The Quixotic Engineer

Since it’s a common question, I thought I’d address it with a quick guide to pronouncing the word quixotic. The confusion is well warranted; while it’s derived from the Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote (roughly KEE-HOE-TAY), the word quixotic has an anglicized pronunciation (KWIK-SO-TIC).

I found a few definitions of the word on the net, but I most preferred this one from Wikipedia: “Quixotism is the description of a person or an act that is caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality.” Engineers are practical by definition, but as a nerd who believes in open-source software, video games as art and harnessing nuclear fusion (someday!), I can’t help but feel like a dreamer at times.

Has it really been a month already since Vol. 1? November just flew by. For the unfamiliar, this is my monthly attempt to conglomerate a number of disconnected recent discoveries into some kind of coherent musical suggestion selection. A musical buffet, if you will.

First up is Robots in Disguise, an “Electro Punk” DJ Duo from the UK. I’ve been enjoying their 2005 album Get RID! this week, it’s got the quirky kind of sound that I’ve come to expect from UK electronica. Strangely enough, I was originally linked to them by Destructoid of all places. The clip below is their latest single “The Sex Has Made Stupid”, which gets bonus points for featuring some mildly unsettling robot pornography.

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Call of Duty 4’s storyline has all the insight and depth of a James Bond film; Russian and Middle Eastern terrorists are the modern day stock villains. That being said, there’s a reason that the Call of Duty series has stood out in a sea of military shooters: Infinity Ward creates campaigns that are masterfully orchestrated and filled with stunningly cinematic moments.

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Video game enthusiasts have had a deluge of great titles to choose from this fall. What started building momentum back in August with the release of Bioshock is coming to a head in November, with hotly anticipated titles such as Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect and Rock Band arriving within scant weeks of each other.

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I had mentioned in an earlier post that I was mildly frustrated by the “new spam messages” counter in Gmail, mostly because I mistook it for the “new inbox messages” counter in my peripheral vision. Before my hard drive crash, I used a Firefox plug-in called Greasemonkey to hide the counter. This solution turned out to be inelegant when I realized that at work, at school, and on any computer other than my own I would still be visually assaulted by that silly counter. I decided then and there that there must be a better way.

Fortunately for me, there was. I had previously tried to go about using the remarkably versatile Gmail filters to mark all spam messages as read, but lacked an adequate description of what messages to mark. A closer look into Gmail search semantics revealed that I could use the keywords “in:spam” to refer to the all messages in my spam folder. Knowing this, I set up the following filters:

• Has the words: in:spam
• Doesn’t have: my name, my school, my work, etc.
• Do this: Mark as read

This filter simple and efficiently hides all new spam messages, while still alerting me when potential non-spam messages have been blocked. If you’re as fussy as I am when it comes to Gmail, I hope that this little trick comes in handy.