Category: Miscellaneous babble

The Gematriculator. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this site, or this Gematria thing.

ou submit a passage or URL, and it analyzes the words to determine how good or evil it is.

nteresting…

Found at Cynical Tyrant

Added the new REM cd, In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 (Special Edition) to my collection yesterday. I decided to go with the 2 disc set with the rarities and B-sides CD. It was just something I had to have. So far it’s excellent. It’s a pretty definitive collection of some of their best songs. I would have added a few others, but at 76 minutes on the main CD, it’s already got plenty to listen to. If you’re an REM fan, I heartily recommend getting the Special Edition, mostly for the 2nd CD. Chances are you’ve already got most of the CDs that the music on the 1st CD comes from.

I was also tempted to add the new Tragically Hip CD, but I decided I ought to save it for another day. Besides, $19 seemed a little much to pay for a CD.

Sadly, my wife is none too fond of REM for some reason, so I’m relegated to listening to their music at work, in my car or when she’s not home. She says I’m lucky she didn’t know that I was an REM fan when we first met, otherwise she might not have looked upon me with as much favour. I guess some things are just better left in the closet.

I’ve come to the realization that serendipity ([definition: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for] from Merriam-Webster) rules my life. Things happen to me. Things happen to everybody. That’s what life is all about…getting things to happen to you.

There isn’t a lot that happens to me, but I’ve noticed that most of the things that do happen usually tend to be good things. I’m always stumbling onto a lot of things. Most of the time blindly, sometimes while doing or looking for other things. But always unexpected. Usually it turns out the a good thing. Not always, but mostly. Maybe I have a lot of good karma built up from a previous life or something. Maybe I’ve just blocked out the bad things so I don’t remember them anymore. Whatever the case, I just seem to remember a lot more good things than bad things happening to me.

Today for example, I happened to be heading down to the cafeteria for lunch. Every year, the MUSC cafeteria people have a pumpkin carving contest. They supply the pumpkins, and people from all over the hospital pick one up and make some kind of neat and clever carved pumpkin. The day before Halloween, they get displayed in the hallway outside the cafeteria. It’s always an entertaining event. Anyway, back to the story.

I was checking out the pumpkins, along with all the other people destined for the cafeteria to get some grub. I thought to myself, “Self, you have your camera here. It might be cool to get some piictures of the more interesting pumpkins.”. So I turned around and asked one of the cafeteria managers, who just happened to be standing behind me, if it would be ok to take some pictures. “Sure,” he said, “in fact, do you have a pumpkin entered?” I told him I did not, and he said “Come with me.”

I followed him into his office, where he handed me a meal ticket, a clipboard with a form on it, and asked if I wanted to judge the pumpkins. “Cool” I said. So he explained the judging process to me and off I went. Judging was simple. Only two criteria, originality and creativity, scored out of 5. As usual, there were a lot of good pumpkins around. Some were pretty ordinary, others were more elaborate. So I judged, and then went to get lunch with my meal ticket. And all for asking if I could take some pictures.

There are others. The way I met my wife, the summer job I got during undergrad that led me onto my current career path and the job I got after I finished my master’s degree are probably the most recent significant events. Maybe I’ll write about them in future entries. It’s not always big good things happening to me. Those happen very rarely. Mostly it’s little good things, like today. And those are the things I enjoy most.

I’ve always been a firm believer that whatever happens to me, good or bad, things will all work out in the end. And you know what, they almost always do. At least for me anyway.

[UPDATE]: If you want to see the pumpkins, head on over to the gallery and have a look.

This article is just way too funny. They’ve taken a bunch of 10-13 year old kids, and plopped them in front of the video games we used to play as kids (Pong, Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, some of those hand-held games etc) and get their reactions. Some of those reactions are pretty funny to read

Man, I feel old now.

Found at Mighty Geek

Somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve been pondering the idea of learning how to write some image processing routines. It’s one of those things that I think about every now and then. I’ve always wanted to write some image reconstruction routines to do some filtered backprojection. Sure, I could probably find some library routines out there that do it already, but you always learn more about a subject when you do it yourself. I’m already familiar with the concept, and it’s not all that difficult. I can use my FORTRAN again! Or maybe I could do something cool on the web! Then I also think about learning how to do other image processing algorithms, like filtering, warping, mapping, transforms. I could do all sorts of cool things to images that I acquire for some of my research.

Other projects come to mind, then I remember all the half finished projects that I’ve got sitting on the backburner waiting for me to get back to them. I’m still trying to learn enough about Visual Basic and using ADO to get my spreadsheets and databases interacting with each other. And then there are the web pages for work I’m maintaining, the web interfaces for my databases that I want to rework, the research projects to do, etc etc.

When I have some spare moments, I’ll sit down and work on some of the programming related projects on my list. Then after working on them for a few days, I remember just how much I hate programming. I really do. I mean, it’s something I can do, and I’ve had plenty of exposure to different programming languages: Applesoft BASIC, Fortran, C, Objective C, a touch of Pascal, and more recently PHP. Maybe it’s just because I’m not proficient enough at programming. I haven’t had much in the way of formal programming courses other than two Fortran courses during my undergrad. Most of my programming knowledge I’ve acquired as I needed it. Most of the programs I end up writing are usually functional, but hardly pretty or elegant. So after a while of pondering how to write something, I’ll get tired and put it away again. Occasionally I’ll get a flash of insight on how to accomplish some task.

hat’s always a good feeling.

But, I’ve decided I just don’t like programming, and any programming I have to do is just a necessary evil. As long as my programs spit out the right results, I’m happy.