Oka
So I went to the Busker Festival today in Toronto, and by good chance saw the live show of this band Oka. You know shit’s up when you see a guy playing jazz flute, a drummer playing electronica style beats, and a third guy letting it ripp (intentional misspelling) on a digitally effected didgeridoo. I was so impressed I took a gamble on two random CD’s (their first and third).
The “guitarist” from Oka is more like a Boy George type of character. He plays flute, this wooden flute-like thing, sax, guitar, etc. The didgeridoo player also lays down some effected key-work to fill in the low end.
Not sure how I feel just yet, but if anyone’s interested, they can form an opinion, too. I’m hosting both CD’s: Onetalk, and Half Lazy Half Crazy.
Flashing the LG GW300FD
So after a whole stint with my Huawei U7519, I decided that it was time to move over to a more reputable cell-phone. My provider, Wind Mobile, was great but my phone was finicky at times. Since Wind isn’t in Montreal, I had to switch providers any way, and Blockbuster was gracious enough to let me return my Huawei.
So Huawei return approved, I went to Fido and picked up the LG GW300FD (see below) for ~ $100 after tax — more or less the same price as the Huawei, then made my way down to Etobicoke and returned my POS touch-screen phone. At this point, I wanted to see what the unlock situation was for the LG Gossip, and so I googled around, and found some people talking about what seemed like a painless way to flash the Gossip. I’m not sure if the links in that instruction set still work, so here are links to GW300_090625.dll, the MTK drivers, the (zipped) Firmware, another set of instructions, and GSMULTI_V30.exe.
LG Gossip
Operator Theory…
Until WordPress, or someone, figures out a way for me to make my heavily macro’d LaTeX code easily copy-and-paste-able into the HTML bar here, it looks like this blog will never see any of my documents outside of their .pdf forms…
I could include this as a piece of crap web 1.0 website (see here), but it looks like garbage, and I just don’t want to make that my defacto level of exposition. Somewhere in this post, you can download/view my introductory notes on the baby Functional Analysis that begets Operator Theory.
LaTeXdraw — Finally!
So this is going to be, by nature, a nerdy post, but it has to be made.
Ever since I was introduced to LaTeX (pronounced “lay-teck”), I’ve been hooked. To be fair, if you gave a shred of an ounce of care about how your documents looked, you’d be all up in LaTeX’s crevices as well*. Any way, LaTeX is the only markup language that can really make math look good**, however drawing crap in LaTeX is a real pain. It’s not surprising that it’s painful though, the primitives are setup to give you as much control as possible, and as most people know: more control means a steeper learning curve. As people who know me also might know: I’m lazy.
Naturally you can understand my apprehension when I realize (every so often) that the document I’m LaTeX’ing up need figures, and worse yet: they need figures with typed math. This is where LaTeXdraw has changed my mathematical figure making world! Think of LaTeXDraw like mspaint on crack: it saves layers, you can move text (nondestructively), and *understands* LaTeX markup. When I put down “$x$”, in a text box, I get my special LaTeX “math x”! (Which is also an italicized x, but whatever.)
This thing is just fricking AWESOME. Here are two pictures of a simple diagrams I made with LaTeX draw:
