Rooting

I have an family member and their spouse who are dealing with infertility. Mother's Day and Father's Day are particularly hard for them, not having kids while many of their friends and family members have kids. Lately they've been saving up for and using fertility medications.

Well, I'm rooting for them. I hope very much that they're able to have children, or even just one child if that's all they can manage.

And if it turns out they can't, I don't think any less of either of them. I don't think it's some punishment or cosmic joke, I don't think it's some deficiency or fault of either of them. Their fertility issues just are what they are. They're both good people. They've stuck together through thick and thin, and children or no children they're great for each other.

7 Seconds

I recently bought a computer game, Terraria, and have played it quite a bit since I got it. I checked the number of hours recorded by Steam, and I have played 62 hours. Granted, a fair chunk of that has been while the game was paused and I was away from the keyboard. But even so, I still played about 50 hours of Terraria.

Today I removed Terraria from my laptop. Took about 7 seconds.

New Standard for the US Dollar

Each time I go to the grocery store, or fill up my gas tank, or pay my electric bill, it seems my dollars are spending faster and faster. I'm well aware of the reason - the value of the US Dollar is constantly dropping due to inflation. And I have no way to do anything about it.

Until now, that is! Thanks to the US Postal Service, everyone with as little as $9.00 can invest in a resource that will never drop in value. Invest in USPS First Class Forever stamps! Each book of 20 stamps costs $9.00, and will retain its value until the end of time.

This is just like gold, except that you don't have to have $1,700 laying around to invest in this timeless resource.

Stamps will hold their value forever, since advertisers are NEVER going to stop sending out those mailers that go from your mailbox strait into the trash bin (or recycling, if you're a hippie like me).

Now all of us lower- and middle-class citizen and illegal immigrants can invest in a reliable, long-term commodity, and keep the Federal Reserve from stealing the value out of our dollars! Buy your stamps today!

Don't Pull Staples Out With Your Teeth

So random story time. Some years ago, back when I was an annoying teenager, I was trying to pull a staple out of...something. Probably a stack of papers. For some reason I was using my teeth. My top incisor decided it was fed up with being mashed against a rough piece of metal. There was a slight cracking sensation, and a bit of my tooth found it was free.

I have a slight divot in the cutting edge of that incisor now to remind me that my teeth are not a replacement for one of these little monsters:

Universities as Dysfunctional Businesses

Photo courtesy of  Håkan Dahlström

At its core, a university is a business, just like any other. The students are the customers.

Like any business, universities have a target market, which they try to recruit from, or in other words, try to sell to. Some departments have a bigger advertising budget and better salespeople. Sports is probably the most outstanding example; recruiters for the university's sports teams do a lot more to attract athletes than the visual arts department can do to attract talented artists.

Universities offer a service. Their employees teach their customers. There are of course lots of secondary services, and even some products, but the main value in a university is in the classes.

A hallmark of good businesses is good customer service. Any salesman selling a $10,000 product is going to bend over backwards to make sure the sale goes through. He'll fill out paperwork, follow up with everyone involved in the process, and do his best to make sure the customer absolutely loves their product.

Universities, however, tend to have abysmal customer service. Their customers have to jump through hoops at every turn to get what they want.

I'm not saying an ivy league school should let just any Joe Schmoe with enough money for tuition in. Or that students shouldn't have to take and pass exams. Nothing of the sort.

I'm saying that each student should have someone they can go to who will go to bat for them at every turn. Someone who will help them with the paperwork and follow up with the various offices to make sure the paperwork gets filed in a timely manner. Someone who can explain how financial aid works, and what different options are, and help each student decide which option is best for them. Someone who will call them if there's a problem on their transcript or their financial aid is delayed. And most of all, someone who will stick with the student for the four+ years they're in school.

Each student is worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's about time universities start treating them like the valuable customers that they are.

Brownian Tree

I've worked on my program to generate Lichtenberg figures and taken it a different direction. Instead of making a bunch of particles that all are attracted to each other, they are launched one at a time and attach to whatever particles have been attached before.

You start with a "seed" particle, then launch a "walker" particle, which moves randomly. The walker checks for a collision with all the attached particles (the seed being the first), and will attach itself if it gets within 1 pixel of an already-attached particle.

This naturally creates a branching pattern, simply because a walker is statistically more likely to run into one of the protruding particles, and less likely to walk all the way to near the seed.

I recently added a function that colors the particles based on when they attached themselves.

The great thing is that with a few modifications I could get this to resemble a real Lichtenberg figure more closely by counting how many particles attached in a parent-child chain through each given particle. Thus the outer-most particles would create very thin lines, and the particles linking back to the seed would create thicker lines.

I also plan to add a way to select a range of colors, so that more than just the current red-yellow-white range is available.

I say "Years", but it was only a few months.

I worked for a photography studio once. Ever since then when I look at a photo, it bothers me when the color isn't white-balanced or the lighting is poor or someone has a really obvious blemish that would take literally 15 seconds in Photoshop to correct. You can time me; 15 seconds, a minute, tops.

A couple months ago I kind of went crazy after seeing my company's old batch of employee photos. The photos were taken outside, which isn't all bad, but the background was this scraggly bush just outside our building. Not a good backdrop. And some of the poses were, shall we say, unflattering.

So I convinced my bosses to have a photo shoot, first of the owner, then of all the employees without photos. I set up a backdrop. I brought in lamps and sheets from home to set up lighting. And I made sure everyone had a decent pose and a smile. I used my own camera from home, which is a few steps better than a camera typical of non-photographers.

My time at that studio was short, but I learned a lot of skills that I use in my current job.

But when I see a bad photo, it still makes my eye twitch.