Bess blocked sites about evolution I tried to visit when I was preparing for a biology class debate. Luckily, the local ISP’s proxy was dead simple to configure in Netscape 4 and got around Bess.
At this point, zero. The framework I built automatically rejects certain patterns that are not conducive to an interesting conversation. The only thing I still do manually, and I think I will automate, is to decide when to stop a generated segment.
It's sort of surprising, but it's a group of weird, creative people with tons of money and free time. I'm sure they're doing tons of odd stuff, model trains among them. (Once they're off drugs, that is.)
Seeing that the author of this review was an undergrad at the time, I tried googling for him to see what he is up to now. It seems he has died after a short but outstanding career.
Wow, what a shock today. I happened to read some of the comments before the top level post and clicked this link. Andy was a grad student in the small lab (just a handful of people) I joined as a freshman in college. He was helpful, thoughtful, and kinder than he needed to be to a not very productive frosh.
We hadn't talked since he graduated, and I had no idea he'd passed. Thank you for sharing this.
My gripe is the 1/2 second pause between tracks, even when they're supposed to blend together, like between 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven's 5th. Otherwise it's awesome.
I've got something similar driven by a data entry sheet where I put transactions. The monthly columns populate by sumifs()'ing off of that sheet.
I just started my third calendar year of this system on January 1st. It's working out pretty well. I like it more than an off the shelf budget app because I can customize it however I want. I use to keep track of other things like the last time I vacuumed my apartment.
Nice. Yes, I handrolled my spreadsheet because I knew exactly how to create the tightest possible effective interface for my use patterns, but I know a lot of my friends struggle to do that so they buy financial software. To each their own I say. I will say the major advantage of spreadsheets is they let you easily run what-if scenarios and see the results update live, which really helps you to visualize if you can better afford a new car in July or October (same spend, different cash flow scenarios).
My inspiration is actually not from accounting or finance, but a simple mass balance equation:
In - Out = Accumulation
Just keep the accumulation positive every month (constraint), and maximize it at year end (objective function).
Also I don't track spend below a certain dollar value. I know people like transaction-level granularity (every chocolate bar, every cup of coffee), but me, I just set aside a monthly buffer for incidentals and forget about it.
Some financial journalists make a big deal of how much you can save by not buying that cup of $2.75 Starbucks coffee every morning, but at my income level it's a rounding error not worth sweating over -- I'd rather focus my time increasing my topline growth i.e. learn and grow into positions with more responsibilities.
(But I also get free coffee at work so there's that :)
I miss them too. On a 1920x1080 laptop display I can see the grayscale font smoothing as a blur which my eyes try to correct for. In order to make it tolerable I've turned off font smoothing globally. Ugly and jagged text gives me less eyestrain than the built in blurriness of Windows font smoothing.
