Change may have increased the likelihood that a user completes a quiz. Difficult to say yet as the "improvement" is still within just random daily fluctuation.

Had a private burst of anger at my math teacher. I failed his course and would like to blame that on his teaching style totally lacking any passion. I've tried to avoid attending the class, every time I leave being less motivated by the subject than when I came in. It's just a basic linear algebra course, which is very very useful and could be presented in an interesting way, but it feels more like attending a funeral. So I stayed at home and tried to study the things as a list of contents got updated to his homepage. But then in the exam (which he had scribbled by hand and xeroxed barely legibly) there was a question which wasn't mentioned on that list, and I failed just barely.

I had studied for that class every day for about two months, but not exactly the things that were in the exam. I got upset enough that I dropped studying math at all for over a month, but now I'm getting my self esteem back just enough to try and continue.

Released update to Mixi quiz app. If it will only improve goal completion by a few percent, that might be enough to turn it from decline to growth. Natural Selection is the most brilliant PC game ever created.

Productive day.

Managed to remove the most failure prone iframe, things are much speedier now too. The app works on three social networks, Mixi, MySpace and Facebook. Most users are on Mixi and I think I will drop the other versions if they start to feel like work to maintain. Did some successful soldering on an electronics kit. Dubai causing stock markets to fall.

Iframes all the way down

In an unproductive slump, to break out of it decided to rewrite parts of the failing quiz app for Mixi. Was a mistake to use iframes so much, sometimes some people are seeing nothing when I try to show an iframe. The app itself is already an iframe, so that's an iframe in an iframe. At one point to show an image upload widget, I have an iframe in an iframe in an iframe.

Today's lack of productivity brought to you by Adobe Flash CS4 and Sampo Bank

Spent much of today staring at the beach ball of doom (a spinning cursor you see on a Mac when things are über slow), Adobe Flash CS4 editing interface is reaaally slow. I am trying to learn how to export isometric graphics from Blender for use in a Flash-based game. I have source files that I am editing in a separate editor, because I can often type faster than CS4 can read my typing, and it will sometimes do nothing for what feels like forever. Not productive.

Computer is Mac Mini, 1.84GHz Core 2 Duo 1GB. Decided to upgrade RAM to max 3GB and switch to a solid state drive. Upon attempting to pay for said drive, web bank wouldn't work. Stalled at "Starting Java..." with a (lack of) progress indicator not quite unlike the beach ball of doom. HD on another computer apparently has bad sectors, so switching that to an SSD as well. Tried to relax from all of this by doing some soldering on an electronics kit, but discovered soldering iron wall plug doesn't fit (ungrounded vs. grounded socket).

Boston

Went to Boston to attend Global Entrepreneurship Week, made new friends. Mike and Val are a fun couple, they are both into demoscene. Showed us around MIT. Saw wonderful little machines (by artist Arthur Ganson) with no other purpose than to look interesting. Favorite one was called "solitude", where a machine with gears made of thin wire existed only to move a miniature man's head left and right.