Nice (if somewhat cut short by Audrey going to bed) music practice session today. I'm feeling more fluent on the bridge of "Well You Needn't" and have mostly internalized the chords for "Someday My Prince Will Come" (which, but it turns out I left it back at the apartment (I'm still at my aunt's in recovery mode, though my productivity is rising back towards normal levels now).

I came across this on Planet Inkscape and couldn't resist.

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Frank Warner's Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups.

I give a clear, detailed, and careful development of the basic facts on manifold theory and Lie Groups. I include differentiable manifolds, tensors and differentiable forms. Lie groups and homogenous spaces, integration on manifolds, and in addition provide a proof of the de Rham theorem via sheaf cohomology theory, and develop the local theory of elliptic operators culminating in a proof of the Hodge theorem. Those interested in any of the diverse areas of mathematics requiring the notion of a differentiable manifold will find me extremely useful.

Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

Cleaning out old links and things as my laptop backs itself up in preparation for migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora. My guess is that I won't notice a difference - I just don't use my laptop in a way that makes it extraordinarily important to me what distro I use. I wonder why others use the distro that they do? Do they notice a difference? Are there killer features? Did they just get really into a particular distro's community.

It's nice to not have a pile of "links to read later." Seriously, I read fast enough that I can just... do it now. A few things as I go along:

  • I like Tim's Flash Forward idea, wherein he writes about options for his future self. Maybe I should try it out.
  • I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to Joel and Tim's OVPC game. It is, alas, not an Activity, as it is based on pyglet. It might make a fun porting project for someone who wants to learn pygame or pyGTK.
  • SVGbuild is pretty awesome; it builds movie frames from .svg files; after ffmpeg, you get cool drawing animations. Rock on, Ed Halley. (It strikes me that this would be an easy way to make kinetic typography, but it wouldn't look very good.) I have not yet gotten SVGbuild to output multiple frames. Working on it...
  • The blogosphere adventure game has some nicely hilarious moments.
  • The IMSA OLPC deployment intersession got a nice writeup in the Acronym, IMSA's newspaper.
  • A small and curious obsession with metrics and tracking has been starting to spring up in my head. (If you want to improve something, you need to measure it so that you know that it's actually getting better.) It's nice to know I'm not the only one.
  • Ben Fisher rocks my world with autoshoop. Better: autoSparta. I'm just waiting for someone to take a FUDCON photo and run it through...
  • I have now added Stormy's blog to my "oh my gosh! people do community work for a living" feed list. (I'm still amazed that people get paid to do this stuff I'd do for free. I have to have some component of community work as part of my next job.)
  • At some point, it might be fun to actually go through some certification books just to see what stuff in it I know and whether there are any foundational gaps in my knowledge that I want to patch. I've heard A+ isn't all that fun/useful and is mostly Windows-based, so I'm not so keen on it. However, I have heard good things about LPIC, so I should keep an eye out for that. (And now I'm geeking out over the design of course material - I find this pedagogically fascinating, as well as interesting from an evaluation design standpoint.) If I want to go distro-specific, there's the Ubuntu certification, or RHCE, which I find intriguing because of the hands-on exam (no multiple choice, says Wikipedia). Has anyone played with any of this kind of thing? What did you think? Is it actually useful material that you might not pick up otherwise? I'd do it for the learning, not the piece of paper.

I did pretty well for productivity today. The hard drive I was backing up my laptop on in preparation for the Fedora migration was acting up (I do have a separate partition for /home, but make backups anyway just in case) so I ended up troubleshooting it instead of proceeding straight to getting Fedora, though the backup is finishing now so I might be able to squeeze it in before I go to bed and check off everything on today's list.

Tomorrow: Call the bank, ask my aunt and the internet about how this "taxes" thing works. Get screenshots of the IRC Activity up on Remora and move its tickets into SL Trac; set up for Sugar 0.84 testing next week with Colin (this one will take a while). Get a good stretching session in and try to memorize "Someday" (I've mostly got it already). If there's time, throw up a different color palette on your website and get SVGbuild to work; use it to animate one of the DigitalFoundations chapters you made. If there's lots of extra time, check out NoteEdit and Canorus (and heck, lilypond) by making chord cheat sheets. Try to figure out how you're going to get all your stuff from your aunt's house to your apartment.