Okay, I just felt like I had to do one. Here ya’ll go.

Status Update: feeling lucky to be single 🙂

Response:

“You’re doing it wrong.”

He wiped some of the dust out of his eyes, probably a bit of the bank that used to be a few meters to the left. He *thought* that a city block or more had just been leveled, but stranger things have happened before when he was in this state.

“What do you mean?”

“You just have to scream it in desperation a bit louder, and it’ll be true”, throwing off the last phrase with a flash of a smile.

He still couldn’t believe that she had survived, or that she was real; pulverized concrete was swirling around their bare ankles, settling onto the now-deserted street. Even stubborn chunks of rebar were still dropping from the sky, which meant that he hadn’t blacked out for more than a few seconds, if that.

“I wasn’t screaming; if anything, it was a hoarse whisper.”

He was pretty sure he hadn’t actually said anything, but who knew? He couldn’t honestly remember his exact actions, barely a minute into the past.

“Oh, no, your intentions were quite clear, and your efforts at suppression were pretty elementary. Ya’know, you’re pretty easy to read.” Again, a smile, accompanying a bashful sway.

“What of it?”, grating the words as they came out.

“Oh, nothing, nothing.” He wondered why she was so damn cheerful. “Just, you know, it’s the oldest story in the world. Separation follows a join, most of the time.” Cocking her head to the side, she seemed to enumerate the violations of her on-the-spot made-up rule.

“You know, I’m okay with being single. I really am.”

“Come on, say it louder.”

“YOU KNOW,I’MOKAYWITHBEINGSINGLEIREALLYAM” Perhaps bellowing with all the dust in the air wasn’t such a good idea: when he straighted again, he notic

“Well, the city block that you just destroyed says otherwise.” Her eyes snapped into focus and it dawned on him that her summer dress actually overlaid body armor. For the first time, he felt a note of disquiet crawl into his throat. “We’ve decided that we need to reign in your psychic powers, and you have a decision: death or loss of your psychic abilities. Which is it? Quick, the default, death, comes.”

He stared at her blankly. What? Was there no othe

Well!

Today, I’ve touched on cython, python profiling, and numpy. Guess who’s wrangling with number intensive code? I’m still working on the bap problem, although I’ve gotten it speedier: not quite speedy enough, though. The guys from 40 years ago are probably still beating me. Hopefully, I have time to write this up so everyone is a bit less confused, although this is unlikely.

Things to do:

• Homework up the wazzoo!
• Reprap research: round out what we need in terms of electronics, and what we need, period.

That should be my life tomorrow. See you then.

So why haven’t I been updating? I like to think that the MCM has irrevocably killed my schedule, but it really ain’t that: life’s just catching up to me over and over again. It’s really annoying. I’ve had viral gastroenteritis (using the power of google, you too can self-diagnose when things go horribly wrong with yourself!), otherwise known as stomach flu, for the last few days, and that just killed my productivity on Wednesday. Shoopdoowap, so that just means I stay up for a night or two. I’m over it now, thought, so that’s one good thing.

Another good thing is the fact that we’ve finally cut our first aluminum reprap part. I finally found an extended period of time when one of the profs and I were both relatively free, and whacked out a z-axis bracket.  It is very rewarding, since I’ve been trying very hard to get to this moment for more than 2 weeks (maybe more like 4). First tutorial in the metal shop was enlightening. If I can help it, we’ll whack out parts at a faster rate. I might have to wake up earlier to do so consistently, which might be an very difficult thing to do. But nonetheless, an exciting moment in the history of UPS’s reprap project.

And one bad thing to wrap up the first half of my Friday: well, I’ve gotten my first D on a math test in a very long time, dare I say ever? Really, if I can’t do math, then I might as well get myself a lobotomy or something. The cloud cover is made of mile-thick lead while the sun is going supernova, I think is a very apt description of these things.

The MCM went alright. We better do well, or we’re gonna have a disowned team mate.

More later tonight.

Hi. The MCM starts in 2 days.

I have to finish a paper and a bunch of lab questions before then, and I want to do at least one run through with my talk on maglev trains (as well as hacking S5 to auto-advance ala ignite), run at least one reprap part into existence, find if we can do etching cheaply, start the E/M test, and talk to a prof about what sort of equation I should use in a feedback loop.

Whew.

So with all of this to do, I took 3.5 hours off and coded up a framework for a problem posed by my prof that could have been a potential summer research topic: looking at the bottleneck assignment problem, what’s the relationship of n and the probability distribution used to assign weights to the assignments? If you are terribly lost, and I manage to do some work on this after the MCM, then I’ll post an update. Point is, I’m code deprived or something, and I just finished something I thought would take me at least a week, which shows me just how good my estimation abilities are (off).

And updating wordpress isn’t such a lark: I gotta do backups? Hell, gotta wrap this stuff up into a script

Okay, so friday, right. First, I edited an arduino program so that it should read a frequency from a spinning thing-a-ma-jig (look, I’m really tired for some reason), and adjust the power delivered to the motor that spins the thing-a-ma-jig with PWM. It depends on if we can get something to switch fast enough; transistor, maybe. And since we’re using a breadboard arduino to make sure our dev board doesn’t die, that’s where the breadboard comes from.

We’re out of TP, and my roomie left for home for the weekend. Yeah, gonna have to go scrounge some up somewhere.

I spent some 2 hours (really? only?) soldering up my minty-amp, which proved to be a tedious failure: trying to bridge tiny distances with short wires is amazingly frustrating: I hereby renounce my cavalier attitude towards laying stuff on perfboard. To put it lightly, I’m not very happy with myself.

Milestone: one tube of solder almost gone! Have something like 10cm left.

Finally, there will be no friday update next week: I’ll be in the thick of the MCM, so my life will be somewhat chaotic. Go me.

Yeah, I’m tired. Have a story, I’m not gonna buffer anymore.

Friend: i haven’t been this bored in a long time… hellllp

Me: write a story

you know thats not very helpful

well try something artsy fartsy with it you know something different

Tangy sea air, wafting lemon pie, musty cardboard

what is that even supposed to mean

hell if i know just take a world and run with it to somewhere youve never been before

well i gotta do homework

Light breeze, chill air with a slight bite, spongy chair, feather weight pencil, sticky eraser cruft,

homework can wait sometimes we just need to escape out of reality and have some time to ourselves

but we have to deal with our problems in reality just look at how screwed up the world is trying to seek escape into some contrived world wont help anyone

and that is where you are wrong

Filtered surf, muted grandfather clock in the living room, breeze through tall grass, distant birds clawing for a meal, percussion of bare toe on wood floor

screw this i cant finish my essay im going to go watch some tv

but you can watch tv anytime now a blank page calls to you to fill it with something anything

but i dont even know where to begin and the only thing i can think of is a direct rip off of my favorite show

the important thing is to create versus consumption its cheesy but writing is the one thing they teach us that we can easily create with

Yellowed mid-afternoon sun, two dark frames splashed against baby blue walls, ajar door leading to hushed interior, ebullient billowing drapes, congested room brimmed with empty boxes, limitless sky,

so how do you

So, random blog post to gather up my ideas and dump core.

Idea #1: Originally, lengths were measured with some arbitrary standard: then, we defined a meter as a millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator, since any sufficiently advanced civilization after us could redetermine what a meter was from the definition. However, once we leave Earth, that standard ceases to be useful. So, we shoehorned the definition of a meter into some fraction of the distance light in a vacuum travels in a second. Better, but no sane person would remember what fraction it was exactly.

Hence, I propose a unit of length split into billionths of the distance light in a vacuum covers in a second (which is another arbitrary unit, but we have to take these things on one at a time). It would come out to be around a foot, which would suit the Americans pretty well: it’d just be a tiny bit shorter. Unfortunately, we would be leaving out all the aliens that developed counting systems in other bases (10 actually is a pretty good number to base off of: it’s small enough to grasp with unhacked minds, but not small enough to be useless at making large numbers). Well, by the time we know they’re out there, we’d probably want to be using something else.

Idea #2: We should get biohacking started, and quickly: once we can reroute orgasms to intellectual activities, we could probably bootstrap ourselves pretty quickly without need for a singularity. Hehe.

So, after this story, I swore that I would not write a story until I had some serious inspiration, since this story is pretty damn derivative. Well, I held out until today. Have my massively derivative story.

Friend: is loading on the tea in hopes to avoid the sickness

Me: Well, it started with the SWAT team. Once they took away my green tea and threw me in the slammer, then it was all over. The beginning of the end.

First, it made you an insomniac. I’d barely figured that out, with the buzz and headaches and new calluses and constant lime green snot that also came with the bug. I couldn’t tell you where it came from. Not that it mattered, since I was soon preoccupied with staying awake so I wouldn’t become a killing machine. It took me a week to figure out that the reports on the progressively uninhibited murderer in the neighborhood were about me; it took me a few more days to find that green tea was the trick to staying sane when sleeping. Barricading myself into the house and watching the news over the next week yielded no more nasty murders, so I figured that whatever was happening to me wasn’t communicable. The next step was to either kill myself in some sterilizing fashion, or turn myself in. I couldn’t decide whether to go with gasoline or bleach when they shot the mug out of my hand and took me in.

I knew I had to die, and quickly. Shiv to the neck didn’t quite work, since… well, I didn’t die. I just procured a shiv in the middle of the cafeteria and didn’t have the presence of mind to do it in private. Lots of blood went everywhere, but I didn’t die. It took a week after I got out of the infirmary for us to overrun the prison: the bug augmented our strength, and when we couldn’t kill, we infected. A whole lot of guys got spit in their faces when they thought they were safe behind bars. The authorities cordoned the area: with the number of new bullet wounds I woke up with, it seems they put up a good fight. After being infected with the bug for a while, it seemed you just couldn’t die aside from complete annihiliation. Like, couple guys didn’t come out of the forest after it got carpet bombed. Those days the few hours I was awake spent looking for tea. by now, I required massive amounts just to stay nurmal. You can’t say I tryd to tellthe authorities, its their own damn fault the shot me in the head than listen to me By time I wake up the urban infrastructure was fallen apart. The green tea supply soon not keep meawake for than hour and night wander wide

time sleep hope their stil some out ther to rea [illegible scrawl]

I seem to like progressing my stories from coherent to decoherency. Except for this next one.

In other news, we’re gearing up to machine ourselves into reprapdom. Also, I have yet to squish this site format to something more column based. Just cause we got widescreen don’t mean we gotta use it all.

Also, I’m REALLY sorry that I’m not posting anything but sucky stories. It’s kind of hard to do anything else with 30 minutes, so I’ll just keep chugging along until I have a big chunk of time.

Okay, so I have absolutely nothing to show for this Friday. I hung out with friends, and didn’t do anything productive other than burning bootloaders into 2 ATmega168 chips. And, I wrote a new story!

Friend: is reminded again that “to be lonely and to be by yourself is not the same thing.”

Me: Ghosts, that’s what they were. Machines dressed and taught to imitate a culture. Sure, they dressed like they were attending a high-class social function, and they spewed words in semi-comprehensible phrases, but they never actually said anything intelligent, no matter how one coaxed them. That wouldn’t have been so surprising, but the fact that the palace never seemed to end suggested something deeper at work. One moment dozing over a paper: the next, waking up in a red dress with hair put up, slouched in a easy chair next to the hor’devours, facing the endless rooms full of partiers. It took only an hour to figure out that none of them were of any help; another six to steal a watch from a portly gentleman exchanging drivel with the rail-thin lady, another twelve to give up hope that this was a dream. Another ten hours to fall onto a couch, exhausted, and what seemed like 5 seconds to find a shadow of a man leaning over me, a blink to find him dissolved. After that, every day was filled with wandering and fits of half-sleep, evading the shadows that came with REM. It took a few weeks until I resorted to attacking the walls with a stout butterknife, finding ordinary plaster and wood beneath the gilded facade before the shadows were all around, whispering about something before they again dissolved. A warning? Perhaps. Would doing something drastic again change *something*? Perhaps. But there was still hope that something would change, and while that still held, doing something at all dangerous could have negative effects. I was wearing away at the edge I was on, though, several weeks having been spent in a silent, furtive walk through the murmuring crowds looking for something, anything. Now, it was again time to find a couch or chair and get some rest. Wait, that man over there isn’t talking to _anyone_… looks solid enough. Maybe I’ll walk over and punch him.

Another text block-ish one. It has a slight basis in The Sleepwalkers from… holy shit. Well, I definitely didn’t intend to copy Dresden Codak when I wrote that. Well, there it is. It doesn’t have the same geek factor that would cause me to squeal with delight, though, so I guess it doesn’t really matter. Anyways, I’m pretty goshdarn tired, so I’m going to sleep. Screw productivity for the short-run. I’ll try to have something to post tomorrow.

Edit: story needed status update that it came from.

Inspiration strikes, I post.

friend: milky way > boys

me: You don’t expect me to seriously believe that, do you?

It’s not a question of belief, it’s a question of whether you’re capable of debriefing her. She’s covered around a million parsecs crisscrossing the galaxy over 90 of your years, so she’ll be out of touch with current events, and you’re the only one she knows and trusts that’s still alive.

But, shit, she took off to see the galaxy? I mean, we thought she was dead!

Sorry, we weren’t going to be in the sector for long, and once she told us you wouldn’t be coming, which was probably for the best, we had to leave somewhat abruptly. Deadlines, you know.

She told me?! Wait, shit, I guess she did. That was pretty confusing. One moment I’m playing some fps, the next she has a huge smile plastered on her face, babbling about something like wormholes or variable cee, and asking if I want to go see some Pleiades up close. Hell, I thought she was talking bout sitting close to the screen for some movie I hadn’t heard about. Told her no, didn’t think nothing of it.

But this has nothing to do with whether you can reintroduce her to your current society.

Why’s it have to be me? We left on bad terms 90 years ago, although I guess someone leaving for 90 years would put a strain on any relationship-

Ah, she could have been gone for much longer. She only biologically aged about a year since we left, so she could have continued with us. It is her good luck that we received an assignment in this sector with enough leeway to let us drop her off.

-anyways. Go talk to some government official or something, right? I’m not really qualified to talk to someone that’s just been traveling around with a bunch of aliens, you know?

She specifically requested that, ahem, you show her around the ‘new Earth’.

Hell, I guess I will. Nothing much to see, though. We’re still fighting for the same godforsaken hunk of rock we’ve always been on, being shitty to each other. Heck, if she’s coming back, I guess I could take back some of those, erm, not so nice words. And retroaging might be a surprise to her.

Ah, we’re sending her down now.

Say, how did she get into contact with you in the first place?

We contacted her. She was in the best position to deliver a certain artifact to us, a shipment of (digs in pocket) these.

Milky ways?

Ah, yes, that is their name?

Huh, no wonder she seemed to be hoarding them. And why the suits called about some boat after she disappeared. Huh.

Ah, she’s here.

Oh, um… hey, honey! It’s been such a longOHMYGODISTHATALASERCANN-

EAT SHIT AND DIE YOU SAD SACK OF FERMIO-

Laser cannons make everything better!

Google, being the benevolent giant they are, have made the api to their document viewer public. Upon realizing this, I added the option to view PDFs through Google rather than downloading a copy each time you wanted to check something. It works reasonably well, although you have to set your PDF to be public in order for it to work (or show up as an option). Hope you guys have fun with that.