Chad Weider

For those of you who may not now, my handwriting has a bit of a notorious reputation. A full explanation of how my writing came to be will have to wait for another day, but today I’m posting about the newly adopted writing style that I’ve began using on occasion.

So… getting more to the point – my handwritting, while it might look “good”, it certainly cannot be construed as legible by any measure. Now this isn’t a problem for me in my normal writing (I’m the kind of person who is quite happy putting up with a few inconveniences for something of aesthetic value), but it does become an issue when you want people to notice and read your message – which was just the situation I found myself in a few days ago…

Thankfully I had spent the last week drawing sketches of type for typography class, so when it came time to post a few notes on the wall, I was quite prepared. For my nice clean, readable (and easy to draw) typeface I chose the fine typeface Futura.

I still need to work on getting accustomed to the large counters in the ‘e’ and perfecting the curve of the ‘s’, I’m pretty proud of my new note posting script.

Hooray, my final semester has already arrived and is on its way out. With ~8 weeks of class remaining, I’m closer than ever to leaving university and being out in the job market.

And, while I’ve gone around to the usual suspects, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I am most definitely not the usual suspect’s kind of material. In light of this, I figured I’d make some kind of announcement here.

So what kind of thing am I looking for? Well… naturally, I am looking to work building things loaded full of 100% pure AWESOME. After that here is an unordered list of:

1. A product that I can fall in love with.
2. Work that requires things to be beautiful — inside and out.
3. Work where broad interests are a good thing.
4. A company filled with groovy people.

And of course that list’s important counterpart — what I can do:

1. Cocoa programming, if you found my blog this is probably why.
2. Web programming, CSS, HTML, and Javascript are good friends.
3. Java programming (i.e. backend of a webapp).
4. “Better than average” sense of design and usability. There really isn’t any objective measure of this but I think it is safe to say I’m pretty good.

I’m not terribly interested in publishing personal information of me or others here on the world wide web, so I’ve only published a reduced resumé here. If you want the full document email me directly and I’d be happy to give it to you.

With weather being anything but conformable, everybody out here is wearing scarfs, gloves, balaclava, etc.. A day or two ago I saw a student walking down the sidewalk wearing this:

For a moment I had gotten all excited, seeing some random guy with the Mozilla Feed icon on his head, but soon enough I realized it was just a North Face beanie. Ah well…

That’s my story for today. And I’ll leave you with this sorta interesting fact – that the “beanie” is more properly referred to as a tuque.

Things have bee a little quiet here in my little corner of the blogosphere (though I assure you real life has been far more eventful). So today I thought I’d liven things up a bit with a post on the maintenance update I did for Traffic a few weeks ago – Exciting!

First I updated the default quota to 2GB, (up from the 750MB, which cause all sorts of problems when listening to SomaFM for days). Then switched things over to using the Apple classes). And, well, that was it. Enjoy the rest of your day.

A gigantic Papier-mâché BNC Connector near the Marina. I have no idea from whence it came or what on earth it could conceivably be used for.

And before you ask – no, I did not find the female connector.

No, not that kind of fun – I’m talking about fun with endothermic reactions!

You see – Dust-Off isn’t really compressed air (pressurized Nitrogen is pretty boring) but is in fact liquid difluoroethane. So what happens when you release a liquid with a boiling point well below that of room temperature (-24.9 °C)?

Lets find out:

You get a reaction that will absorb an awful lot of energy from it’s surroundings (you can freeze stuff).

Getting more to the point- around here, in the summer, I come across a fair bunch of house spiders and, while I don’t mind them outdoors, can’t have them wandering around indoors. The problem is that they can be pretty tough to catch (especially the small ones) and mashing them makes a mess (especially the big ones). However, with the help of the aforementioned fluorocarbon, dealing with insects is a breeze.

All you need to do is give the can a good shake, tilt sideways and aim and fire. If you do things correctly the nozzle (moistened by shaking) will produce a directed spray of very fine difluoroethane droplets that, due to the their large surface area, vaporize rapidly – making the immediate surroundings very cool.

Bonus: on a humid day, your very likely to see frost form from the spray!