Hiatus
Mar 7, 2006
Greetings to all. I'm not dead; at least, I'm sure I'm not.
It seems like forever since I last logged on, and even longer since I last wrote anything for the Guide. (And I used to write almost every month). [sighs] I miss this place. I wish I had more time to write (I have material for at least three new articles, and a couple more are in various stages of completion), but my time and attention are currently split between far too many things. I'm hoping things will change soon... 
Later,
Far.
 Discuss this entry
- 5 replies
- Latest reply: May 13, 2006
Too much mango juice
Dec 28, 2005
Well, Merry Christmas everybody!  ... Um, okay, it's December 28 and I'm four days late... but there are 12 Days of Christmas, right? Whatever. It's got to be the thought that counts.
Anyway, family came up north for the hols; had a great time, in spite of the fact that the big holiday stampedes almost reduced me to buckwheat pancake (damn my pitiful height!!!), and I wound up having more meat than I normally eat in two weeks. But life is now returning to normalcy, and I'm back in my apartment with enough food to open a convenience store.
Holiday stories to share, anyone?
Discuss this entry
- 2 replies
- Latest reply: Dec 29, 2005
Vote-Rigging
Oct 24, 2005
I'm annoyed. For two weeks now the voting for our game box art contest at HF has been going on. Thirty-odd submissions, but it's been clear for the past week which artwork people think of as the best (although it's a race to see if art #1 or #2 will win because they're separated by no more than one or two votes at any given time), especially because all the people who voted for them have sung praises for the submissions.
And then this morning, for the hell of it, I check the poll results (I know I'm not going to win anytime soon; I'm in 4th place, but I'm happy enough about it)... and I find that this one boxart called 'Logo', which no more than two people have voted for in the past week and a half, has suddenly acquired a grand total of *44* votes (which is more than 20% of the total number of votes). WTF??? Of course I know - and I suppose anybody who's been following the poll would as well - that there's been some kind of vote- rigging going on. I checked the members directory and bingo, there's a whole slew of new members on the board, who have not posted so much as a single message at the forum; what's more, they all have short usernames that make absolutely no sense (like 'abc', 'zxz' and 'rul'), which infers that the person or persons (I'm very sure it's 'person') who created the names wasn't bothered to choose a decent one .... because the account would only serve ONE PURPOSE. Namely - to boost the number of votes for that particular submission. Sure, I'd suspend my disbelief and allow for people who have been holding back until the eleventh hour and who have only just made up their minds to make last minute votes... but that submission, while not exactly a complete piece of horse excrement (well, actually I think it was; very little effort had certainly gone into it), was *far* from being one of the best. And certainly nobody had commented positively on it for the past week.
So. Vote-rigging. Of course, our administrators are smarter than that, and an IP check would reveal that all the accounts were spawned by one, or only a couple of people; even if the person had been smart enough to use different computers at different locations, well... it's still obvious that his?her? work was in no way popular, and had mysteriously acquired over 40 votes overnight, which just about screams, 'I'm cheating!!!'. The question is why anybody would attempt something so stupid that (1) is a blatantly obvious attempt to cheat one's way into winning, (2) screams, 'I want attention!' and (3) is only going to make him/her vastly unpopular (or very likely result in suspension or a ban) the minute their identity is revealed after the voting ends. FFS, is winning that limited Japanese edition of the last game all that important? or is it just winning for the sake of winning? Does he really think that his work is so great, even in the absence of votes to support this, that he feels justified in rallying for support or voting for his own submission? or is this some kind of twisted compensation for an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy?
Down to vote-riggers! 
Discuss this entry
- 8 replies
- Latest reply: Oct 27, 2005
The horror of math
Oct 20, 2005
I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry:
I was at this game forum I frequent (hey, I'm a gamer geek), and one of our regulars posted his homework in the off-topic forum, asking for help. It was the formula for a curve; he wanted to know the x and y values and turning point: y= -2x² -7x+5.
And this guy who replied to that post wrote, and I QUOTE:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
X = 5/3
and Y = 5
That is, if I'm not completely retarded, which I probably am. You've gotta substitue 0's in the Y spot, to solve for X, or in the X spot to solve for Y.
Doing shit like centriods currently in math, lucky for you it entails alot of (X, Y).
X-
Y = -2x2 -7x+5
0 = 4x-7x+5
0 = -3x+5
3x = 5
x = 5/3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 !!!!!!!
Since when was it taught in school that 2x²=4x? [buries head in hands]
Anyway, after setting the guy straight, I worked out the values of x as 0.6085 and -4.1085 (to 4 decimal places) using the quadratic formula. Because I'm never confident of my answers even when I know I'm right, I got Ham to do it as well... and I got the second shock of the day when he told me I was dead wrong, and that x was 2.5 and 1. Which, when I replaced the values in the formula, didn't make sense. The whole thing utterly deflated me... until I realised that he'd mistaken the formula for 2x² -7x+5! whereupon he arrived at the same answers as I did.
But anyway.... 2x²=4x!!!! I despair at the modern American education system. 
Discuss this entry
- 4 replies
- Latest reply: Oct 20, 2005
Sea Monkeys!
Oct 8, 2005
Well, I'm finally back, after an almost two-week ordeal without my computer, which had to go to PC hospital. And I have Sea Monkeys! 
It's not unusual for me to go out shopping for books when I get upset (and if you've been wired almost your whole life, you'd know what it's like to spend two weeks without a bright screen and a keyboard), only this time I also bought an executive Sea Monkeys kit from the local science store. The moment I got home, I cleaned out the new tank, filled it with bottled water and purification powder (part of the set) and then, 24 hours later, threw in the packet of Sea Monkey eggs and sat myself down in front of the tank to wait for them to hatch.
Nothing happened.
I checked the tank the next day. No Sea Monkeys.
I checked the tank the day after. No Sea Monkeys.
By the fourth day I was going to give up the ghost and call the experiment a failure, when I saw something tiny and wiggly in the tank. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a Sea Monkey. Apparently, if the tank doesn't meet the *exact* conditions specified by the instructions (*exactly* 24 hours of purification, *exactly* how much water, *exactly* how much light etc), the hatching process is delayed.
So there I was (and if anyone dares make jokes about the monkey's uncle, I'll throw the gunk I pumped out of the bottom of the tank at them!), with a tankful of Sea Monkeys that were growing bigger and fatter and more frisky when, a week and a half later, disaster struck.
My friend had come to have a look at the Sea Monkeys, during which time I fed them... only I accidentally used the large Plasma III scoop instead of the small one. Whoops. So more than twice the normal amount of food wound up in the tank. The Sea Monkeys were elated. Unfortunately, when we returned from lunch, I was horrified to find that at least half of them were ensnared in the gunk at the bottom of the tank. My attempts to free them with the bubble blower backfired, with the result that they became even further ensnared.
By the time I got around to cleaning the tank, all of them were dead, but for a big one (Tim) and a smaller, unnamed one. (I stopped naming them the day I had more than two Sea Monkeys in the tank). Reasoning that if the instructions said for you to top up the tank water with bottled water, that the hybrid Sea Monkeys had probably been engineered to live in fresh water (a ghastly mistake, as we shall soon see; but perhaps I may be excused for the reason that I wasn't thinking right at this point), I transferred them into a cup of mineral water. The mucky water I filtered in hope of finding more survivors, but all I kept seeing were dead Sea Monkeys with their little black eyes staring blindly at me; by the time I had sifted through half the tank, it was obvious that Two were all I was going to be able to save. So I poured the water into a bottle, cleaned out the tank and refilled it with fresh bottled water and released the two Sea Monkeys.
About half an hour later, it became apparent that, in spite of my claim as a scientist, I'd completely overlooked the fact that brine shrimp were brine shrimp. The two Sea Monkeys were no longer swimming around the tank; they were lying at the bottom, feebly wiggling their legs. I let out a string of expletives, unceremoniously dumped the two Sea Monkeys back into the mucky water, and changed the water in the tank to the old one that I'd been meaning to throw out.
By now the smaller one had stopped moving entirely. Tim was still pathetically wiggling around and, for the next two hours or so, looked for the world as though he weren't going to make it. Finally, after about three hours, he weakly started swimming again, and I decided he was going to live after all, and went to bed.
The next day I decided I wasn't going to take any more chances with gunk and sucked the lot out and dumped it all into the empty bottle. By this time, Tim was his frisky self again and was making himself Lord of the Tank. And three new Sea Monkeys had hatched, so it looked as though there was going to be hope for my tank after all.
... And then this afternoon, while I was checking the muck bottle for eggs to harvest, I saw the smaller Sea Monkey, which I had left for dead, swimming around the bottom! It couldn't have been too happy - there was about a centimetre of water in the bottle, and there were Sea Monkey corpses left, right and centre. So of course I wasted no time getting it back into the tank - and, in the process, found two more hatchlings in the water.
So I'm back to having about seven Sea Monkeys in my tank; hopefully more of the eggs I saved will hatch. In the meantime, I've named the smaller guy Lazarus. I don't think Tim is too happy about having to share his 'private space' - I saw him snapping at Lazarus' tail several times. Something that none of the literature I'd found on Sea Monkeys had mentioned.
Discuss this entry
- 9 replies
- Latest reply: Oct 23, 2005
Show more of My Journal Entries
|
Home
Leave a Message