Presto Electro

My favorite living band, The Fiery Furnaces, came to Dallas last night! Although it was a Wednesday, I still found time to make the drive down. It was an AWESOME show, of course (And they're playing in Austin tonight, and Houston tomorrow, if you'd like to see for yourself!) and it was definitely worth the half-hour drive. The odd thing was, even though I spent most of the evening in Dallas, little things kept reminding me of good ol' Denton.

I have a tendency to mistake doors-open-at times for band-goes-on-at times pretty regularly. Unless I've brought someone more sensible along, I usually show up to shows way earlier than I should. Last night was no exception. I showed up to The Lounge at 7:55pm and handed the bouncer my ID. The venue was eerily empty… He gave me my ID back and told me to get the heck out until the place opens, and that the bands didn't go on until 9. So I had some time to kill!

I went to a coffee shop across the street and picked up my time-waster of choice whenever I'm in Dallas: The Dallas Observer. The Observer is the "free press" of Dallas. It's all over the place and it usually has a few stories about Dallas drama (usually in regards to public corruption and whatnot) and reviews of various arts & culture events.

Imagine my surprise when the front cover had absolutely nothing at all to do with Dallas! The cover story last night was about a Denton band, Midlake, and the life and times of the music scene in Denton. That's right, Denton is so awesome it scored a cover-story in a local newspaper based in a completely different city! It was a really good article, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the music "scene" in this city of ours.

Disclaimer: I have not yet listened to Midlake! I am recommending this article solely on journalistic merit! I've been meaning to give them a listen, but I got home late last night and woke up early for classes this morning.

After treating myself to a really fine cup of coffee and a really fine article about a really fine city, I returned to the Lounge for my second attempt. It was open this time, and the first thing I saw when I walked in was none other than Matthew Friedburger staffing his own merch table! We had a nice chat about all sorts of things (including the fact that their next album is going to be a silent record).

Later on Matt traded places with Eleanor, and I told her they should've come to Denton—and she agreed! She would have preferred Denton, but their management didn't give them a choice. I can't tell you how pleased I am to live in the city musicians prefer! And it's only going to get better…

I just read an article about one of UNT's latest advancements in the field of super computing. As per usual when I read about super computing, my mind immediately wanders off to a small island off the coast of Costa Rica and I start to imagine commingling frog and dinosaur DNA.

I read Jurassic Park cover-to-cover a lot when I was a kid. Like most kids, I was fascinated by pretty much every portion of the book, but I still remember one specific detail to this day: the Crays. Michael Crichton really dwelled on the Cray X-MP supercomputers that were behind the park's operations, and to this day I still kinda believe that supercomputers are magical machines that can do the impossible.

As it turns out, the Cray X-MP cannot do magic. By today's standards, it can't even keep up with high-tech toys. At its best, the Cray operates at approximately half the processing power of an Xbox--not an Xbox 360 mind you, just a regular Xbox. Needless to say, the magical Crays of that era can't compare to a modern day Pentium Processor.

As it happens, UNT has a super computing cluster of its own for computationally intensive research. The Talon Research High-Performance Computing System is a supercomputing cluster made up of 224 computers. Each one of these computers has a pair of quad-core Pentium processors. Each one of the cores of these processors possesses more computing power than the Cray X-MP could ever dream of. It's pretty awesome.

I was browsing the (actual, physical) message board for the school of Electrical Engineering a couple of weeks ago, and I spotted a flyer for a totally awesome class: Applied Numerical and Probabilistic Methods for Pattern Analysis and Recognition. I'm pretty sure you need at least 3 years of math to decipher that title, so don't be sad if it just looks like gibberish. The fact of the matter is it's a really math-y class that is focused on analyzing the world we live in, so I'm all over it. Here's the flyer:

There's a lot going on in this flyer. Possibly too much. To the untrained eye, the most awesome thing about this class is not immediately apparent. I'll give you a hint: It's in the "Text" section. See it? The textbook for this class is ABSOLUTELY FREE! The whole thing is available for free on Google Books, and that is spectacular.

Everyone can appreciate free books, but it's even easier to appreciate when you've been in school for awhile. Textbooks have to be purchased at the beginning of every semester, usually all at once, and they typically cost an arm and a leg. Any professor that helps lighten that load (price-wise AND weight-wise) is definitely a friend of mine. Google Books' rapidly expanding library will hopefully make this a much more common occurrence in the coming years.

Google Books has a tremendous archive of books available for perusal, but this is the first time I've personally come across a relevant textbook. Previously I've only used Google Books when I really needed to kill some time. (Classic novels are great for passing time while waiting for an oil change or an appointment.)

For some reason, it never occurred to me to search for my textbooks. I wonder if any of my other textbooks have made it to Google Books…

Happy New Year everybody! I hope you all made it through that ARCTIC BLAST safely. I spent most of December in Austin, so I missed out on all of the awesome winter weather we got up here. A "White Christmas" in Texas is a rare thing indeed.

I'm back in town now, and the weather is back to the normal winter range in Texas: 50-60 degrees. This works out really wellfor me, because I'm planning on doing a lot more biking this year. I got a sweet new helmet and bike-lock for Christmas so I now have absolutely no excuse.

My bike is a 21-speed with un-bust-able polycarbonate tires, and it's a great way to get around Denton. Denton is a great city for biking. Everything is nice and close together, and the roads are plenty wide. There are also a handful of parks throughout the city that are great for recreational riding.

My place is 2 miles from both campuses, and less than a mile from just about everything else. The average person on a road bike can maintain a speed of approximately 15 mph. Even if I am really lazy about it, I could bike anywhere in Denton is less than ten minutes, and in weather like this, the drive is practically air conditioned! If I can invent a way to carry my books and groceries on this bike, I'll basically never have to use a car again.

I sometimes wish I had gotten a mountain bike, though. There are a ton of parks and trails around here, and a road bike is no fun in the woods. Maybe when this bike wears out I'll replace it with something that would fare a little better on the greenbelt.