Setbacks

Well, I was hoping to be a bit further along than this. One of the topics I'm learning in my free time is numerical analysis, which gives me a pretty good swathe of material to blog through. Unfortunately, I have my entire life on a linux machine that I have lent to a friend (he is waiting for a new battery from the manufacturer and I lent him mine so that he can work on his thesis).  I do have a backup machine but it is a Mac and I almost never use it. Before I get any Apple fanboy comments, know that the macbook was a gift.  Not that I think there is anything wrong with macs, I'm just not too fond of the prices. Anyways, I need to get Tex, Octave, and some other GNU components installed before I can actually start producing pretty blog posts (by the way Apple, libreadline really? are you fucking with me on purpose?). I'll probably upgrade to Snow Leopard as well.

In the meantime, I'll relate my first experience with a true Linux hipster. As I'm sure we all know, college campuses are populated by mainly idiots.  I was sitting in class today when someone started talking about some problems he was having with his computer.  I came to find out he was operating linux. He informed the class of this by saying "Oh I'm running linux, it's way better than mac or windows." I'm surprised he didn't add the "you've probably never heard of it" to the end of his statement. Of course, was he a power user? No, his cousin set everything up for him. He literally had no idea what the command line was. How is that even possible? It's really hard to concentrate in class when all you want to do is stab your pencil into your neighbor's throat.

Anyways, I'll end with a funny comic I saw the other day. It's titled "If programming languages were essays".

In hindsight, the "setbacks" title is way more dramatic than I intended it to be.

First Post

I've been meaning to start a blog for a while now, I guess tonight is as good a time as any.  I like math, finance, and programming applications in these two disciplines so my posts will probably stay within these subjects (maybe some MLB and statistics once the season starts). Anyways, this should be interesting.