Andrew Underwood

Relaxing day

Today, Sunday, the sole day I get off from work, was spent cleaning and relaxing. I cleaned up one corner of my basement, and did some ‘cleaning’ of my computer. I cleared my desktop of icons except for just a few, sorted, deleted, and re-arranged. In a way it seems to clear the mind. For breakfast I had bacon and potato cakes, a fried meal. To have something like that is rare, in the morning I usually don’t have time for such time frivolous activities. The frying pan got used again for lunch when I made a stirfry with beef, bean sprouts, cauliflower, yellow peppers, tomato, and green onion. Unfortunately I didn’t have any sauces for it so I added some Worcestershire sauce, which didn’t quite suit my creation but was satisfying nonetheless. The pan I was using is cast iron and rusts when you leave it in water for too long, it’s so heavy you have to redistribute your weight to pick it up. You also cant pick it up with it’s bare handle after it’s been on the element for a while because the heat is conducted throughout so you need a tea towel to hold it. It’s my only one, and being familiar with modern aluminum Teflon coated pans with plastic handles, I find it quite unwieldy.

Later on I went outside to lay in my backyard in the sun. Lying on a blue sheet, I read an ebook about hypnosis for about 3 hours on my PDA. The book read about relaxation almost the whole time, and being in a very calm relaxing environment I found myself more relaxed than I have been in quite some time. Especially when to ‘turn a page’ I only had to press a button that was in the same place every time. By the end of it, reading off my PDA screen was very natural, it felt like I barely moved the whole time, not even my eyes because they are reading within a relatively small theta. The words flowed uninterrupted and pressing the down button came without even thinking. Before I knew it I was cornered by shade from the fence, and the corner of the yard I chose to lye was graced by the last bit of sunshine.

Photoshop Golden Ratio Spiral

This is for all the people arriving at my site looking how to do a golden spiral for graphics purposes. I’m not as skilled in Photoshop as some people might be, and I can’t find anything in it to draw mathematical functions, you might need a program like Mathematica or the like if you want to draw bigger more detailed spirals. Anyhoo, here is a template I made that you can use.

Golden Ratio Thumb

This was just an experiment I did today while I was dabbling in photoshop. It was hard to get a good picture of my thumb print. I’m not sure if there in a proven corelation between thumb prints and the golden spiral, but hey it looks kinda cool. Hopefully no one uses this to steal my identity, heh.

Life Update

Haven’t blogged in like… 10 days. So yeah. I’m still living happily in Lethbridge with no money. I have a job roofing, again, hard work but enjoyable sometimes. There is something about working at the edge of a high and steep roof that gives me a thrill. I feel totally at home on a roof. When you are up there, the roof is your whole world, even though there is a slope everywhere, in your mind it is transformed into a 2D landscape of which your body navigates by a different coordinate system. I am also going for a job at RadioShack, but we shall see about that one because they are probably looking for a more permanent person (I’ll be gone in 3 months).

Radio shack pays $4/hr less than roofing does, but I think that the difference can be compensated by the experience it could provide with my ultimate goal of working in the field of robotics. There are servos, adapters, hobby parts and electric guitars there, yeah! In my mind there is a huge market for robotic guitar players in the future, and robotic musicians in general.

Now to the cooler news in my life (Geek warning). Yesterday I came across amazing deals. Future shop had 100 DVD-Rs on for $30, that’s 30 cents for 4.7 GB! I headed there right after work and got the last one, whew. What’s even cooler though, I was actually headed to XS Cargo that opened yesterday (Future Shop was just on the way) as soon as I could after work for the grand opening. I picked 100 CD-Rs for 20 bucks and a Palm VIIx PDA with a folding keyboard for $50. This is Canadian dollars for my international readers. I am incredibly happy with it, the only quirk being that all the documentation is in some Asian language that I can’t read. That didn’t stop me from getting everything I needed off the net and downloading cool things for it all day. I’ve wanted a PDA for so long, four years ago this PDA costed $600, but now I have one for a minute fraction of the cost. The folding keyboard is just a wee bit bigger than the PDA itself and is about the size of a red New Testament bible, it folds out to a laptop sized keyboard and is rigid which makes it uber cool. The PDA had a fold out antenna which is actually vestigial because the Palm.Net network doesn’t exist anymore, but I probably wouldn’t pay for it anyways. I’ll be looking for a hack that lets me use it for wireless Internet though. It has 8 MB of memory which is more than enough. I’ve downloaded a load of E-books into it so I’ll always have something to read. Be warned, I’m accumulating knowledge faster than you can.

Bigfoot

Here is a link to a video of the new bigfoot footage. In the video it goes on to introduce the “expedition team” that is going to the area to try and find it. It includes a woman holding a chainsaw, who they plan to use as bait and some wacko doctor (PhD) who was wearing a safari hat, a double breasted coat and holding some kind of pointing stick. It seriously looks like a bad skit but they are being serious. Here is a transcript of what this guy says, keep in mind they are headed to the northern edge of Lake Winnipeg in summer:

Ok so very dangerous, the flight it’self about 500 miles in a, I don’t know if it’s going to be a biplane… We’re going to have to say our prayers as we go up there. Then of course as we start hiking through the territory it could be snowing, we could run into a blizzard, perhaps other creatures are up there, a wild moose. -Dr. Franklin Roule

This is totally a gong show, these people are the last people I would like to see searching for bigfoot.