Aelscha and I will be leaving tomorrow to go sailing in the British Virgin Islands with her family. We will be back next weekend, hopefully with lots of good photos. If you need to reach me, send me an email. I’ll probably try to check it at least once. You can also leave a message on my cell phone voice mail. I’ll check that as soon as I get back into cell coverage (in Puerto Rico).

UNH’s Mask and Dagger is putting on Nicky Silver’s Pterodactyls, a wicked funny black comedy. Very black. And very funny. I am the sound designer. If you can make it, you should go!

February 24-26th: 7PM, February 27th: 2PM.
MUB Strafford Room.
Tickets are available at theMUB Ticket Office.

Find the values of λ for which y = e^λx satisifies the equation y + y’ = y”;.

My texbook for Adult Development/Aging claims, in the second chapter, that the human nervous system is divided into the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. Or well, what it actually says is

In this section we consider the age-related changes that occur in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) and the autonomic nervous system (nerves in the rest of the body).

Which, although both parenthetical comments are technically correct, totally implies that the somatic nervous system doesn’t exist. *forehead into palm, repeatedly* I mean, I know (as I have been told a few too many times over the last day) that psych is “not a real science” and all, but this sort of sloppiness is just disgusting.

Currently I have several distinct mailing addresses, with different purposes. My personal mailing address (dpn@isomerica.net), my UNH educational address (login@cisunix.unh.edu or just login@unh.edu), and my UNH physics address (login@physics.unh.edu). Obviously, replace login with my real login to get the real email address. All of these mails forward to dpn@isomerica.net, and I view them all together.

What I wanted was a setup where mutt would automagically set the From: line and the .signature file used when I replied to mail sent to addresses other than dpn@isomerica.net. The prevents several potential issues: I don’t want to mix my personal and work mails unless I have to, and I don’t like to confuse people by having my reply come from a different address than the one they sent to. This is actually very easy to do. Simply add these lines to .muttrc:


# This makes mutt set the From: line to the original's To: line when replying
set reverse_name



# This sets a default reply-hook
reply-hook . "set signature="~/.signature""
# This changes the signature file when replying to messages sent to physics.unh.edu
reply-hook "~t physics.unh.edu" "set signature="~/.signature_physics"


The only remaining issue is the fact that it remains difficult to choose a From: line and a signature for emails which begin a thread (IE, emails that aren’t replies). However, it isn’t that difficult to manually change the signature in vim while composing the email and alter the From: before sending the message. If there is an easier way to automate this as well, please do let me know.

UPDATE: I left out the default reply-hook before. Since this posting has climbed to the top of google, I wanted to make sure it was corrected.

Mezzoblue has a new article up which discusses various aspects of the CMYK color system. As you may know, the CMYK, or Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black, color system is used in printing. RGB, or read-green-blue, color is used for screen display. While I’m no artist, the article is still a good read for the curious.

I just called Verizon and asked them to disconnect our service. I think this was the first time I’ve interacted with a customer service rep who introduced himself as “Mr.” whatever. He asked me why we were dropping the service and I told him that we’re going to just the cell phones. He “quite understands, and thank you for calling Verizon.” So it’s gone, and we’ve officially joined the no-landline-phone demographic. I feel so young/hip/tech-savvy/etc.

After some thought I’ve decided to cancel the conventional (IE, wired :) phone service due to high costs and disuse. If the need to have a non-cellular phone option arises in the future I would consider Vonage or another VOIP provider. We already have a broadband Internet connection. It only costs $15/month for a basic service which includes 500 minutes outgoing, free incoming and tollfree calls, and included long distance anywhere in the US and Canada. This is a great deal. It easily outdoes the $30 per month landline.

Since we’re getting rid of the legacy phone (number ends in 0080) you’ll need one of our cellphone numbers. Mine ends in 5306. If you need the phone number let me know and I’ll pass it on.

*sigh* Comment spam is a serious problem. Previously I was using Spaminator and Spam Karma to help stem the tide of obnoxious spam. But this morning I discovered these tools had made false positives, and there was no way for me to flag them as such and undelete them. This is unacceptable. Numerous comments were also slipping through. As a result, we have a new strategy. I am running Bot Check which adds a small CAPTCHA above the comment form. I think it is fairly easy to read, but if you have problems email me and I can adjust the font.

The second prong of our new strategy is to auto moderate inactive comment threads. The plugin will turn on moderation for threads which have been inactive for more than 15 days. These are the posts most targetted by spammers, because they don’t want blog owners to notice the comment spam and delete it. A notice will be printed in the comment area if moderation is turned on. You can still comment, but it will take up to a few hours for the comment to appear. Feedback is always appreciated. I apologize if you commented earlier and the previous automated moderation “ate” your comment. Hopefully this will work better.

As a lover of rodents, especially rats, I found this cake hilarious. I wonder how long it takes to make something like that? Via BoingBoing.

I’m pondering calling Verizon and telling them we don’t want our landline phone anymore. We currently pay around $30/month for it, which includes local area calling and “pay as you go” long distance. We rarely use it to call out and nobody who knows us personally uses that number to reach us. The only purpose it has currently is a sacrificial number to give to companies. However, we don’t even get many junk phone calls, almost none since Do Not Call. We almost never receive legitimate calls from companies on it. Verizon Wireless coverage in our area is pretty good, although our apartment and UNH are in an “extended network” area where not all phone features are available (not a big deal). Please feel free to weigh in, especially if you have experience ditching your physical phoneline! I’d appreciate the advice.

In my syntax class we’ve started talking about more spohisticated theories that use more abstract structural units to account for quirky-seeming linguistic properties. The details aren’t important. These units are usually written as S’ or N’ or P’ or whatever, and the theory that introduces them is called X’-Theory. Now, how do pronounce these? My math background really really really wants to read that as X-prime Theory, but that’s wrong! In the linguistics world, you say X-bar. I’m not sure I can deal with this… *grin*

Nation split on whether Bush is a Uniter or a Divider. I can tell you one thing: 49% of the people answering that are wrong, and I don’t think I need to say which half. It is preposterous to consider President Bush a uniter, unless you count the other half of Americans united against him. Bush often claims he is going to make a bipartisan effort, but it seems like the promise always falls through. 2001 began with the promise of a new era for bipartisanship. But sadly it was all forgotten.