Are limbs worth going out on?

(Yes that is a preposition dangling at the end of my title)

I feel sort of silly asking this, and I might delete this post when I've thought better of it :) , but I wonder what others' opinions are. (I have my own ideas.)

Given that you have an interest in both girls:
Is it better to ask out a girl for whom the asking out is comfortable? Or is it better to ask out a girl for whom the mere prospect of asking out is terrifying?

I refer specifically to first dates as it seems ridiculous to ask out a girl on a fourth or fifth date when she terrifies you. And I know that the two choices aren't exactly mutually exclusive. And by terrifying I mean that your brain shuts down when you think of asking or think of going...

What say ye?

Shoes

Somewhere, a tight-rope walker is missing his shoes.

Tetris III

My high score is 110 on level 9. How about you?

I should explain the scoring:
1 row = 1 point
2 rows = 4 points
3 rows = 9 points
4 rows = 16 points

(it only works in Firefox)

Amicelli Wangu

This week we finally let Jason the Grouch out of his barrel on the balcony. Now that the weather is warming up, there's really no point making him stay out there.

Also this week, I polished off the last of the Easter candy my mom gave me. I love the Cadbury caramel eggs, and the Lindt eggs, but my favorite are the Amicelli!


Imagine a Pepperidge Farm Pirouette -- it's the thin, cylindrical, butter cookie filled with some kind of sugary goo. Usually the goo is chocolate, or french vanilla stuff or (my favorite) hazelnut-flavored chocolate.

Now ask yourself, "How could I improve upon the near-perfect Pirouette?" What could possibly be better than a thin butter cookie filled with hazelnut chocolate? How about dunking the whole thing in chocolate? Yeahh..... oh man... they're good.


And, two other fun events: I got to go to the VocalPoint concert on Thursday. It was awesome! I had no idea how fun it would be. I loved their Christmas songs, and their reproduction of Vitas was pretty impressive. My two favorite songs were Grace Kelly ("I could be brown, I could be blue....") and September. Fantastic!

And last night, I went to Classical 89's showing of the silent movie: The General with Buster Keaton. They had the organist accompanying the action throughout, and we got to boo at the villain and cheer on the hero -- it was hilarious! Look for tickets next year.

That is all.

Happy Easters!

Amazink

I stumbled upon this little thing I wrote a while ago... I wrote it whilst I was in a ponderous mood. We live in a strange time:

A few months before I flew to Zimbabwe, I remember sitting in my kitchen filling out forms so I could get a VISA. I enlisted the help of Mom's electric typewriter, excavating it from it's grave in the desk downstairs. My parents saw me using the typewriter and began telling me about how their days in college. They used to type entire reports on typewriters! They had a few strategies for correcting mistakes, but it was mostly a one-chance operation. They thought it strange that they had relied so heavily upon typewriters, but that I didn't even know how to really work the device.

Technology changes -- it becomes more and more amazing. Not having gone to college when my parents did, I can not give a comparison between then and now, but I'd like to relate one small anecdote that shows what it's like for me in college.

A month or so ago, I was sitting in my circuits class. The class was taught by Wade, a graduate student, who stood at a podium in the front of the classroom. From there, he controlled a PowerPoint presentation that was being projected onto the screen at the front of the room. He drew on the slides (nowadays they don't slide, but we still call them 'slides') with the mouse for emphasis.

I had procrastinated doing my assignment, so I had to work on it during class. During class, I finished all of the assignment except the part that would be easier to do on a computer. Once class ended, I pulled my lap top computer out of the bag at my side, opened it up and started typing. I copied and pasted a few times for the assignment (didn't even bat an eye) so I wouldn't have to retype anything -- because that would be too much work.

Once I had all the code written, I pulled it into Word so that I could format it nicely onto one page. I shrunk the font size down so that it would fit. Then I had to print.

Still sitting in the same chair, I turned on the wireless network connection of my laptop. Once it found the network (a 5 second wait), I told Word to print my document to the campus printers. Once it sent the job (through the air), I closed my laptop. Mind you, I had been looking at a screen that is thinner than a spiral notebook.

I stuffed my laptop back into my bag, slung it over my shoulder and headed downstairs to the printer in the front of the Clyde building. I touched the screen of the printer to awaken it, then slid my school ID card through the reader on the side of the screen. For some reason, this printer wasn't working. So, I wandered over to the Widtsoe building, walked up some stairs, then around to the computer lab, where I again slid my ID card. This time it worked. The screen showed me that I had just under $2 left on my account. The money got there in the first place by me transferring $5 from my credit card a few months earlier -- a transaction I did online; no money was ever touched. The pages printed; I stapled all my papers together, then turned them in.

So, that's how homework's done today. I wonder what my kids will do...

(end)

And this is my keyboard in the dark:

Tetris II

I did it! I finally finished it. I made Tetris in hardware!



You might ask, "What do you mean by that, Matt?" Or equivalently: "Huh?" Well... do you want the accurate explanation, or the analogy-rich obfuscation? I'll start with the latter:

Inside every computer is a magick box filled with Smurfs. But these aren't garden variety Smurfs... they're extra, extra small, and they're very fast. Just like humans, these Smurfs come in only two stereotypical varieties -- short, squatty Smurfs and slender, stick-like Smurfs. Unlike humans, these Smurfs are constantly at war with each other. Fueled by mutual affronts effected long ago, a girthy Smurf will always attack a gangly foe... and the gangly foe (though he will not call himself so) will never deny himself the satisfaction of dealing the low blow.

As luck (or you might call it fate... depending on your altitude) would have it, the lurpy lot nearly always defeat the smaller Smurfs, and were it not for the huge population of the shorters (owing to their remarkable ability to reproduce), the taller Smurfs would have long ago taken control of the magick boxes.

The warfare is important, but the real reason companies like Intel and AMD breed and captivate these Smurfs is because of their uncanny predictability. On any given day, at any given humidity, you can predict with certainty where a Smurf will go for a walk, what he will say, the joke he will tell you and the place he will dine. It is this predictability that powers modern computing. A hardware designer's job is to create the avenues and cafes that will drive the creatures where we'd like them to go and to stop -- sometimes this means sending a short Smurf to be annihilated by a gang of tall ones. It's brutal, perhaps, but you wouldn't be able to read this on your computer if our society wasn't willing to make that sacrifice.

So, that's what I did today (and every day for the past eight days). I put the Smurfs to work that I might amuse myself with moving colors on a screen.


Brief, boring explanation:
To make something in hardware is different than just programming software. Software requires a processor and memory (both pieces of hardware). Hardware requires electricity. The stuff I did to make Tetris II lies in between software and hardware. I described the hardware in a language (similar to programming software), then downloaded the resulting design to a piece of hardware that can be programmed. Also, if I had the money or a benefactor, I could make the design into a standalone chip ... so I could fabricate something that would run Tetris... you could hold it in your hand, then plug it into a monitor and play. Oh, it was so fun to make.

Tetris

Last week I decided to make Tetris. I egged Todd on until he bet me that I couldn't write it in an hour. He won... it took me 2 hours to get it working, and I fiddled for an extra hour on making it better. The thing that let me do the program so quickly is this Python module called Pyglet. Pyglet makes the graphics really easy, so I could just concentrate on the logic part of it.

Anyway, I'm nerdy, but I've made Tetris... here it is:


In other news, I arm wrestled and defeated Ashley and Alicia. And lest the results are ever contested, here is the evidence of my victories:

Coke

They were selling Coke in glass bottles at Macey's earlier this week. For only a dollar I had to buy one.


The first time I ever had Coke came nearly 10 years after the first time I smelled Coke. I first smelled the stuff at the BYU tennis courts where it was soaking the grass, and in turn soaking up the sun. Sun-soaked Coke will never become a cologne nor a fancy candle.

That's my first memory of Coke.

I was 19 when I first drank Coke. I drank it from a chilled, glass bottle whilst seated in the Rishando's house in Nkulumane, a suburb of Bulawayo. In many ways, Nkulumane reminds me of a slightly more populated Manti. It's a beautiful place with beautiful sunsets, beautiful landscape and beautiful people. It is one of my most favorite spots on this earth.

We had just finished teaching a lesson to the Rishando girls when, as is the kind custom in Zimbabwe, we were offered a drink and biscuits. Oh, how I miss those biscuits. I love dusty biscuits. One of the best gifts I ever got as a missionary was a package (a huge package) of Petit Beurre butter biscuits from Elder Fitzgerald.

Anyway, so Mrs. Rishando (she wasn't officially Sister Rishando at that time) popped the caps off the bottles and I took my first draught. I first thought, after the juice had grated down my throat, "How did Coke ever make any money selling this stuff?!" It took everything I had to finish that bottle! But like any good drug, the next bottle was easier, and the next easier, and so on until I actually started to like it.

So, I bought the bottle at Macey's, chilled it overnight, popped the top and took a memory drenched draught of the familiar liquid. It was good. Though I still wonder how Coke ever convinced people to take a second gulp -- it's potent stuff.

Lampshade > Homework

So, a week or so ago I started thinking: "I wonder if I could make a lamp out of my cell phone charger..." Turns out that I can!


Here's what I used:
6 LEDs
1 paper cup
about 3 inches of wire from the binding of my Spanish notebook
(to honor MacGyver I also used some safety pins, paperclips and tin foil... but ended up discarding them)

At first I just twisted the LEDs together, taped them in place and plugged my charger in. Then I could hold the glowing mass above my paper as I read.

But then, on Tuesday, I happened upon a brilliant thought: "I could make a lampshade out of a cup!" And so, as any diligent engineer would do, I set my homework aside and made a lampshade.


Now all that's left is a stand for the lampshade and an improved hookup for the charger. This was the BEST Valentine's week EVER! :)

Boring details:
The charger puts out 6.25V at 350mA which means it deliver up to 2.19W of power. (6.25 * 0.350 = 2.19) I first bought these LEDs from the shop at the Clyde that run on about 2V. But as I was taking some measurements, Justin came in an offered me some of his higher powered LEDs. Those guys each run at above 3.2V and draw about 25mA. Since each LED has to have at least 3.2V and can't handle more than 3.7V I decided on two groups in series to split the 6.25V. Each of these groups has 3 LEDs in parallel (so 6 total).

It sounds so forlorn

The other day, I got together with some friends who were forming a band. I seem to remember mention of a quintet, but there were seven or eight people there when I arrived. Oh well :)

I had assumed they wanted me to play the drums, but it turns out that they desperately needed someone on French horn. I’d seen plenty of horns and trumpets played and knew the basic principles, so I decided to go for it.

Luckily, they had an old horn there that I could use. I opened the case and put the horn together. I was a little hesitant to put my mouth on the mouthpiece and considered going into the kitchen to boil water and cleanse it, but I ended up just going for it. It had that taste distinctive to old metal -- kind of dusty-like.

I blew once and no sound came out. Then my mind was caught back to the many times in Jr. High band when Mr. Hill would explain proper blowing technique to the lung-users. I suddenly remembered the word “embouchure.” Just as I thought of “embouchure”, I thought the thought I always think when I think of that word: “How do you spell embouchure? It starts with an e.... and it has a ch somewhere near the end... and then there’s that French-ish ou ‘round about the middle.”

By now the horn was responding well to my buzzing puffs and I eagerly tried keying some notes. I rummaged through the case and found a book describing all the fingerings... and though the instructions didn’t seem all that consistent, I felt confident in my ability to play in the group.

About this time, a man entered the room and took a seat in front of us. He seemed drunken, and he seemed to be in pain. He sat slouchily in the chair with a wincing look on his face. He reminded me of William Wilburforce (from Amazing Grace) when he was in pain. He turned out to be the conductor. And though he was drunk, he was agreeable. We practiced a bit before I left...

And then I woke up.

I recently heard on the NPR (I think that’s where I heard it) someone’s theory that our dreams are really emergency training simulations; that we dream through situations in order to prepare ourselves for potential emergencies. Phew! That’s a relief! Now I can feel confident if the Wincing Drunkenman ever needs a horn player. And no big deal if I suddenly lose my ability to fly... or if someone needs me to do a ventriloquist act with a shaggy, blue parrot for a high school basketball game half-time show.

What are you prepared for?

(And this is a picture of a walkway lightly covered in snowflakes - 10 points to whoever knows where it is)