Many years ago, I heard someone say the drive from Pittsburgh to Florida was faster than the drive back because it was downhill. This always struck me as improbable. Does a 960-foot change in elevation really matter on a 1,200-mile trip? That's an average grade of 0.015 ( Read more... )

You may already know that I enjoy clocks which are a bit tricky to read. My private collection includes a linear clock, a binary clock, several count-the-dots clocks, and even a glowing pyramid clock. Now I can finally say I've made a hard-to-read clock. Feast your eyes on the grandest display of my geekdom: the Prime Factorization Clock! It ( Read more... )

The biggest question of the day was how to handle the candles. I wanted to find a big 2 candle and a small 5 candle, but we could only find one size of number. Unfortunately, the two approaches we went with were made a hair less obvious by the angle of the cake. Lesson learned.

( Two pictures )

A big chunk of our training this week was about understanding statistics and measures. Sure, you may know the mean, but if you don't also know the shape of the overall distribution, do you really have the whole picture? Is the sample size good? You may recall that back in September, I was guessing 90% mastery of the material during that training ( Read more... )

Today was 12-21. I saw my odometer hit 68,068 and 68,086 while talking to mab42. When I went shopping tonight, the total was $64.16. Two powers of four in one total! Better than that, its prime factorization is 24 * 401, and 401 turns out to be an absurdly interesting number according to Wikipedia. In addition to being prime itself, it's the sum of ( Read more... )

At work, I've learned far more about spreadsheets than I could ever have imagined. I've made dynamically-updating histograms. I've used the intersections of named references in formulas. I've even tackled the XML of a saved OOo calc document. More recently, I've been getting jazzed up about Google Spreadsheets. Having played a little bit with ( Read more... )

Wednesday was a big day on the road. I had several full houses and most of a run (66,789). The crowning achievement, though, was pulling into a rest area with the odometer showing a five-of-a-kind. The good news: I took pictures. The bad news: I forgot to set the lens to macro mode. Clearly, I have not yet mastered the art of using my phone's ( Read more... )

You may recall that Co-worker Jess was kind enough to make a prototype build status display. Coworker Mike was kind enough to adapt Coworker Jess's design into something a bit more professional looking. He bought plastic boxen and low-power LED packages and put it all together. The lights are a bit small for the size of the box, but we were ( Read more... )

One of my friends mentioned difficult parking at the mall. The parking was bad enough that she did more shopping than originally planned. As a computer science type, this sort of thing brings to mind discussions of resource contention. Would the mall make more money by having more parking? There's very little change in shopper behavior as long ( Read more... )

Remember the continuous build thingy? Friday it jumped to a new level. Co-worker Jess was kind enough to wire a parallel port connector to a little LED cluster with some resistors. The LED cluster conveniently had red, yellow, green and amber lights. He wired them to the first four data pins on the parallel port, and I found a perl library to ( Read more... )