Thanks
July 24th, 2012 at 11:03 pm by Dr. Drang
I can’t stop myself from mentioning that I thoroughly dominated Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network yesterday. Not only was I Katie and David’s guest on a Mac Power Users workflow show,
but I was also mentioned a couple of times by Merlin on Back to Work.
Total pwnage! I hope that Dan, who never misses on opportunity to mention how creeped out he is by my avatar, was haunted by dreams of my bug-eyed snowman last night.
I can’t tell you how the MPU episode turned out, as I haven’t screwed up the courage to listen to it yet. But I can say that David and Katie were wonderful hosts and made the process of recording fun. Between the MPU episode itself and the After Dark, there’s almost two hours of me. I don’t think I’ve ever been allowed to talk so much in a conversation with attorneys.
And Merlin is like my internet godfather. Despite the cane, the carbuncles, and the other ravages of age, he always manages to put in a good word for me.
In addition to Katie, David, and Merlin, I want to thank the people who listened to the show and wrote nice things about it. Even bigger thanks go to those who thought I stunk up the place and kept it to themselves.
July 24th, 2012 at 11:40 pm
The MPU podcast was really good - and the voice changing software they used to protect your identity sounded like a regular human!
July 24th, 2012 at 11:43 pm
I also listened to the show. Good job!
July 25th, 2012 at 5:59 am
I’ve just finished listening to the MPU episode; great podcast. I’ll be listening to B2W later. At some point, I’d love for you to guest on Hypercritical too.
One bit of feedback, on the screenshots/embedded tweets thing: your embedded tweets are much better for the visually impaired. Most screen readers balk on screenshots; your embedded tweets can be read fine.
July 25th, 2012 at 8:10 am
Very much enjoyed the MPU episode—-for me it was really fun hearing household lingo (FEA, thermocouple, etc) on a podcast I’ve listened to for so long. You also have me wondering if I should pick up Octave—-I am pretty set with NumPy, but it sounds like Octave may be a bit less fussy.
July 25th, 2012 at 9:11 am
Ben,
Octave used to be less fussy to install because the octave-forge people built precompiled versions. No longer (and I haven’t updated because of that).
And I’m trying to move myself from Octave and Gnuplot to NumPy/SciPy and Matplotlib. Inertia is keeping me with the tools I’ve been using for years, but I feel certain the Python-based tools are more flexible.
Alex,
I’m glad you mentioned the accessibility advantage of embedded tweets. The main reason I wanted to have the text of the tweet on the page was to make the tweet searchable, but making the tweet available to screenreaders is just as important.
July 25th, 2012 at 4:15 pm
Finally finished listening to the show this morning and thought it was great. I’m glad they’ve had people from the more technical arts on of late. (You and Daniel Jalkut being the most memorable)
July 25th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Just listened to the latest MPU episode. Regarding your name, “Drang” is not the German word for stress. I am a native speaker and the German word “Drang” means impulse/drive/urge/compulsion. The German word for “stress” is – surprise, surprise – “Stress”.
July 26th, 2012 at 8:02 am
Really enjoyed the MPU episode. Your experience explaining technical issues to laypersons must have been really helpful when attempting to describe Octave and Gnuplot to David and Katie (both smart people, of course). Not an easy task.
Looking forward to the follow-up episode describing your switch to NumPy/SciPy and Matplotlib!
July 26th, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Should we start calling him Dr. Stress? Or maybe he has a compulsion to engineer.
August 2nd, 2012 at 1:48 am
The MPU episode was really great, I enjoyed it a lot. However, there was one thing I wanted to know from your workflow related to how you manage your Octave files. Because the octave scripts are project dependent, do you keep them also in the project folder or do you have a central Octave folder? Once again, thanks for this awesome show.
August 2nd, 2012 at 8:56 am
Andres,
Everything associated with a project (except email) is kept in the project folder. If I want to reuse an Octave script on a new project, I copy it out of the old project folder into the new project folder.