Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Beijing- Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

From Yahoo News:

Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive websites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted on Wednesday.


Brilliant. Whoever let China host the Olympics should be fired. China has done nothing that it promised yet we still let them hold the Olympics. We should just break up the Olympic sports this year and hold them at sites around the world, and let China sit in their Bird's Nest all by themselves.

I guess, unless, this counts for reducing pollution:

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Totem Destroyer

I know that you have been looking for a good time wasting game, well look no further, your search has resulted in one result, this one. The name of the game is Totem Destroyer, and it is much like Jenga, but instead of worrying about making the tower fall down your only concern is to keep the golden totem off the ground. Each level you need to destroy a certain number of blocks, the trick of the game is to get the tower to collapse in a certain way to save the idol. Quite fun I do say. Play on!

Monday, July 21, 2008

Buggy

Currently my days at work are training and bug reporting. The first half of the day I spend reading about some aspect of the program and working through the examples that they have. The latter half of the day I spend entering in bugs that I find in the program, or making suggestions about how I think the program can be improved.

Well, last Friday I found a problem were the program was clearly not performing correctly, and this was not a small part either, this was like a major cornerstone of the program that was not working right. At first I was excited, because I found something very important while being at work for only a month. Then I kinda got scared, because if this was actually happening the program has serious issues. It was kinda like discovering a highly communicable deadly disease that eventually will kill everyone, it is a very important discovery -and now we're all going to die.

So I brought the issue up with Danny (programmer/statistician extraordinaire) and asked him what he thought, he got worried about it and had me show him exactly what was going on. So I showed him and sure enough the results weren't the expected results. We ran through all sorts of combinations and possible scenarios about why the program was failing. We couldn't come up with what was going wrong, so he decided to head back up and try to figure it out. As I was closing down the analysis he noticed that I had a check box selected that shouldn't had been way back on an early dialog box.

Dang it. I selected the box early in the morning when I was working with some other stuff and never unselected it because I had just been working with the same analysis all day, and then when I got sidetracked I forgot about it. That box meant that a whole different batch of assumptions were made and the program was actually performing quite well. Call off the CDC that deadly virus was just some soda I spilled on the microscope slide.

Grumble, grumble.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Fruitastic

Fruit is one of my favorite things to eat, so I think it is high time to give credit to the king of all fresh food.





My 10 favorite fresh fruits are:
1. Cherry
2. Strawberry
3. Blueberry
4. Kiwi
5. Guava
6. Nectarine
7. Lime
8. Pineapple
9. Plum
10. Raspberry

Flavorings are a different story, some are very good; here are my 10 favorite flavorings:
1. Melon
2. Apricot
3. Blueberry
4. Goji
5. Peach
6. Acai
7. Loganberry
8. Cranberry
9. Plum
10. Apple

But there are some flavorings that I can't stand:
1. Black Cherry
2. Blue Raspberry
3. Orange
4. Lime (In most cases, in Skittles it is ok)

I also need to give Coconut flavoring a shoutout, it isn't a fruit but it is mighty tasty, and the official flavor of summer.

Hurray for fruit!

Monday, July 14, 2008

Something Strange This Way Comes

Got 5 minutes? Watch this video, it will blow your mind. If you already know about the experiment skip a minute or two, but don't miss the end of the video. I did this experiment in a physics class at K-State, but I never heard of taking the experiment one step further:



After a couple minutes of thinking the best answer I came up with was that the world is based on infinite approximations, and so things that should happen, do happen. However, when we observe something, it isn't an approximation anymore and we see one instance of the process that is usually approximated. So there is something to us that is different than the rest of matter, there has to be, it's not like putting a coffee cup next to the slits makes light act different...

I need to know more about this. I would assume they tested this with the machine that was used for observations turned on and off, and that gave them different results. But what if the data is collected and then immediately destroyed so that no-one can ever see it, then how does the light act? What if the recording machine has a random number generator that turns it off and on, but no one knows the number that it picks, or if the machine is ever off or on. Can we observe how the light particle acted to tell if the machine was on or off?

Some people think that science will at some point eliminate the need for God, to me the more we learn about science the more it proves that there is God.

The universe is more amazing than we can imagine, and we barely know anything about it.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Mighty Cheer

Do you know what is worse than getting a song stuck in your head? Getting a song stuck in your head that you made up during a dream and it isn't good in the first place.

In my dream I am at a stadium attending a cheering contest, however instead of the cheerleaders getting judged it is the crowd that is getting judged about who has the best crowd cheers. (Like the Wabash for K-State.) Well after a crowd cheer of Partyvillie (I don't remember how the cheer goes, but I do remember that each cheerleader had a letter on her uniform that spelled to spell out Partyvillie) came the stupid cheer that got stuck in my head.

The cheer goes: "Mighty the horse was a horse, of course" the tune to sing it too sounds familiar but I can't place it. During the cheer people in the crowd get tossed up by other people and they yell "woah!" when thrown into the air. Yeah, it is lame, but it has been stuck in my head for going on an hour now.

I think the only more annoying cheer than the one I just made up is the "Boomer Sooner".

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

The Stock Market Game.

This is a game that I thought up of to play at work yesterday. It works pretty well because when the window for the Internet browser minimized the Dow is still displayed and updated about every three minutes on the tab. (At least on Firefox)


You get $1000 to buy stocks of the Dow Profits.

The market change can be found here:

Yahoo Stocks

You can buy and sell stocks at anytime, you just have to use the current price.

So for example the current Dow change is at +61.72, so using my $1000 I can buy 16 stocks at $61.72, with $12.84 left over. If the Dow change ever crosses zero, you lose all of your stocks.

If the prices are in the negative, just play like they are positive, but remember anytime the price crosses zero you lose all of your stocks.

The person with the most money at the end of the day wins.


Yesterday I ended up with about $2 left, hopefully I can do better today.