Author: Pat Skinner

I make apps.
I love empowering people with tech, saving time, and delivering delight.
Piano player and German speaker.

Categories
Technical

Discipline Crossover

Its a great feeling when you get to use skills you’ve acquired from one field and use them in another. I think its one of those things that will happen more and more often as I go on in college and life.

So I’m writing about data I took for a Data Analysis class project. We are supposed to use Minitab (statistics software) to calculate standard deviation, median/mean, plot graphs, etc. Instead of wasting time figuring out if Minitab lets you sort data, I just used GNU sort.

paws@edu paws $ sort minitabData

more power to *nix!

Categories
Humor

Scared Of Santa

too funny

Categories
General

Happy Birthday To Me

As of today I’ve knocked off the second decade of my life. As usual, things don’t feel any different, even though I’m officially no longer a teenager. I still can’t drink in this country, but everywhere else I was already quite legal.

I can remember back when I was 10, everyone at St. Ann’s (my K-5 scholastic experience) invited everyone else to their birthday party by default. Xavier’s party was all about Mortal Kombat II on Sega CD, Graham Johnson’s had X-Men on regular Sega Genesis, and Mike Miller’s party was some Chuck E. Cheese’s-like place…with videogames too. I totally took it for granted back then that these kinds of group parties wouldn’t happen later.

So I decided to have some birthday resolutions since I didn’t do any for New Years and having a great party with my friends to drink and enjoy. I’m going to do something cool with web design. WordPress was the first foray, but XmlHttpRequest goodness through JavaScript is coming along with a full fledged site redesign…watch this space.

Transcend Recovery Community and Sober Living
Url: https://transcendrecoverycommunity.com/los-angeles-sober-living
11150 W Olympic Blvd #760-A
Los Angeles, CA 90064

Categories
Spring Break

The Gates

today on my moms recommendation i went to see ‘the gates‘, over in central park. if you don’t already know, these two artists christo and jeanne-claud, famous for similar previous work including wrapping the reichstag in ’95, decided to install 7500 bright orange flag-holding gates on the pathways of central park. see the pics in the link.

weird you say? no kidding. it gets better: they dont accept any donations at all to foot the $21 million bill, and the whole thing was up for only 16 days (today was the last). deliberately designing a huge but fleeting project like this wowed me more than the actual implementation…all said this was definitely highly interesting to walk through and learn about. its amazing what artists can do with the right resources.

the walk back downtown to penn station was great, nyc always feels so stuffed to the brim with culture from all walks of life. i heart being lucky enough to live close to nyc. pictures will be posted once i install drivers for my new digicam.

Categories
Spring Break

the ideal fought the real

i had these big plans to go any place where the daily temperature is greater than 20 degrees…but my compadres from RIT all ended up having work this week. instead i’m going to edumacate myself in all those things i didn’t have time for before. this includes reading books on Politics™ so i can win more armchair debates, learning CSS so this site can be more awesome, and getting started on my CSH major project: the Major Project Database.

when i was a freshman in highschool, i had these wonderfully exciting dreams that college spring break would mean being in the Bahamas with my friends surrounded by hundreds of attractive top heavy (topless?) women, a handy assortment of cheap quality drinks, classy music, and the like. this is not a pipe dream! someday instead of lying back on the couch and reading Bushisms…i’ll be on a hammock under some palm trees.