Hi-Tech Floss?I finished up another roll of floss and started using a new roll. This current roll's brand is Eckerd Hi-Tech Floss, Mint-Waxed: This brings up the question: What the heck is hi-tech floss? Discuss. Furthermore, in preparing for this entry, I had to take a picture, and I made a profound discovery. I take pictures of text fairly often, and usually, they come out pretty blurry and difficult to read. When I was taking the picture of the floss, and the text came out blurry yet again, I suddenly got the idea to look through the 23 camera settings to see if there was one geared for text. It turns out there was! And I tried it and the differnce is remarkable: vs. The lighting in the background was the same for the two pictures, though the exposure settings clearly were different. I tried manually adjusting the exposure for the picture on the left, which was taken in 'Auto' mode, but it didn't help the focus. It's really frustrating because when you prep to take a picture, you press the trigger button half-way down, which causes the camera to adjust focus and exposure automatically, and when the camera's doing its auto-adjustment, there's a split second during the focus/exposure transition when the text is really really clear, but the end state of the auto focus/exposure is a blurry picture, like the one on the left. Finally, a solution. Setting the camera to 'Text' mode made the auto focus/exposure work a lot better for taking pictures of text. And just for kicks and giggles, here are all the 23 modes that my Casio 8.1 Megapixel EX-Z9 has, most of which I've never used or even tried:
Also, for someone like me, who never does poster-sized or large-sized photo prints, it's a waste of memory and transfer time to keep my resolution set to the max 8 Megapixels. Most of the pictures I take I either post on my website or on Facebook, and Facebook automatically shrinks the resolution and I manually crop/resize the pictures for my website, so you never really see an 8 Megapixel picture in full resolution. So I just set my resolution to 4 Megapixels, which is more than sufficient (2 Megapixels would probably be sufficient, but I like to have a little bit of buffer room), and allows me to take about 1.77 times more pictures (according to the camera, which tells you how many pictures you have remaining) before having to clear out my 1 gig SD card (I should get a higher capacity card some time.). Anyways, that's my two cents on my camera after starting this post talking about floss. I'd still like to hear your thoughts about what 'Hi-Tech Floss' is. Oh, the discoveries of life!Post Comment |
Adding GameBack in first grade, I was attending the International School of Beijing (ISB). There was one activity we did in class that I have never forgotten. It was an adding game. The way it worked was each letter of the alphabet got a point value: A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, ..., Z = 26. Using this point system, everyone calculated the point value of his or her name. What made this activity so memorable for me I think was I remember having the highest score in the class. Then, the teacher asked us to recalculate our scores with the alphabet point values reversed: Z = 1, Y = 2, X = 3, ..., A = 26. This time around, there were many other students with higher point values than me. I remember thinking, gee, in order to have the highest score using both point systems, you must have a lot of A's and B's in your name along with Y's and Z's. This thought stuck with me, and sometimes, when I hear a name with a large number of A's and B's or Y's and Z's, I'll think to myself, this person probably would score well in this adding game. This semester, I was reminded of this adding game because of my TA for my Databases course. Her name is Azza Abouzeid, heavy in letters at both ends of the alphabet. So, reminded of the adding game again, I decided to write a little Javascript to calculate the scores of people's names. Feel free to try it out: A-Z Points = 0 Z-A Points = 0 Total Points = 0 Edit: I realized Total Points is not very interesting because Total Points = 27 * # of characters in your name. [See first comment below.] So in the table below, people who have equal total points simply have the same number of letters in their name. Nothing special.
In the table below, you'll see some names I've tested and their results: Yay number games.Post Comment |
A couple things that happened yesterday (2/26/10) and today (2/27/10)
Despite the very different covers, the text is all the same, except my book lacks color, and for some reason, the problems in my textbook are not all the same as the problems in the U.S. edition, as I discovered the first week when I was doing the problem set and compared answers with Lairmate David Zhang. Annoyingly, some of the numbers in the problems have been changed in my book, or two different problems will have been swapped (for example, #3 in the U.S. edition will be #5 in my edition, and vice-versa). So each week, before starting the problem set, I go borrow David's U.S. edition and double-check my problems. Normally I have to fix about 25% of the problems, usually by drawing a double-headed arrow to show which problem it was swapped with. This afternoon, I went to David's room to borrow his textbook and double-check the problems, and while I was there, he also repaid me for some laundry money I lent him earlier. He had a cup of quarters on his desk, and since I was still looking for Oklahoma and Arkansas, I told him he could repay me in quarters. Looking through all his quarters, I found no Arkansas's, but I did find not one, not two, but three Oklahomas! With this find, the only U.S. quarters left I still need are Arkansas and five of the U.S. District of Columbia and territory quarters (I already have Puerto Rico): Let me know if you have or find one of the six coins I'm missing! What you should do is once you find a coin, come drop by Yale, and invoke my guarantee in bullet (1), and then you don't have to bother bringing a sleeping bag or having to sleep on the floor. Five midterms next week over four days + first round Microsoft interview. Will be busy.Post Comment |