Phil online

I saw an interesting story on Digg today.  It was interesting not because of the story, but because I was surprised that others found it interesting.  The link was to an article claiming and proving that 0.99… (repeating nines) is equal to 1.  That is, they both represent the same number.

This is a tautology that every algebra student should be able to understand.

But the comment thread on the original post is amusing.  It starts out with various people claiming it’s not true, and some others showing how the commenters got it wrong.  But then it devolves into several thousand comments, many with Math Majors claiming the original post is so far wrong that it’s absurd!

But it is clearly correct, and anyone who thinks otherwise simply doesn’t understand mathematical concepts.

Hey — here’s an easy problem, but with a surprising answer:

What’s are the next two numbers in this series?

142857,  285714, 428571, 571428, 714285, ??????, ??????

I’ve been insanely busy the last month or so. I still am this week. But I’m trying to use Google Calendar to help organize my life with Perrie. I created her a calendar, and I linked it with mine. Worked great.

Except, my entries are all off by three hours. All the time zones look fine, but my imported-from-Outlook times are all wrong! Grrr! Read the rest of this entry »

My grandmother, Bettie Hord (her real name, not a nickname), was 90 years old. She was bright, alert and coherent to the end. At the age of 84 I gave her a computer, she got online, she learned to send email, and she learned to IM. She continued until her death yesterday at 90.

The last of her generation preceded her in death. Her husband, my grandfather, died two years ago at the age of 90. She had not wanted to outlive him, but she did. Her “little” brother, Pete, died 6 months ago. She was very close to him and his loss hurt her deeply.

My greatest concern for Momabet was that she would live through the ordeal of a nursing home with scant attention paid to her chronic pain (post-herpetic neuralgia afflicted her back) or her phobia of needles. Instead, she passed peacefully in her sleep yesterday, in her apartment where she lived independently, but in constant contact with nearby (and online) relatives and friends. Her pain and sorrow are over. For that I am thankful.

I visited with her two days before she died. She was as bright and alert as I’ve ever known her to be. She talked about her college days at Erskine in the 30’s, her calculus class, her friends, her roommate (who’s still alive) and her first date with her husband.

She had been quite homesick at Erskine. It was 500 miles from home. Previously she had never travelled more than 15 miles from where she was born. Then she brought “Jimmie” home to marry him, and she began her life. She brought these memories to life for us as if it had all happened last week. She seemed very happy. It was a nice visit.

My own mother left us when I was 8 years old. Momabet was the closest thing I had to a real mother all my life. And so I lost two of the most important family members yesterday: my grandmother, and my Momabet.

Lodefizzle is Mike Davidson’s made-up word entirely for SEO testing. It’s sure to get crapstormed as more people write about it (thus wiping out any hope of gleaning from extant results), but the article is pretty interesting at the moment. Check it out. Lodefizzle.

[02/16/2006 — Update: I’m on Page 1 Google results for the term Lodefizzle.  Props 4 my madd 530 skillz, baby!]

My mother-in-law has a phone number very close to to 867-5309, the subtitular phone number from Tommy Tutone’s one-hit-wonder, “Jenny (867-5309)”. When I call her I remember her number by singing the tune in my head and transposing some digits. It’s a useful mnemonic for me.

My wife doesn’t do mnemonics. She accidentally dialed Jenny’s number instead her mom’s. When she did, before the ringback occurred, the phone played “Jenny I’ve got your number 8-6-7-5-3-0-9″. And then it started ringing.

Whoa! What the heck was that? Cool trick!

I’ve since tried a few other area codes (212-867-5309) and verified it happens on all of them.

It appears to be a Vonage trick, since I have Vonage as my sole phone service provider in my home. I tried it on other phones (my cellphone, my office phone) and none of them do anything like this. Ergo, it must be some geek trick that someone played with at Vonage. Maybe they were showing of the new Custom Ringback Feature to the VP of marketing. (Apparently he wasn’t impressed because this feature is not offered to customers yet.)

I tried Googling to see if anyone else found Jenny’s number on the wall, but all my searches led to some news article about a guy auctioning off 212-867-5309 on eBay, and someone hacking Vonage with the same number.

Of all the crazy things you can find on the internet. Now there’s a huge archive of naughty finger photos.

There is no one to blame for Hurricane Katrina. But it’s difficult now on day 5 to think that anyone in government is doing anything productive. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine was in the hospital in Texas having surgery. I called to check up on him afterwards and spoke to his wife. He wouldn’t be speaking on the phone for another day or so. Since I couldn’t talk to him directly, I decided to send him flowers. Guys sending guys flowers — weird, huh? But this is my best friend, and he’ll dig ‘em.

So I went over to my favorite online florist and ordered Read the rest of this entry »

Woo hoo! I bought a new digital camera. I don’t have it yet; FedEx does. But I held one last week at Fry’s. I’ll write more about it here when I get to play with it some.

I got it for the zoom. I knew I needed more zoom than my 3x Kodak DC290, but I didn’t really appreciate what a zoom could do until I marveled over this site of hummingbird pictures. In particular the Read the rest of this entry »

My third grade teacher wasn’t too bright, but she was a great story reader. She did all the dialects in a loud, raucous voice. We ate it up. One day she was reading a story — I have no idea what it was — and someone made reference to a “shotgun wedding“. Maybe it was in the story, but equally likely was that someone in the class just asked her because they’d heard the term.

She boldly looked right at us — and lied. Read the rest of this entry »

My third grade teacher was a lot of fun. But she wasn’t too smart. The best thing I learned in third grade was that I was smarter than my teacher. That’s also the worst thing I learned. Read the rest of this entry »

I bought something on eBay last month. Now that they’ve integrated PayPal, it’s even easier to pay for the item. So I did, by clicking the large, yellow “Pay now” button.

I got a confirmation email. Two weeks go by; no package.

So I went to send an email to the seller. I scanned the message for his email address. And I noticed something strange: the wrong zip code. Read the rest of this entry »

I always heard when I was a kid that if you swallowed bubblegum it would remain in your system for 7 years. Some versions of the story said it lasted “forever”. I didn’t fear these much since I heard all this from children.

When I was three or four years old — this is one of my earliest memories — I saw two teenage girls walking down my street wearing tiny bikinis. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a list of fallacies taught to me by adults in my youth which I will attempt to catalog in the category (click on the Fallacies link). Some of them were jokes, some were sincere beliefs, and some were stated in science books. All were lies.

Lesson learned: Never lie to children.

Read the rest of this entry »

FlexURL is a plugin to help readers find your blog even when then the URL has been word-wrapped in someone’s email. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got the new carputer half-installed in my dinky little car. It’s running on a tablet PC I picked up for cheap. I bought a new license for iGuidance and installed it on there. It’s not perfect because it’s running Windows 98 and it crashes a lot. (Windows 2000 is more helpful at cleaning up resources you forget to release.)

But it works. And it has maps. And it knows directions. And it speaks.

It’s basically TomTom GO for only $200. Read the rest of this entry »

I had given up on the idea of a carputer in my little car. But I saw this ForSale ad on mp3car.com that piqued my interest. It was for an industrial tablet PC. It’s basically a 10″ touchscreen with a computer built-in, for less than half the cost of a 7″ touchscreen. How cool is that? And he has so many broken ones, he throws in a couple of those for spare parts.

It all arrived this week while I was out of town. I’ve only had an hour or so to play with it, but I like it so far. Here’s my write-up…
Read the rest of this entry »

8 years ago I was working for a company in the computer telephony business. I was the CT/Voice-guru-designate for the company, so I got to go to conferences and see what the dreamers were dreaming of in the future. The dreams were all over their demos and promos. They didn’t work all that well, and they were expensive as hell.

The holy grail of the industry was a sort of turing test for IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. This is where you could call a customer support line and talk to a computer without realizing it was a computer. It would almost be as good as talking to a real human. They’ve been doing this Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’ll tell you why not: Money and Time

Don’t get me wrong. I love the carputer Read the rest of this entry »