I was watching some video about what happens to your data when your Chrome notebook dies and there was some stuff on a chalkboard in the background. It took me probably 20 minutes to solve all the equations to get the wrong answer. So I’m replacing my wrong post with this more accurate one.

The board is at 2:24 (seek to 2:21 so you have time to pause):

C=8335727 (I had 8338041 here originally.)
G=90091/100=900.91
H=269462689
M=552 (This took me most of the 20 minutes.)
O=694079
R=222647

X = G/(C*H*R*O*M-3)
X = 900.91/191605050401140404051920181525
X = goo.gl/191605050401140404051920181525

I got here on my own but with a different denominator and realized it was a url. From experience goo.gl urls are 5 characters of case-sensitive letters and numbers. I was trying to figure out how to shrink it.

The winners split the denominator by twos.
X = goo.gl/ 19 16 05 05 04 01 14 04 04 05 19 20 18 15 25
All of these numbers are between 1 and 26. They are just the positions of letters in the alphabet. When you translate them, you get.
X = goo.gl/speedanddestroy
X marks the spot, go there.

Retrospection:
I’m retarded for trying to solve this by hand. The winners plugged this into wolfram alpha.

Yesterday, at a thanksgiving dinner, my grandmother’s friend asked, “Are you letting your hair grow long?” I knew exactly where this was going and responded, “Yes, is that a problem?” So, of course, she mentioned that my response was rude. Then she went on to ask, “Are you planning to put curlers in it?” She was insinuating that I wanted to look like a girl, or something along those lines. Who is the one being rude here? My grandmother interjected at this point explaining that she was the one that asked me to grow my hair long in the first place. I generally try to say as little as possible to avoid annoyances like this. Everyone I come into contact with has such superficial thoughts.

Today I received a letter from my grandmother on the east coast. The letter said nothing of the newspaper clippings enclosed. There were two complete articles out of the opinion section of the Patriot. Both articles were poorly researched and poorly written. One was about net neutrality and the other about people spending too much of their lives in front of a computer screen. I doubt the clippings were sent to me about net neutrality, so I have this to say, “If I were a field biologist, you’d be telling me I spend too much time outside.” I’m a computer science major, so I use computers.

People used to get yelled at for spending all their time writing to pen-pals. “Go outside and make some real friends.” Then they got yelled at for using the phone. “Why don’t you just go over to their house?” The current trend is social networking sites. “Get off the computer!” The fact of the matter is that the concept hasn’t changed. People will seek like-minded individuals so that they may discuss their interests on an equal level. The medium of communication is far less important than the content. That isn’t to say that social networking sites are intrinsically better than in-person communication. However, trying to force people to settle for less invigorating conversation isn’t exactly a solution to the “real friends” problem.

No two people seem to have exactly the same beliefs, so you are always doing something wrong from someone’s perspective. What really matters is whether or not you hurt other people. If your action (or inaction) causes people harm, you are doing something wrong. Otherwise, be happy and share your joy.

I didn’t have any time to work on it that night because grandma talks at me for a while when I get home. So the next morning before my compilers class I started working on one, and realized it was going to take a very long time to dry using that much glitter glue. There were 50 sheets of construction paper. Between compilers and physics I wrote my name, e-mail and phone number on the other 49 sheets, in the same three colors of crayons for all of them. After physics I usually help people with their physics homework for an hour or two. During that time I drew the Konami code, a blue’s clues paw print, and a four leaf clover in glitter glue on several sheets (I didn’t keep an exact count). Then I added stickers and something unique to all of those in the remaining space. The best were “Cowabunga” and a Pac-Man eating dots.

After the glue dried and I was done helping people with physics, I microwaved some delicious frozen food I had sitting in my trunk, in a cooler. (This is how I eat at college). Then I headed over to the career fair. I passed out several “copies” (each handmade) of my resume to various companies. Microsoft, by far, received it most favorably.

Here I thought Microsoft was a “suits” company. Apparently, creativity and fun are important to them. When I walked up to them with my “resume” I expected them to politely direct me to a preschool. That was my idea of entertainment for the day. Instead, one of the recruiters, upon seeing my “resume”, said, “Oh I got this one. That’s the most creative thing I’ve ever seen.” (Or something like that). She sat me down and asked real questions about my skills, experience, and interests. It was never stated that I should write up a “real” resume if I were serious. Either she was genuinely impressed with my creativity, or she’s remarkable at humoring people.

If this actually gets me an internship with Microsoft, I think I’ll take it. I haven’t thought very favorably about the company before, but it might be fun if I get to be creative. “Find a job you enjoy, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” Even if they don’t seriously consider me, receiving it so well made my day. (It also upset a lot of my peers that spent time and effort tailoring their resumes for Microsoft. Sorry guys. I was just playing around.)

To verify credibility as a programmer, at some point this person asked if I heard about iPhone jailbreaking. I couldn’t really figure out the connection as it’s quite simple for anyone to jailbreak a phone thanks to dev-team’s programs. Then he mention that he’s a member of dev-team. After a few milliseconds of disbelief, followed by a few milliseconds of awe, I realized he was serious. Yeah, I’d say that gives him credibility. So I shook his hand.

To people in the normal world, this is like meeting a member of your favorite band at the local grocery store.

So after we had our little chat about me never leaving my room, apparently now I can miss dinner twice a week. Hardly compensation for being 27 and having a curfew, but it’s a start. I don’t sneak out here in the middle of the night to go for walks (mostly because it would terrify the locals if something moved outside), but I still spend a lot of time writing email, writing blog posts, and watching anime. All of which are apparently unnecessary, and if I were caught socializing on my computer instead of doing homework I’d get yelled at… And sleep to deal with the stress… Yeah it’s an endless cycle and it was the same in highschool before I dropped out. Except that was more learning unix than socializing, since I don’t keep in touch with people on IRC (except one person who probably doesn’t read my blog). Anyway I do these thing after I say I’m going to bed because it’s easier than justifying them. My brother and ship roommates never seemed to care. I told them what I was doing when they asked and that was that. They never got upset about it.

The chat was Sunday and I didn’t have school Monday, but without being able to sleep or close my doors to pretend to study while I watched anime to deal with stress, I had to get away. Grandmother was at lunch with her friends, so I made sure to leave before she got back and I would have to justify leaving. (Why I need to justify leaving I will never understand).

I sat at school with my computer and wifi waiting for someone, to sign on to facebook, that would also be on campus. I didn’t find anyone that was available to hang out, but I made plans with someone before I left. I killed three hours or so talking to people that weren’t physically present while I waited for the time when the plans started. Thank you DARPA for being paranoid and wanting a fault tolerant communication system (read “internet”).

The rest of the story is normal people hang out stuff. Ate dinner at a restaurant. Planned to play pool but then saw bowling lanes and went bowling instead. Five games I think. Most of them were bad. When I got a 184 we stopped. I figured I wasn’t going to bowl any better since my arm was getting sore. I don’t get a lot of exercise when I’m not sneaking out at night playing foursquare.

Note I’ve been “sleeping” for the two hours it took to write this post. Does it help me with school? No. Does it make anyone happy? Probably not. So why did I write it? I’m mean.

To recap, I don’t get enough sleep, but I’d rather be teased about sleeping too much than yelled at for playing games. It’s not how much time you work, it’s how effective that time is. I can balance it, and I can explain how I balance it, but I can’t reason with angry people. Angry people expecting a dialogue are stress inducing because true dialogue requires reason.

Moral of the story? If you are angry, stay away from me. I’ll blog about you if you don’t.

I may end up dropping one or two.  This won't affect my academic career.  Pretty much no matter what I do I'll have fulfilled all the requirements to get a CS degree by the end of Spring 2011.  However, I like the idea of pursuing a dual major in Math and CS, so I'll probably stick around for another year before getting my degree.

Grandmother had surgery Friday.  Walking around same day.  Granted it should not have affected her walking.  My point is that she still had energy.  She was doing well today too.  We went to dinner with Carolyn to celebrate my birthday.  I really wanted to get a cheeseburger from Wendy’s, but that is not the sort of thing we do here, so I had a subpar steak at an upscale restaurant that deserves no advertisement from me.  It was expensive.

On an unrelated note, Carolyn started talking to the manager who lost 118 pounds by changing his diet.  He attributed it to a book called “The China Study” or something like that.  Apparently it exists because someone was trying to prove that nutrition cannot cure cancer.  Then they discovered that their hypothesis was incorrect.  I think I want to look into that book some other time.  Someone please remind me in six months.

I took a nap today before dinner.  My grandmother was asleep for a long time and I thought, “yay, I can sleep without getting lectured.”  So while each of us was sleeping, someone snuck into the house and delivered a cake.  Apparently the cake maker called out our names a few times, but after nobody answered, she just left.  Note to self, never lock door, burglars bring yummy treats.

To those that called me or sent me a message, thanks.  To anyone that did not, [shunning silence].

We’re currently learning how to express preferences, saying what we do and don’t like.  When a student asked Onishi-sensei what she likes to drink, I was expecting something like “water”.  Instead, she replied, “beer and wine.”  New to teaching.

I realize that most of my readers aren’t interested in how my website works, so I’m going to try to stop mentioning technical aspects of things.  Suffice it to say, I obsess over them, and spent most of yesterday working on my website.  It didn’t slip my mind that I had a lot of homework to do, but I didn’t bother starting it until after 10pm.  So I went to bed around 2am.

I was very tired when I woke up, so I had some coke (caffeine content).  I read something on lifehacker.com about caffeine helping your memory or some such nonsense, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt with my kanji quiz.  I spent about 10 minutes looking over the kanji before class started, I think I did all right.  I know I missed one, but if I make no mistakes, people get jealous, so it’s not worth extra effort.

When I got home, I was no longer tired (thanks to the coke), but I still took a nap because I knew I needed it.  It takes a long time to fall asleep when I’m not tired, which is why I’m so accustomed to falling asleep around 4am.  At that point, most people call it “passing out”, rather than “going to bed.”  Taking a long time to fall asleep often leads people to believe that I sleep a lot.  I don’t.  It’s not really insomnia either.  If I’m left to my own schedule, I get about 7.5 to 9 hours a day, and I fall asleep within 30 minutes of the attempt.  However, most of the waking hours are when the stars are out.  Although, nobody lets me keep my own sleep schedule.  Everyone has some kind of input.  Which has lead to my current situation of 4.5 to 6 hours and coke in strategically dosed amounts throughout the day.  I mean the soda, despite using the word “dosed”.

Today, while I was napping after class, it rained.  I think that’s the second time this year.  When I “finally” woke up my grandmother “Aunt” Joane pointed out the puddles in the carport.  The expensive new screens in the contemporary design she wanted, rather than the suggestion a neighbor made, facilitate the formation of a thin sheet of water the whole length of the carport.  Most of the water evaporates shortly after the rain stops, but a significant amount of water pools in the dips of the concrete floor of the carport.  The concrete has been there for decades so it is no longer level.  This leftover water “of course” is the “neighbor’s fault” for (beautifully) installing a (functional) trench drain that “doesn’t work”.  A (permeable) vertical screen wall is “obviously” waterproof.  So I’m supposed to have the neighbor that dug the “failed” (working) trench drain fix the water problem (that his recommendation, if taken, would have alleviated).

I think I’m going to buy a big squeegee for the monsoon season.

• Browser: http://www.tekempire.net/
• RSS: http://feeds.tekempire.net/tekempire
• ATOM: http://feeds.tekempire.net/tekempire
• E-Mail: http://www.tekempire.net/feeds/email

These all have the same content, so take your pick.  If you follow me on another site, that’s fine too, I don’t plan on eliminating them in the near future. Just be aware, the above are the primary sources.

Between today and yesterday, I added wordpress and bbpress to my website at “http://www.tekempire.net/“.  The users are integrated and the wordpress side allows OpenID logins.  (I’m not entirely sure what happens if someone logs into the wordpress side with an OpenID and tries to post comments in the bbpress end.  Feel free to try if you know what I’m talking about.)

The reason for the change is because posterous does not yet allow advertising.  Oddly, they do allow propagation to wordpress blogs.  At some point I’ll put adds on my website.  For now though, I’m still tinkering with the appearance.

I added bbPress because I remember I had a forum on my site before that people seemed to like but I got rid of it because I couldn’t figure out how to integrate it with the rest of my website.  Anyway, if people are afraid to use the site because they think I’m going to make changes and delete everything again.  Don’t worry about that anymore.  I’m trying to get into the habit of iterative upgrades.  If I want to make a huge change, I’ll first figure out how to recover the content.

The genealogy logins for “http://family.tekempire.net/genealogy/” are not integrated with the logins on “http://www.tekempire.net/”  (Hence I’m keeping it on a seperate subdomain).  Don’t worry, this applies only to one person right now.

I can technically provide e-mail from my domain (through google apps), but I’m not going to automate the process for two reasons.  First, I’m not a fan of spam, and automated e-mail providers usually end up being zombies.  Second, I can’t figure out how to integrate the system with the user database in wordpress.  If you would like an “@tekempire.net” e-mail address and don’t mind it being a separate system from the rest of the site, just ask me.  (Note: If you aren’t family or a business partner, I’ll probably ignore the request.)

Dinner time.  Bye for now.

Yesterday, I got home as early as I could so I could take my grandmother, Joane, to a breast cancer center (henceforth BCC) to discuss treatment options. Her friend, Carolyn, wanted to go along to help out, but her van was having A/C trouble. The plan was to drop off Carolyn’s van at the shop and then take Joane’s car to town. I, of course, was the chauffer. As Carolyn walked to the building to hand the gentlemen her keys, she had another fall. Plans changed a little and we took her to the VA on our way to the BCC. The new plan was to pick her up on the way back. A few hours passed before we returned to the VA (“cancer treatment options” is not a discussion you want to rush), but they still were not done doing tests, so Joane and I went home.

Sometime in there, my brother, Eric, called me to inform me that he found $200 I accidentally left in a suitcase. Happy birthday brother!

It was a little early for dinner but for some reason I was quite hungry by the time I got home, so I ate early. Which was convenient since the time I normally eat dinner, as I was preparing to study, I got a phone call from Carolyn telling me to pick her up. Of course when I got there, I had to wait another hour or so while they waited on results for a test. So I finally got home and ready to study around 8:30pm, an hour and a half before I normally go to bed. There is a fine line between too little sleep and too little studying. If you get it wrong, you will not know the material. Fortunately I had spent some time trying to learn Japanese on my own a few years ago, however, I think we have now moved beyond where I left off.

If any of you have been following my internet musings over the years, you’ll know I’ve had the domain name for a while and don’t really use it (on the public facing side). I’m not actually hosting the blog myself. I’m using posterous. The service reposts content to facebook, twitter, and blogger. So if you don’t update your bookmarks, it won’t matter, you can still read all my new posts. Assuming, of course, I write new posts.

To make this work by just typing “umount /Volume/<VolumeName>”, I added “export PATH=~/bin:${PATH}” to my “~/.profile” and put the following files in “~/bin”.

If you read this far and do not know what I am referring to, you probably should stop reading here and find something else to do. Otherwise, let me know if you have any problems with this technique, or a better solution.

--- Begin ~/bin/umount ---
#!/bin/sh
# File: umount
# Author: Brian Lindsay
# Purpose: umount a volume from OSX (calling uncruft first).
# Usage: umount /Volume/

uncruft "${@}"
diskutil unmount "${@}"
--- End ~/bin/umount ---

--- Begin ~/bin/uncruft ---
#!/bin/sh
# File: uncruft
# Author: Brian Lindsay
# Purpose: Remove OSX cruft from a filesystem volume.
# Usage: uncruft /Volume/

# MCP
main(){
	clean "${@}"
}

# All known sources of cruft in OSX
osxcruft(){
	#Files
	#echo "._AppleDouble"
	echo "._*"
	echo ".DS_Store"
	echo ".VolumeIcon.icns"
	#Folders
	echo ".fseventsd"
	echo ".Spotlight-V100"
	echo ".TemporaryItems"
	echo ".Trashes"
}

# Forcibly remove cruft
clean(){
	cd "${@}"
	osxcruft | while read cruft; do
		rm -rf ${cruft}
	done
}

# Run program.
main "${@}"
--- End ~/bin/uncruft ---

If you could only do one thing to help prevent the spread of disease, it should be to supply clean water, because nothing else has such a dramatic impact. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that a steady supply of clean water permits the irrigation of crops, which creates a stable food supply. You know what happens when your village no longer spends all its time worrying about its next meal and surviving the next outbreak? Industry. Well, not immediately, but it permits the possibility.

So the important part of the idea. How do you get freshwater to the desert with no streams or aquifers? On a much smaller scale, the Romans had some plumbing that did not require power. Aqueducts. We could use something like that to transport water for the highest places in Africa to all of the smallest villages. The initial expense would be enormous, but if you build it with local materials, you would not have to maintain it. As a passive system, it would require very little maintenance anyway.

The really hard part is getting the freshwater to the highest points in Africa to begin with. I like the idea of selling sea salt from the Atlantic ocean to the developed world, and pumping the distilled water uphill. I have no idea how much salt would need to be sold, nor at what price to make this possible, but I have heard little discussion about it, so I thought I would start the conversation. Anyone interested in a business venture?

I have been toying with the idea of rewriting my website again (the previous versions were short-lived publicly) through google’s appengine. This would allow me to organize messages with respect to topics. That way people interested in my personal life would not have to read about my grand ideas for bringing freshwater to Africa (e.g.), and vice versa. For now though, I think it is better for me to just post everything I want public on this blog until I have time to learn python (a necessary step to move to appengine). In the interim, you can expect a little more frequency here, but less relevance.

So I live in Arizona now.  Officially I have lived here since 2009-08-13.  That is when I got my local driver’s license anyway.   I am what the locals are calling a “live-in care-taker” for my grandmother.  If that were not the case, you see, I would not be allowed to live here.  My current residence is within a retirement community with a minimum age of, I believe, 55.

While I was visiting my grandmother, shortly before I got the license, she had a bit of a fall.  I think it was due to drowsiness from some medication.  The cause is hardly the issue however.  The point of the matter is that it was bad enough that I ended up taking her to the hospital, albeit a few days later.  I thought someone should stay with her, and called my brother to discuss it.  Since he did not offer to sell his house, quit his job, and leave his girlfriend, it was decided that I should make my visit permanent.

I am currently majoring in Computer Science at the University of Arizona.  I am taking a few extra math courses this semester, and plan to add Math as a major before I graduate.  At this point I believe I am a Junior, but I honestly have no clue what I need to graduate.

The purpose of this weblog is to reduce the burden of telling several people the same set of things.  It is a lot easier to write a general synopsis of my days here, than it is to answer real letters and electronic mails asking what is going on in my life.  I still enjoy a good letter now and then, but I am getting too busy to respond properly.  Not that I normally would respond properly, but now, I am also unable to do so.

Feel free to ask any specific questions if they have not been adequately covered.

Sincerely,
<me>.