This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I am currently in Delaware, on the way south from my place to DC. Been on the road maybe 90 minutes. Twice in that time I have found myself following obviously drunk drivers. They were weaving dangerously between all three lanes of the highway. They were slowing down and speeding up randomly. They almost ran off the road a few times.
I just stayed back and kept my distance, but several people who passed them were almost hit as they went by and the drunk drivers swerved when they realized someone was near. This is not something you want to see. These people were clearly a menace to themselves, and everyone on the road.
As it was, I just hung back a few miles at a safe distance until these yahoos exited on their own. (One of them quite nearly took out the exit sign as they were leaving the highway.) But the longer they were in front of me the more I was tempted to call the cops on them. I probably should have.
But what is the “proper” course of action in this sort of situation? Call 911 on the cell? Or is in not enough of an emergency to do that? Or just wait for a safe moment and speed by the drunks as fast as possible to get around them and away from them? I guess that is the normal thing that people do. But I can’t help but feel that when people are clearly endangering others, it is almost a duty to report them. Is 911 the way to go?
Anyway, stopping at the Deleware House for a little caffene and rest before continuing on to DC. Hopefully I won’t encounter any more drunks this time around. I do this drive at this time of day and week fairly frequently, and have only seen such obviously impaired drivers a handful of times. But two in one night got my attention. I didn’t call in, but I hope the cops got them. Or at the very least that they got home safely without killing or maiming anyone.
[Note: I originally wrote almost all of this on the Treo, but then hit the wrong button and erased everything I had written… so rather than do that on the thumboard again I hooked up the laptop for a few minutes. Also cool I guess. But not quite as much so as typing the whole post on the phone. :-)]
It seems like these are happening more and more often. Kasparov is playing one of the world’s best computers at a chess tournament in NYC. I’ve been to at least one game of the last three of these tournaments I think. And watched most of the rest online. Since my schedule is pretty free now, I just signed up for all four games of this tournament. Tickets are free, first come first serve.
Kasparov vs. X3D Fritz
Now, I actually suck at chess, and don’t understand most of what happens in these games. But watching them and the commentary surrounding them is fun and educational. But I must admit, I am mainly there to root for the computer. I think it is only a matter of time before the puny humans are routinely crushed, and hope to see the day that happens, and Kasp can’t even eek out one win. We probably are not there yet, but soon perhaps. Soon…
I do have a couple beefs with how the computer teams have been run int he past though. Here they are:
#1) While the computer chooses its own moves, the TEAM of human programmers and handlers has always decided when to offer resignations and draws, and has decided if they shuld accept draw offers. This is just wrong. The computer should have to make these decisions itself. This is a part of the game, and if the computer is truely to be the one playing, humans should not be involved in ANY decisions.
#2) Even if the computer makes the decision, it should remember that it is a computer. It will see any mistakes immediately, and not make any obvious ones. The human can. Even the best human in the world. As a strategy to WIN the computer should NEVER resign, offer a draw, or accept a draw. It should force each game to conclude via the rules only. Checkmate, stalemate, draw by repeated poisition, 50 move rule or lack of time. (Or I suppose the human can resign.) First, this would give the human many more opportunities to make a mistake. A mistake the computer could take advantage of. Two, such a strategy would fluster the hell out of the human and anger him (especially Kasparov with his temper). That would make the human MORE likely to make a mistake. Third, in an extended draw sequence, the human is far more likely to get into time pressure, again increasing the chances of an error, or even running out of time. If the computer truly wants to win, it needs to fully take advantage of its strengths… which includes giving the human every possible opportunity to make a mistake. Finally, there are a lot of chess newcomers watching these things. And seeing draws accepted early in the game all the time does not really help to encourage the game in the mind of those people. These games are going to be televised on ESPN! Give the people a good show darn it!
Anyway, both of those tick me off. There is no reason for a computer player to EVER agree to end a game before it has to end. Give the humans chances to make stupid mistakes! Yes, this shows some lack of respect for the opponant. But screw it. Go for the jugular. Feed Kasp the rope and let him hang himself!
I’m posting this from my new phone. Just because I can!
Just a quick update on Sam’s life and situation. On September 17th, as I aluded to on this blog but did not talk about specifically, I was told that when the current round of reorganizations in my group was done my job would be eliminated as the group (Marketing) would no longer need to type of work I do (helping business groups analyze tech projects and work with both business and technical groups to develop requirements and get those projects built). I was told at that time to prepare myself and start looking for other possibilities.
I couldn’t complain too much, because I’d been saying they should do that for a long time. The type of work I do, and the type of work the organization did and was interested in started to greatly diverge back in 2000 with a few management changes back then. I have not been a good “fit” with my organization since then, and have not been particularly happy in my position, aside from a few brief periods. It is now very much a true “Marketing” organization, and anybody who knows me could tell you right away I don’t belong in Marketing. So this is in the long term good. I needed the kick in the pants to move on.
Well, it took them long enough, a month and a half, but today was the official day. I was called in and given my severance package, and am now officially “between positions”. Based on my length of service, the severance will essentially be my full pay for just under five months. It could have been a bit better, but also could have been a bit worse. That will last me through March even if I am not frugal, longer if I am smart about excess expenses.
Over the last month I have been talking to various people I know about possible spots. The two that would have had me actually stay at the same company have both fallen through as of today. I am also speaking to two external companies who seem interested. If one of those works out, great. If not I’ll be hitting my network of friends again, and the recruiters and job boards.
The current version of my resume is here. So if any of you are hiring for anything like this, or know of someone who is, especially within a 45 minute drive or so of Yardley, PA (northeast of Philly, near the New Jersey border) then please let me know!
Anyway, while I have been prepared for over a month, and all my stuff was packed up and taken home long ago, this still kind of sucks. But hey, it will be better in the long run I’m sure. But this in between part will be a bit annoying I’m sure. Either that, or a lot of fun. We shall see. :-)
I’m going to have a decent amount of free time, so if any of you want to come over and visit, or have lunch or dinner or drinks or anything like that, please give me a call or an email, I’d love to see you all.
Thanks everybody! Keep in touch!
Found this post this morning. Gotta love discussions of non-Euclidian geometries. I need to find a way to carve out some hours each week to play with fun math. It has been way too long.
Non-Euclidean Space
(USS Clueless)
In Euclidean geometry, the fifth axiom was: if there is a line on a plane, and a point on that plane which is not on that line, then there is exactly one line on that plane passing through that point which is parallel to the other line.
For a long time, it seemed to many as if that didn’t need to be an axiom, and much effort went into trying to prove it using the other four axioms, all of which failed.
In the 19th century, some mathematicians decided to try a different approach. One can prove a statement is false by presuming it is true and showing that leads to a contradiction. (Or vice versa.) So what they hoped was that they could try to show that the fifth axiom didn’t need to be an axiom by showing that every alternative statement of it led to a contradiction. If successful, that would mean it was tautological and thus didn’t need to be axiomatic.
Of course, I’d spent a lot of time looking at various non-Euclidean geometries in the distant past… nothing really intense, but the basics… so nothing really NEW in the article for me, but it was good to see that kind of thing again. Makes me want to go do some 12-dimentional contour integration. :-)
OK. Been running panther for a couple days now. Love it! Use Expose all the time. Once I had the external drive to get around the failure of the internal CD drive, all went smoothly. I like the new look too. I made myself some extra users just to try fast user switching, even though I’m the only user. On my older machine it doesn’t do the nice animation. I’ll probably turn it off since it uses a lot of space on the menu bar. I wish I could set it to just show my picture instead of the full name.
The new mail is nice too. I have it set to do spam the default way again for a bit, but that will probably change before too long. As is, if I take spam out of the spam folder to file it (rather than delete it) it gets marked as not spam and screws up the spam identifying heuristics. I know I am screwed up for actually saving every single spam I get, but hey, I do. Before I had gotten around of this by setting up a seperate spam folder governed by my own custom rules. I may do that again.
Things do feel a little faster. I still need a whole new computer soon though. Hopefully Q1 next year. I should start counting the pennies. :-)
Panther is awesome though. Everyone needs to upgrade right away! :-)
The external drive arrived FedEx this morning. I am now at work, set up the drive and everything, and fired it up. The scratched Panther disk booted just fine. The install process started up. I had to wait like ten minutes for some reason for it to give me the continue button on the first screen, but then I was able to go through the options for the install and start it.
I picked just a regular “Upgrade”. I know an Archive and Install works better and is “cleaner” but from past experience it is a pain, because there are a handful of things I need which are in the world outside my own user folder, that I have to hunt down and move over one my one. So I’ll do an upgrade install first. If I run into any issues, I’ll go back and do an Archive and install.
I also went into the customize and made sure I was getting ALL the language packs and other such things. I hate it when I go to some foreign website and I don’t see the characters properly, even if I can’t read them anyway. :-)
So, it is chugging along installing right now. This will take awhile I imagine. I’ll go get myself some microwave popcorn or something. It is lunchtime after all.
Noiw I’ll finally get to get going on Panther! Several days later than I should have, but hey, at least it is working!
Just checking recent logs and saw a few incoming from the Philly LocalFeeds and started playing around on there. Found out I could center it on me. The GeoURL site shows websites near me, but this is much more fun, because it shows recent blog entries from other blogs within 20 miles of me (I could change the distance, but that is just fine).
LocalFeeds centered on Abulsme.com
It shows the last 50 posts people have made from that 20 mile radius around me.
As of right now the breakdown of posts in that last 50 are:
13 posts from Judith Meskill’s Knowledge Notes
12 posts from Mike Zornek
9 posts from Abulsme.com
7 posts from Coplan’s Nonsense
5 posts from Lascivious.org
4 posts from AnthonyTrumbo.com
So I’m not doing too bad. 3rd most prolific blogger of 6 active bloggers in my area. Cool. (Well, of people that have their location properly geocoded.) I think I’ll probably start following these local feeds in addition to the other places I check regularly. Some of this looks potentially interesting.
Judith Meskill’s specialty appears to be knowledge management, which is closely related to some of the content management stuff I’ve been doing the past few years. Looks good. And sounds like Mike Zornek is doing some Mac stuff, also good. And the others look like they have some occationally interesting stuff too. I’ll be checking in regularly to them, and any others that show up within 20 miles of me. :-)
I am not an optimist. I tend to expect the worst, then let myself be pleasantly surprised if it turns out better than that. The article below supplies the alternative rose colored glasses we can do no wrong view. It is an interesting read. My view when reading something like this is “Well, that would certainly be nice if it worked out that way…” but I just don’t think it really will. If it does though, I’ll be happy that I was wrong.
(As an example, at the time I thought the Reagan defence buildup and especially the “Star Wars” project were completely insane, however, in the decades following, when various former Soviet leaders talked about what had happened many of them mentioned that the USSR’s inability to keep up with the US on those fronts, especially when they thought they might have to expand even more to counter “Star Wars” was a direct and significant contributor to the changes in policy that led to the end of the Cold War… it may not have been exactly the way Reagan and his buddies thought things would happen… it almost definately was not… but in the rear view mirror, it seems to have been a good course after all… or at least we got very lucky.)
We’ll see if we get lucky again.
The Event of the Age
(Victor Hanson, National Review)
Yet here we stand, a little more than six months later, with a country that was the worst in the Middle East evolving into the best. We are witnessing nothing less than the revolutionary and great moral event of the age, and when it comes to pass, a reborn democratic Iraq will overturn almost all the conventional wisdom, here and abroad, about the Middle East, the nature and purpose of war in our age, the moral differences between Europe and America — and the place in history of George W. Bush.
(via Cold Fury)
So, during the day today, Ron took me to a local Best Buy to try to find an external CD-ROM drive. They had bunches. USB 2.0/1.1. No Firewire. My old laptop only has USB 1.1, which is dead slow. But it is what they had. I got one. Had a burner in it too. Cool enough.
Got it back to Rons place. Plugged it in. Put in the OS X Disk 1. It saw it! All the files looked like they were there. Did a disk check on it. It said it was fine! Woo! Hit the install thing, and it rebooted to start the install… and booted normally, not from the CD.
Repeated by choosing the bood drive from the Preference Pane. Same deal. After finding some hints online, repeated by booting with the option key and choosing the external CD. I hit Opt-V to get the verbose listing as it started to boot. It would start… then just keep waiting forever for data from the drive that wouldn’t come.
Read several places online that booting from a USB 1 mounted drive is like booting from floppies in the old days (takes forever) except the OS is now many hundreds of floppies in size. The drive whirred for a while, but then seemed to stop, no data transver lights flickering. The boot process just continued to report “waiting for device” every minute or so.
This was definately a no go.
Now, me by myself would have probably just thrown the drive in the basement and bought a firewire drive when I got the chance, but Ron’s wife Ursula offered to return it for me and so instead I got the full purchace price credited back to me. Thanks Ursula!
I did call the CompUSA in Pittsburgh (the closest big computer store to where Ron lives) to see if they had any firewire CD Drives in stock. They did not. So I just went to the Apple Store online and ordered one to be FedExed to me. Hopefully I’ll have it Monday morning. If not, definately Tuesday.
Now, of course I don’t know for sure if the scratched CD is useable. (Although Ron buffed out a lot of the damage with toothpaste, it is still quite visibly scratched.) When the drive arrives, I’ll find out. If it still doesn’t boot, even with a firewire drive at a decent speed, then I’ll ahve to get the disk replaces. I’ll probably start by asking Jon if I can borrow his. But eventually I will probably buy the one I had intended for my mom… or… Brandy says she will take it back to the store and see if they will replace it. Perhaps that would be more cost effective. :-)
Anyway, I’m quite annoyed at being several days delayed on trying Panther. Sigh. Oh well, guess I’ll have it up and running Monday or Tuesday probably.
Now if only Zeus can remain functional until next year too…
Oh. I also went to the gym with Ron today. Felt great. I really should do that more often. :-)
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