Jeremy's Blog

Please be sensitive to the feelings of others. Don’t compromise your own feelings, but don’t let their (or your) irrationality allow you to be blinded by the fact that they have feelings too.

Sidenote: If you’re reading this, Dr. Mom, I’m sorry about what happened before. Oh, and this entry isn’t about that incident, but something more recent. Completely unrelated to what happened with us.

Ruzena’s a college student and her doing well means a lot to me. While I was in Houghton, I did my part to help her study for a lab practical that she had in her Botany course. She used flash cards as a means to help her learn and memorize the common and scientific names of the plants that she needed to know for this exam. They worked well and I believe they helped her quite a bit. Boy, are they a pain to put together.

As you all know, I’m a programmer. Being a programmer, I believe that software is doing its part more and more everyday to make our lives easier. I like to solve problems, but what are the problems that need to be solved?

1. They’re tedious and difficult to make.
2. They’re somewhat easy to lose, since they can be tiny slips of paper or note cards.
3. They’re not necessarily environmentally friendly.

Okay, maybe that last one is stretching it a bit, but all of you can agree to the first two points I’m sure. So, my goal is to attempt to solve the problems by making flash cards easy to create and easy to access from anywhere you have an internet connection. Enter OmegaFlash, my company’s Open Source Web-Based Flash Card System. In the interim between the company starting and us releasing our first major product out into the wild, I’m going to be going on the endeavor to work on a few projects and open sourcing them for anyone to use and modify.

With a simple and easy to use interface, you can create flash cards for anything. The initial version of the system is going to support users creating a key to store their flash card groups under. You keep the key somewhere safe because it’s what you use to “login” to the system with and how you access your flash cards. You can create multiple groups of flash cards. For example, Ruzena might need to create flash cards for Botany and Western Civ for whatever reason, so she can separate these into two groups so the flash cards don’t get mixed up. It’ll support uploading or linking to images to be displayed on the “front” of the flash card along with whatever text you put on the front, and whatever text you decide to put on the back. For actually viewing the cards, it’ll give you the option of going through the cards in order or going through them randomly, viewing either the front or back first.

For future versions, I’m planning to add the ability to have the flash cards test you, so you enter in what you think is on the front/back and it will tell you if you’re correct and can give you hints on what the other side has if you’re incorrect. I hope this is something that more students besides just Ruzena can benefit from, so I’ll be linking to it from here when it’s ready to be used. Also, keep an eye out for the SourceForge project that’s currently pending approval.

Enjoy.

Ruzena mentioned in an earlier post that I had started Omega Vortex back up, so I just wanted to give a quick update to let everyone know that I’ve setup Omega Vortex’s Company Blog which we’ll use to keep the public updated on our progress on things. Have a look, bookmark it, and let us know what you think.

Greetings from NY. I’m up a little late doing some calculations on my finances to make sure I can still live through the month.

I made it out to NY safe and sound and was able to make all of the arrangements necessary to get from Buffalo to Houghton, so Ruzena and I have been able to spend some time together. Still a few more days to go, although we’re going to kind of take tomorrow to ourselves. She’s got a lot of work to do for her classes and I need to put some hours in to cover the ridiculous amount of money I dropped on a suit right before I left. I know I needed one. I knew it was going to be expensive. But, man… I also need to remind myself to tell Ruzena that I was off by $100, tomorrow. For some reason I was thinking I paid $700 for the suit, but that was more like what we spent that day (suit + groceries). The suit itself was only a little over $600. And that’s the full deal, by the way. I didn’t own any of it myself. I needed the pants, shirt, tie, belt, shoes, coat … The whole nine yards. So, I’ll be taking very good care of it. Hopefully, it will last me quite a while.

In more personal news, it’s great to be back with Ruzena again. Those of you that know us know the circumstances behind our relationship, and I have to say that I’ve been the weak one, lately. I did a little research on what I was going through before I came out here and the symptoms all sound like it’s separation anxiety, so I’m hoping this little visit will help fix me up. It’s been a lot more expensive than a psychiatrist would’ve been, but there’s really no better therapy for me, right now. Her moving into college mixing with my personal fears and such caused my brain to stop working properly, for a while. I think I’ll be okay again, after being with her here, though.

Anyway, it’s late. I need to get to bed so I’ll actually be able to get up and have lunch with her tomorrow before we go our separate ways to get work done. Goodnight.