One year ago today: April 10, 2013, no.govt.greenland.com?
Five years ago today: April 10, 2009, mailbox webcam idea.
Here’s the commencement of restoral to my trusty Jamus, the bike that brought me back from the brink. I found enough spare parts to get it back in shape though I do not yet know how to replace broken spokes. I know the guy at New Age Cycles did it without removing the rim from the frame. And if he can do it. I’m working in the front yard all day just because I can. I see why the gang likes to work here. That’s where all the nice, shiny, clean sets of matching tools are.
Back in the late 80s, there was a Patsy Cline cassette I was never meant to have. Over two years, that tape avoided staying put where I needed it. Fast forward to now and it’s happening again with my pound of axle grease. Where is it? I drove all the way to Pep Boys on Sheridan to buy that can and for the third time inside my place, it has gone missing. There are not that many places it could be but I cannot find it. That’s more mystery right there than in Prof. Oz’s book.
I finally told Prof. Oz that other than reading the remainder, I cannot put more time into this project. It’s past the point where he says he wants to make some changes but is not interested in my suggestions. He feels rearranging the chapters is the key. One chapter he says is about sailing and very enticing. I have not read that part yet.
The book has good passages and they are always where he writes about the unusual. The snake that falls out of the tree. A customer breaks a wrist and sues. The voodoo spell to protect his pub. And the circus elephant funeral. However, he writes “around” these incidents, which detracts from their novelty. He needs such extras since the rest of the story line is bland and he’s a fail at writing filler. Prof. Oz insists the book is about the yahoos that drink in the bar, but just as that theme picks up, he lapses into a few chapters about the owner and his barmaid’s sick grandmother or some such inconsistency.
Not another ignoramus in a foreign jail begging for help. That dork in Cuba on a hunger strike, Cross. Let him starve. I say absolutely no to using public money to rescue these clowns that get in trouble in foreign countries like Iran or Cuba. These places are anti-American and the only reason Americans go there is to spy or to make money without paying taxes on it. Put another way, if he wasn’t spying, he should not have been there. Just like those hostages who stayed on of their own volition after DC warned them out, they should have been left to their own resolve. Alternative? Let the bleeding hearts split the bill. Nothing changes a liberal into a screaming conservative faster than having to pay his own money.
And talk about public embarrassment. The Miami-Dade College ruckus. The corrupt college administration facing off with an equally parasitic life form, the Florida politician. I say let them duke it out. The college can’t float its own boat and wants to tax the general public. The politicians are not about to let a school of any kind start dipping into their precious sales tax pie, and the greed on both sides escalates.
Here is another view of the product of 3D printing. The printers I saw were single color only and the rough finish on the right side figurine is apparent. My hesitation is that such a printer is not worthwhile to me unless new designs, not merely copies, can be easily or at least cheaply produced. The duckie was probably rendered by one of the new laser scanners and thus a copy. And not such a good one.
ADDENDUM
Here’s an update on my programming studies. I was able to get my “maze” of one million random lines to split into two lines, sort of competing for space on the screen. Once you have a basic set of formulas to enable an action, it gets easier to play with the motion. However, the ability to play what-if is dependent on how well you set up your variables. This, C+ types, is the reason you don’t “hard code” patterns or use data statements. I did run into a problem I cannot solve. Want to hear it? Sure, but this is not for beginners.
I wanted to “animate” a rectangular spiral pattern of lines near the center of the screen. While developing this, I discovered an interesting effect. I listed the coordinates of the line along the left edge of the screen thinking they would scroll past as I examined the behavior of the line. Ah, but when the list got to line 24, it scrolled up one print line and dragged my line up away from screen center, making it a line segment that moved up the screen. The next animation was drawn as a segment because the previous coordinate had been dragged up the screen. It was absolute coordinates versus relative coordinates. I wondered if that had been used in any games.
So what is the complication? Developing the spiral variables. I’m stuck because I never learned trigonometry, the part with sines and cosines. Let me refine that, I have never met a teacher/author who can explain it in a way I can wrap my brain around it. I grasp the concept of my spiral design problem, which I’ll give you a chance to do in a bit, but I do not possess the math needed to develop the variables to get the animation I want. Either I am too dumb to learn trigonometry or the teachers I’ve met are too dumb to teach it. Lord knows I’ve tried. (I can easily do it on a calculator, but that’s different.)
Now try your hand at it. Here’s the analogy. Suppose you have a large diameter stationary pipe standing on end and you dropped a small marble down the middle of the pipe. No problem, the marble just falls through without hitting the sides of the pipe. Now tilt the pipe 45 degrees. The marble enters the tube but hits the side of the pipe before it gets to the other end. If you’re thinking like me, all you need do is swipe the tilted pipe fast enough across the falling path of the marble and it will still fall through unimpeded. True, you could just use a shorter pipe, but my point is, at what speed OR angle does a long pipe have to move so that the falling marble never contacts the sides? Trigonometry.
Later today, let me add that the effect described above has a name, "aberration". I was intentionally avoiding the technical term so we could think it through.
