i prefer pi

I got home from work this evening not feeling very hungry, so I sat down to work on some site-stuff and got distracted by Sim City Classic. Two hours and three Gozilla-rampaged cities later, I was feeling a bit hungry, so I checked the fridge, the cabinets, and in desperation, the dish washer. Nothing of nutritional value except for Jigar’s Indian-food mixes which, although both delicious and nutritious, have names that I can neither understand or spell (plus, he wasn’t home). I decided that I’d settle for milk and cereal (it was better than peanut butter and no-jelly sandwiches), but I discovered that the bag was sealed shut. Odd; I thought at first that Jigar had taped it shut. After wrestling with it for a while, I realized that it must have been resting above the toaster when we had omelettes and toast for lunch on Sunday and that it had melted and burned shut in the process without our noticing it. So although I’m grateful that our apartment didn’t burn down, I’m frustrated by my inability to get to my corn flakes :^\

I lopped my locks the other day because I was starting to develop the “of course I wear a helmet” triple-mohawk during my morning bike to work. I shaved it down to a 5, but it’s still a bit long… I think I’ll try to do a 4 (1/2″) in a few days, but I’m not optimistic about my ability to get it to come out evenly. I suppose I can’t do much worse than last time.

Green Party picks California lawyer as nominee

Unlike the 2000 election, when the Green Party was making an all-out grab for the 2-5% mindshare necessary to secure state and federal funding, it would appear that the GP is now trying to mount a legitimate campaign. Fair enough; Nader has courted the rightish Reform Party and their seven ballot lines in addition to Populist support, which would make strange bedfellows for the traditionally free-thinking GP. I suppose that’s why I’m perplexed by the article’s last paragraph:

“‘I’m going to walk out of here arm and arm with David Cobb,’ [the vice-presidential nominee] said. Cobb said he didn’t want to play spoiler, pledging to follow a ’safe state’ strategy of campaigning only in states where Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is certain to win.”

So I’m confused: I thought the idea was to build your own party and support your own ideals. Wasn’t that why Nader was rejected? Oh well… good game, Democrats. Another round?

I totally meant to go to bed two hours ago, but Jigar had friends over (which was really cool) and I made the mistake of mentioning that I enjoy animé. Here’s a principle to live by: it’s never a good idea to express interest in japanese animation unless you’re an animé nut. Reactions from non-fans will range from indifference to hostile ridicule, which is actually preferable to the fate that will befall you if you happen to bring it up around “ani-maniacs”; you’ll be drawn into an inescapable discussion of characters, storylines and series, subjected to a thousand “Oh, have you seen”-its (as a rule, you haven’t, and you absolutely have to watch it), and be expected to explain how Serial Experiments Lain has changed your ideaology and outlook on life. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your conversation =P

Tomorrow is Puzzleday, about which I’m completely stoked. It’s a 7-8 hour competition in which you try to solve as many puzzles as possible (there are about two dozen or so), all of which give you clues about the larger metapuzzle (you can read some random intern’s journal entry about last year’s if you want). I’m excited about the team that I’m on, but I wished that we’d done more work together in preparation instead of solving puzzles individually. Oh well — I suppose it’s all just practice for The Game…

To whom it may concern;

First of all, I would like to say that I have been an avid user of your English Language product for many years, and it has become (quite literally!) an indispensible tool that I use each and every day. I was an early adopter, having been introduced to your language system by my parents at an early age. I’ve experimented with other products over the years and make occasional use of them, but my primary devotion has always remained to English.

One of the things that I appreciate most about the lexical subset of your tools is the modularity and content creation mechanisms that are built in, allowing me to “coin” new phrases and overload existing operators and functions to suit my information-conveyance needs. An idea that I’ve had for a while involves implementing a hysteretic effect when using noun objects whose plural forms require exception handling; of especial interest in my line of work is the “vertex” instantiation of the Noun class. As you are no doubt well aware, its plural form requires the definition of a subtrahend string initialized to “ex”, the root remainder of which is concatenated with the special_plural string “ices”. While not terribly complicated in and of itself, such a construction leads to inaccuracies when incrementing or decrementing by unity — the tendency is to make reference to a single “vertice” when multiple “vertices” were previously in use, or to create constructions of the form “one vertex plus one vertex yields two vertexes”.

Implementing a hysteretic effect would alleviate these incongruities; one such noun added to another would simply result in the non-special pluralization, while adding a larger number (say, one hundred) would make a jump to the specialized class. The more common of the two errors occurs in decrementing a noun class, so I propose that the hysteretic constant be set to a much larger value, possibly INF. This would mean that “vertice” would be an acceptable “special_singular” form when preceeded in a dialog stream by the special_plural form.

I realize the desire to maintain backwards-compatability with unsupported legacy systems (e.g. Latin) and the need to provide cross-platform compatability with other “Romance” lingual systems, so my thoughts on the matter were to make the addition available as a member property that could be overridden for locally inherited objects. In this manner, the option would be available for specialized distributions and broadcast as part of the functional interface, allowing networked agents to adaptively and dynamically make use of hysteretic constructs as the need arises.

I understand that the implications of my suggestion require exploiting polymorphism in a way not currently supported, but I feel that such an improvement in English would serve great benefit. Thank you for taking the time to consider my suggestion; whatever your thoughts regarding it, I am (and will continually remain) indebted to you for the work you have done.

- Caleb Bell

This is not a smiley. This is a smiley (I hope) :^)

EDIT: Woot! ^_^ :thumbsup:

Yes, I’m still at work, but today was definitely a productive day:

Thanks to Jorge Cham of PhDComics.com for all of the late-night inspiration

It’s an annoying coincidence that the longest days of the year have coincided with my longest work days so far. 10 AM to 10:30 PM on Monday, 8 AM to 10:15 PM yesterday, I got in at 9:00 this morning, and it’s looking like it’ll be another long one tonight, too. >_<

On the positive side, all this time in front of the PC has given me a chance to listen to a lot of music -- I've gotten reaquainted with Keith Green, listening to the first Caedmon's Call album reminded me of a lot of things about last summer that I'd forgotten, checked out Rachael Yamagata’s new release, and I finally took in all of “The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” (Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg) in one sitting. Next up would be Wagner’s Ring Cycle if I could find a recording that didn’t cost $100. I’ve also gotten to know my coworkers and fellow interns a bit better, which is a :thumbsup:.

Time for me to go back to work…

Edit: Apparently, MovableType takes offense to my use of umlauts — it turned the ‘ue’ into ‘ü’. Peculiar.