26 July 2004 02:01
please pray for my coworkers people—––because i'm staying up way past my bedtime tonight.
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wow am i ever bringing back the memories tonight. i just dusted off my old gateway2000 anykey(tm) 125 key keyboard, assembled in Mexico by worker "F/EC2" on 04-26-95. if it helps give you perspective, i was a mere 14yo and the label was printed with a dot matrix. (please ignore any space typo's, this poor keyboard has been through the mill and hte spacebar seems to be heading out the door first). i've spent more time in the past two days on my TI-92plus htan i have since leaving school. i spent half the day yesterday playing with a nice (albeit probably useless) trig problem. i spent half the day today browsing a hacker lexicon, the descriptions therein bringing back fond memories of life in the dorm, CS majors, the batcave, and gecko&c.
i'll start with yesterday. i wanted to write yesterday, but i couldn't. i was entirely too lethargic. after lying on my 'high quality' futon for 12 hours, my body couldn't take it anymore. that was the first time i'd gotten up at quarter to three on a saturday afternoon in a phenominally long time. my mindset here is quite different from the days when i'd reguarly get up on saturdays intime to make saga before it closed at 1800. now two in the afternoon seems like a really really late time to be getting up. i got up today at eight, and that seemed late, even after yesterday. so i never quite recovered yesterday. i was trying to get some stuff done, but wound up working on that trig problem all day.
i was browsing trekearth.com and came across a picture that i wanted to workshop. the guy had taken it off-kilter with the horizon, so i was straightening it out and recropping. when you rotate a picture, you automatically lose some of your border in order to maintain a frame that is parallel with the horizon. i went back through some of my pictures to try and find one that needs straightening for example, but alas, i'm so good at holding a camera...[3].
so i found one that didn't matter as much which way was up, clips. anyroad, i got curious to know what percentage of the original picture was there, so i sat down and puzzled away at it. (this isn't the first time for such things for me, but it has been a while). i started off with a square, which was easier (1:1 ratio), and came up with this formula, which results in the percentage remaining if a square is rotated 'A' degree(s).
ex: given A = 2ยบ, (with the square, dimensions are irrevelant because we know already the ratio). you can type this into your ti if your bored, 1+sin(2)*(sin(2)/(sin(45+2))-2^(1/2))/sin(45+2), and you'll get 93.5%. someday i myself will get bored and will type up a proof and calc screenshots and graphs and all that mishmash, untilthen you just have to believe me...
that was a lot of fun, esp the simplifying. but then i started in on a rectangle, spec an 800x600 one which is what i deal with on trekearth. that didn't simplify so nicely. the actuall dimensions again don't matter, but the ratio does. you can plug in 1024x768 or 800x600 and you'll still get the same results as 4/3:1. but here's my pretty drawing. i had to put my pencil there to help my poor camera focus, it wasn't liking dim lead on white background. eventually i simply had to get unlazy and use manual focus, which meant the pencil had become extraneous, but by that point i was simply trying to hold still for a 1/5sec shutter time (which is next to impossible), plus i wasn't unlazied that much. but i had to bump the contrast and brightness up on both paper shots, so please excuse the coloring on my poor pencil. i actually stole it from work, but since it was doomed to be disposed of, i prefer to term it "rescue."
{ahem} ANYROAD, back to the topic at hand, rectangles were a lot messier and simplification simply wasn't happening. so i ended up writing a function for my calculator, if you really want the code i could give it to you, but i doubt anyone has much intrest. but entering RECT(800,600,1) gives me a beautiful return of {"790x586" "1.35:1" "96.5%} (so i added some bells and whistles, sue me). i got tired of it taking 30 seconds to draw a graph (i never said my function was streamlined) that i moved to something with a bit more processing power (understatement: my p3 750mhz laptop. though i would hesitate long and hard to call qbasic an enlightened way of stepping up—talk about being unequally yoked...).
the bells and whistles and qbasic bits didn't happen until today, the remainder of yesterday was spent watching foyle's war and an episode of nova on the engineering of the twin towers with a step by step breakdown of the stresses that caused them to eventually collapse. i subconciously as well as purposefully ignored much of the hubbalaloo surrounding nine eleven, including all the interesting stuff like this. this was the most back to back footage of the collapse that i'd watched since seeing it on the news on the original day. now that nine eleven isn't so much of a public fad, i felt it safe to watch this documentary when i came across it last night without offending my sense of being anti-mob.
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today actually started out being the opposite of yesterday. that means i got up almost seven hours earlier. then i went on a two hour bike ride to get my blood stirring. aha! but then i sat back down at my computer and spent the rest of the day staring at it. here's where i spent my day, with this blog entry sitting in infant form (although it'd been collecting notes since yesterday). fortunately, i'd been saving it (that goes waaaay back to oft-occuring yet unpredictable power outages in mandeville jamaica when i was 12 or something) because i came across this:
which displeased me greatly. i eventually had to resort to pulling the ac power and the battery to communicate my intentions with it. all because i tried to look at a prime number (it was a display driver conflict, probably had to do with me using opera). i don't even know what i was going to do with it. part of it was arrogance at having a broadband connection (the same arrogance that has me uploading all these pictures at you), blithely ignoring the warning to 28k surfers. (i got all the way to four percent before windows crashed. i admit, the file was big). but it made me remember and wonder if schooby still has those cd's lying around that he burned pi onto for umpteen tens of thousands of digits.
ahhh, perfect segue. did you know that a nanocentury is within half a percent of pi?——
okay, so it wasn't a perfect segue. that is, it segued great, but it was all out of place chronologically... on my bike ride, i rode around in a cemetary down in huntington beach. htere was a sundile there that had four quotes on the four sides of the pedestal. three were scripture (gen 1.14, ecc 1.9, and one from ps), the fourth was a poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney (i had to google for her name, the pedestal didn't give a source—type the poem in and it appears to be a common one for sundials):
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of a bird for mirth;
You are near God's heart in a garden,
Than anywhere else on earth.
now, i would have read that tounge in cheek at the cemetary/mortuary, because it was a garden in the barest sense of the word. morelike a park. nice trees and lawns, but not a garden. when i think garden i think colonial gardens or jane austen era gardens. something with structure that still allows for apparent randomness of nature (mathamatics notwithstanding). i would even find myself nearer God's heart in a vegatable garden than that cemetary, provided the sun was hot and i had loose dirt between my bare toes. not because it's a cemetary (i'm not very reverent for the dead), but because it was cold and aloof.
it was an interesting charachter study, riding around htere. it's peculiar what some people will put on gravesites. there's also a large vietnamese ethnic group in the area, so there are gravesites that are more like shrines, with candles and incense and flowers and little whirley fans. that was a kicker for me, i always associate those with white trash hickville yard ornaments, to go with the glass crystal ball and plywood silohette of grandma in polka dots bending over the flowerbed. but they've got some fancy gravestones out htere now too, etching technology has apparently moved up, i saw a couple with color portraits that were at least 72dpi quality. of course, one of the designs puzzled me for a while until i figured out it was tracks from the riding mower in the dust on the glazed surface.
eulogy of the day: (on a 4yo's headstone)
"our little angel in heaven (raising hell)"
since i'm in a quoting business, and since i'm all chronologically whacked anyway, i'll give the quote that i started this file off with in the first place last night while watching a blurp from that 70's show.
"you know what they say...Rome was built in a day"
i think i'll segment today's post, i've still got a ways to go...
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