| Angels |
[Apr. 29th, 2012|05:15 pm] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | silence | ] |
Haven't posted here in a while, but I wanted to mention that I ventured back into the world of sanctioned Magic for the Avacyn Restored prerelease yesterday. The short version is that the gaming was good, but the crowd (and crowdedness) remains somewhat unpleasant, so I'm probably not going to start playing again seriously. Still, it was fun.
( And I opened a theme deck in my sealed pool (kind of). ) |
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| Way Too Many |
[Dec. 19th, 2011|10:29 pm] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | busy | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | Pink Houses | ] |
I shudder to think what this will look like in a month.
SELECT user_info.username, COUNT(*) AS count FROM comments INNER JOIN user_info ON comments.uid=user_info.uid WHERE comments.type != '3' GROUP BY comments.uid ORDER BY count DESC
username count
onethreeseven 5073
[name redacted] 1706
emily 1450
[name redacted] 1262
[name redacted] 1186
...
On the other hand, as you can tell, I've finally learned SQL. |
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| Nutshell |
[Sep. 17th, 2011|03:10 pm] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | in shadow | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | silence | ] |
At these times I'm reminded of a moment from the winter party.
I get shooed into the living room.
What's going on?
It's a birthday party!
Oh.
They've made a cake. I peer at it. Indeed, a birthday party.
The singing begins. I sit heavily on the couch, newly a year older myself, and watch the happy people celebrate each other.
That, right there, is all twenty-nine years of my life in a nutshell.
Update (since some people seem confused): yes, they all forgot my birthday, and ostentatiously celebrated two others in the same week. As I said. Nutshell. |
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|
| Yet Still |
[Sep. 17th, 2011|02:24 am] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | void | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | Abigail's Song | ] |
Alone in the dark, waiting until the last points of light go out. |
|
|
| Truth |
[Sep. 5th, 2011|09:32 pm] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | dying | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | Carrying Cathy | ] |
All good things are lies. |
|
|
| Hateful Existence |
[Aug. 19th, 2011|04:38 am] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | furious | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | silence | ] |
I haven't had a week this bad since... well, July. But this is, if not as emotional, much more frustrating.
First, the Mystery Hunt is in a total state of crisis-- we are approximately 60% done with metapuzzles and have zero fully tested puzzles-- and I feel like it's all piling on my shoulders. Everyone is demanding more throughput and full of suggestions. Not everyone is full of actual work. Meanwhile it's all I can do to maintain quality standards and stay on top of all of the traffic, and occasionally actually edit something.
Second, it feels like everyone is out of town (although at least some people aren't), and it's incredibly isolating. Days go by where I don't see anyone at all.
I had been salving both of these wounds with a big programming jag, coding nearly three days straight on a fairly delicate task, algorithmically speaking, for a metapuzzle I'm writing. (Those of you who follow my gchat status know this project as the one where I'm cleverly avoiding doing 18! or (10!)(1811) work through appropriate use of algorithms.) It was interesting, and reasonably distracting, and I was very close to a very nice bit of code which would actually let me write the puzzle and get it into testing this weekend.
Then my hard drive died. (I'm typing this by booting off a USB stick; the computer won't boot, from USB stick or otherwise, if the hard drive is inserted.)
My last backup is from the 16th, which thankfully means I have everything... except for these two and a half days of code, which I poured a ton of energy into. I'm trying desperately to record from memory the algorithms I was using (in prose) so that when I get a new computer and can start rewriting it maybe it'll only take one day. But my dreams of getting this very elegant but tricky to construct puzzle into testing this weekend are totally dashed.
So: alone, tired, frustrated, getting yelled at about things I can't work any harder to fix, have only a barely usable computer, and lost three days of work I was very proud of and which was on the cusp of paying off. Oh, and about to be out $1000 or so on a new computer (this one has enough other problems that it's not worth getting a new hard drive), which I'd really rather not spend right now.
I haven't wanted to cry, or scream, or maybe worse, this badly for at least a year now.
Update: I went the lazy route and bought a new hard drive at Staples for $65. So my wallet suffered less, but I did kind of throw good money after bad. Still, at least I'm back up and running more or less 100%. |
|
|
| Combinatorics is Hard |
[Aug. 12th, 2011|11:20 pm] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | bored | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | silence | ] |
Some of you may remember the Mockarina of Lime, a tiny Flash doodad that I helped build for last year's Harvard puzzle hunt. In the course of that project I became interested in the physics of ocarinas, and in particular in finding out what we can learn from the way a standard ocarina is fingered.
I recently decided to try to complete my investigations into the subject, and, as so often seems to happen, the physics problem morphed into a programming problem. From there, though, it's turned into a combinatorics problem, and I know little about combinatorics. Thus, to the Internet I go.
( Counting is hard. ) |
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| Enough Linguists |
[Aug. 11th, 2011|05:16 pm] |
| [ | place |
| | 02138 | ] |
| [ | soul |
| | curious | ] |
| [ | ears |
| | Real World Go | ] |
Enough linguists read this livejournal that I'm sure I'll get a nice, quick answer to this.
I recently had reason to do the following:- Take a blob of English text
- Write the words in alphabetical order (discarding duplicates).
- Inspect them in some (irrelevant) way.
When I did this, I noticed that short words which were basic to the language tended to cluster together. For example, "of, on, one, only, or, our, out" appeared in an uninterrupted run, as did "that, the, their, them".
Is there a good explanation for this? |
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