Movies on the big screen and graphing on my computer screen

I think I set a new record for seeing movies in theaters. In six days last week I saw four movies.

• Monday She's out of my League When I first saw the trailer for this movie I knew if I saw it it would be because I was watching it with Larry.


• Tuesday The Book of Eli This was at the dollar theater. They have a special where movies on Tuesday night are half price; the ticket only cost one dollar.


• Friday Shutter Island We saw it at The Block and ate Krispy Kreme Doughnuts afterward.


• Saturday Date Night This most recent release on the list is also the least impressive. Afterwards, the In-N-Out on Bristol was frequented which reminded me of high school.

This all started because my friend Larry said he wanted to do some things and the best we could come up with was seeing movies. Since his quarter at UCI (our quarter at UCI now that I am taking classes through extension) just started, he wanted to hang out and do fun things before the work piled up. I saw the first three movies with him and some other people while the last one was with Aden and Dave.

Graphing in MATLAB
On Sunday my first MATLAB assignment was due. One of the questions ended up with this as an answer.


Launch of the Labels
A few days ago I decided to start using labels for my posts. After adding labels to many of my older writings and changing the layout of the posts to display their labels, I had no success. After searching for solutions, I found one that said to click "Revert widget templates to default" in Layout> Edit HTML. I had to click it a couple of times, but now the labels are up and running.

There are two divergent approaches to take to tags (or labels as Blogger calls them).

1. Tag as many different topics as possible. This means an author will come up with new tags all the time even if they are only used in one or two posts.


2. Only create tags for large groups of posts. This means posts will have vaguely descriptive tags, but when a reader looks at all the posts under a specific tag he will find things he might like but would have never searched for directly.

Tags can be used in either extreme or somewhere between these two views. I think tags are only useful when they connect a reader with other posts that might be of interest. For example, I could go tag happy and list the name of every movie I mentioned in this post (4), the places I ate (2), my new record (1), UCI class (1), MATLAB (1), programing (1), graphing (1), my thoughts on blogs (1), and even a tag about tags (1) for good measure. However, I do not see myself mentioning some of the tags (the 4 movies or the record) ever again. What I do say about some of the other topics (like MATLAB, programming, and graphing) is so tangential it offers nothing a person would ever want to seek out. Of the 13 tags I just listed, over half of them would be dead ends.

Tagging anything and everything possible reminds me of people in high school (1 more tag for high school) who would highlight most of the lines in their textbooks. Overusing highlighting or tagging undermines its purpose in calling attention to important things.

If you have not figured it out by now, I favor the minimalist approach on tags.