What's one positive/neutral thing that's happened today?

Happy birthday, Jeffery! :partying_face:

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Happy birthday!

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Happy birthday!

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Happy Birthday from Italy !

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Progress on the bottom of my beaded candy sack has been going much slower than work on the sides, and I’ve had to add some extra beads that don’t fit the pattern from where unexpected gaps have cropped up… if the wall of the bag doesn’t give away the amateur, handmade nature, examination of the bottom definitely will… Also, for some reason, the bottom is turning oval(sorry, fellow geometry geeks, no idea what kind of oval beyond being approximately mirror symmetric on both axises) instead of circular and the bag resists any attempt to make it circular… decided I’m just going to go with an oval cross-section unless something else goes odd as I close the bottom, and I’m thinking of ditching my original plan for a pair of tote handles with a width of 4 beads for a single handle 5 beads wide, maybe lengthened to a shoulder strap… ~1000 black beads for makig the strap, divide by 5 beads for the width, 200 times 9mm comes to 1.8 meters… even on my tall(6’ 2" on my shorter leg), broad(60" waist and chest circumference last time they were measured, but that was pre-pandemic and I think I was closer to 350 at the time) build, that sounds like it would be long enough to have the strap on the shoulder opposite where the bag rests against my torso and it hang decently low on my torso. Oh forgot to mention, but part of why I stopped at 6 stripes for the body of the bag is that, bending myelbow at a right angle and resting my forearm on the top rim, the bottom of the side way reaches to around hip or upper thigh on my body, which seemed like a good bag to body ratio… experience says a 5 wide strap is going to be more annoying to make than 4-wide bands… with even, you always come out of one row read to do a u-turn into the first bead of the next row, with odd widths, you sometimes have to backtrack to an already finished row and do loops inside the beads to line up for the next row, but the way the oval has formed, I think I need the odd width to make the strap centered on the vertices of the oval… plus, even with a wider strap, going rom two to one means there will be less connection between the straps and the bag’s body, and I don’t yet know if any of this will actually be able to bear weight.

And thanks for all the happy birthdays.

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Well, finished the bottom of the candy sack. the bottom is kind of a mess and their are a few beads that refuse to lie flat in the plane of the bottom, but testing it’s ability to bear weight with my ~120mm d20 satisfied me… would have finished it a couple days ago, but the initial test with teh d20 resulted in the bottom bursting, so I added more beads and reinforced things with extra fishing line. Next step is to get sighted help to find the black beads in my bag of unopened bags of beads and start on the shoulder strap.

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My health has been steadily deteriorating for a while, and today it put me in the ER (where they ran a bunch of tests and said, in effect, that they didn’t know what was wrong so they were sending me home). That’s not the positive part.

But having my schedule and task list thoroughly destroyed meant I spent the night working on ECTOCOMP with my siblings instead of more toiling over CVs and cover letters, and I think that did me good.

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MY SSDI came through as it should despite the government shutdown. Also, things worked out to give me an unusually low grocery bill when I placed my big grocery order for this pay cycle which actually doesn’t feel that big… helps that things worked out that I didn’t need to buy dried beans this time around and most of the things that are a once every 2 or 3 months purchase didn’t need restocking.

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Technically last night, but went to an open mic night last night, played 3 Beatles covers. That ruled. Had several friends congratulate me for that. One of ‘em even joked that I pulled ‘em “out of their depression”. XD

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Hello.

Yesterday I defended my Master’s thesis and got this degree in computer-science. :slight_smile: I received 4 (good) grade which is equal to B grade in United States of America’s system.

My thesis was related to integer primality determining algorithm cost.

I’m not sure what will follow, but I like compilers, programming and world wide web. I think about some business in these fields.

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Congratulations!

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Thank you very much! :slight_smile:

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Woah!! I’d love to know more, if you’d be up to messaging me!

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Very nice. Congratulations!

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I got this small capybara plushie with a yuzu on its head:

It is slightly chonky for the floating shelf above my desk, but it brings me joy to look up and see it there.

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made another bit of programmatic art, this time inspired by the abacabadabacaba pattern. Basically, at each coordinate, I halve the coordinates until they become odd, counting the number of halvings, then multiplying by an appropriate value to get values throughout the 0-255 range. For this first version, I did 255 frames of 255255 pixels, resulting in a maximimum of 7 halvings for 128, so I multipled the number of halvings by 36, giving the highest pixel value of 252(736) Plan to do larger versions, but want sighted confirmation the output looks correct… sadly, it would be unfeasible to take this to its logical extreme(just to expand to 15 levels of intensity for each color channel, I need to expand to 6553565535 pixels per frame, making each line 1 mm thick, that image would be larger than half a American Football field, bumping up to 31 values would take a resolution of over 4 billion4billion… that image would cover most of the US assuming 1 millimeter lines… going all the way to using the full 0-255 range would require an image width on the order of 10^77 and the number of millimeters in a parsec is on the order of 10^19… there aren’t enough elementary particles in the observable universe to display that image if every pixel was 1 particle.

Won’t embed the images directly as I believe the blue and full color versions might have the kind of flashing that needs to be disclaimed, but the directory containing the images can be found at:

pretty sure the red and green channels are actually static.

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I see vertical red lines and horizontal green lines. They’re static, and form what looks like an orderly grid. The background flash blue, goes to black, flashes dark blue, and goes to black again. It vaguely reminds me of a flasher on a police car.

Luckily the lights in my room and my darkened screen made the flashing negligible, but I will confirm, that there is a blue background flashing at about 4 Hz, for anyone else who wanted to click the link.

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That’s pretty much the intended effect… if I had a way of assembling the frames into a voxel image, the result should logically be parallel planes of red, green, and blue with the colors orthogonal… alas, a google search for how to assemble pngs into a voxel image didn’t return anything that seemed useful… my metaphorical kingdom for an animated voxel grapher where I can use red, green, blue, and alpha as dependant variables while x, y, z, r, rho, theta, phi, and time are independant variables… bonus points if r, theta, and phi are defined relative to all three axises… Though, thinking a bit more, instead of each frame being a z-slice, it might be better in this case to try for having the frame show part of a larger pattern and the animation being a pan across it, perhaps with red and blue for horizontal and vertical and green diagonals if I want to keep all three primaries in the mix.

Also, went out to my cellular provider today to find out why my phone hasn’t been working properly. Turns out the phone just needed a new battery, and while they don’t sell replacement batteries, they had a phone of the same model in their recycle bin and swapped my dead battery for the one in the other phone for no charge. Also, paid off the phone on a line I wasn’t using, so I could finally get rid of that line, which should save me about 15 USD per month starting next month. Also, we got ther just a few minutes before they opened at noon and were home by 1, an unusually fast turn around for anything that requires going into the store(had the problem with my phone required getting a new phone, we’d probably still be waiting on the activation process to complete. I’ll probably still order a new battery at the earliest convenience since apparently this is a common problem with this model and I swapped for a used battery, but its a relief I don’t have to deal with a new phone and the inconveniences that come with it.

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Most enjoyble. Very creative.

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Forgot to mention this, but it actually feels like October for a change. The highest temperature forecasted for the next week is 69F and the high for Halloween is 64. with a low in the 40s and the low for the next week even breaks into the 30s. Also, yesterday was the first time I broke out the kettle to make hot tea since cutting my tea consumption a few months ago, and other than cooling faster, switching from making hot tea in a quart double walled metal tumbler to making it in a pint mug went well. I was expecting to have to wait at least another month or two for weather this nice… Halloween has hit 80F a few times this decade.

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