Take your money and go eat it. The guy is tall, rich, good-looking, gift of gab, but for him to imply that these are personal achievements gained through his belief in God goes beyond repugnance. Anyway, not content with televangeling little old ladies for their grocery money, he’s come out with a book just in time for Christmas. Fancy that. The Christian Marketing Service?My bingo project has taken over most (but not all) spare time. I have three DVD players, which I use to display my CD menus. This is expensive, but ordinary CD readouts or number displays aren’t worth dick on a dimly lit stage. What I’m trying most to do is get one unit to play (output) more than one track at once without using an audio mixer. I report success by using separate stereo channels, not a problem since my house PA is mono. Tomorrow I find out what that co-ax digital socket is for. I’ve never used it purely because the necessary cable is never included in the box.
It’s tempting to use DJ gear. That won’t work for me as I only have one free hand while calling bingo. After rigging up the show on the dining room table (we have two dining rooms, the other is for food) I was able to plan an easier way to put everything through two PA channels. Everything works but at the expense of an awful lot of cables and adaptors. If there’s time, I’ll run the setup over to Jimbos tomorrow and give it a test run. I need another volume pedal, and am reminded of how that Miami music store on Dixie ripped me off.
I dug into my archives and can’t find the name of that store, but I’m sure I cost them thousands in lost business. It miffs me that I can’t find the records from the blog or the books. Then again, the books (accounting records) for this musical effort begin January 1, 2006. That was when I decided the people I was practicing with were not serious about their music. I was driving 30 miles to Pembroke Pines but others were “too busy” to have practiced during the week.
It has been raining since before sunrise, giving me some unexpected time (in addition to waking me up). I’ve toyed with the idea of a formula that converts Arabic numerals into Roman numerals. If this has been done, I am unaware of it, although I know there are applications available that use a table look-up to accomplish the same thing. I insist on a formula that I understand myself. Turns out this is far from easy. It is reminiscent of office work, where seemingly easy tasks leave you exhausted at day’s end.
I’m developing my formula to emulate the human logic, knowing this may not be the most efficient method. Look at a number and deduct the next least Roman value and then look at the remainder. You can’t use modular arithmetic directly because division won’t handle multiple strings like MMM or XX. Try it. I’ve delved into this before and restrict my formula to numbers less than 3,319 with no fractions. I did read once (2007/12/08) that the Romans had characters for numbers over 6,600 and for fractions. That’s why they are called numerals and not numbers, I suppose.
Later. After an hour of concentrating on the problem, I see that others have taken the easy way out. They either try to explain in English the process of converting to Roman numerals (the opposite direction is relatively easy), or they revert to a lookup table with all the numbers preformatted. So it is clear, I want an algorithm. A single computer formula that can deal with any valid number I punch in. No, not something out of Excel. And that’s another beef I have, the way MS has held back spreadsheets for ten years.
That is correct. Spreadsheets were a great idea that was cooking along until MS got hold of it. For the uninformed, Lotus used to have the market, but made the mistake of using the Win 95 operating system. MS simply introduced a glitch in Win 98 that caused Lotus errors while working perfectly with their own Office spreadsheet (Excel). By the time they “fixed” the problem, Lotus was history. Since then, spreadsheets, in the now historical MS pattern, have gone nowhere. A few cosmetic changes.
It is still nearly impossible to change the contents of a remote cell, there is still no command to go to the lower right cell of your work, and programming Excel is an evil in itself.
