Merry Linkmas before January is finished

I want to recomend to my friends, a website, called "The Stingy Scholar". I learned about it from textbookrevolution.org, a website that catalogues free textbooks available online. The Stingy Scholar, well, let's quote what they say:

This site shows how to get university-caliber educational materials on the cheap. I'm constantly on the look-out for great sites and podcasts.

But I say it comes up with some of the cooler websites out there. I'd say it's a good collection of links, coming up in a blogger's format, and while they do link to MIT's open courseware, it's the links like whatsthatbug.com and endless links to webcomics and I never thought of Cecil Adam's "The Straight Dope" as an "educational material", I suppose it is.

Socket Programming Howto

And blogger.com claims they are having a scheduled outage at 4:00PM PST. It's 6:44PM EST. My little brain goes into translating time zones and ....

So I better write quickly.

I wanted to throw up an appeal for a good introduction to socket programming, complete with information about how to use select and examples, in C, or at least preferably in C, or in a language close enough so that all the examples carry over. I've been using Beej's guide to socket programming, and realized that perhaps why didn't understand any of it is because it is a little rough around the edges. A zillion people recommend that book[1] which I might have to go out and purchase.

The way I've really been doing it is staring at code and then modifying the code so that it does what I want. But then when I start to get something useful I think "Should I credit Beej (or one of the many other tutorials I've copied code from) or should I learn how to do this on my own?"

[1] Unix Network Programming, volume 1

6:50PM, alright, getting it typed in time!

Emails I send....

"WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - U.S. consumer prices fell unexpectedly in December but rose when energy and food costs were excluded, reinforcing
expectations the Federal Reserve will continue to raise interest rates at
the end of the month."

Isn't this the opposite of what people are saying? I thought food and
energy prices were going up, and everything else was going down. Am I
misreading this paragraph?

BBC has it written very differently, the CPI fell 0.1% in December, due to
energy prices going down, but for the year, it goes up 3.4%.

Am I correct in understanding that the CPI does not exclude food and
energy per se, but tries to adjust the value of the things it looks at
based on what they would cost if food and energy prices were constant?
That's the impression I get trying to read the FAQ.

Funny how the Rueters article doesn't mention the CPI at all, yet uses the
exact same numbers.
http://today.reuters.com/business/newsarticle.aspx?type=tnBusinessNews&storyID=$
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4624944.stm
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm

Who still doesn't have a gmail.com address?

I saw some requests on a public forum and realized I still have 100 invites sitting around. If I get an email address from you I'll send an invite.

Back from the mythical land of Arcata

In one piece. Had great fun. Got there after the power was restored, and witnessed the destruction of rainstorms, yet missed 90% of said rainstorms. Played lots of Magic: the Gathering. Didn't play nearly as much Twilight Imperium as I thought would happen, but enough Master of Orion 2 to make up for it. Hung out with my grandmother a lot and my uncles less so. Talked about five year plans and the possibility that my mom has turned into a speed freak and where I might live and where others might live and movies my friends are making and movie directors that my sister is dating. Visited my brothers and hiked all over UC Santa Cruz. Had no money the entire time, living entirely on my broken credit card.

I think that might sum it up. Did I miss anything?