James Rohal

I was going through some old documents and ran across this little gem. I’m not sure when I wrote it but I was definitely young.

When I was little, I always thought that dust bunnies were little bunnies made out of dust and they were gray. Everyone use to laugh at me because only I could see the bunnies that hopped under my bed and they couldn’t. I would look under the bed and say, “Hey bunnies, how are you doing?” Even I thought that my mom and dad thought that I was a little cuckoo, but I wish that they would use their imagination and think what I thought.

Once my friend played a trick on me and hid under my bed. When I asked how they were doing, they answered back, but it was really my friend. When he came out, I was surprised and mad that he didn’t imagine.

When I am really bored, I crawl under the bed and talk and play games with the dust bunnies. The dust bunnies and I played a story telling game, and we raced from one end of the bed to the other. I met the mother of all the bunnies and I asked how she could manage all of them, and what they ate.

Sometimes the dust bunnies crawl into my bed and make me sneeze, they follow me to school and back home. Wherever I go, they go. When I go on vacation, the bunnies can’t follow me, but when I arrive at my destination, I meet new dust bunnies and make new friends. Whenever the dust bunnies are sleeping or away, I make up new ones, and they don’t make me sneeze! My new friends are different from the other dust bunnies because they have an imagination of their own. They help me imagine new places, like flying in space or turning a snowy day into a journey across the North Pole. The dust bunnies are from MY imagination and I can control, but it is really fun hen they follow me outside into the snow. I bury them all with snow, but they come back and knock me into the snow.

I can make up other friends but the dust bunnies are my best friends. They help me through the dull days and without an imagination they would never exist. If everyone would use their imagination all the time, everyone would understand what everyone is thinking.

PSU: Cosair CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V

More than enough power to drive an SLI rig.

Case: Cooler Master HAF 932

Provides great airflow. Full tower will fit anything I need. Push button drive bays make for a painless setup. Supposedly the EVGA motherboard sits quite nicely in here.

Motherboard and Graphics Cards: EVGA X58 ATX and two (2x) EVGA GTX 260 Core 216 (Overclocked)

Sweet deal over at Newegg. I decided to go with nVidia because I wanted CUDA support.

Processor: Intel Core i7 920

Allows for amazing overclocking using the EVGA board.

Soundcard: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional

RAM: Cosair Dominator 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Triple Channel

If you are going with a Core i7 processor, be sure to go with triple channel ram.

Hard Drives: One Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB for my operating system and one Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB for my data.

Cooling: Thermaltake V1 Max-Performance CPU Cooler and Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound

Monitor: 24″ BenQ G2400WD

If you only plan to run a 1920×1200 resolution, then this is a sweet monitor. Recommended by AnandTech.

DVD Drive: Samsung 22X DVD+/-RW SATA Burner

Miscellaneous: Four (4x) SATA cables and Cable Ties

Buying multiple SATA cables saves you money. The cable ties allow for cable management even though the HAF 932 helps you out

I did not purchase speakers, a mouse, or keyboard. With mail-in rebates ($40) the total comes to (with shipping): $2509.21.

Update: I created a post over at Tom’s Hardware where I updated the specs.

I have recently become fascinated with Yahoo! Pipes because it is so simple to use. I’ve even completely given up on visiting Digg by aggregating popular content from Reddit, Digg, and Delicious and sending it Google Reader! Here are some modules I wish they would implement.

1. Intersection: It is already possible to do this in Yahoo! Pipes but why don’t they implement it?
2. Unique Filter by Source: It would be nice to give precedence for a certain source if there are duplicate entries. For example, if I take data from Delicious and Smashing Magazine, I might want to return the Smashing entries over the Delicious entries. I’m not sure which source the Unique module chooses from.
3. Support for HTTP-Auth: The Diigo API can’t be accessed currently from Pipes due to this limitation.

What are your suggestions?

I couldn’t find any posts that gave a solution but this seemed to work for a friend.

1. Reboot Windows into Safe Mode and perform a virus scan.
2. Make sure you have a clean Windows host file located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Open the hosts file with Notepad (or some other text editor) and replace all the text in hosts with the text below. Be sure to save the hosts file without an extension. In Notepad this is done by selecting File -> Save As and choosing the “Save as type” to be “All Files.”

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

127.0.0.1       localhost

3. Run Spybot – Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware to get rid of any other malware.
4. Clear your internet browser’s cache.
5. Don’t download and install files from warez sites!

To aide others in the application process for graduate school in mathematics I will provide elements of my application that might be of use.

Application Materials

Personal Statement: PDF, LaTeX

Results

1. University of Utah: Pending
2. University of Maryland at College Park: Pending
3. Florida State University: Pending
4. University of Iowa: Pending
5. Rice University: Pending
6. Cornell University: Pending
7. University of Texas at Austin: Pending
8. North Carolina State University: Pending