Largest amount I can make a check out for on QuickBooks Online is:

“Nine trillion nine hundred ninety-nine billion nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and 99/100″.

Hehehe.

I guess I can’t pay off our national debt with a single check, then. Damn.

I just wanted to point out that Zenia is nice to work with. She’s very helpful and lets me eat her leftover food when I’m hungry. At least she did once, so I’m hoping she’ll do it again.

Look, Zenia, your name even made it into the subject line! You have to be positively glowing with pleasure.

This is the old version, where I was just testing out this instrument:

–> Pompous

Quoting what I originally posted on Xanga:

I was experimenting with a nice sounding VST (a standard plug-in architecture for software generated instruments, and the instruments which hook in using it) in FL Studio (music composition program) and this little clip is what resulted. I bet you’re going to listen more than once…

This one has an additional element at the end which provides some counterpoint and has a nice melody:

–> Pompous-2V

The “2V” just signifies a sort of version number of the song.

The weakness of Google Maps is in its printing capabilities. It’s great for looking up directions and exploring a route, but when you only have time to look something up fast, print it out and jump on the road, only one map view prints, and that’s the current one where you happen to have panned and zoomed the map. On the other hand, it prints out the text-based directions at quite a large font size (on a separate page), which is nice because you’ll be referring to those often while driving. Let me see if I can manage not to get lost tonight.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday.

I have lots and lots of Gmail invites now, if anyone wants.

Half finished. Has some flaws. I couldn’t think of a better name.

–> Electronic-3

Hyper Mike said:

The running motion is actually significantly different running on a treadmill. I think you use your calves much less because the road is essentially being pulled from under you.

I don’t doubt the running motion itself is different, but it’s not for the reason he stated, since everything is relative. It’s still “ground moving relative to you”, whether or not it’s the “surface of the Earth” kind of ground or “rubber surface of the belt on the treadmill” kind of ground. You have the same momentum, relative to each respective surface. So why is one’s running motion on a treadmill different from running on good solid ground fixed to the Earth? I’ve mostly run on treadmills and personally notice only a slight difference, but let’s theorize.

The main difference would be, and this is probably the biggest one, the lack of air volume moving towards you (or you moving through it; same thing) when running on the treadmill. If you’re running at 8 MPH, there’s no 8 MPH headwind. It doesn’t seem like that would make a big difference, but I think it does. The secondary difference would be the machine’s softer surface. Perhaps not always softer (what if you’re running on grass?), but different from real ground. Bouncier. Returning much more of the energy from each footstep. (That explains the decreased calf usage.) Thirdly, the belt doesn’t exactly move at a constant speed, especially on poorer quality treadmills. When you’re in the air, it’s moving at a certain speed, and when your foot strikes the ground it squeezes the belt against whatever’s below it and because of friction the belt slows down a tiny bit before the motor can compensate (if it does). If your center of gravity moves back and forth just a little bit, then that force gets exerted forwards or backwards on the belt and speeds it up and slows it down. That effect might affect how you run. Fourthly, there’s the size of the machine, where you know you can’t take very big steps or vary your pace wildly or you’ll fall off the end or bang your knees on something like that… maybe you can’t swing your arms in exactly the same either way because there are rails in the way or just influencing your movements. Fifthly, maybe an element is psychological. Maybe you naturally don’t lean into the run or assume the same posture when you don’t have the same sensation of forward movement. Still, I think wind and bounciness are prime. It’s definitely not “the road being pulled out from under you” though. When I’m on the freeway driving 65 MPH, that would be identical to driving on a giant “roadmill” at 65 MPH with a huge fan blowing 65 MPH wind at the front of my car (which is nonetheless not moving relative to the surface of the Earth, but that’s irrelevant) as far as the car is concerned. Anyway, we’re all sitting here moving thousands of miles per second through space relative to the sun, or the center of the Earth, and so on.

Here’s something else, though. It annoys* me when I see gym-goers increase the grade of a treadmill so they’re walking up it at the steepest possibly slant, which, they probably think, is giving them a good workout because they’re walking uphill, and that’s harder than walking on level ground. It’s like a challenging hike, climbing up that steep hill, no? At least it’s burning plenty more calories than walking on level ground, wouldn’t you think? Since walking uphill is very tiring! And this would all be true, but… here’s what happens. After ramping up the treadmill, they hold tightly to the bar the entire time while walking on it. I never see anyone walking up that high-grade a treadmill and not holding onto the bar. They’d have to assume a different posture to do that on a real hill without a bar to cling to; a climb, with bent knees. Like climbing a flight of stairs. Anyway, think about it like this: you could have a treadmill that’s adjusted its slope to the point that belt is nearly perpendicular to the ground, and you could still walk on it if you held tightly to the bar. You could walk up a wall if you had an upwards-moving bar to hold on to that would pull you up. (The main exercise in that circumstance would be the “leg lift” aspect and not much else.) You could walk up a real hill and that would be good exercise, but if you held on to the back of something that pulling you up the hill, it would be the equivalent of walking on level ground. Or you could have a friend just push on your back as you walk up the hill. Same thing. So what I wonder is, do these people realize that when they make the treadmill that steep and hold on the whole time, they’re not getting any benefit from going uphill, at all? Also, the Calorie readout on the machine probably assumes the exerciser is doing all the work of walking up a hill, since it doesn’t sense backwards force on the grab bar, or lack thereof on the belt, but in actuality no additional Calories are being burned as compared with simply walking on level ground, and so is misleading. Maybe walking on a slant just feels nice for a change, or gives a little bit of arm exercise (you can do reverse-pushups of a sort while walking, I can imagine), but I do get the impression most of the time that the people walking uphill as described really think they’re “working it” and getting some sort of heavy exercise by going up so steep a slope, whereas in reality they’d be much better served just setting the slope to a slight angle above horizontal and walking without using any rails for support.

*I mean more like amuses, but this ought to be common sense… right?

I’m in Palm Springs, visiting my grandparents here for the day. I was going to drive back tonight, but it’s still wet outside and I’d rather wait until tomorrow morning and exchange darkness for traffic. In one minute it’s going to be my birthday. There we go. I’ve never done anything big for birthdays, except when I was little and had birthday parties. Now, just a nice family dinner where I get to specify the menu. What should I have? My little brother has already volunteered to specify my menu and says steak; I say that’s not a bad idea. Birthday parties when I was little: Those were fun. Most memorable experience is of a friend of mine singing “happy birthday to washing-machine!” because my birthday is the same as George Washington’s. So now you know. Don’t use this information to steal my identity, ok? (I think anyone determined enough would be able to find that information in public databases, anyway. So my plea is directed at the casual identity thief.)

Sometimes friends ask me what I’m going to do (expecting a lavish party or something, who knows what their overactive imaginations hold) and I’m probably letting them down by saying “nothing much”, but in a way I’d rather it just be another day. I suppose there are two ways of looking at it.

One way is like sleep. In general, when I think of days, I don’t think of them as being divided, one from another, by an arbitrary time like 12:00 AM; I think of them as being divided by sleeping periods. For example, even though now it’s technically Tuesday, it’s still part of the same “day” as far as I’m concerned. When I go to sleep and wake up, it’ll be a new day. That means an all-nighter leads to my having a strange sense of the current day, since it’s really one day, but a day with two mornings and two afternoons and maybe two evenings… but it doesn’t feel like so much time has passed. Maybe because I think of a day as starting when I wake up and get out of bed, and not having that as a reference point means that a new day never really started. A birthday is like 12:00 AM. It’s an arbitrary point which divides ages, just as midnight is an arbitrary point which divides days, both being for logical purposes of letting us communicate with others and have standard definitions of things. So what’s the “real” divider of ages? What says that now I’m one year older just as going to sleep and waking up says that now a new day has started? Maybe there isn’t one and I’d rather just see life as one continuous amount of time not punctuated by years. Why even view days that way? (That’s a dangerous view, though… it leads one to sleeping whenever one wants and floating around the clock not in synchrony with daylight or anyone else’s schedule. Anyway, that doesn’t work when one needs to be available to meet with or have calls with others at specific times, which would be during standard business hours.)

The other view of birthdays compares them to new years, or new school terms, or anything that provides a fresh start. Now it’s the first day of my being this age, and here is a fresh chance to make this the best year I’ve lived yet. Just like we have New Year’s Resolutions, or an attitude at the beginning of a semester that “I’m going to study hard and remain focused and not fall behind in any class and get straight A’s; I’ll start my homework when it’s assigned and not wait until the last minute for anything; I’ll do all the assigned reading right away and start studying a week before each exam to give myself plenty of time and consequently not ever have to feel stress when the exam looms because I’ll be confident that I know all the material” and so on. Why not birthday resolutions? Today’s as good a reference point as any.

(It’s been a while since I wrote the above.) So maybe it’s just another day. But the steaks are about to go on the grill…

Google Maps is awesome. I’ve been playing around with it and exploring various areas. I followed the 10 freeway from Santa Monica to it’s ending point in Jacksonville on the east coast of Florida. I never knew the streets in the Park La Brea apartment community had such an interesting layout (search for “park la brea 90036″; what you’re actually searching for and will find are shops with “park la brea” in their names and the map will show all of the matching stores on the map with pushpins). I like how the map images are anti-aliased; that was on my suggestion list for MapQuest and Yahoo Maps for years. Well, it seems like MapQuest anti-aliases the lines on their images now, whereas Yahoo Maps does not. Compare the image quality of this (Yahoo) with that of this. You’ll note that MapQuest is much cleaner and smoother. However, Yahoo has a Javascript-based pan function whereas MapQuest does not. In Yahoo when you click on an arrow to pan the map image in any direction, only the image reloads, which is quick. In Mapquest the whole page reloads when you pan in one direction, which is not only slow but also means that your scrollbar positions in the Web browser get reset, because as far as the browser is concerned you just went to a new page (since the view is controlled by the Query String portion of the URL). And likely you’ve scrolled down to see the map, since there’s a lot of heading information on the page, and so each time you pan you’ll have to scroll back down to center the map in your window again. Google Maps has the best of both worlds, though, with a heavily Javascripted interface (like Gmail) and a nice anti-aliased display. Try panning on Google’s map by dragging… isn’t that amazing? The map itself is composed of a bunch of tiles, and so when you drag it to expose new areas only the tiles required to fill in those areas are downloaded. It also seems that the page must load tiles around the edges of the map that aren’t viewable, so when you start panning in any direction those already-cached images are shown immediately, while the browser gets to work loading the next set of images that haven’t yet hit the screen. I don’t know how this program will work for someone over a modem link, though… the fundamental speed limitations of dial-up connections much be too much for a program like this to run at a decent speed. But then again, who has dial-up anymore? I hope that’s going the way of 256-color displays (and the whole concept of “web-safe colors”). Actually dial-up is a ubiquitous fallback, since one can always find phone lines, say in hotel rooms or when a guest at someone else’s house far away from the comforts of home, when an emergency Internet connection is needed for a laptop computer, for example. But then, something we’re probably going to see soon is wide-area wifi coverage which will initially only be available in select cities, but the popularity will grow. Eventually, we’ll take the ability to get online anywhere over the airwaves for granted just like we take AM and FM radio stations for granted. That’ll put cell phone carriers out of business, though, since if the Internet is available freely anywhere, someone will start mass producing “cell”-phones which just use voice-over-IP to communicate. Actually that concept exists already, for when you want to talk for free in a coffee shop or some other place where there’s unmetered wifi available; it’s called “voice-over-IP-over-wifi”. But the places where you can find a wireless hotspot that lets you connect are pretty limited. The coffee-shop wifi links which are consistently available make you pay quite a bit to gain access, though I think the services are overpriced because the equipment necessary to set up a hotspot is very limited. Basically all you need is a broadband wired link (DSL or Cable) and a solid wireless router. I bought an 802.11b (slower speed than the current latest standard, 802.11g, but plenty fast for Internet access since it’s faster than most servers’ links) for $10 at Best Buy (with a rebate) and it works great, though the commercial services probably want something a great deal more solidly built and with greater range. Still, it’s a one-time expense. And the DSL or Cable link (or both for reliability) wouldn’t cost much, in the general scheme of things, either. Unless they’re going for a T1 line, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. Starbucks locations (Starbuckses, preciousss!) general have a hotspot provided by T-Mobile whereas Coffee Bean locations uses a somewhat cheaper service called FreedomLink which apparently is provided by SBC. (As an aside, I dislike SBC. Their DSL connections are horrible to troubleshoot because they use PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) which adds a completely unnecessary and pointless level of complexity and authentication to the connection. If you have the choice between SBC DSL or someone else’s Cable, the latter’s probably the better choice.) Anyway, Google Maps is to the other online map services as Gmail is to the other big webmail services. And no double some people will find it a huge revision of the status quo in how mapping and driving direction sites are done, while others won’t like it. It’s the same with Gmail… I have friends who, for whatever reasons, don’t like it much and just want to continue using Hotmail. Part of it is, I’m sure, that changing an address is extra work because you have to e-mail everyone and let them know, and check the old address often, and so on. I didn’t have to deal with that since I just set me old addresses to forward to Gmail… if you have a Hotmail account you probably have to pay them for that ability, and I know I’d have to pay to do that with my Yahoo account. But that’s okay; “mjhecht@yahoo.com” is for setting up accounts or buying things online and the receipt of junk mail; their spam filter is pretty good and real people I know who want to e-mail me things don’t even know about that address. So I check it every once in a while… and since it gets, maybe, a hundred junk messages per days, I don’t care about posting the address here where it can be parsed by address harvesters crawling the web for addresses. (I wonder how “smart” those crawlers are… do they look for text like “mjhecht AT yahoo DOT com” which people spell out all the time to obfuscate an address when posting it on the Web and supposedly protect it from harvesting? I always assumed they did, or at least some did, and so I used a more advanced obfuscation scheme. More on that another time… I think I’m up to about three levels on the tangent stack at the moment. Or maybe just one level.) Anyway, in conclusion (which is the same as my introduction): check out Google Maps. And don’t worry too much about staying dry, a little water won’t hurt you, we’re waterproof.

It’s funny how the more that I write here, the more I find I have to say. Our brains are interesting that way: generally the more they do of something, they better they get at it. For example, how your memory works is the opposite of how a digital data store like a hard disk drive in a computer or a memory card in a camera works in that the more you memorize, the greater your capacity to memorize more things will be. That reminds me of a book I read (Memoir from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin) in which the author describes how he’s made by a strict tutor to memorize the phone book, after which his mind is so receptive to information that he absorbs anything with ease. That’s fiction, of course, but it seems like it would apply. Before I go about memorizing the phone book though, and that’s just like one of the kinds of things I would do, if you knew me, let me say that that there are plenty of other more productive ways of training memory. For example, learning a new language. Anyway, I have a very poor memory for facts to begin with, and I’ve gotten through life with no trouble thus far… But memorizing the phone book as a way to “prime” the mind for more useful information? That’s like how some people claim that if you want to learn a new language and have two years, you’d get better results by, rather than studying that single language straight through your two years, studying Esperanto for one year and then your target language for another year. (Esperanto is the Dvorak keyboard of languages.) So perhaps there is something to memorizing the phonebook. Study the phonebook for one year, then study Esperanto for another year, and finally study your target language for a third year. You’ll be a memory genius, able to absorb complex facts in a single glance!

Anyway, writing is fulfilling and gets easier with practice. And (along with eating oranges) it punctuates the endless hours I seem to be spending in front of the computer nowadays, working in Access or PHP or Access or PHP… Speaking of memory, I can’t remember whether I wrote and posted a “review” of the aforementioned book. And then there were those shoes which lived in a locker at the gym for four months, and I lost my cell phone recently (and didn’t get it back), and my wallet (but did get it back with all contents intact)… But then, I hadn’t lost my wallet in three years prior, so I figure I was due for a wallet-losing. (Everyone has to lose a wallet every once in a while.) But still, maybe I really ought to get started on the phone book right away.