Sh**F***.

Okay, a few things:

1. My dad was at my place recently, and he could load reddit on his laptop using my wireless. So... The reddit mystery is back.

2. On Friday, one of my students (a sponsored cyclist) came up to me and said, "I'm riding South Mountain tomorrow, here's a graph. I need to beat 19 minutes and 9 seconds. How fast do I need to be going on each stretch of the trail?" I looked at the graph...
Then I looked at him and said, "Not enough information, buddy." But, in a classic example of nerd sniping, I ended up solving for the problem after school. Essentially, I used the drag & gravitational forces to solve for his velocity during each stretch, and then to get the different split times. I got some pretty good approximations. The race was yesterday... he didn't actually beat the record (neither did anyone else in his category), but I'll be curious to see if the work I did helped at all.

3. After sending my student all my calculations, I discovered that someone actually wrote a program to calculate these things. Dammit.

4. This experience of solving physics problems that I would normally never even dream of solving... well, it seems to be happening a lot lately. And I'm good at it -- basically because I am curious what the solution is, and I don't stop until I've found something reasonable. I think I should start some kind of consulting business. You know, like, "Got random physics problems that you need solved but don't have the patience for? Bring them to me! And pay me." I joke, but theoretically, this could be lucrative.

5. I have registered phaiakia.net and phaiakia.org and claimed phaiakia as mine on myspace. Now, just so we're clear, I have been using the screen name "phaiakia" since I was 12 or 13 years old -- so for half my life. I imagine that this is longer than most people have been using their screen names. However, some jerk has registered phaiakia.com. I am very angry with this person, especially because they obviously have no intent of using their domain name for anything useful. I have two options: A) wait for the page to expire -- which it does on 01/11/09 or B) find a way to hack into it and redirect it to my own. While I like option B much better, I am unfortunately not a hacker, so... I guess I'm stuck waiting. Sh**F***.