I absentmindedly cut back on coffee this weekend and then decided to catch up by having a whole wack of joe sometime between 8 and 9 pm tonight. Not suprisingly, I had trouble getting to sleep and decided to work instead. I’m thinking now about how many posts begin with some sort of comment on coffee consumption.
Good:
Last Sunday night I went to see a friend of a friend’s band, Kids Eat Crayons, at Petit Cafe Campus. I had heard a few tracks before and thought they might be interesting but I was pretty much blown away with the energy and tightness of the live performance. Sounds like a jazzier, loungier, harder Mr. Bungle – though I wouldn’t say I have listened to more than an album’s worth of Mr. B so maybe the comparison is not great. I think their MySpace selections are more jazzy and low key than most of their stuff. They are pretty much a local band for now it seems, playing a few shows in Quebec and Sherbrooke I think but worth heading to if you get the chance.
Awful:
Maple is a commercial symbolic math software package produced with some sort of affiliation (at least originally) with the University of Waterloo. Maple is awful. The GUI is wretched even after 12 (twelve!) versions. My officemate nominated it for one the worst applications awards on slashdot recently. I don’t think it gets enough use to actually win one of those, but I would definitely second the nomination. The only real alternative is Mathematic which has a much more expensive site license … hence we have Maple at work. Recently, I found what I think is a pretty bad bug in Maple which is costing me weeks of delay trying to work through some calculations another way. The bug is something which produces results as bad as (positive #) times (positives #) = negative. I’ve documented the bug on MaplePrimes but the site is conveniently down now. Nothing like commercial software, where for a price you get the privilege of beta testing. Thanks Maple.
Bad:
While writing this post, Firefox crashed.
Nice:
I had not yet saved the post but to my pleasant surprise, the wordpress form was saved by Firefox (or maybe wordpress) somehow. At this hour of the night, small things like this make me pretty happy.
