Author: Peter Jones

The Wif made and threw away two batches of fudge last night. Tonight I make the fudge. Never having made fudge before, I think, I looked up Alton Brown’s recipe. I miss him on the Food Network. The thing that’s great about him, is no where in his recipe does out mention an arbitrary colour, texture, or mood. There are times and temperature. The thing about baking, is that its science.
I looked at the Wif’s recipe for fudge and its all having her get to the magic temperature for no reason. The reason you get your chocolate to 234°F is science. If you’re not using chocolate, but chocolate chips which more resemble flavored candles than chocolate, the temperatures for individual crystalline structures will be different. Obviously the recipe works for many people, at least to a reasonable degree, but it’s imprecise due to the choice of ingredients, and this imprecision will compound from that point forward. This is how something add exact as chemistry turns into art. Not to diss on art, I like art, I just prefer to keep things simple when simple works.

I really haven’t done anything that useful the last few days. I got the Wif’s laptop more set up, less McAffee more other stuff. I shredded paper. That’s about it on the home front. The Wif did get me a lab book at the school bookstore. They’re just perfectly formatted for doing a science.
The other item off note, assuming that there was anything with biting in the preceding paragraph, I’d my coworker showed me Duolingo, that is awesome. Totally leading German during my commute. It’s the first time when I actually started thinking the foreign words to myself, this is after I took the years of Spanish and helped the Wif with a year of it as well. Really, its dope.

Mad River – Jamaica Brand Red Ale
Thick and almost nutty. Feels more like a brown than a red. Nice tight bite.

Breakside – Eurotrash IPL
Very smooth with strong rosemary. Hop aftertaste in a good way. Fun for summer, would recommend with roasted chicken.
Deschutes – Hop Henge IIPA
Bright, almost an amber taste. Very hoppy with a slightly syrupy consistency. The Wif thinks it tastes like sleeping on a skibum’s floor.
Stoup – Red IPA
Makes me think of mellow jerky. I wanna snap into a Slim Jim. RIP Macho Man Randy Savage.
Scuttlebutt – Gale Force IPA
Citrus and cloves. Clean. Like the gray of the ocean at dawn while running down a hapless cargo ship. Arrr.

While last night my achievements were few, yesterday during lunch was a different matter. My spreadsheet now has the data sorted by team, and the teams are now named areas. This means I can now look at future opponents and look at how well their offense and defense are doing.
Pulling from the above data I was able to give bad estimates of what the score should be and whether that called for a win. These I compared future to real performance and hit a solid 50%. As I was already assuming the first the weeks would be off, that puts me at 66%.

Not entirely true. I did done shredding, and got the Wif set up on her laptop. The things pretty dope. Of course, trying to connect to the WiFi turned into the usual cluster off not being able to find the password. Me and my big long random hand done passwords. So I reset the router, which annoys xfinity, so I have to power off everything at least three times. Finally get a new password for the network, new password for admin, everything is written sheen and everything works.
She goes to bed and I head down to the den. My desktop is also on the WiFi, and you guessed it. I have to remember the password. I go back upstairs to grab it, and the post-it is gone. Just a big stack of nothing nowhere. I search for ten minutes on and under everything. Totally an exaggeration by the way. Finally I find it crumpled a little bit on top of the garbage. Oops. Disaster averted. More shredding and cleaning tonight.

During my lunch yesterday, I started looking at how to figure out winners. I then left everything at work. Oops.
I have a spreadsheet now with some basic numbers for each team in each game. With my being a purist though, l hit the wall of Excel’s useful functions for what I’m doing. Excel is incredibly powerful, the second you use it only for layout. The fact I have to go into a different editor to be able to do basic database style queries kills me. Hell, just embed an ability to add vbasic directly into cells. Is that really so difficult? I know, Excel isn’t designed for more than a spreadsheet, but if that were really true, why have the hooks already there?
Also, why is it called Visual Basic? It’s not like its a very visual programming language.

I did nothing on my list this weekend. I’m actually kinda disappointed with myself. Do I need to set targets before I play video games? Do I need to tell the Wif that I’ll be making a racket in the den while she’s watching some show or I think I need to get to a baseline cleanliness down there via the racket method, followed by a target achievement before video games. I should also define which video games I play at a when. Mount & Blade is only viable when I have plenty of time. That is an awesome time eater right there. I wonder if people would get it if I started referring to time sinks as Langoliers?
So yeah, my goal is to clean the den tonight and then start seeing targets. Probably this weeks first target should be v1 of my game picker. I need to coffee up with a name for it.

No one with a beard should be putting little bobbles in their beards, though its at least an improvement over hippie beads. No, they should be building Christmas displays in their beards.
Now I have myself a couple 555 chips, some red and green LEDs and an idea. Thinking a barrett, with perfboard hot glued to one side, using the metal of the clasp to hold onto the underbeard and a coin cell battery.
Right, so I need to breadboard this. I would really like to alternate green and red blinking, and I think I see how that can happen, which its funny as the way I would bee doing it, without using a spare transistor, would be using the odd diode as a Diode more than the whole light emitting action. Seems legit.

This will be the last time I pick the NFL winners based on guesses. It might not be a solid model at first, but it can’t be consistently worse than my average. Knowing me, what should take an hour will be more like eight, but whatever. I also don’t know if people want me taking a picture of a football pool, one which I did entirely for fun, and tagging it as #madewithcode. I’m sure some people might be peeved with that.
I’m still not sure what the original algorithm is going to be, the first iteration of you will, but that should hopefully work out fairly fast. Then as the days and weeks go by, just add another layer of data and have it determine the best multipliers and exponents on its own. Of course, I’ll have to start looking at secondary variables fairly soon, but that’s all doable.