Glog

Check out my 5 min project

http://www.sporkywort.com/testmap.html

If I have time, I’ll add new features.

By the way, click on the tics.

I can’t watch another Spiderman movie without wondering why he won’t summon his giant robot.

This adventure starts out after a delightful afternoon of tea drinking with my three DC buddies; Jon, Brian, and Dorthy. We ran out of ideas for activities and we had couple more hours to burn before anyone needed to head back, so, we decided to check out a comic store I saw on our way to the teahouse. As we head towards the general direction of the comic book shop, out of the blue, Brian says something to the effect of “I don’t want to be the warrior.” I was dumbfounded. Brian clarified that Jon was the representation of a thief, Dorthy a healer, and I a mage. Thus, in his mind, to complete the D&D party, he would have to be the warrior. To make him feel better I volunteered to be the warrior/monk allowing him to be the mage.

I woke up this morning feeling physically shitty and for the first time since I graduated college it was not because of a traumatic dream or undue stress. Last night I hung around with my cousin and her lawyer buddies while downing a few special death mixes made by her friend Tom. It was a rather enlightening experience to see how lawyers operate in a social setting. There were a lot of bitching and moaning about their previous employer, in which they all quit to find something better. There was also a lot of witty jabs being thrown around which I definitely had fun partaking. I even had a chance to network with this guy who’s now working as a General Counsel for a firm well connected with top Democrats. From my talks with this guy, I could tell that he is definitely going to be “SOMEONE” at the White House if the Dems are able to take back the Executive office in 2008. Either that or, in his words, he’ll be running for congress in Maryland for the Dems. Hoooray for my first foray into power politics. I don’t know if I feel sick from the death mixes or the idea that I’m stepping into something I’ve been trying to avoid for years.

This rant is going to be a continuation of an instant messenger conversation I had with Shannon today. Needless to say, I jumped around a lot of different ideas probably giving the perception of a near psychotic neurosis. In fact, I’m going through a normal period in my life where I have discarded all everything I find true and started a new. I usually go through this period on a fairly frequent basis. For me it’s a way to reflect upon everything and to reaffirm core ideas or bring new ones into the fold. Normally when you talk to me during these periods I jump between different ideas but in fact I am trying to process and organize everything.

I found this list laying around my cube when I first moved in. I checked the ones that applied to me and think I had all but 15 or so. Even if you’re not an engineer, this is pretty darn funny. Think about your engineer friends and see which ones apply to them.

• If you are convinced you can build a phaser out of your garage-door opener and your camera’s flash attachment
• If, at a traffic intersection, you try to figure out the synchronization pattern between your car’s blinkers or wipers and the others’

1) Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2) To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong.

3) Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4) Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5) (Miller’s Law) Three points determine a curve.

Quite recently I’ve taken interest in learning more about the reasons behind Yutaka Taniyama’s suicide. For those who do not know, Yutaka Taniyama was instrumental in solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. This is was the last theorem that was unsolved by Pierre de Fermat after his death. Its significance comes from the multitude of famous mathematician who failed to find a solution. Essentially, without going into the details behind the mathematics, it is a simple theorem that states that “It is impossible to separate any power higher than the second into two like powers.” It was solved quite recently by a fellow named Andrew Wiles, 367 years after its inception, with the assistance of Taniyama’s Taniyama-Shimura theorem.