Blessed by the Potato

I’ve had about 5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours as I try to cram out (at the last minute, of course) some papers for an upcoming conference. It’s been a nightmare because, amongst other reasons, the ridiculous copyright policy of the conference means that we have to submit papers that are different enough from what we usually write that we can still have freedom to use our own work elsewhere. It’s hard enough to hammer out a paper in the first place, then to have to try to do it in the literary equivalent of a funny accent…

Anyhow, I’ve been battling with yet another nasty case of writer’s block — something that seems to hit me far too severely when it comes to my professional writing. I think Wayfare hit the issue on the head: I worry too much about how the work will be received for professional stuff and just lock up, whereas on my pseudo-anonymous blog I can just hammer away at the keyboard and not even worry about proof reading since I don’t have that much invested in it. Nothing to do but just try to get over it. In the meantime, Netbug suggested I take a quick break and put up at least a Tater’s Takes post, so here you go.

On the health/diet front, I found out that my scale got miscalibrated somewhere along the way. I’m not sure when it happened, but it was reading high by 3-4 pounds, which means I’ve really only gained about a pound from when I started. Still, wrong direction, but not quite as bad as I had thought. The last week was decent but not great: I’ve been watching what I eat more, but still had a few doughnuts at work through the week. I’ve started writing down my meal plan for a ~3 day period, and have been sticking to it reasonably well, and including lots of healthy stuff like vegetables and oatmeal, so that’s been good. I only had two good long bikerides in the week, but considering the week I’ve had, that’s pretty good (I plan on retrying the 36 km trip around Fanshawe Lake once these stupid stupid stupid papers are in).

“Today” though has been hell on the diet: I’ve resorted to undergrad cram tactics, pounding down full-sugar Coke & Red Bull and eating nothing but junk food to burn through the night. 3940 calories in the last 24 hour period (I don’t know what I consider a “day” anymore — best to try to stick to the subjective view of time the rest of you hold), which is simply not an efficient way to produce written words. As soon as the caffeine starts to wear off, I’m right into the head-bobbing vertigo stage of sleep deprivation, so I’m really hoping these stupid papers get finished soon.

In the news, BP’s latest cap attempt actually appears to be working. The stock shot up, then slid back down on perhaps fears that the shutting-in of the oil may have put too much pressure on the parts of the well below the ocean floor, causing oil to seep out (in a way that could be very difficult to control).

Also finance-related, a quick note that I sold my H&R REIT yesterday. Thanks to falling behind on my thesis and staying a grad student longer than my scholarship said I should I know that I’ll need to be raising cash, and also H&R is starting to look fully valued to me, so out it goes. Again, this isn’t a case of not liking the company, just thinking that the price was getting high enough…

I was going to look into the new Ontario “eco fee” tax this weekend and blog about it, but it looks like the negative publicity and poor roll-out has lead to it being canned… for now.

After running headlong into Bell’s very restrictive 25 GB data cap in May, I had to complain to any that would hear me that the $2/GB charge was very obviously excessive, and in no way actually reflected the incremental cost of that data usage. Plus, of course, the comparison to Rogers’ slightly more generous 60 GB cap (and 5 years ago the cap was also 60 GB, long before most users started watching videos on the internet, or Bell/Rogers themselves started rolling out video-on-demand portals). Netbug sent along an article that looks at this issue for US ISPs and concludes that indeed, most of the cost structure is composed of fixed-cost infrastructure type spending, and there’s no support in the ISPs’ business model for the caps and data charges that have been rolled out. Congestion issues are also unlikely to be the reason for the fees, since if congestion at peak times was the issue, the ISPs should instead implement time-of-use charges.

A weird, weird day in the markets today, as on basically no new news there was a huge negative spike at about 2:45pm. The markets are still down considerably as I write this (a few minutes before the close), but if you check there are a lot of companies with a big spike right at that time, some down 30% or more.

My day started off weird too, as I tried to put a bid in for SPB just to have it cancelled instantly by TD; the stock went down to $8.40 at one point with no bids (and that was when I really wanted to be the only low-ball bid!) before trading was halted. When it resumed it came back to the $13 range. Again, a weird computer issue at the exchange?

Update: it looks like they are indeed blaming a computer glitch, and are reversing some trades.

Seriously, centipedes: WTF?

PS: I need to start springing for blank paper instead of doodling on the backs of other things.

PPS: Fun with Texting

If you send a text message from your cell phone to a landline (which obviously can’t properly receive text messages), instead of bouncing it, the phone company will have a robot read out your text message.

Sometimes, I like to text people’s landlines, and have the robot say “death to humans” in the middle of the message.

To break down what it is I’ve been doing for the last few hours, I take recordings of the electrical activity of someone’s brain, it looks something like this:

Lots of squigglies. Too many, in fact — some of those squigglies are the influence of the electrical activity of the heart and of outside sources (like the MRI we stick them in), and they don’t represent the brain activity that we’re looking for. So, you spend a few hours playing with various computerized filtering techniques to get rid of those influences and get something like this:

Presto-boom-o, you’ve got some more-or-less pure brain activity to look at. Repeat it about 50-60 times for all your subjects (PS: still need subjects, enquire within), throw them all together for some groupwise stats, shake it up, have a cookie, and go write it up to share with the world.

Unfortunately, tonight has not been my night for analysis. The stupid program keeps crashing randomly, and now I’ve gone back to look at some of the saved data from earlier in the night:

No squigglies.

WHERE ARE MY SQUIGGLIES??!!

Anger and frustration do not even begin to cover it.

My laptop is a death trap, I must finally come to admit it.

I mentioned the woes I’ve had with this hot, heavy A70 before, specifically the annoyance of having to resolder the power connector thing. The heat it generates must be melting the solder, because I’ve had to redo that joint every 6 months or so after it went the first time, which is really terrible considering the light usage that laptop gets: I haven’t gamed at all on it in the last few years, and my day-to-day computer needs are met by my desktop, so it’s really just for weekend email — i.e., maybe 40 days of actual usage between rounds of having to fix it. Finally, our technical wizard, Lynn, replaced the pin with a bigger copper one he made himself (and, I am convinced, enchanted with ancient runes of power), cleaned up the other two pins, and resoldered it all for me. It’s been a year since that repair and the power connector hasn’t even come loose (the first stage of failure).

I can’t believe he didn’t win the staff award, again, at our annual research day. The judges are on crack for shutting him out.

Anyhow, I digress. In addition to the power connector problem, it’s also a computer that’s prone to overheating and crashing. As it’s aged, normal everyday tasks like surfing the web and checking email seem to tax it more and more, so now it’s overheating and dying after an hour of that, even. On top of that, the power cord now has a small fray in it (and seriously, don’t show this to my insurance company edit or to Wayfare):

Man, this computer is a blazing inferno waiting to happen.

However, it still runs fine: although I can tell it’s using more CPU resources to get the job done, the job still gets done (and still faster than Wayfare’s brand-new netbook). Since I don’t use it much, and don’t need it, I don’t have any plans to replace it in the next year or so, though if I have a job in the fall I will likely find this Boxing Day to be very tempting.

PS: the fray is on the DC output part, which is moderately less dangerous than if it was on the cord going to the wall outlet.