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Posts published in March 2016

So, dakotafrost.com has been hacked

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So, yeah. I’ve lost sites to hacks before - the wiki on dresan.net, which I barely used - but those were obvious. This one is a subtle hack, not immediately visible, detected by the supercomputers at the Google. Will take a bit of effort to work this one out.

You see disruption here, you know why.

Sigh.

-the Centaur

I can’t channel John Scalzi

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Imitating Scalzi’s inimitable style (at least when he’s too busy to blog): “Has the novel been sent back to the editor? NO.”

But Debra did like the new first couple of chapters for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, and her guidance gives me a clear path forward to cleaning them up, and the changes to the rest of the novel are minor … if I could Just. Get. More. Time. Friends from grade school are crossing the country to visit me, and friendly mathematicians are dropping by my coffeehouse table to school me on Clifford algebras and deep learning, to the point at which I finally had to turn down an impromptu lunch meeting today with someone who really wanted to know more about my team, just because I had no more time.

So, having no more time, just now I wanted to throw up a quick blogpost, other than the half dozen half-finished longer blogposts I can’t get done and still get to my own work. So I tried imitating John Scalzi’s quick posts when he’s backed up. Normally a sentence, and a photo. That’s it. But today, Google Photos and AT&T’s network and my phone and SPACE GREMLINS have conspired to make it impossible for me to upload photos in a timely fashion, I mean, dammit, how hard is it to write a sentence and post a photo?

THIS is why Scalzi is paid the megabucks.

I am no John Scalzi, so, here, you get a picture of the structure of the first 72 positions in tic-tac-toe, because I can’t not do the foundational work on a problem once I’ve thought of it, or I’ll never get back to it. This is important, it will mean something, I promise. But later.

Back to the novel.

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes I know my Mathematica could be simplified via NestList or something like that, don’t bother me, don’t bother me.
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Reminders

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reminders.png I’m a packrat - not just the six tons of books I have in my library (as of 2006! God knows how much I’ve got now) but at work, where in last week’s office move I had thirty-two individual labeled items for the movers to move, sixteen of those boxes of stuff (again, mostly books, both for my personal library and for the robotics team library). But there were two boxes of stuff I took home, along with various bric-a-brac - mostly genre toys, a lot of them items only there for entertainment, like my large centaur statue or my mini R2D2 robot. But in that is a far more important genre of materials - in a way, the third most important category of things on my desk. The most important thing on my desk is the computer - I’m there to work, natch. The next most important thing is a picture of one of our cats - not because cats are important, but because it’s a reminder of my wife and family, of why I’m working. But the third most important thing are a set of awards, swag and trophies from work itself. These trophies include everything from a major award for a team I was on to a tiny piece of swag for hosting an intern. Not a one of them - not a one - is a major award for me in and of myself, sorry; my contributions were minor. But they are reminders that I’ve done something at work I can be proud of. As a neurotic workaholic, I need that feedback to keep going. When I’m struggling, when I’m fighting an algorithm, when I’m debugging code, I can always look to my right, see my cat sitting in front of a sabertooth skull, and remind myself why I’m doing what I’m doing; then I can look to the left, give my Google Instant globe a spin, and remind myself that hey, don’t you worry: you’ve got this. -the Centaur