The ongoing conversation
I recently had to transform a set of data from typical date & measurement to a more compact date range & measurement format. The data in this case was very static: as the date incremented, the measurement was much more likely to be remain the same than it was to change. So storing the starting […]
I recently read a blog from the Wall Street Journal, “12 Debt Myths That Trip Up Consumers“. It includes many great tips, leading with the best: “Avoid debt.” But then toward the end, it stumbles badly with this one: Mortgage-interest payments can be deducted on your tax return, which can save you a bundle. The […]
Quizgle is live! Quizgle is a puzzle game where you have to guess the words that were used to generate the displayed search results. At a game of five rounds, you can share your result to see if your friends can beat your score. I had a lot of fun working on the database side of […]
Inspired by this comment, I decided to come up with a chess variant for RoboRally. I wanted to keep the programming aspect of RoboRally and the multiple pieces & capture-the-king goal of chess intact. Programming a “side” of 16 bots would be too daunting, but a king bot and a handful of piece bots (using chess […]
Neil deGrasse Tyson was a special guest at the Nutter Center last night, and my wife and I took the kids out to see him. The teens were skeptical about the event, since it meant giving up one of this week’s iterations of their League of Legends event at Epic Loot, but they enjoyed Dr. Tyson’s […]
Philosophy is one of those areas of study that people outside the field have a hard time finding applications for. It enables the basis of logic, and so underpins all of computer programming, so computer geeks should have at least a subconscious grasp of the fundamentals of philosophy. In theory anyway. My own visceral feelings […]
An orc cook goes to the orc butcher and asks for some prime elf steaks. The butcher says “It’s not ‘prime’ these days. Elfmeat went to ‘good’, ‘plusgood’, ‘doubleplusgood’.” “Oh. Okay, gimme some plusgood elf steaks and some doubleplusgood pixie wings.” “Pixie wings are now grade A, B, or C.” “Erk. Gimme grade-A pixie wings. […]
This time of year brings together two ideas that don’t have much in common: I’ve received all of my documentation that I need to prepare my tax returns, and this week is Valentine’s Day! A few years ago, my wife and I decided to make a Valentine’s Day gift to one of our charities, and […]
You can find any number of lists of “facts” in the Internet. Weird facts, fun facts, pointless facts, interesting facts. And just like you’ve heard before, just because your read it on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true. Here are some corrections to some “facts” I’ve seen on these lists: The quack of a duck […]
The return of my ice rules for RoboRally: There are two unofficial RoboRally boards available online that feature Ice. “The Ice Rink” includes rules for inertia. “The Cold Room” features a much nicer graphic, but the “spin chart” is not yet available (and, given the time spent coming “ASAP”, unlikely to become available, but it […]