Category Archives: Uncategorized

Down the road from us is a house that looks like it could be straight out of rural West Virginia. Chickens in the yard, junk strewn about, little shacks, a chicken coop, etc. In true houseblinger style, the residents there have decked out their property with all sorts of christmas lights and ornaments. Kathryn spotted lit snowman figures there mounted in a circle on top of what looked like a partially above-ground septic tank. So, naturally, we’ve now coined the term “Septic Snowmen”. If I ever started a band, that would be the name!

Incidentally, it was Frank that reminded me about this story, since his screen name is “septicfields”.

To do some Christmas shopping, I went to the ghetto-licious Toys-R-Us here in Roanoke recently (you know, the one where the shelves never have anything on them, and you feel like you’re walking through an abandoned hospital instead of a toy store). On the way to the store, I walked through the parking lot for David’s Bridal. I looked up and saw their brightly lit sign. I looked through the windows and saw the immaculately presented wedding gowns. And, I looked down and spied a soiled diaper right in front of the store.

Perhaps it is there as an omen to keep your wedding dreams grounded in harsh reality.

“What a wonderful world this is! I click a mouse somewhere, bits
fly through optics, go to some undisclosed place, money
electronically changes hands, and then atoms in useful
arrangement are flown in airplanes and hand-carried to my
doorstep. When you think about it, this is miraculous.”

– Robert W. Lucky, in “Reflections”, IEEE Spectrum Magazine,
November 2005. The writer had purchased a new laptop computer
online.

The Mandelbrot Set!

(via “Revenge of the Tattooed Nerds”)

I was obsessed with the Mandelbrot set when I was a kid. A friend of mine (Wes) showed me a Mandelbrot set program on his Commodore 64 as well as the computer magazine article that posted the algorithm for it. Determined, I ported it to BASIC on my Apple //c. I succeeded but the machine at the time didn’t have the chops for speed, so some of the sets took all night (or multiple days) to render. If that wasn’t geeky enough, later on in my high school career I made a similar Mandelbrot plotter on my TI-85. Nowadays, an everyday web browser can render the Mandelbrot set more quickly than I ever could, even in JavaScript.

What’s the big deal? Well for me the fascination was that something so complex as the Mandebrot set could be represented by such a simple-seeming equation: z = z² + c. I think the beautiful imagery that arises from such a simple equation explains its enduring appeal. It is one of the things that really inspired me to get into more math as a kid (such inspiration was of course much evaporated by the time I got to college).

A very interesting modern variation is called the “Buddhabrot”:

The Buddhabrot is featured on complexification.net, a fascinating “gallery of computation” focusing on very cool mathematical eye candy, including some algorithms that are featured in the wonderful xscreensaver program. Xscreensaver is the evil eye candy screensaver that runs on my Linux machines – the program is a fantastic gallery of fun algorithmic displays put together by Jamie Zawinski, one of the original Netscape luminaries (he helped write v1.0 of the Netscape browser for Unix – nowadays he seems to have given up on software altogether by running a nightclub in San Francisco).

Speaking of Mandelbrot variations, this one’s pretty. Ooh, shiny. (via this fractal gallery). Puts my monochrome (green and black) Apple //c fractal display to great shame.

From Christina:

To celebrate our recent snow and ice days, Diana sends the awesome classic Calvin and Hobbes “Grotesque Snowmen” series:

Some of those were new to me!

From Kathryn’s parents:

More info on the book if you’re curious:

Glass, Robert R., and Phillip B. Davidson. Intelligence Is for Commanders. Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Co., 1948.

Pforzheimer: “Although basic, fundamental, and somewhat outdated, the book nevertheless has valuable insights into the critical relationship between the commander and his intelligence officer.”

From the youth gym at the local gym (gym-within-a-gym), back in August, via camphone.

As Iris would say, “wanna play bouncing-da-ball?” (the same phrase she uses when she sees kids playing soccer)

Well, my sense of invulnerability to the constant email barrage of ebay and online banking phishing scams has eroded tonight. I’ve won the humiliating scarlet “I” (for Idiot) for being suckered by a (seemingly) new scam that forced me to change my eBay password after realizing I was so easily duped.

Here’s the email I got:

My first thought was “hmm, I never asked anything about any sports memorabilia”. So instinctively I want to know what the hell is going on with my ebay account – did someone ask a question via my account without me knowing? Is someone going to bid on a thousand dollar baseball jersey with my PayPal account? Like a lemming, I click on the item number link, and I get the “ebay” login screen. At this point I’m still thinking “I better log in and try to find out if someone’s hacked my account.” It fails my login a few times, but then succeeds, because I think the third attempt is the REAL eBay login page – the other login screens were part of the scammer’s site recording my username and password (the link was http://signin.ebay.com-ws.org/signin.html — as soon as I saw that com-ws.org domain, the jig was up.)

*Sigh*. So stupid. Ah well, I changed my password before anyone could do anything with my account. And I’ll know better for next time. Meanwhile, there’s an online bank that really needs me to “update my security info.” They are really interested in all my credit card numbers, too. I better go log in and give them the updated info!

UPDATE:

A related quote:

“If you give a man a phish, he has a stolen credit card for a day. If
you teach a man to phish, he will eat three square meals daily for a
lifetime; perhaps served from behind bars, but he will not go hungry.”

A while ago, Sean made this funny typo in an email:

“Sorry for the incontinence.”

It was very unique and hilarious at the time. I blogged about it thinking I was preserving a unique moment. But to my surprise, today I found that there are many references to this very typo:

Google Blog Search results

More proof that we all think the same!