Erwaman's Personal Journal - February 2010

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:

1. Auto
2. Movie - So, before I discovered this mode, which is literally the next one listed after 'Auto' [the default mode], I thought the only way to take movies was with 'For YouTube' mode [option 22]. But the 'For YouTube' mode only allows you to take 2-minute movies. So for almost a year after I bought the camera originally, I thought the max-length for videos was 2-minutes, so whenever I wanted to shoot longer videos, I had to chop it up into 2-minute segments. One notable is example is Finger Fighting from freshman year in the Lair. You'll notice the sudden change at the 2-min mark.

   I was pretty shocked when I discovered 'Movie' mode that it took me nearly a year to find it. 'Movie' mode allows you to shoot movies as long as your memory capacity permits, and it tells you how much time left you can record.

3. Portrait
4. Scenery
5. Children
6. Sports
7. Candlelight Portrait
8. Party
9. Pet
10. Flower
11. Soft Flowing Water - LOL! This cracks me up.
12. Sundown
13. Night Scene
14. Night Scene Portrait
15. Fireworks - Ooh, people always say fireworks are hard to take pictures of. Perhaps this mode makes it easier? I'm guessing it probably uses longer exposure times.
16. Food
17. Text - OMG, wish I discovered this earlier.
18. For eBay - Modes like this crack me up, too. What special characteristics is a picture 'For eBay' supposed to have? I would think if you were posting a photo on picture, you would want to use the setting most appropriate for the object you were shooting, in order to get the best picture possible, and then post that picture to eBay. What the heck is a 'For eBay' picture?
19. Backlight
20. Anti Shake
21. High Sensitivity
22. For YouTube
23. Voice Recording

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.

Back 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:

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.

This also means my notion that someone could have the highest score in both point systems by having a name with lots of A's, B's, Y's, and Z's is also erroneous.

In the table below, you'll see some names I've tested and their results:

1. Chris Jeng showed up yesterday at Yale for the second time this school year, this time for the Ivy Leadership Summit X. And, just as I promised him in a Facebook photo comment a month ago, I let him sleep on my bed while I slept on the floor instead. Since it is very fun and enjoyable for me to host people, I extend this offer to everyone: that is, if you need a place to stay in New Haven, you're welcome to stay with me, and, during your stay, you have first dibs to my bed.
2. One of the classes I am taking this semester is Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations for Engineers (ENAS 194 (Engineering & Applied Science)). Wanting to save money on the textbook, I used Cheap-Textbooks.com to find the lowest price for this book. As is often the case, the international student version was cheaper than any U.S. version, so that's what I ended up buying. It ended up costing me $38.98 (tax & shipping included), whereas the standard U.S. edition was over $100 I think. Here are some pictures of my book and a picture of the standard U.S. edition:

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.