Posted by me on Tuesday, the 12th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 12:07 AM, local time.
… that I don't almost forget until the very end of the day to blog. But, the fact that I am still here writing something up shows my present dedication!
Not a whole lot exciting new today, since I had to work through most of it. It does sound as though my air conditioning will be fixed tomorrow (or at least diagnosed), so that is good, if it happens. Its still hot here in Rochester. I try not to complain, but there is just so much heat to complain about!
In other news from several months ago, here is a great Dinosaur Comic that I had wanted to blog about. Its just so awesome! I don't really know why for sure, but somewhere around panel 5 I just start cracking up. I mean, come on: "It's a holiday for people who are GOOD ENOUGH, just not transcendental!" Its good stuff! And don't forget to read the mouse over text, and the Comments mailto: link subject text. And the title (its a pain, but you may have to read the source for that one).
There, 1 down, only about 70 to go on my unannotated list of things I was supposed to blog about but never quite got around to.
Tags: air conditioners, dinosaur comics, pi day, procrastination, rochester, summer, transcendental
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Sunday, the 10th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 11:24 PM, local time.
As you may have read, my air conditioning is not presently working, and today was rather hot out anyway, which would have been enough to make the temperature in my apartment rather uncomfortable. However, as today was apparently Jeremiah's cooking day, it was soon pushing 90 degrees or so at its worst point. Some of my friends further south (or from further south, anyway) may laugh at my discomfort in such a chilly temperature, but I assure you I almost died.
But that is really only a segue into what I was planning to write about. To combat this heat, I brought up a little fan I had obtained while in college for such situations and turned it on myself whilst I read. When growing up, we never had any air conditioning, and each summer was such a painful season for this reason that I can only assume my present dislike of the season stems from that. We always had fans going throughout the house to keep us as close to comfortable as was possible. While I sat reading in my chair, with some piano music playing in the background, constantly fighting for the aural spectrum with this simple little fan whirrring about, I was strongly reminded of my childhood summers, when I would similarly read at night with fans being heard everywhere, and my sister practicing her piano in the other room.
It is often strange to have such recollections, but pleasant. Well, I should get back to reading. It seems there is nothing else that can really be done under such conditions :)
P.S.: It looks funny, but is obviously frequently used enough to get past the spellchecker. I can only assume that it is a correct spelling: whirrring. (With three 'r's.) Or perhaps my spellchecker is off. I will assume instead that it is a correct spelling :-) That is far more fun to do!
Tags: air conditioners, fans, memories, reading, summer
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Sunday, the 10th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 2:30 AM, local time.
Do you like…. Malted milk shakes? Yes…
Do you like…. Cheese? Yes…
Do you like them… together? Ewww!!!!
Anyway, my daily post today (ignore the time, this is still saturday in my book), is a bit late, but it was much busier day today then I anticipated it being. Anyway, this morning I went to the farmer's market again, to see if they had some pepper plants, and they had some that I got, even though they weren't exactly what I wanted. I also go some local home made mozzerella cheese. Looks really good, I may try to make a pizza with it. I also tried to find fresh basil there, but no one had anything. Apparently it is not quite the time for basil. I had to buy that at the store instead. How embarrassing!
On the way home from that, I got a strange craving for a malted milk shake, and thus went to Target and got some Malted Milk, some all natural vanilla bean ice cream, (and some basil), and went home and mixed it all (not the basil) up with some milk with my immersion blender and had one of the best malted milk shakes I've had in a long while. And I can make them whenever I want! It's like, perfect!
But yes, a busy day. Early in the afternoon, there was a free concert from the Rochester Community Band in central park, so a bunch of us went there to support our friends in that band (yay Jim and Pam, and Zane if you would just go and practice everyonce in a while…). It was a really great day to be outside in the park (with the shade and all). I could have really just sat there for a while. It was very relaxing. While listening to the music, I took the opportunity to knit in public. Just trying to test out some sock yarn and needles I just got and check out my gauge. I've not dealt with such small needles (or such small wool yarn) before, but it went pretty well.
After they made me leave the park, I went to the book store to get the book club book, and ended up getting some Prokofiev CDs and some wild strawberry cheesecake. Man that was pretty good tasting stuff! Also went to a neat little downtown corner grocery store and meat shop, and found that they have a pretty nice selection of meats behind their meat counter, and a quite awesome selection of cheeses. Next time there is a cheese party, I know where I am going. That's right, I'm talking about Just Rite Foodstore on 2nd street and 6th avenue. Very cool. Never knew that was there before.
Later in the day, some of us went to Red Lobster for some dinner, and it was ok. The clam chowder (New England, of course) was quite good, and the lobster tasted really good, too. The steak, while properly medium rare inside, was somehow pretty not cool on the outside, tough and crunchy, and it just didn't make me as happy as it could have. After that, I learned that I am still as horrible at mini-golf as I am at regular golf, but I enjoy them both quite a bit. Mini-golf does have the nice distinction of being cheaper to play though.
Finally, a few of us sat down and talked about how we will certainly all be rich once we retire, and won't it be awesome when we buy castles overlooking our own villages when we do retire, because that's likely what will happen, right? Also, how to make Rochester a thriving and growing city, and how its not going to happen, but wouldn't it be cool if it did? And then it was 1:30am. That's how these conversations go sometimes. It can get tiring.
Tags: cheese, farmer's market, food, knitting, knitting in public, malted milk shake, mini-golf, new england clam chowder, red lobster, rochester, rochester community band
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Friday, the 8th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 2:35 PM, local time.
or, How I Acquired Two New Hobbies at the Expense of some Free Time
This post is about knitting and crocheting. For you poor theoretical physicists worried about the fact that $A_{\mu}(x)\rightarrow A_{\mu}(x)-\nabla_{\mu}\alpha(x)$, this might help, although you might learn useful things about differential geometry if you stay here for a bit. Probably not though. And for the few engineers who stumbled here trying to figure out why your extruded metals are not the right size, I can’t really help you at all, though you really should fix that in case I need some 1’s to make a sock or something.
But seriously, I digress. On to the real point of this post: Learning to knit (and crochet). After learning both things, I am really convinced that they are one and the same. That is, Knitting Theory can be expressed using Crochet Theory, though I grant that it could be quite difficult keeping that many loops on your hook at once, and I don’t really know that you’d want to anyway. But, even though I am pretty sure knitting is a degenerate form of crocheting, and crocheting (in its simpler, most commonly practice forms) is much easier to do, I think knitting is probably more generally useful, and certainly is more often practiced. It is surely for these combined reasons that shortcuts from using crochet hooks for knitting were developed, known as knitting needles (Surely this is how it came about.) Anyway, I digress again.
This may be boring to some of you, but I thought I would talk about the why and how I learned to knit (and crochet… that’s getting old. From now on, I’ll just assume you know what I mean). When I was a young lad, maybe 5 or 6 or so, my grandmother taught me to crochet. I assume it was mostly to keep me busy and out of her hair. Anyway, I don’t remember crocheting much, but I think I still have the hook she gave me somewhere in my room back home. More recently, as in, mere months ago, I saw some websites online where they talk about crocheting and knitting complex mathematical surfaces to get a better feel for how they look and work. I mentioned this before. Also really awesome: this Lorentz attractor!. As a mathematician at heart, I was intrigued, for there were lots of really cool complex shapes that have really simple equations, but its really hard to get a feel for how they look, even when its just in normal euclidean three-space. Let alone hyperbolic space, or higher dimensional spaces. So at that point, I kinda wanted to learn how to do this stuff.
Luckily, my good friends Jim and Pam, also known as the spectacular husband and wife knitting and crocheting team, were kind enough to teach me how to do this amazing things. Jim taught me to crochet, and that went really quick, and I seemed to get the hang of it pretty easily. Pam, not willing to let another go to die Dunkelseite, taught me to knit. Knitting was much more difficult to master, and I still have a few issues now and again, but it is also enjoyable, and there are definitely benefits.
So, I started making some swatches, and started making an afghan with crochet, and it was good, but slow going (also, it will take a lot of yarn). Its easy enough to figure out what to do with crochet (everybody likes afghans, and everybody needs potholders), but I was having some trouble figuring out useful things to make with knitting. Luckily, my main failing is that I like to buy books.
Enter, Knitting with Balls. A manly set of knitting projects that were useful and interesting (everybody needs beer cozies, and a simple but warm hat and scarf set is always useful. Also: a very interesting cabled laptop case. Haven’t started that yet. Need more practice!). So, I’ve started a few projects there, and now I got another book about making socks, cause that always looked interesting to do, and takes far less yarn than making afghans.
I am just starting to make socks though, and am working through some initial issues. First of all, when knitting on the round, I have trouble with the gauge and tension in the neighborhood of the initial join. I almost need to just practice that a few times, with only a couple rows of actually knitting afterwards before ripping it out and doing it again. That leads into another general problem I have with all sorts of knitting (and thus leading to the title of this post): Gauge Invariance. I don’t know if I’m holding the yarn wrong, or pulling too much after each stitch, or what is going on, but my gauge does not appear to be constant throughout my fabric. Especially when going back and forth between knitting and purling a lot (as in the ribbing for the hat I am working on), and when joining rounds (like the socks), and even sometimes just on the edges of the fabric when I turn around. I suppose with practice I will get better, but still, its a little frustrating.
Well, a longish post, but I’d been typing it for a while. At least I now have something to do while I am watching television. I always felt bad before, because whenever I watched TV, it seemed like I wasn’t doing anything useful, and wasting so much time. Problem solved!
Tags: crocheting, crocheting theory, differential geometry, gauge theory, hobbies, knitting, knitting theory, mathematical crocheting, physics, sock knitting
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Thursday, the 7th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 11:33 PM, local time.
In the interest of keeping momentum, I am trying to write to my blog now every day, at least once. I have a huge backlist of topics I want to write about, but most of them are currently just on my iGoogle homepage quick notes list as a simple phrase or two that I know what I mean to talk about, but would be meaningless to anyone else… some of them go back 6 or 7 months even, when I was still blogging more or less regularly, but didn't want to take the time to expand on those topics yet. So, they may sit there a bit longer as I try to figure out what to say.
Anyway, its getting pretty hot in Rochester this summer. Others may complain that I am complaining too much already about this, but I know that the sudden change in a single day from comfortable and rainy to that hot hot wind of summer that is so unbearable is really just an indication that this summer will surely get even worse. It always seems to. It’s at this point that I really start wishing for the late fall or early winter, when its not yet 30 below, but there is nice fluffy snow every once in a while… sigh.
Well thats probably enough for now. Expect posts soonish about my acquisition of yet another set of hobbies (knitting and crocheting), the wonder and awesomeness that is Opera, ways to keep my books in order (LibraryThing!), ways to keep my music in order, and my patio-container vegetable garden (and associated patio-container fruit orchard).
PS: I've started "tagging" blog posts, since its so darn easy on WriteToMyBlog.com to do so, and it might help with google searching for my page. Maybe.
Tags: blogging, rochester, summer heat, tagging
From "That which need not be read, Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Sunday, the 28th day of January, anno domini 2007 at 9:18 PM, local time.
So, it’s been a while since I’ve bothered Jim about teaching me to knit. However, in my usual meanderings through wikipedia, I happened upon the knitting entry, which in turn led me another site, where I found Something Worth Knitting. I then began to look a bit further into such things, and discovered some other very interesting things.
So anyway, uh, Jim? About that ‘knitting’ thing?
Tags: crocheting, geometry, knitting, math, mathematical crocheting, wikipedia
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Wednesday, the 17th day of January, anno domini 2007 at 1:20 AM, local time.
So, a quick update from the new year (yes I know, the new year is several weeks old now). First off, I’ve started a new blog. Or rather, I’ve split this one into two parts. I’ve noticed that I tended to blog about lots of random things here, but very seldom have I been blogging about technical subjects. I also recognize that while some of my readers might be interested in those technical subjects, many others might not be. So, any new ramblings about technical things (computers, math, programming, etc.) will go to this new blog, Complicated System of Pulleys. It can be reached from this blog by going to the link off to the right side, down in the sessrumnir.net section.
Related to this splitting, I have done a bit of a name reversal on this less technical blog. It used to be called sessrumnir.net and there was just a little comment under the title saying Nevermind…. Well, since I now have this second blog at pretty much the same site, I thought that it was more appropriate for both of them to be considered sessrumnir.net and each should be given separate names. Complicated System of Pulleys was pretty easy to come up with, and since Nevermind… had always been part of the old blog’s masthead, I thought it too might be appropriate.
Lastly (for now), I have added a small quote section to the mastheads. There was a lot of empty whitespace up there, and I like quotes, so there we go. Right now, I have to manually change the quote every once and a while, and I’ll probably keep it that way, though I imagine I’ll make it easier for myself to change it eventually. The two blogs will have separate sets of quotes. The quotes will generally be something that popped into my head, or something from a book I am/was reading. I will try to give proper credit/blame when possible. Some of them I might make up and those won’t be credited to anyone.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Oh, except to say that there is now about 4-6″ of snow cover. This is cause for celebration and joy. Thank you.
Tags: blogging, happiness, meta, new year, pulleys, snow
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Tuesday, the 6th day of June, anno domini 2006 at 10:28 PM, local time.
So, my script to filter things is complete, I think, and works pretty well. I think :) As I use bits and pieces of it, I shall find out.
Anyway, as I mentioned a while ago, I didn’t think the Unbound Bible was quite up to par but there was another one with better concordance with the Strong Numbers. Well I found it: http://www.bju.edu/bible/bible.php works great for that sort of thing. Only KJV, but that’s really to be expected with the use of Strong Numbers.
Tags: bible, filters, scripts, strong numbers
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Monday, the 5th day of June, anno domini 2006 at 10:53 PM, local time.
This will test some initial filtering stuff I added. First bold, then lots of bold. Then italics and more italics. Then underline stuff.
Link type 1: Wikipedia
Link type 2: Google
Link type 3: http://maps.google.com
Can I bold
across lines?
End of blog.
Tags: filters, google, maps, meta, tests, wikipedia
From "That which need not be read, Tripe. Utter tripe."
Posted by me on Tuesday, the 27th day of December, anno domini 2005 at 9:14 PM, local time.
While I’m on the topic of Uncle Orson, I just thought I’d bring up something I realized the other day. Many of you likely will think it foolishness or boring, and rightly so, for it is foolish and boring. That is why it is in this category. If you don’t want to read about foolish and boring things, then move right along.
Anyway, as I was saying, I was recently reading Uncle Orson, whom I have been notorious in the past for agreeing with wholeheartedly, and thought to myself, wow, I really do agree with him on a lot of things. But, then I thought, thats not really all that good, for if he thinks all my thoughts, and I have no new ones of my own, what is the point of my own existence. Why not just hand the whole show over to Orson and let him take it from here? Seems simpler, really. Then I could just sit back and relax and do nothing. But, I realize that that is not a Good Thing.
So, I have decided that I do not always agree with Uncle Orson. By decree. (Note the previous post for an example, if you don’t accept my simple decree.)
So there. I am a different person (with a different name and everything) and thus my existence is partially justified. Now if only I could figure out what to do with the stupid thing…
Tags: agreement, existence justification, uncle orson
From "Tripe. Utter tripe."
« Previous Page« Previous PageNext entries »