Mizblog

Quotes used in The Millenium Project – 1 to 100

Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics

I like playing Minesweeper. This guy goes into some detailed but not difficult statistics to try to figure out a difficult board position, and the thinking is fascinating, but I would have quickly hit the 50/50 choices (bottom center and top left) and if I survived those, I’d have hit the bottom-right corner square next. It’s got a better than 90% chance to not be a mine, and 60% chance to not be adjacent to a mine (thus opening more free squares and yielding more information about the remaining mine placement).

Of course, if one of those 50/50/90 choices had got me blown up, I’d have just started a new game.

One variant I like to play is where you don’t mark the positions of known mines, leaving them unmarked until the end when you’ve clicked off all the non-mine squares one by one. It’s quite difficult and often slower than the marking method (you can’t use the trick of clicking both buttons to reveal all unmarked adjacent squares) but it sure is a memory challenge. If you like playing minesweeper, you should try it.

We have a chalk board on an easel in our living room. Sangeeta uses it to write words for things that Saranya is familiar with, like yogurt, egg, happy, etc.

The other day, Saranya was rubbing the chalkboard and getting her hand all covered with chalk dust. Then she went to show her hand to mommy. “What’s that on your hand, Saranya?” asked mommy.

“Egg!” explained Saranya.

(She had erased the word “egg” with her fingers!)

Saranya woke me up by licking my face. When I spluttered and looked her in the face, she proudly shouted “I’m dog!” and started panting.

I haven’t been posting anything here because of a couple reasons.

1. I’m very busy
2. Every day is a lot like the last

I’ve been keeping my head down, supporting my family, crafting a lot of Actionscript 3 code, learning PHP 5, saving money, trying to manage my stress in some way other than eating too much food, and playing World of Warcraft in my spare time.

Oh, and I also decided that I was going to buy a house in 2008. It’s my annual resolution. We’re mainly looking for places in West San Fernando Valley, since it’s near my parents’ house. There are so many short sales on the market right now. I’m sure they won’t all go through, and that’s an indicator that the economy is going to go even farther down the drain soon. Better news for me, unless I lose my job somehow.

xkcd – Windows 7

I’ve been working with MS Excel quite a bit lately, and one of the things that’s been driving me nuts is fractions. You can represent an improper fraction as text, and you can format a proper fraction numerically, but whenever you use it in a formula it’s the decimal that’s utilized. Given a large spreadsheet with a mixture of numbers, fractions, mixed numbers, and text already there, how do I make sure that my numeric fractions are preserved in my formulas in other cells?

Well, I decided to convert them to text. Automatically. I made a formula that did this, and I want to save it here for future reference:

=IF(ISNUMBER(A2),TEXT(A2,”### ###/###”),A2)

I was reading this article (Psychology Today: The Secrets of Happiness) and it occurred to me: they could have edited it down to one thing.

The Secret of Happiness is… be happy! That’s it! Just do it! All the rest of the advice are just techniques to trick yourself into having that feeling.

Dr. Kellman was telling the lab about some people he knew who died, and was fretting about death. I got the impression that he never really thought about it before, and that surprised me. I used to think about it all the time, until I got used to it. Sure I’m scared of death, both in an abstract way and in a very visceral way at the same time. But I don’t let it get in the way of my enjoyment of my life. Most people go to great lengths to distract themselves from the reality of mortality, even going so far as to invent “the afterlife” to make it more bearable. Come on, people. It’s just death.

There are more dead people than living, and their numbers are increasing.

God never gives you anything you can’t handle, unless of course you die of something…

For the last few weeks I’ve been learning Actionscript 3. For those of you who don’t know what that is, I’ll tell you: Actionscript is a scripting language used by Adobe (and previously by Macromedia) to control things in Flash movies. Actionscript 3 (AS3) is the latest version of Actionscript, and it’s a complete rewrite.

Learning a new language is a difficult task. Fortunately, much of AS3 is the same as AS2, which I learned last year. Unfortunately, almost all of the parts of AS2 that I hacked my way through to design and implement a PLM client framework last year were the same parts that were rewritten, changed, or scrapped in AS3. XML handling is different. Event distribution and handling is different. Display management and interactivity is different. So I had to learn all the new stuff and then figure out how to rethink my hacks into the way AS3 lets you do things.

It’s coming together now, in the 4th week of the process, and it’s really a lot cleaner than it used to be. It uses about half the code to get the job done, since the new tools built into AS3 take some of the burden off of the PLM. I just can’t wait for this thing to be finally working! I’m going to go back and hammer on it some more now…