Oh I had to do such unholy things to that illicit copy of my textbook. The WHOLE TEXTBOOK is in two and three columns. There’s only one way that works to get into a single colum, and that’s opening the PDF in Word and making it one column. But because textbooks depend on you paying attention to ITALICS and BOLD, which get lost in these conversions and are hard for me to read anyway, I decided to convert every italic and bold to UNDERLINE. What a miraculous difference for me that is . Finally, to VIEW underlines in a console like that – well, there’s very few options available that work that I’ve found, except for one and that’s converting to HTML. BUT only ONE browser in Linux RESPECTS the underline properly and that is “elinks” (not ‘links’ or ‘lynx’ – they try to render it in color) and so, with contorted process in hand, I get to look at text in a way that’s pleasant for my eyes, holds my attention]…

Oh I had to … [read full article]

 

Oh I’m opposite. I love converting data. It’s one of my long time hobbies. Converting a WAV to a BMP, processing through a program that was designed to work with medical imaging (IMAGEJ) to run mathematical morphology on it to find the median, convert the BMP back to WAV and play a sound stripped of all its harmonics – that was stripped using visual processing – is one example of the kind of thing I’ve done for fun. I am continually amazed at the variety of different ways you can get different file formats to work via different modalities on a computer. It never gets old for me. In the end, it’s “all the same stuff” so it’s almost always “possible”.

Oh I’m opposite. I
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I was working for Schering-Plough pharmaceuticals at the time. A lot of the systems were written in the 1980s on IBM mainframe equipment. They didn’t expect them to still be in use 20 years later. So when Y2K came up – I was there at the time – they had to hire about a dozen COBOL programmers. We had some on hand of course for maintaining the old reports but this required going through very old code with a fine toothed comb. They’d been trying to retire the old systems and convert to other reporting systems, but some things only sound easy on paper to the higher ups who don’t have to deal with it. I was only marginally paying attention to it at the time. I wasn’t worried about planes falling or banks failing but I knew in our systems at lot, a lot of really neglected code that should have been upgraded long ago just, kept working and they didn’t want to invest in reinventing the wheel when we’d had a perfectly good one. After Y2K though, there was a big push to change everything to XML as that was going to be the new thing. And Microstrategy was going to be our datacube or something.

I was working for … [read full article]

 

“not every opportunity is one” – love the way you put that. I could’ve done Julliard at 11. Even then I knew I wasn’t the right ‘cut’ for it. Had the lessons that worked towards the entrance test, I backed out last minute. Glad I did. Had a chance to get into Gifted program. 5th grade. 3/4 of the way through a test taken in a large empty room with only one teacher, I realized I wasn’t doing this for anybody. I asked “do I have to take this?” )well don’t you want to… [reasons] “yes but am I required to take this?” more reasons and hoping I’ll finish it, and we go back and forth about 4 or 5 times before he gives no, “No, it’s not required”. and I put the unfinished test down. “Come join me to India – my father owns shoe factories and wants to convert them to computer manufacturing” – 1993 – at Chris Anderson’s dad’s work at the time – Killam Assoc. I came close to getting on a plane to India – it was only a 5 year contract. I’d have been there during the 1995 computer boom. But I also knew – I’d likely stay after the 5 year time. I’d not have regretted it if I did, but I also knew I wouldn’t regret it if I didn’t. So I stayed.

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The reason I point out the importance of affect here : what I did with this [piece, song, Melody, tune, composition],  is find a couple of tools online to convert it to mixolydian mode. The reason I didn’t want it’s original key, is that I wasn’t going to allow this song to dominate my day by converting it to mixolydian, and listening to it, I could carry that version in my head such that The old sad, haunting melody, song, composition, piece, would not interfere with my way of thinking today. if my piano was free, I would’ve done it myself, but with only half a cup of coffee in me I figured I could just find a midi and some program that could automate it. I thought I wanted major but it was terrible. mixolydian was perfect.

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