Shawn Lankton Online

I would like to introduce you to a wonderful product: Pallet wrap as a packing tool. As many of you know, I’ve been participating in quite a bit of moving during the last months. Moving myself, and the majority of my friends has taken up several weekends, lots of hours, and more than a few beers.

We’ve had U-hauls, falls, lifting, straining, carrying, and maneuvering a-plenty. One thing stood out, though that may revolutionize the way I pack and move. While renting a U-haul in Charleston, NC we saw this innocent-looking roll of plastic on a spool and thought, “why not, its only five bucks.” This would turn out to be the purchase of the century!This product is like a roll of plastic wrap (Sran wrap, Cling wrap, Glad wrap, etc… the stuff you use to cover half-eaten potato salad or wrap chicken before freezing it). But instead of being in the usual kitchen-drawer sized box, this bad boy is on a spool with an easy-grip plastic handle and wrapped up thick (about 10 in. [25 cm])! Now anyone can see the utility of this immediately. “Oh, I can wrap up drawers so they don’t come out…” Sure. In fact that’s a great use. But what *isn’t* immediately apparent is that this stuff has a million uses!

We used it for wrapping drawers, wrapping beds to comforters, wrapping AV equipment together, wrapping computer wires, wrapping up an elliptical so it wouldn’t bang around, wrapping tools together, wrapping books together, wrapping the cat up… um yeah, sorry about that, cat… Basically, everything could use a little wrapping to make it easier to carry and move. (or in the case of the cat, to make it a little more pissed off and hilarious.)

What really amazed me though, and inspired me to write this was last night when I drove across Atlanta with a mattress and a box spring held to the top of my car using *only*… you guessed it, plastic wrap! This stuff is so strong that it required nothing else to keep those bad-boys on the top of my car even at 55mph!

So, the moral of this story: Next time you’re moving, get the spool of plastic wrap. (In fact, go get some right now… you’ll use it before your next move.)

Those of you who don’t know or don’t care what Matlab is… today’s post isn’t for you. Just skip it.

Now that the cool kids have left, us geeks can be alone: So, in my lab at GT we primarily use Matlab, so I’m trying to rekindle that romance after a torrid affair with C++ at Siemens. Unarguably, one of the best things about Matlab is how easy it is to visualize things. However, one little tidbit has always bugged me. There is always that damn big fat gray border around all of your figures. This is only mildly annoying while programming… but when it comes time to save figures out for a paper or a report annoying becomes infuriating. You have to scale and crop and zoom and you can’t script it well at all. (Not being able to script things is one of my pet peeves.)

But fear not dear friends… I have found the solution: exportfig. This is a great script for Matlab that lets you A) use tight borders for the figure, B) change the colors cleverly to black and white or grayscale, C) save the figure directly as a .eps file for easy integration with LaTeX! Here’s a nice page that explains how to use the library: Exporting Figures for Publication: Part 2.

One question that I haven’t been able to solve is how to eliminate that gray border in day-to-day usage. I pretty much never want it. If anybody has any suggestions, send them my way!

And, since I have the attention of all you Matlab-ers out there, I just got R2006a (this is the newest version). This baby rocks. It has a cool feature that allows you to execute code in little blocks called ‘cells.’ This is exactly how I debug and prototype, so it saves me a lot of highlighting and pressing [F9]. Check it out if you have the means to.

Over my Christmas Travelling I finished “Suburban Nation” by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck. It was a very interesting read that really identifies the pattern that you see all through all of the United States. It points out the fact that no matter where in the country you go, as soon as you get out of whatever ‘downtown’ remains, you see the same Bed Bath and Beyonds, Best Buys, Targets, Wal Marts, McDonnalds, Wendys, Starbucks, housing pods specking the paved, parking spot covered, unwalkable terrain.
Not only does “Suburban Nation” identify this problem… The authors also discuss the historical caues as well as the current policy that keeps this type of development going. The book makes me yearn to live in a world where everybody lives in a real town, and I don’t have to feel like I’m in the same city everywhere I go! It also makes me happy that the place that I live now I can ride my bike to the gym, to work, to class, and to the grocery. I can even walk to the neighborhood bar or cafe!

I’m hoping I can keep a similarly city lifestyle once I’m a ‘grown-up.’