Holy crap! I haven't posted here since August!

Earlier today, I removed a semi-frozen 1 pound, 15 ounce solid chunk of pork shoulder from the fridge and cut it into smaller pieces. Being semi-frozen made it easier to cut up, but my left hand sure got pretty cold. It was a necessary sacrifice for the plan. Miss Lizzy will make the pickle meat and rice; I'll make the red beans. I can't wait. I love beans and rice, especially red beans and rice. One of the worst parts about having cancer was the truly awful food I was given to eat while incarcerated in Rush North Shore hospital. Exactly once, and only once in all the time that I was an inmate there did they serve red beans and rice. They were beyond adequate, they were actually pretty good. They were one of the few things that actually smelled appetizing when you lifted off the cover over the plate. Of course, that meant that they had to remove it from the menu, to better inflict the patients with more poorly cooked chicken, mystery meat and dry turkey sandwiches with no readily available mustard. You know, healthy food.

Such bad memories. Enough of that.

I wasted some more time today playing Kingdom of Loathing. Great fun! I finally killed Ed the Undying, got the Holy MacGuffin and had a ticker tape parade. Then I discovered that I could adventure in the CRIMBCO WC while falling down drunk, so a had a few more Salty Dogs and hit the head to fight some hobelfs. Yeah, baby! Unlike in the real world, in the Kingdom of Loathing I'm the man. That's one of the cool things about KOL.

In the real world, Miss Lizzy and I went to Starbucks to get out of the house. George was there, and being a true gentleman and scholar, he bought Miss Lizzy a Eggnog Latte and me an Americano. We spent some time chatting, and I got to talk geek with George for a while. I love talking geek. I get to do it so little these days. I told him about the current status of my great vaporware project, BrikWars Arena and my current Project Euler woes. Yup, I talked too much. I need to learn how to curb my enthusiasm a bit.

So Happy Crimbo to all, and to all, a good night.

Adventures in Notetaking

I'm testing out using vimwiki, yes, a Vim script, as a notes program to keep some information synced between my netbook and my desktop. Keeping some notes in Dropbox so they can be accessed from two different machines shouldn't be an exercise in rocket science, yet this been an annoyance for a while. I've looked at some other programs to do this:

•  Tomboy, which is a pretty good program. It relies on Mono. I don't have many philosophical problems with Mono. (Hey, if Microsoft want to  support open source .NET, cool.) It's just that a huge pile of Mono needs to be installed for Tomboy to work, and I want to try to keep my netbook free of big, big, big programs. Especially big, big, big programs that use Microsoft-type technology.

•  Gnote is a reimplementation of Tomboy using C++ instead of mono. It's as great as Tomboy, only less filling. The problems that I had with it was that Gnote (and Tomboy) want to put the note files in a fixed location. A fixed location that is not in my Dropbox directory. I want that location to be somewhere in the ~/Dropbox directory, so that both of my machines can work with the files. I tried to use a symbolic link to relocate the files to the Dropbox, and it seemed to work, at least for a while, before it screwed up. Data was lost. No fun. Definitely my bad.  Possibly this will work in a future version. It may even work now, for all I know. Cleaning up the mess was a pain and I don't want to do it again, so I'm avoiding these programs.

•  Zim is yet another note program, this time implemented in Python. I like Python. It seems pretty good, and I can easily put the notes into my Dropbox folder. The problem that I have is the netbook version is older than the desktop version and can't easily find and read all the files created by the desktop version. The newer version on the desktop machine keeps wanting to uprev the files created on the netbook. They just can't get along. I tried to install the newer version on my netbook but that's a NOP. I get this error message:

       Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: python-support (>= 0.90.0)

Since the system uses Python for, well, I dunno, probably something  important, I'm not messing with it.

•   Viki/Deplate is another vim script that provides wiki capabilities. I did not have a happy experience with it. I installed it, and a few other scripts that it depends on my machine. Let's just say that I had troubles with it. As the author so helpfully points out:

See :help vimball for details. Also, make sure to read |viki-customization|. If you have difficulties to install this plugin or if you use vim 7.0, please make sure to use the current version of vimball (vimscript #1502). 

I did RTFM. It was like beating my head against the Great Wall of Vim. Guys, I just want to use a script, not study Vim scripting. This thing should just work out of the box.

•  vimwiki is the current contender. So far, so good. It allows you to choose where it will save the notefiles, and selecting my Dropbox  directory was not a problem. I can look in the directory and see and open the files. The files are plain text files, readable by darn near anything. I like this. I'm going to play with this for a while. We'll see how it goes.

July 2010 Update

I haven't written in my blog at all in July. Here's some things that happened:

• The Feds have collected all my remaining  census materials. The only things that I had left were my training manuals and workbook. I had already turned in my ID and enumerator's bag, so I can no longer impersonate a g-man.
• We had an end to the census NRFU (Non Response Follow UP) phase of the census. We had hot dogs, chicken kebabs and fun.
• The Feds telephoned me asking for my ID and enumerator bag back. I told them that I had already turned them in. "Who did you give it to?" they asked. My crew leader, (name omitted here). "How do you spell it?" they asked. Being a super grass, I told them. I then emailed her to give her a heads up. You got to love dealing with temporary feds.
• I fixed Python scripting in Golly on amd64, at least on my machine. It seems there is a two year old bug, reported to Debian, that has not yet been fixed.
 The bug report:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=495941

How to fix it.

• Installed and played a bit with some other cellular automaton programs. Golly and Mirek's Cellebration still rule, as far as I can tell. I plan to revise my CA (cellular automaton) program, but I'm in learning mode right now, picking up more C++ skills. I'm using a book from the library, Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. I highly recommend it; at least it's working for me.
• John Biggins, the author of A Sailor of Austria, is writing again! His new novel, The Surgeon's Apprentice, is available as a kindle book from Amazon.com. It's great, even though it's not about the Austro-Hungarian u-boat service. He's working on another novel, too. Life is good.
•  It's bedtime, so I'll bore you dome more...  later.

Another day, without the dollar.

No longer a g-man

I cleaned up my last addresses yesterday. Since there is no more work for me from the local census office, I was released. Surprisingly, I was the first to finish. I should have milked it more, but what can I say? Wen you're done, you're done. I had to turn in my ID badge, a boatload of paper forms, and sadly, the cool census enumerator's bag. I was hoping to keep the bag, but it is not allowed. I did get to keep the four government issue number 2 pencils, the surviving blue ballpoint pen (one messily self-destructed), a pencil sharpener, some pencil erasers and some paper clips. All useful stuff, even if the pen is a bit suspect.  I also have the D-547 2010 Census Nonresponse Followup (NRFU) Enumerator Manual and the D-590 Census Employee Handbook for Enumerators, Recruiting Assistants and Crew Leader Assistants - 2010 Census. The books never were good reading, and now that the census is over for me, they're not much good for anything except origami.

It's good to be done, because I have definitely worn out my welcome on the street that I was working on. People get cranky with you if you keep showing up, asking the same questions. Of course, that gives them motivation to be a proxy for you, and give you information about their neighbors and landlords so you can complete the census questionnaires of people who did not fill out a census form, moved in or out on census day, etc. They give you the information so that they can see the back of you. They want you to go away and never come back. Now I never will, unless they want to get together, grill some burgers and drink a few beers.

It would be nice to work s new street, but there's none left to enumerate. So it's back to unemployment for me. The job search continues.

Another One Bites the Dust

I think I'm back in the game. My score is now 74.

Project Euler Status Report

Today I cracked not one, but two Project Euler problems: numbers 76 and 63. Woo-hoo! For the longest time I was stuck, but persistence finally paid off. My score is now 72.  I should not have been stuck for so long, but it is what it is. I'm not the best Project Euler competitor by a very long shot. I don't have great knowledge of  number theory and algorithms, but I'm working on it. Now, at least I know what "partition" means in number theory.

Knowing the correct math terminology makes it much easier to research solutions. I need to spend some more time with a number theory text, pencil and paper. I never thought I would spend time on this kind of math...

By the way, yes, the "private email" listed in the image will connect to me. It's not the best way, but it will work.