Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

You might have heard of the Warcraft III custom map DOTA, otherwise known as Defense of the Ancients. A particular flavour, Dota Allstars, is incredibly popular on Blizzard’s WC3 bNet servers, but getting the latest maps can be a problem because the popular distribution sites are always down. So, if you want to download the latest DOTA, this is the place to find it!

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It’s 5 AM in the morning, which is always a good time to write a little update before eating a very late dinner and doing my chinese homework. Things are mostly well with me–the web properties are still recovering from their 1and1 mishap, which makes me feel that diversifying across a number of domains might be a good thing for me. I just got a cheque from Yahoo that floats my boat, classes are mostly good, and I have lots to keep busy with. So, let’s make a list:

1. I just got two more sites online–my CS482 notes, which I had actually been emailed about by sad students–as well as the Books blog. No one really reads them, but the CS482 notes are a valuable resource, and the books blog lets me post my essays and literate musings. You have to forgive typos, though. I tend to spell like some kind of gibbon.
2. There’s a stack of guitar books yearning to be learned. And a new nifty POD XT to make beautiful sounds. I’m really, really looking forward to this weekend, provided homework is light, to get on the Guitar again and pick up a song or two. I have the Santana, Beatles, and a Classical songbook here with me!
3. Math 335: Cryptology / Cryptography is doing better than hoped. I wasn’t at the bottom of the curve this time, and numerically I’d almost pass anyway, which means that yes, I’ll be able to graduate. This was my biggest worry, because although the course is on number theory, the professor expects me to know group theory, and tests on it. Since this isn’t covered in the textbook, I missed those questions in my study and on the test. However, if we have another test, I’ll ace it because I know what to ask the TA about now.
4. Other courses: all are going well. My two English classes are very easy and quite enjoyable. I just wrote an essay on a 9/11 book, which I think takes it apart pretty well. Asian 212 is enjoyable and interesting–I am learning lots about China. And Chinese 102 is hard, but fun. Languages are always fun. We’re learning the ba3 structure for objects right now, which is making the grammar a little harder because verb-end sentences are not at all like English structure.
5. I have an idea for a web-blog-ping service I’ve been interested in doing, but it’s hard to find the time to start to write. It would require (probably) a dedicated server, and lots of bandwidth, but it would be easy to do, perhaps profitable, and a lot of fun. Although, server-side spell checking is probably not the right way to do it, how many blog authors can you think of that would like their content automatically spell checked, and emails about mistakes?
6. Blog theme: This green theme is getting way old. I have a new one in the works, but it’s only about 25% done. Semantically it’s fine, but graphically there’s a ways to go. And, I need to update it to allow it to silently upgrade all the old posts, which is a bit of a pain. Every post on the new theme has a bunch of meta-information associated with it, which is critical to its operation. In some ways, the new theme works like a little gada.be for every post. It’s uber cool. When I’m done, you’re all going to drool over it for hours.

That’s all for now! Leave comments if bored!

I got the following cool email today:

I just stumbled on to your blog via someone’s installation of your hashcash plugin. I was wondering what in the world hash cash was and then got distracted by your blog (that I had to read via Google’s cache because your site seems to be unreachable this morning). I just had to email someone who has (almost) the same name as me. And, we also share a similar goal! One of my goals in life is to be known as just “Eliot” without the use of my last name. I love how infrequently I meet other Eliot’s (or Elliot’s or Elliott’s) and I’ve even rarely met someone who knew another Eliot (or Elliot or Elliott). I want to take advantage of that and become like Madonna or Prince or Beck. A one-name wonder, you might say.

Yes, being named Elliott is indeed pretty cool. We’re not named for ET–think T.S. Eliot. And, even cooler, is that any of us can be effectively named E(l+)iot(+) without difficulty. Elllliotttttttttts of the world, unite!

For those of you who don’t know the origin or history of the name Eliot, try this list of people by surname El from wikipedia, or read about how Eliot derives from Hebrew Elijah, meaning “The Lord is my God.”

And, contrary to popular opinion, it’s a statistically significant American name:

Elliot is a common male first name, ranking 582 out of 1219 for males of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. Elliot is a very popular surname, ranking 1841 out of 88799 for people of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census.

Update: Did you know that Elyot is another variant of this name? It’s a rare spelling from the 16^th century!

[21:19] <poo3728732> yeah, where do you guys even get new episodes of 24?
[21:19] <poo3728732> can you rip it straight from tv?
[21:19] <kiwiii> we watch tv
[21:19] <kiwiii> and recite the pixels
[21:19] <kiwiii> into notepad
[21:19] <poo3728732> wow
[21:19] <poo3728732> that must take forever
[21:19] <kiwiii> after computing the discrete cosine transform
[21:19] <kiwiii> in our heads
[21:20] <poo3728732> it must be a discreet cosine transform, I’ve never heard of this process
[21:20] <kiwiii> LOL
[21:20] <kiwiii> HILARITY!