* “gfxcardstatus”:http://db.tidbits.com/article/11982?rss to let me fiddle with macbook pro graphics hardware. which is proving to be problematic. Why does the browser (Chrome) require the high end power-consumptive nvidia chip? Seems like this feature of the macbook is a waste if the browser is always going to force the power hungry chip on. OK hmm, this might be just a Chrome issue as Safari is staying on the intel chip. gfxcardstatus is great for examining status and dependencies! * “techdygest”:http://dygest.net/. Might be a little too digested. But worth a try. * “daytum”:http://www.coolhunting.com/tech/daytum.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ch+%28Cool+Hunting%29. I want to love this but too hard to get going. There needs to be some easier way to populate it with personal data. * “socialeyes”:http://www.socialeyes.com and “dailybooth”:http://www.dailybooth.com. There is something intriguing about the front-facing camera. I suspect there will be a lot more software written around. What will be the first front-facing camera game? (Ignition is an investor) * “greplin chrome extension”:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bjclhonkhgkidmlkghlkiffhoikhaajg. Search of my content seems super fast, i am intrigued. (Ignition is an investor)

Well, winter quarter’s Computation Fluid Dynamics just about killed me. My lack of a solid fluid dynamics basis certainly was a big reason for my struggles. It may have been a bridge too far for me.

Spring quarter will be “High Performance Scientific Computing”:http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/appmath.html#amath583 and then I will have completed enough credits for my Master’s work. I need to take a breather after that and think about PhD progress and whether I want to really drive the rest of the way or not. I will clearly need to spend even more time on academic matters if I want to continue the PhD chase, and I don’t know how realistic that is given all my other commitments and time limitations.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about our scholarships for Marion County students. We started doing this maybe 10 years ago and are glad every day that we’ve made the investment. The students we’ve helped will certainly make a great contribution to Marion County, to Ohio, or to whatever community they end up in, and hopefully they too will extend a hand someday to help the next generation of students.

3-4 years back, we also were introduced to the Point Foundation, whose mission (in their own words) is to provide “financial support, mentoring, leadership training and hope to meritorious students who are marginalized due to sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” We became a supporter of their scholarship programs, and have continued to support ever since. We’ve heard personally from young kids who were cut off from family support because of their LGBT status, and these stories are just heartbreaking. Casting aside young people because of their orientation is terrible, and so we happily support any effort to give these kids a bit of help in the world. We can never make up for the loss of support from their family or community, but if our financial assistance helps them through some tough times, we feel great about it.

We have been fortunate financially and so we can reach out and help on the financial issues for young people. If you are also fortunate, we’d encourage you to reach out and help a group as well, whether it be kids in your community, or kids in an interest group you care about, or any other set of kids. And if you can’t help monetarily, well these young people need encouragement and mentoring and guidance and emotional support and everything else. Do what you can to help them get ahead.

Seriously. We have much to celebrate. #1 Men’s basketball team heading into tourney season. Big 10 champion women’s basketball team, again. The next 2-3 weeks should be awesome and we should enjoy our successes.

And yes, well, we have this hiccup in the football program. Mistakes have been made by many people at many levels. It is a little embarrassing and not in keeping with the standards we have set.

But the mistakes are magnified by those high standards of on-field and off-field performance we have established. If Ohio State had some 3rd tier football program, no one would care (including us). But we have a great and proud program that has accomplished a great deal and we should remain proud despite the news of the past week.

We all have successes and failures, we all have moments of great personal performance and moments when we stumble. The measure of a person is not how many successes they have – it is how they handle themselves in times of success and failure. When successful, do they share the credit, do they acknowledge the team, do they remain humble, do they treat the less-fortunate with respect? And in moments of personal failure, do they accept responsibility, do they learn from mistakes, do they bear down and fix them?

Our football program has a great opportunity now to act like a winner, to set an example for others, as it deals with the issues at hand. And I expect the people in the program to work hard and handle the problems well and make us proud of how they deal with adversity. There are coaches and administrators in the land who run to new jobs or the NFL when times get tough, I am proud of our staff for putting their nose to the grindstone and working through the troubles.

Again we have great success in so many sports, and exciting basketball to follow, and a great opportunity to show the world how to deal with adversity, and so it truly is a great day to be a Buckeye.

I don’t need or want any of this stuff actually but am drawn to all of it…

* “Car map light”:http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20100526/flexible-map-light/. Ok who looks at maps anymore, but this is nicely designed! * “Multimeter Clock”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/06/24/multimeter-clock-styled-after-the-simpson-260-multimeter/. Love the reuse of old tech here. Wish I had the skill/vision to create things like this. * “Carol Kipling Plates”:https://www.carolkipling.com/product/Gogi%20Seeds%20Glass%20Platter. Love the platter but $2800 is steep… * “14 wheel skateboard”:http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/07/26/the-flowlab-14-wheel-skateboard-can-it-possibly-work/ so I can suck at skateboarding 3.5 times as much. * “Tourbillon vase”:http://www.coolhunting.com/tech/tourbillon.php – awesome organic-looking glass. * “Urban Balance Wave Hammock”:http://www.allmodern.com/Outback-Chair-Company-UBC6XX-OCC1014.html?SSAID=276135&refid=SS276135 – can this possibly be stable? But cool. * “Designer Scrabble”:http://design-milk.com/designer-scrabble-by-andrew-clifford-capener/ I love board games and I love nicely crafted items. I have a great cribbage board, would love to buy great boards for other games – Catan, TIcket to Ride, etc. * “LaserPegs”:http://www.laserpegs.com/. Lasers make everything better, including construction blocks. * “Freesia Book Stands”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004652.php – these look awesome, seems like a great item to have. * “Chemically Accurate Crayons”:http://www.etsy.com/shop/QueInteresante?ref=seller_info. OK these are just labels you stick on crayons you buy, so kind of dorky, but I love the idea. “Could you please pass me the Yttrium Oxide crayon”?

For about the 10th year now we are providing funding for scholarships for Marion County residents and Marion County high school graduates. We’ve used different mechanisms in the past, but for the last 5-6 years we’ve done this through the OSU financial aid office as need-based scholarships for Marion County residents or Marion Country high school graduates, any high school in the county, attending any OSU campus. If you know someone who is from the Marion area and wants to attend OSU and needs some help, make sure they ask about!

We have a deep and ongoing connection to the Marion area – we had great experiences growing up there. Much of our extended family still live there and we get back for an extended visit once a year. We are blessed with families who encouraged and supported us to get our educations, educations which have meant a lot to us. And we have fond memories of our time at The Ohio State University. So we want to support the community, the university, and the students who need some help.

And the students who have been awarded scholarships so far are just awesome. We met about 10 of the then-current students a couple years ago at an OSU tailgate and they were all so impressive. Big goals, hard working, youthful vigor – it was inspiring to be around them. Just having a lunch with these students was a huge lift for us.

We’ve never been very vocal about our support but in these times of economic challenge, we felt it was important to become a little more vocal. We hope that everyone does what they can to support and encourage the full development of our young students. Some of these young people will go on to create businesses and jobs, lead our communities, enrich our lives through their art, or otherwise make a great contribution to our lives. Having them sidelined because they can’t quite make the economics of college work out, or having them burdened with a mountain of student loan debt – neither of these seem like good outcomes. So we do what we can, and we hope and trust that others do as well.

OK my pleasure reading is way off because my brain is buried in Computational Fluid Dynamics and also in some pretty interesting things at work. I am reading a ton actually.

* “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”:amazon by Muriel Barbery. A powerful tale, the ending is a gut punch. Totally drawn in by the characters and totally exposed at the end. I’m still reeling. Amazon says just 3.5 stars. Goodreads 3.66, I like this one way more, 4.5 stars. * “The Economics of Intercollegiate Sports”:amazon by Randy R. Grant, John Leadley, Zenon Zygmont. Scholarly look at the NCAA and BCS cartels and how they operate our primary “amateur” sports. Undergraduate economics level, good read overall. Clearly articulates exactly how the NCAA and member universities constrain the opportunities for athletes to benefit the institutions. Unrated on Amazon and Goodreads, but I give it a 4 if you are interested in this kind of thing. The biggest negative is its textbook pricing. * “Lords of the Horizons”:amazon by Jason Goodwin. A somewhat literary history of the Ottoman Empire. It is a very pleasant read but I can’t say it is gripping. I am having problems finishing it because, while it is interesting and very nicely written, it lacks drama. Amazon gives 3.5 stars, Goodreads about the same, I have to stop at 2.5 stars.

I had forgotten how ugly Fortran could be, tho it has gotten a lot prettier since 1979/1980.

And it caused me to reflect on all the programming languages I have used over the years, starting from my earliest days…

* TI-59, whatever language that thing used. I had no idea what I was doing really but was intrigued. * Fortran. Yay punchcards. * COBOL. ugh. * Basic in many forms. Apple’s Integer Basic was maybe the first, or maybe the Basic on the TI 99/4 * PL/1. bad memories here. A command for everything, programming was an exercise in finding the right command. * ASM in 6501, 68k, and x86 flavors at least. I am sure there were a few more in there too. probably my first in depth coding. * Forth. always thought it was interesting. * Pascal. * C and a little C++ tho the C++ came much later of course. still as comfortable in c as anything. * APL. what a terrible idea for a language! unreadable 10 minutes after you looked away from it. impossible to type. * dBase. ok barely a language but useful. * Hypertalk. never anything serious but always fun. * So many batch language variants I can’t remember. * Javascript. * Java. never did much with. * Perl. learned enough to deal with movable type at one point, never loved it. * PHP. * Python. still learning. mostly interested in scientific use with numpy/scipy. * MatLAB.

Sure I missed some. Probably forgot some on purpose due to the pain they caused.

Scalzi has some thoughtful criticism of Facebook.

For me, Facebook isn’t bad, it is just boring. For all the things I do online there are experiences and sites which are so much more engaging. Twitter for late breaking tech and sports news and snark around them; sports sites and sports blogs for college football; immersive games for entertainment (have you tried Minecraft? or Steam best sellers?); photography and electronics sites for gear reviews; and so on. Occasionally I get some useful extended family pictures from Facebook but no great pictures. There is just no great reason to go to Facebook that often.

The movie was entertaining though.

I am fortunate to own two very nice cars, a Porsche Cayenne and an Audi S6. They are both great pieces of engineering, they drive well, they are comfortable, I get a great amount of utility out of them. I have been just as happy with less expensive cars, but these are great cars.

The Audi has a beast of a powertrain, handles very well, and the interior controls and layout are very good. Out of the many OEM and aftermarket GPS systems I have used, it is in the top quartile of usability, tho a touch screen would be nice. The iPod integration is reasonably well done though could make better use of the screen in the dash. The seats are awesome. Overall a super nice car.

The Cayenne also drives well, the interior finish levels are very nice. The interior control layout is a bit of a disaster, clearly the A-Team engineers work on powertrain and suspension, and leave controls to summer interns or MBAs (I’ve been both so I’m allowed some latitude…). But still a very nice car.

Both the cars have interior audio alerts to make the driver aware of important conditions and faults. What would you imagine the shrillest, loudest alarm is for? I could imagine a lot of things that demand my immediate attention. An imminent collision. Backing into an object. Brake system failure. Maybe even the traction control system engaging, indicating unsafe driving surfaces or unsafe driving. Maybe even driving at night without headlights on. All these conditions are unsafe and could result in injury to myself or others. I could make a case for all of them to result in the loudest, shrillest interior alarm.

The Audi has excellent interior controls so of course the loudest, shrillest interior alarm is used to indicate that a rear light has failed. Not necessarily the rear brakelight, but any rear light – turn signal, operating light, brakelight. And the alarm sounds every time you start the car and cannot be silenced. And I am not sure exactly what the “shrill” scale is, but this sound is 3x shriller than any other alarm in the car.

The Cayenne is not to be outdone though! The shrillest alarm by far is used to let you know, after you turn off the car, that you have left your turn signal on. Not that the light is actually lit or visible, but the control arm on the steering wheel stalk is in the “on” position and damn it, that is just wrong. Of course, given the general goofiness of the Cayenne interior (the worst GPS ever, cup holders the size of thimbles, two control screens with functions randomly split between), this is to be expected.

OK, no one should feel sorry for me, these are two great cars, but Audi and Porsche – if you are going to spend this much care designing these cars, can’t you spend a few minutes getting this right?

My thoughts turned to the importance of design this morning on the news of Steve Jobs’ leave of absence, here is hoping he is well soon, the world needs more people who care obsessively about the details of design.

This course may kill me as I know nothing of fluid dynamics, but I am hoping the computational focus will play in my favor. I’m not so interested in macro-scale behavior but more focused on nano-scale applications.

_Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a set of methodologies to solve numerically the governing equations of fluid motion. In the past decades, the development and use of CFD has widely grown in both academia and industry to perform fundamental studies and engineering computations of fluid flows, e.g. for the design of airplanes, turbine blades, jet and rocket engines. This course is an introductory course to CFD covering its fundamentals, as well, few advanced topics.

The students completing this course in good standing are expected to learn: 1. the fundamentals and few advanced topics in CFD; 2. to select and implement numerical schemes for solving model equations for fluid dynamics; 3. to write and execute their own CFD codes (in Fortran or C); 4. to postprocess and analyze CFD results; 5. to write technical reports on CFD results._

I’ve made a number of changes on the first page of my iphone since “last survey”:http://theludwigs.com/2010/08/whats-on-the-first-screen-of-my-iphone-august-2010/.

Firstly, the bottom row: Mail, Messages, Safari, and Calvetica in place of the Apple Calendar app. Calvetica doesn’t offer a lot more features but has a pleasing look. I’m not sure I will stick with it but worth a try. But I use all these apps constantly so they all deserve bottom row status.

The rest of the first page then, a set of communications apps:

* The Apple Phone app for voice and voicemail. * The GroupMe app for group texting. Actually I have been bouncing this position between GroupMe for group texting and Google Voice for wifi texting. And I still have the Messages app in the bottom row. I would really love one app that did texting, group texting, and on either wifi or carrier networks.

A set of cloud apps:

* Evernote. For text and increasingly for photos. In fact I have pretty much relegated the standard iPad camera app to the dustbin, by using Evernote for photos, they are dumped into the cloud immediately. Handy. * Dropbox. For docs that don’t fit well into Evernote – spreadsheets, etc. * Wordpress. For managing the blog.

“News” apps:

* Echofon for Twitter stream access. I’ve tried the official Twitter app and it is fine, but I am used to Echofon. * Byline for RSS feeds. I’ve been using this for a longtime, there may be better choices, but I am comfortable with. * NPR for general news. Echofon and Byline both just feed me topics I have self-selected, I need a source of news that informs me more broadly, the NPR app is about right for me.

Reference apps:

* Stocks and Maps. I’ve tried to find upgrades to the Stocks app but there is nothing great that I have found. I’d like something that tied to my Yahoo finance portfolio data. * Weather HD. I am toying with apps that replace the Apple Weather app. Weather HD looks nice but otherwise is no more functional. I really want something like the WX for Ipad app.

Utilities: Settings, Calculator, Clock. Don’t love any of these but need regular access to them, and not worth the trouble to go find upgrades (tho the Apple Clock alarm issues this year have been annoying).

And finally, a folder of Travel apps: TripIt, KAYAK, Southwest, Flight Update, Urbanspoon, OneBusAway, Yelp. The first four get solid use.

Apps that don’t quite make the first page:

* App Store. * Google Voice, previously mentioned * A sports app – ESPN Scorecenter or Yahoo Sportacular. I like the Yahoo app. * Facebook and LinkedIn. I rarely use these anymore. Just don’t get any distinguishing vale. * Kindle and Amazon.com. I rarely read Kindle books on the iPhone. More frequently I shop at Amazon. * Goodreads. Growing in use. * US Bank mobile banking app. * Starbucks Mobile Card app. * Wolfram Alpha. Very episodic use. * Redfin and Zillow. Also very episodic.

* “Through the Looking Glass”:amazon by Guy Deutscher. Interesting exploration of how language may impact perception with examples drawn from color perception, direction, and gender in language. Engaging and educational. 3.63 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8444621-through-the-language-glass, 4 stars on Amazon, I’d say 3.5. * “A Journey: My Political Life”:amazon by Tony Blair. Could have used more editing. I was interested to see the past 20 years thru Blair’s eyes but it just wore me out, too many details and not enough conclusions and insight. 3.29 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8861670-a-journey, 4 stars on Amazon, I give it just a 2.5 and that is generous. * “The Emperor’s Pearl”:amazon by Robert van Gulik. Fine detective story set in first millenium CE China, starring Judge Dee, who per the author is the Sherlock Holmes of China. Much more readable than the typical Holmes story tho, closer in feel to an Agatha Christie tale (not shocking, the book was written in 1962). 3.95 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1055473.The_Emperor_s_Pearl, 4.5 stars on Amazon, I give it a 4. * “Misadventure”:amazon by Millard Kaufman. Nice noir detective tale in modern-day LA, written by the (late) creator of Mr. Magoo. 4.5 stars on Amazon, 3.57 on “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7763581-misadventure, I’d give it a 4.

* “Poor Halo play prompts stabbing threat”:http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/archives/231642.asp. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. I’ve heard campers threatened with worse. * “How Secure Is My Password”:http://howsecureismypassword.net/. No idea how accurate, but fun. 17 thousand years for my typical password. * “Rich on photobooks”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2010/12/photobooks-for-christmas/. I just always use the default in Aperture but perhaps I should branch out. * “AR.Drone”:http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/01/ar-drone-torn-down/. Why don’t I have one of these yet. * “Declining energy quality as recession cause”:http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-declining-energy-quality-root-current.html. An interesting way to look at things. Not sure it actually makes sense tho. * “Now you can swap useless Amex reward points for useless Zynga crap.”:http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/30/american-express-now-lets-you-swap-rewards-points-for-zyngas-purple-cows/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch) * “Snoopy themed Windows tablet”:http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/11/25/onkyo-announces-snoopy-themed-windows-tablet/. Take that, Apple. * “Spiders on Drugs”:http://design-milk.com/spiders-on-drugs-by-guillaume-lehoux/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_campaign=Feed:+design-milk+(Design+Milk). We are asking for some serious payback from spider nation some day. * “Umpteenth article on the death of cable TV”:http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/internet-tv-and-the-death-of-cable-tv-really/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch), yawn. Until I can watch HD live sports without stuttering I am captive to cable/dish. Going to be a while. * “Charles on breaking up MSFT”:http://www.platformonomics.com/2010/10/the-baby-bills-are-back/. Good as always. * “Habitable planet found?”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/has-a-potentially-habitable-planet-just-been-discovered.html * “Languages you’ve never heard of”:http://gadgetopia.com/post/7105?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+gadgetopia+(Gadgetopia). In the future, we will all have our very own programming language. * “Topologist suggests new form of matter”:http://www.kurzweilai.net/topologist-predicts-new-form-of-matter. For most of our history we’ve used the forms of matter that nature gave us. It is interesting to observe and think about what we can create as we gain mastery over atomic organization. * “One man’s indictment of iTunes”:http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/09/03/the-leaning-tower-of-ping-how-itunes-could-be-apples-undoing/. The thing is a giant hairball of software. * “Exercise and aging”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28athletes-t.html?_r=1&ref=homepage&src=me&adxnnlx=1290787262-FJGn2RNM8RCjxiaHpyyVDA&pagewanted=all. Crap I need to get after it. * “Show Me What’s Wrong”:http://www.showmewhatswrong.com/. Super useful. * “User experience of F1 telemetry”:http://www.solidstateux.com/interaction-design/the-user-experience-of-f1-telemetry/. Always impressed with the amount of money spent on racing. * “MacPaint and MacDraw source code”:http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/. Nostalgia.

* “Printopia”:http://www.ecamm.com/mac/printopia/ to enable printing to any printer from iphone/ipad (via “Tidbits”:http://db.tidbits.com/article/11829?rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+tidbits_main+(TidBITS:+Mac+News+for+the+Rest+of+Us)) * “Textastic”:http://www.textasticapp.com/ code editor for the iPad (via “Read/Write Web”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/code-editors-for-the-ipad.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+(ReadWriteWeb)) * “Postbox”:http://www.postbox-inc.com/ email alternative for OSX. * “Momento”:http://momentoapp.com/, a diary app. (via “TechCrunch”:http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/28/momento-app/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)) * “A whole bag of iphone apps for engineers”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/17/iphone-apps-for-engineers-electronics-and-more-an-adafruit-electronics-gift-guide/. * “Calvetica”:http://calvetica.com/ replacment for iphone calendar app. * “boxcar”:http://boxcar.io/. Don’t really grok this one but people seem to like it. * “Firesheep”:http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/firesheep-in-wolves-clothing-app-lets-you-hack-into-twitter-facebook-accounts-easily/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch) * “Bit.ly bundles”:http://gigaom.com/2010/12/15/bit-ly-bundles-now-allow-hyper-personalized-wikis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+OmMalik+(GigaOM:+Tech) * “mynameise”:http://www.mynameise.com/ * “GoMiles”:http://www.gomiles.com * “One man’s view on essential programmer utilities”:http://jesseliberty.com/2010/07/29/12-absolutely-and-insanely-essential-utilities-for-programmers/ * “Google Public Data Explorer”:http://www.google.com/publicdata/home