Category: STEM

Keep This Job and Love It

For the second day of my ‘Thirty Days of Thankfulness‘ posting series, and in light of the continued high unemployment the United States still suffers under, I thought an appropriate topic for appreciation would be my job.  The ‘Great Recession‘ marks my third ‘period of reduced economic activity.’  The last one I remember would have been the dot-com bubble bursting a year or so before 9-11.  Prior to that, I believe it was the fallout from the savings and loan crisis in the early 90s.

Except for a one or two month time frame during 1988, I have been employed full-time since 1985.  That brief hiatus saw me transition from the insurance industry (as an appraiser – both residential and commercial properties) to the legal industry.  I liked the legal vertical so much, I’m still employed by a law firm (the same one for the last fifteen years) and still loving the challenges and the people.  I’ve probably spent as much time, if not more, with some of my coworkers, as I have with my immediate family.  Especially during those years when the IT department planned and converted hundreds of computers and systems in massive upgrades (usually driven by a change in operating systems or business productivity software handed down by Microsoft).

My only regret stems from sacrificing my career for the stability of a job.  As I approach (or skid down to) the latter half of my life, I feel the lack of a satisfying career, a professional pursuit that feeds not only my pocketbook, but my personal life as well.  While I thoroughly enjoy my adventures in Information Technology for all things legal, I find myself asking myself, will this matter after I’m gone?  What legacy (besides my glorious children) will I leave behind?  Will I leave a positive impact on the world?  Could I have done more to make a difference, however small (remember the butterfly effect)?

Yet, I am truly grateful to wake up each morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and spend another day overcoming the next technology challenge with my IT buddies.

Quotes on Employment:

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
~~~ Theodore Roosevelt

The taxpayer – that’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.
~~~ Ronald Reagan

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
~~~ Pearl S. Buck

You’ve got to find what you love and that is as true for work as it is for lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you’ve found it.
~~~ Steve Jobs

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.
~~~ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism

Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful success, in spite of poverty.
~~~ Louisa May Alcott

Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.
~~~ Leonardo Da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life

A Year in the Life of My Blog

Last year, a few days after my birthday, I scrapped my MySpace blog, mostly due to interface changes, and ventured here to WordPress with a backup blog at Blogger.  My original intention was to journal my astronomical adventures here and do some inspirational topics on the backup site.  While I didn’t blog daily, I did manage to craft over two hundred blog entries here (this being my 225th).

Cygnas (the Swan)
Cygnus (the Swan)

In honor of my original intention to explore the heavens, I wanted to encourage everyone (and motivate myself) to participate in this year’s Great World Wide Star Count.  Don’t be shy!  Anyone can participate and it doesn’t require any equipment beyond your eyes.  This project is an annual survey of the night sky, held this year between October 14th and 28th (7-9 pm optimal viewing window) to record how many stars you can see in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) in the northern hemisphere (follow the link above if you reside Down Under).  This helps map the spread of light pollution.  I plan to get out my telescope (for the first time this fall) and view the beautiful blue/yellow double-star Albireo. I can’t tell from the survey’s website if they are affiliate with the IDA (the International Dark-Sky Association), but I’m doing my bit (via this blog) to raise awareness about the value of dark skies and their preservation and restoration.

And now, a brief retrospective of some of my favorite blog entries (indicated with asterisks) from the past year and a few popular (according to the stats) highlights:

An Evening at the Family Tech Support Opera

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, except in the case of my daughter, who has an understanding and equally sarcastic nature comparable to my own. And I’m just as guilty as those family members I poke fun at below in seeking their expertise with respect to technology of a different flavor.  The generation that preceded me has years of hands-on experience applicable to the infrastructure we depend on everyday (electricity, plumbing, mechanical know-how, etc.), while I’ve spent years storing up knowledge of a less concrete kind (aka information technology).   Frequently, I reinforce to all family members when they come calling that “I don’t do hardware” so as long as we keep things soft, I’m all ears and ready to help.

One night this past week, after a dinner, my husband and I decided to watch The American, a movie starring George Clooney, something we’d recorded to DVR several weeks ago and just hadn’t gotten around to watching.  Thirty minutes into the movie (with more dead bodies than dialog), I received a text message alerting me to an e-mail from a family member (while we can both claim to be of the Baby Boomer generation, he was in the vanguard, while I squeaked in the rearguard), who had just purchased a Nook Color, detailing some of his frustrations with the accessories.  I grabbed my own Nook Color and logged into my Yahoo mail account to retrieve the entire message (too slow via my dumb phone).   Since I had recommended the Nook Color, and the anti-glare scratch protector accessory in question, I felt chagrined by his difficulty in wasting two of the expensive covers in two attempts to align and adhere to the Nook Color’s screen (without bubbles or dust or grit getting between the protecting plastic and the glass screen).

Since the movie bored me to tears, I grabbed my phone and headed upstairs to my library (formerly my daughter’s ‘green’ bedroom).  I called my frustrated family member and caught him mowing his lawn.  I volunteered to send him my spare anti-glare screen protector (I applied mine correctly the first time which is a miracle … see ‘I don’t do hardware’ above), but he declined.  We spoke briefly about his buying experience and lack of wifi at his home.  He returned to his mowing and I called B&N customer service to learn more about how (and if) ebooks purchased from B&N Online could be synced to the Nook Color in the absence of wifi, using only the mini-USB cable and his wired home computer.

Rather than return to the movie, I finished reading Leviathan Wakes, the scifi space opera selection for September at the GoodReads SciFi & Fantasy Book Club.  I called the family member back, ready for a long call on how to download ebooks and transfer them to the Nook Color from your computer.  He had already attempted to use Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), which is required for checking out ebooks from most libraries (see this excellent “how to” article created by the Kansas City Public Library for more information).   ADE correctly recognized his Nook Color, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t drag an ebook to his device.  I gave up on that and promised more research (which I did the next day, turning off wifi on my Nook Color and successfully dragging newly downloaded ebooks to it from ADE).

Next I helped him download public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, going step-by-step (and ‘blind’ in my case, doing it all from my memory) from where the file was downloaded on his computer, to finding the correct folder on the Nook Color’s virtual drive (the J: drive in his case), even renaming some of the epub files to make them easier to find on the Nook and wrapping up the process with the ‘safely remove hardware’ feature of Windows Vista (another ‘amazing’ feat of tech support, since I’ve rarely ever used Windows Vista and relied on the theory that Microsoft programmers were inherently lazy and didn’t change the dialog boxes much between Windows XP and Windows Vista).  Shockingly (well, not to me anyway), he had never used the Safely Remove Hardware feature before.

In the midst of this long phone call requiring intense concentration on my part, I heard my phone blip at me several times.  I assumed I received some text messages or other e-mail alerts.  Imagine my surprise when my husband opens the door to my library holding his phone out to me telling me it’s our daughter.  Wondering why she couldn’t just talk to her dad while I was otherwise occupied with my own phone, and worried something horrific had occurred (stupid, I know, but I’m a mother), I put the other family member on temporary hold and took my husband’s phone to my other ear.  The first words out of my daughter’s mouth were:  “The text in this table keeps bleeding past the table boundaries …” Can you see my eyes rolling up into the top of my head?

Once my brain rebooted from the overload, I told my daughter I’d call her back in about thirty minutes and also told her to e-mail me the document she couldn’t format correctly.  Returning to my other phone call, I reviewed the process two more times with him, watching (well really listening to his astronaut-esque recitation of what he was doing in the absence of a video feed) perform the download/transfer process successfully twice.  I gave him a couple of tips for re-arranging and removing items on the Nook Color home screen and called it a night.

I returned back downstairs, to wake up my laptop so I could fire-up Word in anticipation of rescuing my daughter’s document.  I checked my Yahoo e-mail account but had not received anything from her.  I called her and she thought she had sent me the e-mail with the document attached, but had forgotten to click the send button.  My eyes rolled up into the top of my head again and came back down when I finally received the e-mail.  With her still on the phone talking to me (I put it on speaker phone so her dad and I could both listen and talk to her while I typed), I deleted a couple of misused drop caps and inserted some hard paragraph marks in the overloaded table cell, saved the file and returned it to Rachelle.  She’d already left her computer but returned and didn’t like where I’d put the hard paragraph marks so I let her in on the secret (which works whether you use MS Word or OpenOffice like she does):  To insert a hard paragraph mark, hold down the Shift key and then press the Enter key.   Terry and I said goodnight to Rachelle and I went to bed to dream of something other than ones and zeroes, bits, bytes or anything remotely related to information technology.

For those looking for free or cheap ebooks to purchase and download to your Nook, here’s a handy list of my favorite frequently used sites:

Tau-Day (yesterday)

Tau-Da!

I completely missed the celebration of tau yesterday as well as being completely ignorant of a movement among mathematicians to replace my favorite constant, pi.  I have spoken previously (once) here about pi and even use the first few digits of it as part of my username here at WordPress.   At least once a year, on Pi Day, which corresponds to March 14th (or as close to 3.14 as you can get on our calendars), I celebrate the never-repeating, endlessly enlightening expression of the ratio between a circle’s circumference and it’s diameter … or wait, is that it’s radius.

I received a Tweet that intrigued me, entitled ‘Mathematicians Want to Say Goodbye to Pi‘ with an accompanying link.  I read the article, but what really held my attention was an inserted YouTube video from someone named Kevin Houston (with a British, not Texan, accent).  If you enjoy math, take a few minutes to watch his video.

So, since Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th, and 2π is roughly 6.28, it follows that celebrating tau should occur on June 28th.   Or so the tau enthusiasts hope.

I’m still on the fence, preferring pi for the moment; although, I agree the use of tau has its merits in simplicity and beauty.

Constant Celebration

Can you guess what my favorite mathematical constant might be?  There is a clue in the URL address of my blog.  Still unsure?

This mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends or repeats.  It is also a transcendental number, which implies, among other things, that no finite sequence of algebraic operations on integers (powers, roots, sums, etc.) can be equal to its value.

Yes, together with other math-loving geeks out there in the universe, I’m celebrating Pi Day.  And if WordPress behaves itself and publishes this as I’ve scheduled it to, at exactly 1:59 pm (Central time), I will have succeeded in my mathematically constant celebration.

Pi pie
Pi pie

Algorithmic Crochet

I forgot in my last post on my crocheting technique, Back to Math Basics, to explain further how I use the following table and how I arrived at it’s contents:

Row x2 x3 x4 x5 x6
16 32 48 64 80 96
17 34 51 68 85 102
18 36 54 72 90 108
19 38 57 76 95 114
20 40 60 80 100 120
21 42 63 84 105 126
22 44 66 88 110 132

I used some algebra (or possibly finite mathematics) to achieve the process for inserting the six additional stitches equadistant around the circumferences of the cap.

Let the row be represented by a; let the incremental stitches be represented by b; and, let the insertion position for the additional stitches be represented by P.  Then,

P = ab-1

Using the table above, at the beginning of a round, I stitch a-1 stitches and insert the a stitch in the same stitch.  For row 16, I started off with 15 stitches and put the 16th stitch in the same stitch as the 15th, then I continued counting 15 more stitches (or to the number 31, since that is ab-1 or (16×2)-1, and inserted the second additional stitch, which is also the 32nd stitch, in the same stitch as the 31st stitch.  How many times can I type stitch in a sentence?  🙂

When I reach my safety pin which marks the end (or beginning) of the round, I should have reached the 96th stitch, after which I slip stitch into the first stitch of that round.

Algebra doesn’t always lends itself seamlessly to application in crochet, but an algorithm works perfectly.  For example (using no particular programming language, but rather just generic easily understood syntax):

Row = 16
MaxRow = 22
IncreaseBy = 6
Stitch=1
AddStitch=1

While Row < = MaxRow
While AddStitch <= IncreaseBy
While Stitch < Row
Stitch=Stitch+1
EndWhile
AddStitch=AddStitch+1
EndWhile
Stitch=1
AddStitch=1
Row=Row+1
EndWhile

I think that algorithm works, however clumsy it may appear.  I’m sure I could do it with less loops and/or recursively, but I’m too far removed from my programming days to dredge up those memories.  I may research a bit to remind myself of some more aesthetic algorithmic techniques and revisit this in a later posting.

Still, I find it fascinating to confuse what otherwise could be a boring bit of crocheting.  Besides, I always love to tout all the math my fellow students complained about in high school, whining that they would never use algebra or geometry or trigonometry, etc. in the ‘real’ world.

Ha!

Back to Math Basics

Sunday afternoon became more distracting as it approached evening.  Aside from the numbness and tingling which reasserts itself every few minutes, I find it difficult to count stitches and determine multiples of double digit numbers in my head while remembering the end goal of max stitches for that row all while the rest of the family watches a movie or taunts the Rotts into playing boisterously.

At row fifteen, I stopped and took a break for a bit.  I read a few pages in Grand Conspiracy.  I then found a piece of paper to write out the next seven rows numerical stitch pattern.  For example, until row twenty-two, I need to increase each row by adding six stitches evenly spaced around the round.  I wrote the following quick chart to aid in my stitch counting:

Row x2 x3 x4 x5 x6
16 32 48 64 80 96
17 34 51 68 85 102
18 36 54 72 90 108
19 38 57 76 95 114
20 40 60 80 100 120
21 42 63 84 105 126
22 44 66 88 110 132

I made it to row eighteen last night before retiring to bed.

Eighteen Rows or 108 Stitches Around
Eighteen Rows or 108 Stitches Around

Part of the reason I enjoy crocheting, or music (which is tangential I know) has to do with all the finite math involved with the patterns.  And the best part of all, at least when working a circular crochet pattern is the chance to use my favorite mathematical constant.  Stretch your memory back to the days of algebra and geometry and remember the simple formula for determining the circumference of a circle:

Diameter of 10.25 inches
Diameter of 10.25 inches

Can’t remember?  Well, let me remind you using the photo above.  If the diameter of a circle is 10.25 inches, the circumference is the diameter multiplied by the constant pi:

C = dπ

Or, as illustrated above:

C = 10.25 * 3.14159

C =  32.2

I have four more rows of increasing before I crochet a band of a half dozen single crochets (with no increases in stitches).  After that, I start decreasing.  The pattern reduces to a head band circumference of 18.25 inches, which is too small for Rachelle’s inflated ego, er I mean head.  Her cranium has a circumference of over 22 inches.  So I’ll have to do yet more math to determine the proper stopping point during the reduction.

I’ve decided not to take this Brimmed Cap project with me to work today, even though with the vanpool I have over an hour I could be crocheting to and from work.  Mondays (and Fridays) I usually have to tote quite a few things with me (like a week’s worth of lunches and a laptop).  If I don’t finish the cap this evening, I’ll probably take it with me on the commute Tuesday.

… And Now For the Rest of the Story

Subtitled: Everything I forgot to mention in the previous post due to time constraints and memory overload.

I did lend a hand, at least temporarily, with reviewing and tweaking the old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop.  I manually removed over 10,000 files from the temp folder after which my dad showed his brother how to use Window’s built in Disk Cleanup utility.  The laptop has only 512 MB of RAM, but could probably benefit from a memory upgrade to 2 GB if possible.  Both dad and uncle are pricing RAM this week.  The hard drive is anemic at 30 GB (and Office 2007 is fully loaded on it) and is using compression (ugh!).  Without more time and some of my normal utilities, I couldn’t accurately predict if turning off compression would result in a fully utilized hard drive (i.e. no free disk space for Windows to operate ‘normally’).  Granted, the laptop is over seven years old, so I’m not much that gone be done to improve performance without dumping too much money into it.  As with most electronics, it’s sometimes better to cut your losses and jump to new and improved hardware.  I suggested a netbook if 90% of their needs involve internet access (webmail, Googling, weather, news, etc.).

My uncle and I (both avid readers and he’s also an aspiring author) swapped several pounds worth of books.  I’ll do the inventory this evening and start sorting for swapping and trading via BookMooch and my local used book store.  My dad gave us both the evil eye, since I somehow ended up with about twice as many books on the return trip to squeeze into his car, along with the telescope and me.

I spied and watched some local fauna, including a large woodchuck, a small green and gray toad and a pasture of self-shedding sheep and their well trained unsupervised sheepdog.  On the ride down to Winfield, we saw many red tailed hawks in the pre-dawn life puffed up like owls, but later in the morning they were sleek or fast as the glided over the planes in search of breakfast.

And we ruminated squeaky floors and their cures and the consensus became you must pull up your flooring, use screws (not nails) and possible some glue to quiet those squeaks.