Old on Evan Hoffman

Day 4 post-op for Achilles' tendon repair surgery

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 18:46:22 +0000

Today’s Friday, 7/20/2018; I had the operation on Monday. I made a couple Youtube videos before and after the operation describing it. According to the surgeon, it went well. My leg is in a dressing from just below the knee to the tips of my toes, which it will be in until my followup visit on July 26th. At that point I expect to get another full-calf dressing/cast. I can’t put any weight on the left leg at all, which has been fairly annoying so far. After ~3 weeks I should get transitioned to the boot for another 9 weeks.

Java compound interest calculator

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:08 +0000

I wrote a thing to calculate compound interest and print out how much you’ve accrued after each period. It’s pretty basic but I was bored and didn’t want to do it via calculator. The code is in InterestCalculator.java, sample output is below:

Initial principal: 5000.00
Interest rate: 0.05 (4.93%)
# of ann. periods: 4
Total years: 5
Annual Addition: 500.0
Starting year 1 with $5000.00
Year 1, period 1, accrued $61.62, value is now: $5061.62
Year 1, period 2, accrued $62.38, value is now: $5124.01
Year 1, period 3, accrued $63.15, value is now: $5187.16
Year 1, period 4, accrued $63.93, value is now: $5251.09
Added $500.00 for the end of year 1, total is now: 5751.09
Starting year 2 with $5751.09
Year 2, period 1, accrued $70.88, value is now: $5821.98
Year 2, period 2, accrued $71.76, value is now: $5893.73
Year 2, period 3, accrued $72.64, value is now: $5966.37
Year 2, period 4, accrued $73.54, value is now: $6039.91
Added $500.00 for the end of year 2, total is now: 6539.91
Starting year 3 with $6539.91
Year 3, period 1, accrued $80.60, value is now: $6620.51
Year 3, period 2, accrued $81.60, value is now: $6702.11
Year 3, period 3, accrued $82.60, value is now: $6784.71
Year 3, period 4, accrued $83.62, value is now: $6868.34
Added $500.00 for the end of year 3, total is now: 7368.34
Starting year 4 with $7368.34
Year 4, period 1, accrued $90.81, value is now: $7459.15
Year 4, period 2, accrued $91.93, value is now: $7551.08
Year 4, period 3, accrued $93.07, value is now: $7644.15
Year 4, period 4, accrued $94.21, value is now: $7738.37
Added $500.00 for the end of year 4, total is now: 8238.37
Starting year 5 with $8238.37
Year 5, period 1, accrued $101.54, value is now: $8339.90
Year 5, period 2, accrued $102.79, value is now: $8442.69
Year 5, period 3, accrued $104.06, value is now: $8546.75
Year 5, period 4, accrued $105.34, value is now: $8652.09
Added $500.00 for the end of year 5, total is now: 9152.09
Final value: $9152.09

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:56 +0000

sup dawg

Java utility to reorganize photos by date taken (via EXIF metadata)

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:37 +0000

I wrote a little utility to reorganize my digital camera pics based on the EXIF date-taken data stored in the pic. It’s pretty simple, I hacked it together in about an hour, but I thought it might be worth sharing for anyone else looking to do something similar. My camera organizes stuff as it sees fit sometimes, I am particular about my directory structure. This is probably a job best left to perl, but I don’t feel like getting Perl running on my Windows box where all the pics are. Now I can finally burn all my images to DVD.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:00:22 +0000

Oh snap here it is!

Froogle wish list

June 6, 2006

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:19 +0000

I played around with a Canon PowerShot A540 at Staples the other day and I like it. It takes pictures really quickly… no waiting at all. The 530 may also do that, I’ll have to play around some more.

A530 and A540 compared

Apocryphal post #6

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 00:00:34 +0000

EXCITING UPDATE

It’s been a long time!

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:30:38 +0000

It’s been quite a while since my last post here. My life has changed so much since then. It’s almost funny to go back and read the things I wrote while working in the city. That was one of the most miserable periods in my life. There’s so much stuff going on, but I really hate posting personal stuff on the Internet. It always seems to come back and bite you in the ass.

Apocryphal post #4

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:03 +0000

This is not a “blog.” I hate that term and always have. This is just my page, which I update manually by SSHing to this box and typing all this text in vi. I don’t use any fancy schmancy “content management” stuff, that’s for newbs.

So Christmas has come and gone, I got an Xbox (not 360, which is crap). I used a soft-mod tutorial on it because I have no interest in playing Microsoft’s crappy offerings, and I’m cheap. So I put Xbox Media Center on it and a bunch of emulators, and relived the joy of The Legend of Zelda for NES on my Xbox. I got up to level 5 in a couple of hours. I got a few other emulators running on it, including Xenesis and Surreal64, and I played Zelda64 for a bit as well, though the emulator does some weird stuff with the graphics.

Apocryphal Post #3

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:44 +0000

I wrote a crappy perl script to read all the .flac files in a directory and convert them to MP3 using LAME, extracting the meta-data and inserting it as ID3v2 tags. I figured this might be somewhat useful to others, so here you go: <flac2mp3.pl>

Flac to MP3 (flac2mp3.pl)

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:44 +0000

https://gist.github.com/1642637.js?file=flac2mp3.pl

Apocryphal post #2

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:00:24 +0000

I watched Chocolat tonight; it was pretty good. So much stuff is going on that I can’t even begin to explain it. The job is good and everything else is ok, or ok enough for now. One thing is clearer to me now than ever before: I was never meant to follow in anyone’s footsteps.

On a less ominous note, here’s a pic of a spider that’s been weaving its web on my front porch for the past 3 weeks, despite my repeated walking right through it. This web is huge, like 3 feet in diameter now.

Apocryphal post #1

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:00:02 +0000

This morning, with the help of archive.org, I found a paper I’d put up on my website way back in 1997. It was written for my 12th grade AP English class, during the peak of my Stevie Ray Vaughan fanboy phase. I converted it to PDF because the original ASCII text version looked kind of crappy. Anyway, here it is: Stevie Ray Vaughan’s music as an example of “Flow”.

I am a weird dude.

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:01:00 +0000

I am a weird dude. I still feel like there’s a huge part of my personality I’m hiding from everyone, including myself. I feel like if I go in there it would be really weird.

When I was in first grade I won the spelling bee because two other people misspelled the word “thief.” They both spelled it “theif.” Dan Madonia won the Spelling Bee in 2nd grade. Then I won again in 3rd grade. In High School I finally realized that the spelling bee is a retarded competition, basically because retarded people started winning it. Sure, if you do nothing but teach spelling 24/7 you can win… duh. Anyway.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:32:06 +0000

I am a player of World of Warcraft, I play as Cellen the Human Paladin, currently on the Doomhammer server. As a refugee from EverQuest I found WoW to be a big breath of fresh air after the eternal grind of EQ. As of this writing my character is level 56 and I am still mostly enjoying the game, however the game does have some serious deficiencies.

The one I’ll discuss presently is the poor itemization for most quest rewards. In EQ, as in WoW, classes were limited to certain armor types - cloth, leather, chain, plate. One subtle difference in WoW is that each tier of armor-wearer can wear all the armor below their tier as well as the armor designed for their class. This means a plate wearer in WoW can wear mail, leather, or cloth. This has the interesting effect of allowing people to “Graduate” to higher tier armor once they reach level 40 (though the same thing could be accomplished in EQ by restricting an item both by class and level). Now this isn’t the main problem with WoW’s itemization but it does tie in, as I’ll explain.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 11:33:07 +0000

Yesterday was probably in my top 5 worst days ever in terms of commuting. When I left the house around 8:15 AM it was about 35-40 degrees. Sometime around 11-12 it started snowing, and by about 2 it was blizzarding heavily. The wind was insane. Snow stopped around 5 PM and the sun came out - wee!

So I end up leaving work at the normal time, 6:45. There’s ice all over the street. I get into Penn Station and my train is operating about 2 minutes late, which is pretty good considering the weather.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 11:34:05 +0000

Here’s a sentence whose horror can only be appreciated by people familiar with the Long Island Rail Road:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, for today only, this train will be making all local stops to Penn Station.”

Seriously… fuck you guys. My monthly ticket went from $168 to $178 and the service has continued to degrade.

Car is working, family is well, life is beautiful. :)

The smiley insertion thing doesn’t work well here.

March 1, 2005

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:35:37 +0000

Ok this day is starting out really super. I wake up to my alarm clock blaring, interrupting a dream in which somebody was yelling at me that “The database connection is DOWN! It’s DOWN, man!” But I don’t think the guy meant down as in like, defunct, he just meant it was down, like, “man the database connection is really down with it.” I don’t know what that means. But I do know that I was fucking exhausted when I woke up. I sat in the shower for like 10 minutes hoping the water would thaw my eyelids open but it didn’t work. I got dressed, and went outside to shovel the step and the driveway. The guy who lives downstairs loaned me his snow shovel which was a lot better than mine, and man this thing cuts ice like nobody’s bidness. So I got the sidewalk cleared and I looked around, and none of my neighbors had cleared their sidewalks. Whatever.

Monday, February 28, 2005

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:36:39 +0000

First let me say, TP on.

This weekend we had no car at all so we were basically stranded in the house. Which was fine really. I have no problem staying in the house, I figure if I’m paying that much in rent, the longer I stay in the house the more I’m getting my money’s worth.

It’s depressing looking at the housing market in New York. Regular shitty houses are going for like half a mil. It’s depressing because you have to accept the fact that you will never be able to afford a home where you’ve grown up and spent your entire life. I was thinking I could get my parents’ house but I imagine the capital gains tax alone on that would be obscene.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:37:21 +0000

I feel really old sometimes, and it doesn’t feel how I expected it to feel. I don’t think I was ever young. It’s really weird. I feel like I was born old. Maybe I’m some old dude reincarnated. It would be really reassuring to be able to think that; I guess that’s why people come up with shit like the afterlife and heaven and all that. I still want to go to Rome and stuff.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:38:49 +0000

So today I wake up – very reluctantly I might add, after a 3 day weekend – and head into the shower where I had my 15-minutes of fame, and when I finish, I open the door to find a nice pile of dog shit on the rug outside the bathroom. My life is dominated by feces. So I got dressed, picked up the prize and put it out on the curb with the rest of the trash, then walked the dogs who provided me with some more gems to deposit.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:39:42 +0000

I forgot to say my basic point about the gift thing, which was “Fuck Valentine’s Day.” If you love somebody, you love them all year ‘round, not just on fucking valentine’s day, regardless of what the Whitman’s Sampler and Russell Stover assholes try and tell you. I can’t think of a more retarded holiday.

When we were in like, 6th grade, I had a crush on this girl Becky. My school had “Candygrams” that you could send to somebody for 50 cents and the money went to the “Student Council,” whatever the hell that was. So I must have sent Becky like 50 to 100 candygrams all from “Your Secret Admirer.” Somebody put 2 and 2 together and figured out it was me and that was really fun. 6th grade sucked. Anyway fuck Valentine’s Day in the neck.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Sun, 13 Feb 2005 11:41:37 +0000

Yep, it’s my fuckin’ birthday. Well, it was on the 12th. At least some people remembered this year. I am so tired of this gift-giving thing. Once a year I can handle, but I feel like they’re trying to stretch it out so you feel compelled to buy stuff all year long. Yes I know that seems like a “duhhh” type of a thing to say, that’s what ad agencies are for after all, to convince people that they need stuff that they really don’t. But I’m willing to suspsend my misanthropy and cynicism for the month of December, and while I’m certainly not one ever to be “filled with xmas cheer,” I can appreciate the smiles on others’ faces when you give them something they want, even if they may not have realized they wanted it.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:42:40 +0000

Adventures in Dog Shit. It’s not just a meaningless phrase! Two members of my family happen not to be humans. Bruiser and Sierra are my dogs and their specialty is making huge piles of dog crap.

Like humans, they both have weird habits when they crap. Bruiser’s idiosyncracy is the way he walks around while taking a crap. He cops a squat, starts pooping, then something a few feet away gets his attention, so he does a squat-walk and leaves a trail of shit all over the place. This is a joy to clean up, especially when he does it on somebody’s lawn. Sierra’s oddity is the way her movements just seem to come upon her out of nowhere. We’ll be walking down the street at a good clip, and she’ll just come to a dead stop and start making brown toothpaste. She also tends to crap 2 or 3 times when you walk her. Really, a treat.

February 7, 2005

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 11:43:53 +0000

I’m at work. I’m writing some code.

I think I want to be a chef. I made chicken quesadillas last night. It was something I’d wanted to do for a while but I had no idea how to prepare the chicken. I mean, a quesadilla is a simple thing to make - it’s cheese between two flour tortillas. But if you want to add chicken, then how to you prepare it? I mean, you don’t throw raw chicken in there and cooking it without seasoning would make it taste assy. I ended up marinating it in some generic Seven Seas Robusto Italian dressing and chopping it up and using it like that. I used 2 chicken breasts to make 3 big quesadillas, and it was good. If I’d had the right cheese I bet they woulda been awesome (had slices of regular American cheese instead of shredded Monterey Jack like recommended).

February 4, 2005 2

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 07:50:27 +0000

I hate blogs! I hate the word, I hate the idea that people think someone else cares what they ate for breakfast.

I’m misanthropic like that.

What’s a spleen for?

February 4, 2005 1

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 07:47:01 +0000

I can’t believe I am so gay that I actually made one of these.

Sadface.

Evan's Semi-complete Aimster Saga

Sun, 02 Sep 2001 05:33:37 +0000

The following was written by me in my Slashdot journal on September 02, 2001. I have not edited it since then except for formatting. This is long and rambling and will likely have parts that make no sense. I just finished writing it at 5:33 am right now Sunday morning, so that is my excuse. What’s yours?

In September 2000 I was gearing up to return to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to begin my senior year. To say I wasn’t looking forward to it would be an understatement. I had two courses left in my Computer Science major: Theory of Computation and the “culminating experience,” a course that I guess takes the place of a senior thesis. The most theoretical aspects of Computer Science have never interested me, and since I know that I will never have a use for the vast majority of them. To graduate I still needed to take 8 more classes and none of the offerings were terribly appealing. For the fall term I enrolled in Theory of computation, an econ class, and a government class (the standard courseload is 3 classes). I wasn’t terribly thrilled with any of my classes.