philihp

I have moved here: philihp.blogspot.com.

You can also find me at: www.philihp.com.

It's been grand, folks!

Last night I had one of those dreams where you're really not sure if it's a dream, or if it's reality. But this dream was different. In my dream, I woke up in the middle of the night next to Madison, and she wasn't breathing. This didn't alarm me, though. My clock had stopped ticking the seconds past, but it seemed normal. There were no cars driving by. Nothing. I got up and walked around. When I opened my refrigerator, the light didn't turn on. At about then, I noticed the air was stale, as if the A/C had stopped working. Time had stopped.

And in my mind, it was as if this was an ordinary instance. Like walking outside and finding it's raining. I walked outside. It was raining. The droplets of water were suspended in the air.

Then I got to thinking about the trees, and the grass, and the flowers. They all desperately needed the rain to fall to them. So I decided to start time back up again. So I went back inside, got back in bed, and went to back to sleep.

When I awoke this morning, time had returned to normal.

Today I received probably the highest quality gift I've received in a long, long time. It's the Chronos Blitz Digital Game Clock... or... a Chess Clock. It's encased in a metal shell, which seems to be fairly rare these days where just about every item is some sort of polymer plastic, or aluminum. This beast is built to last.



So in any board game, like checkers or chess, the players alternate moves. Anyone who's played chess with someone in their family has probably had the painful experience of having someone take 10 minutes to move. In order to keep things interesting, chess players usually use a chess clock. At first it worked like this: you had two clocks. When it was your turn, your clock ticked down. When it was your opponent's turn, his clock ticked downward. If someone runs out of time, regardless of how well they're doing in the game, they lose.

The interesting thing about this gem of an item is the confusing bit of its interface. There's a big red button in the center, and two touch-sensitive metal plates. The metal plates measure the capacitance in your finger... so you don't have to depress them. Just tap them lightly. If anything's going to break in a device like this, it will be moving parts... and when these buttons are being pressed hundreds of times in a night, they're going to go bad fairly soon... unelss there are no moving parts, like in this clock.

That's it. Just 3 buttons. BUT yet another nice thing about this clock... the features. So remember how it was basically just when your clock ran out of time, you lost? Well some guys like Bobby Fischer came along and had some ideas like "wouldn't it be neat if every time you made a move, you had 15 seconds added to your clock?". This wasn't really possible with analog clocks, but with the advent of digital clocks such as this one, anything's possible.

"The Chronos Blitz Digital Game Clock has 4 blitz modes, 8 tournament modes, and 12 optional user preset modes 9divided into 3 groups of 4). It has options to save move-times, generate shuffle chess positions, and adjust the beeper pitch."

And all of that is configured with 3 buttons. Crazy.

To turn this beast off, you hold down the red button, and press either player button five times.

Jeff Atwood is usually a pretty elitist nerd when it comes to a lot of things, but the following made me smile.

As a technology enthusiast with a bad impulse purchase habit, I get a lot of complaints that I am difficult to buy for. That's sort of intentional. I spent my entire childhood waiting to grow into an adult partially so I could afford to buy myself all the crap my parents wouldn't buy me when I was a kid.

I now regret that. Well, a little. Man, it's fun to buy crap.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001010.html

Amazon.com's UPC Scanner

This is pretty cool. Using a Flash embed, they have a movie that (supposedly) shows you what's on your webcam. When you put a UPC code in front of it, it reads the code and searches Amazon for that UPC code... if it knows it, then you can add it to your online collection.

I scanned a couple things around my room into my collection. From this, Amazon can recommend movies and what not... I doubt they trust their analytics as much as to offer a million-dollar prize to whomever can write a better recommendation engine.

In mathematics, 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + … is the infinite series whose terms are the successive positive integers, given alternating signs. Using sigma summation notation the sum of the first m terms of the series can be expressed as



The infinite series diverges, meaning that its sequence of partial sums (1, −1, 2, −2, …) does not tend towards any finite limit. Equivalently, one says that 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + … lacks a sum.

Nonetheless, in the mid-18th century, Leonhard Euler wrote what he admitted to be a paradoxical equation:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%E2%88%92_2_+_3_%E2%88%92_4_+_%C2%B7_%C2%B7_%C2%B7

"Satan," he said, "couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be bored and scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and receipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokeable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes.
"Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked."

useful everyday latin phrases:

Braccae tuae aperiuntur
Your fly is open

Abutebaris modo subjunctivo
You've been misusing the subjunctive

Nonne de novo eboraco venis?
You're from New York, aren't you?

In late 2003, the technology writer Danny O'Brien decided he was fed up with not getting enough done at work. So he sat down and made a list of 70 of the most "sickeningly overprolific" people he knew, most of whom were software engineers of one kind or another. O'Brien wrote a questionnaire asking them to explain how, precisely, they managed such awesome output. Over the next few weeks they e-mailed their replies, and one night O'Brien sat down at his dining-room table to look for clues. He was hoping that the self-described geeks all shared some common tricks.

He was correct. But their suggestions were surprisingly low-tech. None of them used complex technology to manage their to-do lists: no Palm Pilots, no day-planner software. Instead, they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it. Some of O'Brien's correspondents said they opened up a single document in a word-processing program and used it as an extra brain, dumping in everything they needed to remember - addresses, to-do lists, birthdays - and then just searched through that file when they needed a piece of information.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html

Pure, raw, explosive pleasure!
Better than drugs, better than smack!
Better than a dope-coke-crack-fix-shit-shoot-sniff
ganja-marijuana-blotter acid-ecstacy
Better than sex, head, 69, orgies, masturbation, tantrism,
Karma Sutra or Thai doggy-style!
Better than banana milkshakes!
Better than George Lucas' trilogy, the Muppets and 2001!
Better than Emma Peel, Marilyn, Lara Croft
and Cindy Crawford's beauty mark!
Better than the B-side of Abbey Road,
Better than Hendrix, the first man on the moon!
Space Mountain, Santa Claus,
Bill Gates' fortune, the Dali Lama,
Lazarus raised from the dead!
Schwarzenegger's testosterone shots,
Pam Anderson's lips!
Woodstock, raves...
Better than de Sade, Rimbaud, Morrison and Castaneda!
Better than freedom, better than life!

hear me now.

when i die, i want a wake. like the irish type. everyone must get drunk - especially those who never drink (do it for me). lots of stories about how awesome i am, and of the awesome things i do and have done.

and none of that showing up to make an appearance, and leaving. when the drinks are on me, and you're roasting me, you'd best stay for the party. yo.

that's all.

dear everyone:

write a letter to your grandparents, or anyone directly related to you over the age of 60. it has to be handwritten. go do it now.

3d LCD display

http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/autostereo/

i am impervious to financial woe.

goddamnit. this is a little frustrating. it's a little like zach braff in garden state feeling pain... only with me it's feeling financial pressure. all i really have to worry about is... well... work. and school of course... but not now. soon though.

i'm an alcoholic... although i don't drink to drown pain. i don't drink to be happy, or to be social and get girls. of course i could do all of these things. but instead i drink because it's something to do. it rests my mind, because i'd otherwise be at work 12 hours a day.

whatever. fuck'em. back to doing something productive. see ya'll in a week.