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Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • FF13: What I wish I’d figured out sooner

    There are a few aspects of Final Fantasy 13 gameplay regarding the shop/economy/item system that I did not figure out until relatively late in the game. Both were probably due to my (relative) illiteracy in Japanese. (日本語がちょっとだけ読めます) Note that you can largely ignore the shops until very late in the game (even until the postgame!),…

  • FF13 adamantoise farming

    I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy 13 lately, and am trying to finish up the post-game content. The most efficient way to gain power towards the end of the game seems to be farming the adamantoise class monsters. These are the giant turtle-like monsters you see walking around on the surface near the…

  • Email thread replies

    A pet peeve of mine: many people do not realize that the email you are replying to is in the email header. (Specifically the “In-Reply-To” and “References” headers) This feature makes it much easier to thread emails. It is easy for a mail client to tell that message X is in reply to message Y.…

  • Laundry Race Condition

    It turns out the dryer in my apartment building has an interesting race condition: if you put more money in right when time runs out the dryer will not notice and stop, just as if you hadn’t put any additional change in the machine. It just cost me $1 to discover this interesting bug.

  • Endianness

    Apparently Endianness comes from Guilliver’s Travels. Furthermore, apparently its shocking that I did not know this. Doubly so since I read (most of) the book 15 years ago. This will make it easier for me to keep straight that big endian means big end first, which is something I had trouble remembering until recently.

  • The Power of Chuck!

    My clothing was imbued by the power of Chuck! On the 4th of July, I joined a bunch of Oliners to watch the Boston fireworks from the Charles river. We brought a bunch of inflatable rafts and launched into the river. Unfortunately, I slipped out of my boat and fell into the river while boarding…

  • Left of Way

    During my crazyland Boston visit this week, I am just struck by how different the pedestrian/car interaction is here from Chicago, or even Champaign. As I understand it, the point of “right of way” is to clarify who should yield to whom. Being polite is suboptimal, because that just leads to confusion when people can’t…

  • Clown Pants

    Today I tried putting on one of my favorite pairs of pants from a couple of years back. I still wear it occasionally, but today it really just struck me how poorly they fit now along the waistline. Seriously, they look like clown pants on me now! They’ve got elastic, and if I stretch the…

  • Do stuff!

    As a first serious post on this blog, the advice I’ve been giving to freshmen, especially in engineering and computer science: Do stuff! As a freshman in electrical engineering, I was quite daunted by electronics projects and the like. Heck, I didn’t even really know what a transistor was. I figured that I would be…

  • A first post

    This is a first post; more coming soon.

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