2011 Recap

With just over 6 hours left of 2011, I thought I'd go back and look at the year we have just finished. A year comprised of many ups and downs, both globally and locally, but one in which we've hopefully ended up better than we started.

Internationally, 2011 was a year of great change, possibly the greatest since the early 90s and the fall of the USSR. The "Arab Spring" as people called it, started in Tunisia and spread across north Africa and the middle east, rocking entrenched dictatorships. Along with Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were successful in overthrowing their dictators. With mostly peaceful protests in Egypt, and 6 months of full on civil war in Libya. And the fighting is still going on in other places, like Syria and Yemen. Will the new order be more friendly to the US? Only time will tell. I can only hope that the pro-democracy movements don't get hijacked by the Islamism sharia law supporters.

On the other side of the world, the pacific and eastern Asia saw extreme natural disasters. Flooding in Thailand, earthquakes in Japan. The death toll was large, and the secondary effects (such as rising prices for tech produced in Asia) still hasn't fully fallen out.

Closer to home, politics began heating up. In response to the tea party movement (the far right), a new movement has arisen. The Occupy movement. Occupy Wallstreet is where is started, but the protests spread across the country, targeting wealthy corporations. Granted, the movement doesn't seem to have much in the way of demands other than, we're unhappy that you have so much money and we don't.

Additionally, Washington politics grew more strained as the year went on. In the 2010 midterm elections, the GOP took control of the House and nearly the Senate. Since then we seem to have jumped from crisis to crisis, including several near government shut downs, and each party tries to blame it on the other in preparation for the larger 2012 presidential election. Overall the Democrats have won though, with Obama's ratings going up significantly, at least in the second half of the year.

The GOP primary race also got kicked off, with a string of widely followed televised debates. Mitt Romney, the assumed forerunner, maintained a steady support in the mid 20s, while others rose and fell. Pawlenty and Bachmann in early summer, Rick Perry in August, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and now there are even a few stirrings for Rick Santorum. Throughout, Gary Johnson was left out of nearly all debates and polls, and finally gave up and switched over to the Libertarian Party. Ron Paul of course was around the entire time, support steadily growing, but still too small to matter.

In a much less depressing area, tech progressed hugely in 2011. The iPad 2 was released early in the year, and the first Android tablets as well. Near summer Android finally had a decent on in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, but with no marketing and a string of legal attacks by Apple, it never took off. Amazon went a different route, with a more inexpensive tablet, the Kindle Fire. It didn't seek to compete with the iPad, and has done quite well. Finally more recently, things like the Asus Transformer Prime bring the best of tablets and laptops together. Terribly expensive though, I doubt the price will let it be a huge hit.

Smart phones saw little significant change over the year. Lots of refinement, of course. Faster processors, more memory, better screens. Android 4.0 and iOS 5 can out, bringing improvements to the software side as well. No major breakthroughs though. Even the new iPhone was just an incremental upgrade. Windows Phone 7 did get some nifty improvements, and while nearly everyone who uses it enjoys it, it's got so little market share that expanding in the face of iOS and Android will be almost impossible. Nokia near the end of 2011 finally began releasing WP7 phones though, so 2012 will be the last chance Microsoft's platform has.

Down then to the personal level. Both Spring and Fall semesters were good for me academically. No grades under a B, in fact. I also replaced the F and D+ I'd gotten during the terrible fall of '10 with and A and A, pushing the overall GPA up quite a bit. Non-academically I had a good pretty decent year, though it certainly was better during summer and fall. I stayed at Purdue over the summer, working for ITaP, and teaching myself several web design languages on the side. I'm also dating someone at the moment, which is quite unusual for me, so wish me luck.

This post has gotten quite a bit longer than I originally was anticipating, so I think I'll wrap it up. I hope you all had a good year, and I'm looking forward to 2012. Happy new years!
 

Geeks unite!

I saw this today when youtube surfing. Geeks unite!


 

Geekin' Out Tonight

In the past few days I've found some really awesome geeky songs, and I thought I'd share them.

Star Trek:




Robots:




Zombies:




WoW:




Batman:



And finally: Lots of Nerdy/Geeky All Combined:



And unrelated .... 100th post for the year, woo hoo!
 

Fixing Facebook With Stylish

Facebook is a great website, and after Google, my main destination on the web. But there are some annoyances. People You May Know, as well as Sponsored Ads, for example. I've been looking for a way to fix that, and the only working method I'd found uses Greasemonkey to kill the entire right column. This removes Upcoming events as well, and leaves a large white space, which is almost as annoying as the Ads. What I wanted to do was remove just the People You May Know box, and the Ads box, and using the power of Stylish, I have done it.

Stylish is a Firefox addon that allows me to run custom CSS on top of a website's own. This lets me make any changes I desire to the look of the site. Hiding an element in CSS is simple. You set it's "display" to "none". The problem lies in finding what an element on a page is called, so that you can call it out in your code.

Fear not though, for we have the Page Source view on Firefox. And since the title rows of the sections we want to remove are plain text, I can search for that text in the source page, which gets me close. Facebook unfortunately uses minimized code, meaning that instead of single lines, spaced nicely for ease of reading, it's compressed. This allows for a faster page load, but a slower read. Which is also a benefit to them, since a site like Facebook doesn't WANT us messing around with their code. Understandable, but I'm out to please myself, not them.

So, looking around, I finally found what I'm looking for. The class of the container holding the unwanted items is "ego_column". So I pop up Stylish, and set up my document. First I place in a beginning line, which just tells Firefox what type of document this is.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

I then place in my container, which specifies that the code only affects Facebook.com.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {

}

Inside that then, I write my code.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {

   .ego_column {display:none !important;}

}

The result is immediate. Here is a screenshot from before:



So, yay for Stylish!
 

Gen Con 2011 Cosplay

Throughout the 4 days of Gen Con 2011, I had my camera with me, and anytime I saw a cool costume, I'd ask if I could take a picture. So much awesomeness! Plus me with a giant goblin at the end.