestrian and the car decide to go without waiting. Then assume that there will be a car crash and both individuals will die and the...

W is worth only 4 points? Lately I've been playing Words With Friends a lot. For those of you that don't know what it is, it's basically just Scrabble for your smartphone or a Facebook game that you play with your friends. I like it particularly because I don't have to overly commit to it and can play at my own leisure. I make a move, you make a move. It could take days, even weeks, for a single game to end. Sometimes I have to look at a specific game-board multiple times (couple of days) before I can finally decide on what word to play. And If my opponent notices that I haven't played a word for a long time (3 days+) he/she starts pestering me, "Hey man, it's your turn on Words " or "Are you ever going to play your word?" It's not particularly annoying and most of the time I just brush them aside until I have the time to actually sit down and play my turn.  Yet, I can't help but think that the pestering has a subtle subconsci...

I saw the movie Margin Call yesterday night. It was a pretty suspenseful movie that dramatized the recent financial crisis of 2008. At the very least, the cast was very well selected and every actor was incredibly professional. While I don't fully understand the financial crisis, nor am I claiming to be an expert on economics or finance, but the movie made me feel a little weird--especially at this point in my life where a lot of my peers in school do in fact go off in search of finance jobs. One particular scene struck me--the scene where the character Seth Bregman (portrayed by Penn Badgley ) is crying in the bathroom stall because he's afraid of getting fired. A little background info on Seth before I tell you how I felt. He's a 23 year old working in the Risk department at a large unnamed corporation who made $250,000 last year in bonuses and salary. I was a bit annoyed as to why he was crying. Here's a young fresh graduate making six figures with an abs...

Left - Shuffle, Right - Smart-shuffle Wouldn't it be nice if all media players, iPods, Android phones, or whatever you use to listen to music could all sync? I would love to look at the statistics on my music listening habits. Which songs get skipped one second in? Which songs have I listened to the most in my lifetime? Which songs are never played? Which songs are over-played? This got me to thinking about a smarter way to shuffle songs. Let's just assume that somehow, music we listen to was kept track regardless of whatever device we use. Some magical tool that we shove in our ears, I don't know. Think of the possibilities! Music that was recently added to the library have heavier weight. Songs with high play-counts can slowly decrease in weight à la diminishing returns. Lower play-count songs will be favored over higher play-count songs. The same song will never play back-to-back. An option to have smoother transitions from song to song so we aren't listening...

At school, I currently work part time (9 hours / week) at the school eatery as a cashier. It's not the most glamorous job in the world, but I find it incredibly relaxing and fun. Which is contrary to general consensus--that a minimum wage job cannot be anything but hell on earth. I brought this up to my dad, proud in my unique ability to see the silver lining on what is considered to be a dark cloud. He then suggested that my part-time job didn't sound like a job, but rather an escape. An escape from the ordinary and mundane life of a student. Is that true? Was working a cashier job an escape to me? It's true that the money doesn't really matter to me. If I think about it, what's truly special about working is the interaction I have with the countless students who pass by. I have more fun in those 3 hours of interaction than I do in any class or study session. I guess it was  an escape after all. This led me to think about what else in my life is an escape? ...