A bit of a slow night tonight after a full day of skiing is allowing me to post some quick edits on the trip so far. More, as always, in the gallery.
The skiers for the week (minus the photographer), (R and Mom D are enjoying some quality condo time):
N’s riding the lift with the big kids:
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Big man on the mountain:
Enjoying our ski trip to Sunday River in Maine. Some fresh snowfall today added to the surface provided by copious snow-guns. This evening the snow changed to a fine crystal ‘mist’ which created these light pillars above the night skiers.
Ok, I know I have many Scrabble geeks amongst my friends and family. Here is a challenge for you:
What is the largest contiguous block of letters (e.g. a rectangle with no empty spaces or extensions) that can be formed in Scrabble with only legal moves?
Anyone?
PS: I found these two discussions with a search, but they didn’t seem ‘conclusive’. I’m not sure if a ‘proof’ is possible here.
Between the regular craziness of the holiday season, a complete hard drive recovery and traveling hither and yon to visit family, I’ve collected quite a backlog of imagery.
Here’s a sampling:
First Snow worth Mentioning (and other than a few days ago, our only one so far):
Thanksgiving in Maine and the Portland Children’s Museum:
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Christmas in PA:
Church Christmas Pageant: (Starring one very little angel, and one ham of a sheep)
It’s been a bit slow here at Schierer Space lately. The great blog experiment may be coming to a close. We’ll see what the new year brings.
In the mean time, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
No? Perhaps figuratively? Ok, this thought is going the complete wrong direction.
Perhaps I’m late to the party, but I tripped over a site called CamelEgg that has historical pricing information for NewEgg products. This rocks, because NewEgg is my primary site for purchasing computer and electronic equipment. It’s probably a close race as to whether we spend more through NewEgg or CamelCamelCamel does the same thing for Amazon products, with CamelBuy for CamelCamper and CamelSounds.
Here’s an example of what you can get (and a sample of the current hard drive price hysteria):
For documentation I do at work I occasionally use LaTex to format formulas for display or print. Like most markup languages, LaTex is extremely powerful, but requires a certain level of programmer-esque skills to use. I use it rather infrequently, so I’m constantly looking at various sources for reference on how to make a certain symbol or format a certain function.
This is a classic example of when a typical text based (e.g. Google) search falls short. How do you search for a symbol who’s name you don’t really know… or has such a common name that it’s hard to distinguish the one you want?
Well Daniel Kirsch made it happen. Today wasn’t the first time I used Detexify but in a moment of work avoidance I played around with it a bit more than I had in the past.
Here’s an example of what it does:
So yeah, you draw a little skull and cross-bones and it uses the power of some kind of (probably) neural net examination and finds the symbol you needed.[1] Try it out, it’s sort-of fun just to play with. You can also go to the symbols page and pick one to ‘train’. You then draw the image by hand (mouse?) and it adds it to its training pool.
He’s working on a new version that also does Unicode characters. It will also offload some of the searching by running the algorithm on the client side using Java. Pretty impressive that such a search can be done in a reasonable amount of time using Java in a web browser.
If you liked my previous link to the International Space Station (ISS) video, you’ll like this montage even better. 18 separate passes with shots of city lights, atmospheric glow, aurora, and thunderstorms. Thanks again to the Bad Astronomer for pointing this out.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
http://vimeo.com/32001208
Make sure to select HD and full screen. There’s a list of where the passes are below the video, but see how many you can identify without the list.
At the rather arbitrary time of 11 seconds past 11 minutes past 11 hours[1] on the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year after the (end of) the last millenium, I was transferring files to my new PC.
What? You weren’t staring at your digital watch, glorying in the one-ness!?
Nope, I was in the final throes of the several iterations of recovering backup files that were eventually required to get the new box up and running.
For the bit-heads, here are the stats of my satisfyingly powerful knee-of-the-curve modern PC:
Reused Components:
At this point the previous machine is idle, and probably will be for a while. Although it still contains a 60GB SSD and a 250GB IDE drive that I haven’t incorporated. I stuck one of my older silent video cards in it, in case I need to boot it up, but the Win7 license is no longer legal (since I’ve reactivated with this hardware).
Windows tells me my “Experience Index” needs to be updated, so here goes the before/after:
| Component | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | 4.9 | 7.5 |
| Memory | 5.4 | 7.8 |
| Graphics | 6.8 | 6.8 |
| Gaming Graphics | 6.8 | 6.8 |
| Primary hard disk | 5.9 | 7.9 |
| Base (lowest) Score | 4.9 | 6.8 |
Not surprising that the video card, now the oldest component analyzed, is the limiting component. I opted not to buy a new one at this time with the Thanksgiving and post-holiday sales forthcoming. The card I have is pretty robust for an older model,[2] and dropping $150-$200 for only a ~2x improvement in rendering speed didn’t seem a priority. I’m hoping that the significantly improved memory and bus speeds will keep the GPU better fed, so it can really be the bottleneck it never was before. It’s also impossible to get a faster card with a passive heat sink. Perhaps I’ll buy a second on eBay and link them instead.
It’s also pretty obvious that the “Experience Index” upper ranking of 7.9 will quickly need to be increased if this sub $1k build could come so close to maxing it out. Perhaps they’ll increase it to 11.
Thanks to Teresa Campbell of the Cazenovia High School, I have acquired some recordings of our recent Cazenovia Community Band performances. We were only one of several groups which performed at the Cazenovia Choral Festival this year.
It’s been quite a bit of fun playing trombone again. In addition to myself, we have a music teacher who majored in trombone, a woman from a family of trombone players and our director, who plays trombone himself. This allowed us to close out our portion of the concert with The Trombone Rag. (Yes, that’s yours truly on the high notes.)
Without further ado, here are the three pieces for your enjoyment.
Date: 08/10/2007
