| Your "Hue IQ" |
[Jan. 4th, 2009|02:32 pm] |
Here's a quiz to test your "hue IQ":
http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77
It looks kind of like a squatter site at first. Choose your language and things get better. ;)
I got a perfect score. So, while I may not use the same names for colors that other people do, clearly, I know what I'm looking at! :P |
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| Yep. |
[Nov. 16th, 2008|03:04 am] |
So, I guess it's been forever since I updated this thing. What's gone on?
Well, I quit Epic. They "encouraged" me to do so, and they may even have me marked as being terminated, but literally, I resigned.
There's a position at UW-M that Andrea thinks I'm a perfect match for. I don't share her optimism, but it is a closer match than a lot of job ads I see. I'll be applying for it.
I've spent quite a bit of time mulling over keyboard layouts lately. Back in July I gave Colemak about a 40 hours, but wasn't very happy with it; I learned the whole layout and get up to 35 WPM with it, but it didn't feel all that great, and I was having to think pretty hard about each letter I typed, which I hate; it looked like I'd be in for at least another 160 hours of that, so I threw in the towel. A month or two ago I gave Dvorak about 40 hours, but totally hated it. I only learned about half the layout, and that to only to about 25 WPM. I didn't like the feel at all.
Still, I wanted to learn a better layout than Qwerty. The main problem with Qwerty is, the most frequently used characters are on the top row, so you spend roughly 50% of your time typing up there. Well, I noticed when trying to learn Colemak and Dvorak that I had the hardest time with characters that moved to different fingers than they are on Qwerty (especially if they moved to an adjacent finger!). So, my goal was to design my own layout that addressed those two issues. Here's what I came up with:
Q W D F G Y J K L ;
A S E R T H U I O P
Z X C V B N M , . /
The E, R, T, U, I, O, and P top/home letters swap. The bottom row is completely unchanged (so undo, cut, copy, and paste quick-keys are still where you expect them to be).
I call it "Aserth" after the first six letters on the home row, plus the fact that it sounds cool (kind of like the name of a city in a fantasy novel).
So, I pretty much achieved my goal. Home row usage on Aserth is 50%, and it was fairly easy to learn. Actually, the keys that move from the top row to the home row are extremely easy to learn--I got used to those almost immediately. The hard part is learning the keys that move from the home row to the top row. However, once you learn which keys they are, it's a simple matter of watching out for them as you type, and then mentally "pushing" them up to the top before typing the proper key. That sounds dorky, but it works. I managed to get up to 70 WPM within the first week. My old Qwerty speed was 90 WPM back in July, so it didn't take long at all to get close to that. I'm averaging 80 WPM at the moment. With Dvorak and Colemak, people usually talk timespans of several months to get back to your Qwerty speed, so this is significant!
Aserth isn't perfect. It corrects Qwerty's over-reliance on the top row and, as a consequence, corrects a lot of Qwerty's top/bottom row jumps (e.g, between E and C in "RECEDE"). However, it doesn't correct other things, like the common digraphs ED, LO, and KI being same-finger sequences. Qwerty also over-relies on the left hand (there are far more English words that can be typed with just the left hand than with just the right), which Aserth does not correct.
Still, were I the salesman type, I might actually be able to push this as an alternative to Qwerty. Dvorak famously failed to overtake Qwerty because of the difficulty of retraining Qwerty typists for Dvorak (pretty much every character radically changes position). That's far, far less of a problem with Aserth (by design).
Is it worth it? Well, I admit to having gotten somewhat frustrated with Aserth and even nostalgic for Qwerty a few times, enough to try switching back. It only takes about 10 seconds of typing before I how much better I had it with Aserth, and I immediately go back. It's hard to overstate how much more comfortably it is to be able to stay on the home row most of the time, and I say this as someone who touch-typed Qwerty for 16 years and didn't know any better. :)
Anyway.... |
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| Waaaaaahmbulance |
[Aug. 13th, 2008|08:29 pm] |
Eleanor has been very whiny lately. Unfortunately, she has a penchant for finding THE most excruciatingly annoying noises IN TEH WURLD to express herself.
Last night I lost my temper a bit with her. She'd been taking things off my computer desk, and I'd been taking them back and putting them out of her reach. After a few rounds of that, she grabbed onto the sliding drawer my mouse is on and managed to push it most of the way in. I barked at her and pushed her away. She tends to seize up when pushed, so she fell over and started crying.
I'm worried that, as she gets older, I'm going to be prone to totally flying off the handle with her, as my father did with me when I was a child. I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about it. :/
(Oh yeah, and I had a nervous breakdown of sorts last week that I had to be hospitalized for. It probably didn't help things that I was just coming off of that.) |
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| Blagoblag! |
[May. 17th, 2008|04:33 pm] |
I've been making jokes about the "Blagonet" for a while, and promised Andrea I'd show her the source:
http://xkcd.com/181/
I still haven't completed training at work. Yes, it looks like it's going to take the full six months. Amazing.
My current best score on the Netflix challenge is 0.9126, which, if I submitted it, would land me in 578th place, or thereabouts. Not real great considering only 3411 teams have even submitted anything, and especially not great considering none of the ideas I used are mine. The current #1 score is 0.8646. (Yes, lower is better--it's an error measure.) |
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| This is pretty scary |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|11:51 pm] |
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.pop
Apparently, it's illegal to merely click a link that claims to direct to illegal material, even if there is no such material on the other end.
In this particular case, the FBI set up some links that claimed to direct to a kiddy porn video. Anyone who clicked the link had their IP logged, their ISP forced to cough up their identity, and then got a visit from ARMED OFFICERS who roughhoused them, and then seized (stole) all their computer equipment and a lot of their financial information.
One could argue it's unlikely someone would accidentally click a link claiming to go to something like this. However, according to that story, the FBI did no sanity checking of their data--they didn't even bother checking the referrer site, so they didn't know whether someone used their links to get to their site, or used the links of some prankster who said there was something legal behind those links.
Granted, if, after destroying your computer and other electronics as part of their forensic investigation, they found no evidence you clicked their link (and found no evidence of anything else illegal), maybe they'd let you go. Maybe. But you're still out $1000s in equipment, must spend lots of time getting your finances back in order, probably lost your job while you were in jail, and your neighbors all think you're a dangerous criminal because they watched you get yelled at and cuffed at gunpoint. Great. Even if you win, you lose. |
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| Work, AI |
[Mar. 8th, 2008|12:06 am] |
Work has been somewhat less stressful the past couple of weeks. I put in some time this week to finish an old project. We'll see Monday whether I did it right or not.
My little AI foray has taken many (MANY!) twists and turns, but things are progressing nicely. I figured out a way to get my algorithm(s) to handle datasets in the millions of elements, rather than the thousands. This means it's far more practical. (In CS-speak, I figured out how to reduce the space complexity of the algorithm from quadratic to linear without sacrificing its linear time complexity.)
It turns out Netflix is holding one of those $1M contests to make an algorithm that predicts how people will review movies.
EDIT (03-11-2008):
Contrary to what I thought I'd read, Netflix does, in fact, include temporal data with their testing database. So, it's possible the AI thing I've been dinking with could find a use for this. |
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| Stuff |
[Feb. 20th, 2008|05:25 pm] |
Work has been pretty stressful. There've been a few times I was sure I was going to quit, but I haven't, yet. Hopefully things get better.
I've been working on a couple of simple pattern recognition AIs off and on for the past few weeks. Will post more if anything comes of them.
Even though he never gets the chance to wallow in or eat filth, our dog still reeks. I don't understand it. |
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| WTF?! |
[Jan. 27th, 2008|03:15 pm] |
Alright, first I couldn't create an online account with the student loan place. That is, it pretended to let me create an account, but then it wouldn't let me log in using exactly the same information I just registered with.
Now, I can't create an online account on my credit card company's website! I go in to make an online account, I put in exactly the information they request, and they say it doesn't match their records! That's my real information, and it's the same shit that's on the card they issued me. What the fuck?
Why can't these loan places get their shit together? Is it really that hard to store and retrieve information from a database? Why have they been loaning me money all this time if they don't even know for sure who I am? |
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| bleh |
[Jan. 14th, 2008|06:49 pm] |
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Sorry you had to read my uncouth ranting. I'm better now. |
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| First day of work |
[Jan. 7th, 2008|09:55 pm] |
Today was my first day of work. There were some hiccups. I parked in the wrong spot; the letter I received from the place said there'd be signs indicating where new hires were to park, but I didn't see any. To fight drowsiness (woke up at 6:50 a.m., when I'm used to getting up between noon and 4 p.m.), I tried to drink some coffee. I'm not a coffee drinker--the stuff tastes pretty much like boiled cigarette ashes, to me--so was only able to get down half the cup. Worse, once lunchtime rolled around, the coffee in my stomach had started to revolt, and I just about couldn't eat anything because of nausea. On the way home, there was fog out so thick I could barely see 10 feet in front of my car.
Beyond that, things went alright. There's going to be a lot to absorb and take care of in the next week. I don't think learning the material is going to be hard, it's just that they seem to be throwing lots of disparate things at me at once, and it's difficult to keep it all in my mind at once. |
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| Another "what D&D character are you" quiz |
[Dec. 21st, 2007|08:58 pm] |
The short version:
True Neutral Human Ranger (4th Level)
Str 11, Dex 12, Con 10, Int 13, Wis 12, Cha 11
True neutral? Definitely. Ranger? Maybe--that was my favorite class when I played tabletop. I don't really know how it came up with those stats--the quizzes I took a few months ago were closer, I think.
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| stupid math tricks |
[Dec. 12th, 2007|02:50 am] |
So, I've been banging my head against the wall for the past couple of hours, trying to understand the Command design pattern (computer programming thing). Anyway, one of the examples I was reading through was a little desktop calculator that let you undo math operations. To undo a + 50, you'd do a - 50. To undo a / 5, you'd do a * 5. Okay, so what. Well, I realized the program would crash if you tried to undo multiplication by zero. Why? Well, the undo of * 0 would be / 0--that is, division by zero!
So anyway, that gave me a cute little justification for division by zero being illegal. Every other multiplication by a real number, you can undo with a division by the same real number. However, if you multiply a number by 0, you effectively destroy your data (the number)! Think about it: Given any number n, if you multiply it by zero, you get zero. So, * 0 maps all numbers to zero. But then, if you want to reverse that operation, with division by zero, how can the division operator possibly know what number you started with? (Computer scientists would call this an instance of the pigeonhole principle. A similar argument is used to prove there exists no file compressor [like ZIP or RAR] that can compress all files.)
Maybe I'll run it by Eleanor many years down the road and see what she thinks about it. Then I'll try to convince her that 0.99999... = 1. Hehe! |
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| red-hot molten STUFF! |
[Dec. 1st, 2007|03:41 am] |
So, the aircraft place "filled their position internally." That's what the HR lady told me. Wonderful turn of phrase, eh? Anywho, we're movin' to Maddy, baby!
There are pros and cons to this opportunity. We'd both preferred not to have had to move. The majority of our immediate families are here in Wichita or just a couple of hours away. Also, the work will be more people-oriented than I'd prefer. On the other hand, the pay is outstanding, the benefits are great, and it is mostly computer programming, which I like doing. |
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| employment, games |
[Nov. 24th, 2007|01:43 am] |
I told myself I wouldn't get Half-Life 2 because I found their copy protection mechanism distasteful. However, this weekend Best Buy was selling "The Orange Box"--a bundle containing Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal--for $25 (normally it's $50 or $60). So, yeah, I cracked. Or rather, Andrea never got me a birthday present, so I told her she could get me that as a late present. :)
Oh yeah, the sweet-sounding job made me an offer a couple of days ago. I still haven't heard anything from the aircraft place, but will try to get in touch with them soon. Once it's clearer what's going to happen, I'll have more to say about it. |
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| Drawing to a close |
[Nov. 16th, 2007|11:17 pm] |
So, I've done the aircraft place interview, and we've been out to the sweet-sounding job and I did the run-through there.
The aircraft place said they wanted to hire for January, and that there'd be several interviews. However, it's been about two weeks since I interviewed there, and they haven't gotten back in touch with me. So, I'm pretty sure that one is going nowhere.
The sweet-sounding job. Well, my face-to-face interview there did not go well. The interviewer was just like, "This interview is about you. Start talking!" So I rambled on for an hour and a half about my thesis and a personal project I did; the guy had zero background in almost everything I was talking about, so I don't think any of it made any sense at all to him. At the end, I had to take a set of three tests. One was a math/riddle test. I think it had maybe 14 questions on it, and I know for sure I missed a couple of them, and in retrospect, neither was even very hard. What concerns me more than just missing the problems is, the test was timed, and I took a long time to complete it--long enough that I should have got everything right. Needless to say, I'm fully expecting a rejection email from them next week. |
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| They like me! They really like me! |
[Oct. 30th, 2007|08:38 pm] |
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Got an email today from the sweet-sounding job people. I guess I tested okay (well?) after all, because they want to fly me in for an on-site interview! They're covering airfare, hotel, some food, and are giving me a tour of the facilities and the city! It sounds like they'll cover Andrea's fees to go down with me, as well, which is cool. |
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| Jobs and Games II |
[Oct. 26th, 2007|06:35 pm] |
I went and took a skills assessment for the sweet-sounding job. It was one of those deals where you have to hand-write computer programming language code, and so, never get to test it. Think of it like having to come up with a recipe for a new dish, yet never getting to actually touch the ingredients or cook anything--even if you're a pro, there's still an uncomfortable element of faith there. All considering, I thought I did a decent job. However, I can't shake the feeling that I screwed everything up and they'll never get back in touch with me; it's been a week and I haven't heard from them, exacerbating such feelings.
Miraculously, one the local aircraft places responded to my resume submission and wants to interview me. Unfortunately, the interview is 9 in the morning. That's probably nothing at all to you guys, but is way early for me! I know, I know.
Andrea's mom wants me to work November and December as a seasonal employee where she works. I'm not thrilled about the work--it's a bit of a throwback to my days at the post office many years ago, and I feel it's a waste of my talents--but I have to start paying on my student loans in Jan, so can't really afford to be choosy.
As mentioned in my comments for the last entry, I finished MotB with a Brd 1/Ftr 14/Rdd 10/Fb 5. I highly recommend that build if you don't care about casting many spells.
In other news, I've started doing a little working out. Carrying Eleanor around has felt harder on my arms than I believe it should, and I've always had relatively weak biceps, so I've been doing a kind of hammer-curl-into-shoulder-press exercise. I just finished up with 30 pound dumbbells today, and hope to work up to 50s by the end of the year, which is my goal. From what I've seen, 50s are about average for fit guys, so that's a good place to be. If my body seems to be holding up by then (questionable), and I'm not starting to look like a freak with overly large gunz, I might shoot for more. |
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| Jobs and Games |
[Sep. 27th, 2007|08:11 pm] |
Finally had my phone interview today. It went as well as could be expected. The guy conducting the interview sounded at least as nervous as I was, so that helped some. Next, they're going to be sending me skill assessment to complete. That's encouraging, since I tend to test well.
On the NWN2 front, it looks like Europe has already gotten ahold of MotB. The Bioware forums are alight with discussion about feats and the like. Surprisingly, devastating critical didn't make it in. There also seems a dearth of class-specific epic feats. Rather bizarrely, warlocks get virtually none of their PnP epic feats, yet do get access to epic spells. Huh? |
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