My word of the day, found while reading "Scheme: A Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus"
perspicuous
I hope that my thesis defense is perspicuous enough such that even Andykerr can understand it.
I now know that functional usage is more perspicuous than continuation passing though. (according to Sussman and Steele)
When a blogger has a writing block, the blogger has two options:
1) Don't post and lose readers
2) Create an open thread so people can talk about random stuff
I'm going with 2).
What is everyone doing for July 4th?
I pulled out the ol'AR today, I was feeling the itch. Range time is going to be a requirement soon, or I'll end up buying a new firearm. I alleviated the itch by zeroing the pellet gun and noting where it shoots at the bruise setting.
I am glad to report that after over 6 months (I don't think I have been to the rifle range w/AR since at least Jan) I still know how much slack I can safely pull out of the trigger. Its almost like a little internal safety, when I am ready to shoot and on target, I take up the slack. When I move off target, the slack is released and the finger is outside of the trigger guard.
Its sort of like I have a two stage trigger, but its all in muscle memory and my head. Take up slack, squeeze the toothpaste, then its like the proverbial 'rod of glass'. I dunno if it is bad form, I guess I just speed up the squeezing process by pre-squeezing a set amount, then the slow-dunno-when-it-will-fire pull.
I am not as proficient with the trigger of the 1911, although I still take up some of the slack. Dry firing more regularly should fix that, I am just surprised that my body remembers the AR trigger more than the 1911 trigger (the 1911 trigger has been used more often more recently).
Also, a good side effect of practicing with the 1911... My hand is dead steady with the Wii remote. No jitters from this video-gamer.
Kerrminator, hows the new trigger? I know you haven't taken it to the range yet, but I assume you have dry fired it?
Going back to the creek adventure, Sara noticed something weird about one of my teeth.
I have a chipped tooth from the encounter,
Exhibit A:
A non-chipped matching tooth from the other side
Exhibit B:
A chipped tooth
Exhibit C:
A cool pic I made of myself while taking photos of my teeth in the mirror. (actually, I used the mirror to see the back of the camera, and took the picture with the camera facing me...)
I suppose I need to do something about that? What downfalls are there to a chipped tooth?
That reminds me, I need to figure out who my dentist is...
Last weekend I went tubing with Todd and Sara. Matt and Denisse were in a kayak with Bella (dog). Right at the beginning Matt threw a beer can at my face, and I cut my lip on my teeth. I also got a bruise.
The water there is really cold. In the inner tube, your butt is sitting in the water. I was being silly and decided to get Bella into my lap for a while. She was ok, but didn't like having some of her body in the water. I decided to let her go back to the boat, but when she jumped off she tore a hole into the inner tube. I had to keep a finger in the hole the whole time after that. It was about half way, and the trip was about 5 hours long. Todd needed to get somewhere in a hurry, so Denisse and Matt left Sara and I with a paddle and zoomed away. With me sinking and having only one useful arm, we traveled very slowly. Sara kept us moving, and I tried to help with the paddle, and ended up getting a blister on my finger from it. By the time we got to the exit point, i was mostly in the water and contemplating either swimming or getting out of the water to warm up.
Anyway, bring a canoe or kayak if you start at bufford dam, that water is COLD. Boats also travel MUCH faster than an inner tube on a slow moving creek. The inner tube wins on going down rapids though. Wear enough suntan lotion (ahem, Todd/Sara) or else you will be hurting the next week (and also have cool lobster tans with great patterns).
I was walking along, and was thinking about big screen tv's.
I think that most of the people that are going to buy a big screen tv for sports have already done so. The real killer app for big screen tv's is video games. Social video games (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, first person shooters, etc) require large screens so that everyone playing can see their characters and what they need to do. In first person shooters the game is normally split into quadrants, so the individual screen size is 1/4 of the size of the screen. In Rock Band the players basically split the screen into thirds, but the top of the screen is taken by the vocals.
Once you have played on a big screen, you don't want to play on little screens. Since many of these games bring together groups of people, they will start wanting the proper equipment.
Microsoft Word sucks for any sort of team report creation exercise. Strong leadership is required and short projects can suffer from a lack of standardization, without getting into classical Microsoft Word problems.
Silly people that dress up their contributions of text and bulleted lists with custom bullets and funky fonts should be put in stocks.
Next time I am telling everyone to give me an ISO 8859-1 compliant text file.
The benefits to LaTeX are enormous. Separating content from the display of the content allows consistent formatting and reformatting if required. The fact that it is a text file allows you to merge and track changes easier (for example, with tools designed to help you do that and not manually).
