Followups

1. The empty restaurant building across the street from me now has a sign that says:

Coming Soon
Cajun Grill Cafe
Bourbon Chicken !!

So. More chicken then. But at least it's not the battered and deep-fried kind, like the last two places (that failed there). If it's anything like the one at the mall food court, I'll probably eat there regularly. If not, well, I hope it will serve actual Cajun food, which the mall food court doesn't.

2. I stopped using the shoe lift.

You know how when one of your joints needs to be cracked, it feels sort of itchy and naggy (and eventually stabby) until you crack it? Well, that's what happens to an undefinable spot in the back left of my skull after a few weeks of shoe lifting. The chiropractor couldn't reach it. The backup chiropractor couldn't either. It takes weeks after I stop shoe lifting to work out on its own.

I think I'll save the shoe lift for times when I'm doing lots of touristing.

3. She is a dear, sweet little old lady. She was retired and gone, but says she found it not to her liking. Now she's unretired and back, and watching over us all once more.

4. Good things that have ended sometimes have epilogues and sequels.

Business at their wholesale seafood market is slow but growing steadily. The bun that came in February is now in China. The bun's brother, who was in China, is now here. A few of the original takeout customers have indeed found their way there. And apparently my Mandarin has improved due to those eight months of being unable to communicate with the new takeout staff otherwise.

5. The traffic light that hates me still hates me. For a while I was driving through the shopping center to go through the crosslight without having to make a U-turn. Then for a while it looked like it had changed its ways - so I lost the habit of driving through the shopping center. But it was all just a clever ploy! Now, this past week, it's back to the same inappropriate redness as before. T.T

6. Last year I was paid to skulk around a dormful of sleeping children. Last week they paid me to do it again. Next year I'm penciled in to do it a third time. Who says peace of mind is priceless?

7. Not only can I touch my toes without warming up, after today's yoga class I could touch my thumbs to the floor! Yay progress! :)

Trust

You can trust someone with your life.
You can trust someone with your heart.
You can trust someone with your money.
These three things are not the same, and should not be confused with each other.

Depression

There are really two kinds of depression. There's the emotional kind, which is when something bad happens and you're sad. Then there's the clinical kind, which is when your brain chemicals stop working quite right, and you think you're sad.

The world has an emotionscape, where all sorts of emotions are flying around everywhere all the time. As an empath who constantly experiences other people's emotions, I've come to understand the difference between an emotion that I myself am feeling, and an emotion from an external source. It's subtle, and the brain is naturally inclined to assign internal reasons for emotions that appear without one, which makes it all that much harder to distinguish. If anger appears, then my brain finds something to be mad about. If sadness appears, it finds reasons to be sad.

Last weekend I lost all will to do anything other than lie around staring at the wall. I didn't want to do anything else. I had no energy to write anything, or cook anything, go out for any reason, or otherwise engage in anything. Attempts to snap myself out of it by jumping into the apartment complex pool were fruitless. I played a lot of Bloons.

But I wasn't sad. I have nothing to be sad about. I just had every other symptom of a clinical depression. It went away sometime yesterday evening, possibly because I ate something specific that got my brain moving again (though I don't know for sure). Still, it was an interesting experience. It seems I've gotten so good at separating external emotions that now I can be depressed without being depressed.

Things I Remember

I remember the world holding its breath, watching to see what we would do. I remember when we stood at the precipice, on the cusp of world unification, strength in togetherness, so many directions we could go, so many possibilities. All it needed was a great leader with the confidence to take that step forward. And I remember thinking, this man, the one who leads us, is not that man, and he will stumble and fall.

And he did.

I remember the aftermath when "we" decided strength came from standing alone. It's something a great many teenage boys start out thinking but eventually, as they mature, learn better and grow out of. I remember thinking that the one with the most power had not. Many people stall out somewhere along the way, for many reasons. It's unfortunate that one of those had come to that place of power, a scared little boy instead of a true adult.

I remember when we became "we" and eventually not "we." For me, it was when he declared war on "terror" - and I knew we would be tilting at windmills forevermore. That was when he lost me.

But I remember all the hope in that first perfect moment.

---

What I said last year also still applies.
Jim Wright's memories
Robert Sloan2's thoughts on the matter
Alcar's thoughts

My Office

While I was taking keyboard pictures yesterday, I also took some of my office. Here's what my desk area looks like:

Retarded keyboard arrangement of keys

The esc key so needs to move to that blank key above it. -.-

---

By popular demand, here's some more pictures of my keyboard(s). This one shows where the tilde is located:


And here's the whole keyboard, followed by my home keyboards. The work one is from Sun and goes with a Sunblade running Solaris (unix). The main home one is a wireless that came with my iMac G5. It's a piece of crap compared to the ADB that came with the Powermac in 1996. I really wish Apple would go back to whatever technology/company made their ADB keyboards back then...

Deep End Geometry Revisited

(Note to Nathan: It's math again, but this time with no numbers at all! Only pictures! If it still doesn't make sense, well, the pictures are pretty....)


This is the type of picture I've been making for the past three weeks. That rainbow blob thing in the middle is made up of several thousand dots¹. Wouldn't it be nice if I could stretch them out to fill the whole box instead of having them all jammed together in the middle?


Here's the direction I want to stretch them. The one on the right is a bird's eye view of the same thing. Unfortunately, I can't stretch them out that way. I can only stretch them in one of these ways:


Obviously, then, I should move the blob until it's pointing in a better direction. To be able to stretch them the way I want, it needs to be pointed like so:

See how easy that was in Photostudio? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that when it's a bunch of dots on a grid. To do what I want, I need to either move the grid around to match the blob, or move the blob around to match the grid.

Lots of people made lots of suggestions, all of which had strange side effects, so in the end, I didn't end up using any of them. See, it turns out that although it's hard to rotate a blob of dots when you have them in a box, it's not at all hard when you've got them on a circle². In fact, it's ridiculously easy.


Yep. That's what I call thinking outside the box. :) And it allows me to do this:

---

Footnotes for the advanced class:

1. 79,744 total data points. Which needed to be rotated 55 degrees counterclockwise.

2. Cartesian coordinates are X, Y, Z. Polar coordinates are directions with magnitudes (or angles with radii) (or, in 3D, it's azimuth and elevation to go with the radii). Rotating in polar is easy because all you do is add to the angle. So I converted from cartesian to polar, did some addition, and then converted from polar back to cartesian. Voila!

Wanted: Greater Variety of Restaurants

The restaurants within walking distance to me are:

1. A southern-style diner with late hours. Lots of deep fried stuff. Good crab stew and hot wings. Expensive sandwiches. Fake scallops. Their food quality had plummeted the last couple times I was there, so I try to ignore it.

2. A Japanese restaurant. Good but not great sushi. Run by Mandarin-speaking Chinese people.

3. A Domino's.

4. A Pizza Hut that also has a WingStreet in it. Good wings, better pizza than Domino's, much farther walk.

5. A Sonic. This is a drive-in fast food place with burgers and shakes and stuff. It doesn't usually come to mind when I'm trying to decide on a restaurant to walk to.

Then there's an empty restaurant building. The last two restaurants in it were both deep fried chicken places. They probably went under from competition with the diner. The diner's food quality has probably plummeted due to lack of competition from the chicken places.

Me, I'd be thrilled to see something in it that offers food other than what we already have in the immediate area. A Chinese takeout, for example. Or maybe Mexican - we do have a fair number of Hispanics in the area. Or if someone could pull off an Indian takeout, or a Korean takeout, or Greek. I could do with a baklava stand. Anything besides more deep-fried chicken.

Flowering Chives

My chives are in full flower. I saw some bees frolicking in them this afternoon, but neglected to take pictures while they were there. The tomatoes behind them are also doing well. Still no fruit and only a few flowers.

Some Easy Arithmetic

Today I made graphs. Lots of graphs.

The goal was to make a two-month time series. I picked out 19 days. The figure for each day had four panels. Each panel had two lines. Each line had 110-190 dots.

So, that's 19 figures. 76 total panels. 152 total lines. 9,348 total dots.

Predictably, the first one was insanely difficult and took 5-6 hours. (Arrr Matlab.) After that, I had a script. The other 75 took maybe 20 total minutes (interspersed over a bunch of blog reading... >.>). Yay Matlab. :p

Printing involved some voodoo (is there any other software out there where, if something fails to work the first time you do it, it inexplicably works fine when you do it a second time? even if you change absolutely nothing in between?), but fortunately it didn't involve sacrificing any goats like the last time I had to work with YY-plots.

Tomorrow? I get to do it all over again with the same 9,348 dots - only this time, I'll be doing it in 3D.

random thought for the day (...or month)

If they have enough advanced planning and funds, anyone can do anything they want to us at any time. The key is not in stopping them from doing things. The key is to stop them from wanting to.

Closure

One hundred eighty two days after I swung the clue-by-four, he said "I'm sorry."

So I called him an asshole.

He said again, "I'm sorry."

I called him less mature than a 15 year old.

He said again, "I'm sorry."

So I forgave him.

The end.

Headlines of our Lives

Apparently we're having another UCF Bonding Event this week, so here's my placeholder post in case any of them land here. :)

Going off the deep end with geometry

[Warning to Nathan: Lots of math is about to ensue. You might want to cover your eyes...]

Yesterday it took me all night to learn that single precision numbers and double precision numbers are not at all the same thing. Not that Matlab will tell you this, of course. They'll look exactly the same to the untrained eye. No, you have to specifically ask, using an obscure function such as superiorfloat(). All Matlab will do is inexplicably refuse to make straightforward plots of those numbers until after you change them.

Today I learned that it's quite difficult to rotate the axes of a cartesian system to anything other than 90 degrees, especially if you've never learned any math past calculus (and you didn't do so good in calculus).

There's:

origin=newpole(polelat, polelon);
[lat_rotate,lon_rotate] = rotatem(lat, lon, origin, 'forward', 'degrees');

... which will indeed do some rotating of the data. However, the end result won't bear much resemblance to what you had at the start.

Then (via John) there's:

xdist = sqrt(((m*lat - m*b) ./ (1 + m^2)).^2 + (((1-m^2)*lat - b + b*m^2 + m*lon) ./ (1 + m^2)).^2);
or
xdist = sqrt((((lon + m*lat + m*b) / (m + 1/m)) + b - lat).^2 + (((lon/m + lat + b) / (m + 1/m)) - lon).^2);

... which uses linear algebra and vectors and dot products and all sorts of stuff that go completely over my head. I have no clue how the equations got derived, only that they don't seem to do what I want them to, and I don't know how to fix them. Also it occurred to me while I was fiddling with them that they'll only give me the x values, not the y values...

Snave tells me it's simple. Those matrices look scary to me. o.O

On Monday I'll reveal my utter ignorance to the local Matlab expert, and maybe she'll figure out how to do all this for me. Either that or I'll abandon this foray and go to Plan B (which is to do what my boss actually asked for as opposed to what he wants (and will probably be asking for when he finds out that what he asked for won't be sufficient)).

The Return of My Infamous Food Posts Part II: House Specials

Nathan asked:

What's really in the 'house special' fried rice?

At the takeout where I worked, it was chicken, pork, shrimp, and vegetables. You could get each of those separately, or beef fried rice, or scallops if you wanted to pay more. We also had 'house special' lo mein, egg foo young, chow mein, chop suey, and chow mei fun. And it was possible to get sweet & sour pork, chicken, and shrimp together, but we called that a "combo" instead. (Which was not to be confused with our "combination platters"...). Then there was Hunan Triple Delight, which was chicken, beef, and shrimp. And Four Seasons, which was all four of the main meats. There were other meat combination things too that involved various forms of seafood.

To answer the unspoken insinuation in the question that you may or may not have intended: no, we did not serve cat meat. Chinese restaurants don't serve cat meat, they're subjected to the same health dept regulations as every other restaurant - which includes checks of whether food suppliers are approved or not. Chinese restaurant owners are either confused by the concept or insulted, depending on how often they've heard it. Either way it isn't very funny from the kitchen side of the counter.

My Lush, Expansive Garden Volume Four

Here's what my garden looks like at the moment. To the left is the present state of my basil. I let five of the flower stalks do their natural thing, but have been trimming off any new ones I see. Still, it was too late, as you can tell by its pale yellow color... On the other hand, I have lots of little black seeds. I can make new basil! There are two small sprouts at the bottom, possibly the earliest seeds, which are making the original rounded leaves instead of the pointy ones.

Meanwhile, my chives are also flowering. None of the buds have opened yet, but I'll get closeups when they do.

The other two pots are tomatoes. These were originally planted by a neighbor who had 50 of them all in one tiny pot. He offered to give me a few. Somehow I ended up with 20 - about 15 in the two pots pictured and another 5 in a third pot on the neighbor's patio. (They're there because animals kept digging them up when they were on my patio.) Something keeps eating the flower buds, so I've sprayed them down with Sevin, so hopefully they'll actually manage to fruit at some point.

The Return of My Infamous Food Posts Part I: Soups

Jeri asked:

Do you cook? What do you like to make when you're cooking for others?

I do cook. By far I'm best at making soups. They're easy because it's much harder to burn something while boiling it than by doing anything else to it. It doesn't generally matter how much of any given ingredient is in it or whether I leave it out entirely. Textures aren't very important. They keep well and freeze well (try freezing them in individual portions for high convenience). Pre-boiling prep for the kinds I make tend to be limited to washing and chopping, as opposed to making dumplings or other heavily hands-on things (that is, I'm too lazy to make kreplach, even without chicken livers involved).

For every soup recipe I've developed, the important part is what order to add the ingredients. Things cook at different rates, so they go into the pot at different times. Dried beans take a long time and therefore go in first, while green peas are best if they're barely cooked at all, so they go in just before you turn off the heat. Meat takes a long time to get tender. Corn starts out tender, then becomes stiff, and then if you continue boiling it long enough it becomes tender again. Potatoes are a firm 20 minutes, even if the pieces are really small.

Additionally, almost all soups taste better if you leave it sitting around slowly cooling for several hours so the flavors can meld together. I generally leave it covered on the stove overnight, then move the whole pot to the fridge when I get up. Leaving it out doesn't seem to hurt the soup any, while moving a hot pot into the fridge right away does hurt other food already in it.

My main repertoire these days are Beef Barley Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup, Spinach Tofu Soup, Lentil Chili, and Adapted Canned Tomato Soup. I make these a gallon at a time, and they seem to still be good after two weeks, though your mileage may vary (I have an iron stomach). I used to make a pasta sauce that I adapted from canned clam chowder as well, but then Jim Wright posted an excellent recipe for making clam chowder from near-scratch, so I adapted a version of that into my regular rotation instead. (And speaking of Jim Wright's soups, he just posted a recipe for Sour Cream Potato Soup. I'm looking forward to trying it.) Last summer I often made this bizarre rendition of a gazpacho, but I'm not sure I like it enough to keep making it regularly.

As for what I make when cooking for others: well, unfortunately, I've yet to figure that out. I had a great tandoori chicken with green beans and basmati rice, but then I ran out of the tandoori powder that made it work - and haven't managed to find that brand again (Kissan Tandoori Masala, if anyone has heard of it; my empty bottle claims to have come from Canada). I can put together a decent basic lasagna, but that's not high on the presentation score. Then there's Pasta with pseudo-Alfredo, but I've yet to make it for anyone other than myself. It's colorful and tastes good, I just don't have houseguests anymore, like, ever.

These days, cooking for others mostly means work potlucks, and cooking for something to put on a buffet line is different from cooking a meal to be served at a table in one's home. I don't have a crockpot, which takes out anything that should be hot, such as soups. I'm not practiced in salads because I don't generally eat salads unless I'm at a potluck or buffet. My baking skills aren't worth mentioning (plus we always seem to have 50% dessert dishes). Mostly I just bring a big jug of fruit punch instead.

LOOT

My loot from Janiece has arrived. As with everyone else, I'll refrain from saying what it is until everyone else has theirs. ;)

Also arriving today is what appears to be preloot loot from Michelle.

And a postcard from Rebelcat and Galenthias while they were in Crete.

And a package of dried fruits from my mother.

It's been a loot-rich day. :)

The Severe Downside of Being Addicted to Sinta

Ninja Kiwi, the people who made Bloons (the latest rendition of which is Pop Three), have a new game out called Sinta. Basically you run around as a little white cat, armed with bow and arrows, in a trap-filled dungeon. It's very addicting. Unfortunately, there are some serious flaws with the game.

1. Unless you have extremely well-coordinated and dexterous left fingers (which I don't), it requires three hands to play - two on the keyboard to run and jump, and one on the mouse to shoot. It would work a lot better if shooting was also a keyboard button, such as the spacebar.

2. After you acquire your fire arrows, the game gets extremely lagged. It is impossible to get through the entire game without fire arrows - and because of the lag, it's also very difficult to get through the game with fire arrows.

3. Layout of the page it loads on is unspeakably bad. The game itself ignores scrolling, which is bad because the bottom part is cut off in every browser I have (Firefox, Safari). So, no idea how many lives I have, what my health is, how many arrows I have, how many stars I've collected, etc. Opera's true zoom function can zoom it down enough so that the entire game is within the window - but the game is unplayable in Opera because the keyboard buttons don't work the way they're supposed to.

Some of the browsers will also load advertisements over the top of the game - and although they can be scrolled out of the way, it's tricky to find a free spot where enough of the game is unblocked.

This is a problem with all of Ninja Kiwi's games. They recently did a revamp of their site's layout, and now it's a lot worse than what they had before. Also, every game has developed a slight lag that wasn't there before, and which gets increasingly bad the longer the game runs.

Even so. I like the cat, so I keep going back to play the early part of the game - before the lag sets in. I just wish I could continue on in the Wizard's Tower to find out what happens. :(

In which I belabor metaphors to their breaking points

Eric asked:

Whence Wikipedia?

I thought about elaborating on that, but every other question I came up with started to show my own prejudices; I'll leave it more open-ended and give you a chance (if you'd like) to riff on the future of Wikipedia.

Whence Wikipedia?

I think about Wikipedia in terms of the Greek Fates (or, more accurately (and this will highlight just how much of a total loser roleplayer I am), the Garou Triat of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm). The one who spins new thread, the one who weaves the thread into useful fabric, and the one who clips excess thread. The editor who creates new articles on interesting topics they've found or adds new content to existing ones; the editor who formats them to standards, revises them, organizes them into categories, and finds citations for them; the editor who scrutinizes them for notability and deletes or redirects the unacceptable ones.

In the beginning there was mostly content creation. Then came the other two kinds of editors, and shortly thereafter there were admins and bureaucrats - editors who wove or clipped other editors rather than articles themselves. From anarchy there arose a massive tangled bureaucracy - which, having grown organically rather than along any kind of plan, looks to the average outsider like a Gordian knot.

Hence Wikipedia?

Well, it remains to be seen whether we can have a proper balance between the weavers and the cutters - a stable, long-lasting one. In the cosmology of the Garou, the Weaver went mad with her thread and ensnared the Wyrm, who also went mad with destruction, and because of the struggle between the two, the Wyld is dying out. On Wikipedia, all the arguments about notability, citations needed, issues of format, following of procedures and protocols and so forth are driving away the spinners.

Some of the spinners are simply surprised and confused to find structure where they expected chaos, while others have trouble wrapping their minds around the prevailing paradigm (that is, it's not about editors, it's about articles). Even aside from those, however, many would-be spinners (and some would-be weavers) take one look at the Gordian knot and just turn around and go away.

Can the bureaucracy be woven into a useful tapestry that helps more than it hinders? Or do we need a hero to come along with a sword? I don't know, but I lean toward the former much more than the latter.

How Now Wikipedia?

Editting for Wikipedia is a lot like making sandcastles. At any moment, a big wave might come by and revert your masterful work of art to a pile of sand.