Brief Thoughts on Commencement

Due to travel and being home in Minnesota all last week, this post is coming late today. This past weekend, my girlfriend graduated from college. It was an exciting time, and she officially finished up this chapter of her life and began to look forward to the PhD program she begins in the fall. Going to commencement was exciting, having this official moment to mark the occasion. This is what I appreciate about commencement, is its role as the milestone. ...

May 21, 2019 · 2 min · 242 words · Mark Richard

How I Podcast - Hardware

I am not very much of an audiophile, nor do I do podcasting to make any money. As such, all of the hardware I use is hobbyist at best, and completely amateur otherwise. But, I’ll give a quick rundown of what I have. ...

May 13, 2019 · 4 min · 731 words · Mark Richard

How I Podcast: Editing

As promised, I’ve recorded myself editing a podcast (published at 2X speed), which you can find in the middle of this post. Beyond that, this post will just be an overview of my editing workflow. ...

May 6, 2019 · 4 min · 677 words · Mark Richard

How I Podcast: Software

After nobody asked me to, I’ve decided to write a few posts about how I podcast. There might be an additional post where I talk about some other software I use on my computer in general, but we’ll start with podcasting because it really is the heaviest use of my computer. In this post, I’ll focus on the software I use to record. In the next post, I’ll share some of the hardware I use. And finally, I’ll explain how I edit podcasts with the aim of having a screen recording of myself editing either OHAC or Comical Start. ...

April 29, 2019 · 6 min · 1240 words · Mark Richard

Some New Code

After playing around with Project Euler for a while, I determined I wanted to challenge my coding skills even more, but stay firmly planted in the mathematical realm in which I’m familiar. So, I’ve begun writing some code that can be used for certain mathematical objects. In particular, I’ve written a fraction class, a 2D vector class, and a complex number class. You can find the code on GitHub. ...

April 22, 2019 · 2 min · 358 words · Mark Richard

Birthday Index

It was my older sister’s birthday yesterday, and it had me thinking about how we talk about birthdays. There’s a peculiar inconsistency in the language we use which I vaguely noticed for the first time a couple of years ago, but never really pursued the thought. We index our birthdays from 0. ...

April 15, 2019 · 2 min · 221 words · Mark Richard

Looking Stupid

I’ve been sitting around, trying to determine what I wanted to write for this week. I’ve had a few underwhelming posts over the past month, due to some time constraints and missed deadlines, so I’m really aiming for ideas with a bit more substance. I try to make note of some ideas I have, whether that is quotes from books I read, ideas from podcasts, little pictures, or just something that pops into my head that I want to save for later. I was going through those notes and determined this is the right time to get to something I heard a high school girl say at a Starbucks a few months ago. ...

April 8, 2019 · 4 min · 693 words · Mark Richard

Baseball is Back

Although I missed another Monday deadline (spring break has really gotten me in disarray), it was for good reason. My parents were visiting in San Diego, and it was fun getting to do some of the more “tourist” type places with people who had fresh eyes for the area. But more importantly, my dad and I went to Petco Park to watch the Padres. Baseball season is finally back, and it makes me incredibly happy. ...

April 3, 2019 · 1 min · 173 words · Mark Richard

Project Euler

As part of my year of focus, I’ve been trying to spend more consistent chunks of time working on programming. In particular, right now I’m focusing on doubling down on my Python knowledge, and exploring some other aspects of computer science that interest me. After checking out a few books and tutorials, I’ve made my way back to a website that I found a number of years ago, which is the most intriguing to me: Project Euler. ...

March 25, 2019 · 3 min · 561 words · Mark Richard

Spring Break

I missed my first self-imposed Monday deadline in a while. I’ve actually been on Spring Break, in a sense. My girlfriend is in town visiting, and we’ve been staying pretty busy. Tomorrow we’re on our way to Universal Studios Hollywood. We both went to the Orlando location back in high school, so we’re somewhat familiar with what it has to offer. But it will be an excellent time. I just wanted to write this brief post as a marker of my failed deadline, but to keep the number of posts per week consistent enough. ...

March 22, 2019 · 1 min · 103 words · Mark Richard