Godly Musings » Oh, the Angst!

Steiner faces the third degree…

god — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:48:34 +0000

…Is the most amusing Google translation I saw of “Steiner, Flächen dritten Graden”. This is of course the short form of “Steiner, J. – Über die Flächen dritten Grades”, the article I have been translating from fucking German for a presentation I’m doing this week.

Anyway, most of the work is done, and my German is now a little more fluent. That is, up from “barely at all”. Most of the language is translated, leaving mostly just notation, plus a couple of technical terms like Asymptotenpuncte (asymptotic point) and Ebenenbüscheln (sheaves). You can see the original and the results here:

Steiner, J. – Über die Flächen dritten Grades [1857] (PDF)
Steiner, J. – Über die Flächen dritten Grades (text, edited OCR, German)
Steiner, J. – On surfaces of the third degree (text, edited and Google-translated OCR, English)

It’s some cool stuff, and it kinda makes me look forward to learning to do Math in German. But holy shit was this a pain in the ass.

My birthday’s comin up!

god — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:44:39 +0000

… hint, hint.

Also, I’m running out of trustworthiness. So if you need to rely on me for something you have about a month left to do it.

Get out your black d20s

god — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:40:59 +0000

… because Gary Gygax has appparently gone to meet his player. Yes, the honcho of hack-and-slash has failed his final saving throw, and the dungeon crawl has lost the head of its pantheon.

No word on how he died, but I’m assuming it was a band of flumphs led by a tarrasqolich. Oh, and apparently he made a last-minute edit to the “religion” field of his CS as he saw the end approaching. No comment.

Like a cruel joke

god — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:34:13 +0000

A bit of background: I live in the most culturally and ethnically diverse city in the world. However, the university I go to is comprised mostly of people from a very conservative background. This creates weird dynamics, and contributes to an atmosphere of intolerance toward groups those backgrounds habitually marginalize. There’s lots of homophobia. I’ve seen some racism and a fair amount of ableism*, but I’m not in a position to gauge the extent of those.

So for various reasons I showed up at the latest meeting of the committee that oversees the member of student government in charge of equity issues. Actually, I might as well say what the main reason was: the member in question was found to be a religiously homophobic asshole. So I presented my case, and lo and behold, the committee that oversees the homophobic asshole are also a bunch of religiously homophobic assholes.

That’s fucked up, right? It’s not just me? That the member of student government in charge of making sure that everyone gets a fair shake, as well as the committee that is supposed to make sure he’s doing his job properly are uniformly (or almost) homophobes?

* on a side note, the campus is reportedly quite accessible, so go them!

Not dead

god — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:52:15 +0000

Just completely unable to motivate myself. Sorry.

Server change == ARRGH

god — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 18:14:30 +0000

I’m in the process of moving all my stuff — and all the stuff of my clients — from one server to another. Thank fuck I only have a dozen or so clients, because I really don’t think I could automate all this shit. However, since the new server uses cPanel it should in theory be easier to move from there to any new server that also has cPanel installed.

We’ll see. Arg!

Update: not as bad as I thought, but there’s more downtime involved than I had hoped. Oh well.

I will never look at typefaces the same way again

god — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:02:53 +0000

I just caught a glimpse of the word “Arial” out of the corner of my eye, and for the first time saw something else. Now I’ll misread that word for the rest of my life. Gr.

Headaches

god — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 20:55:18 +0000

I’m having headaches again. I go through a mental checklist of the things that cause my headaches, trying each remedy in turn.

Dehydration. Drink some water. Wait a while. Drink more water. Feeling any better? A bit? Wait a while. Drink more water. Still got the headache.

Caffeine withdrawal. I haven’t had any caffeine today. Get a coffee. Get a Coke to drink while the coffee is cooling. Drink the Coke and half the coffee. Feel better? No.

Hunger. No, I had a good-sized lunch. I was quite sated.

Protein deficiency. Nope, had lots of protein last night and today. And iron as well, as long as we’re counting.

Discounting the possibility of my just having caught some bug, this leaves one more cause: stress. My headache is probably caused by stress. And the bastarding thing about it is that there’s nothing I can do right now to fix that. The weekend’s coming up, so I’ll sleep then. Perhaps getting four hours a night all week wasn’t so great for me. But for now I’ve got to keep working for another hour or two and not think about the possibility that I’ll have to come in over the weekend.

54 megs of text

god — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 19:43:05 +0000

So I’m combing through 54 megs of logs, looking for a problem in the server I am debugging. Wanna know how big 54 megs of text is? This one file is ten times the length of the complete works of Shakespeare. And I’m supposed to find out where the error is? I’m on line 283154 now, and decided to take a break.

Le sigh. Back to work.

Moving

god — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 06:09:18 +0000

I’m moving on Wednesday. That’s a good thing, because I currently live in a shithole and the new place is much more pleasant. Thing is, this involves a whole lot of packing and throwing shit out and arranging stuff. I’m hiring a couple of movers, which should speed things along, but I still have to take time off work to pack. Bleh. Fuckin’ awful.

I’m really looking forward to the time when I will have a home I live in for many years, not having to move every couple of years. Fuck.