Category Archives: General

Anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere.

Salt, Vinegar, and Vending Machine Wounds

I’m a cheap bastard. I’ve been a cheap bastard for a long time. I just want to feel as though I get something for my money that is worth while. Maybe cheap bastard is the wrong term. I’ll spend more to feel like I got the best value. I could after all buy a cheap notebook instead of a MacBook Pro, but the pounding in the ass I’d take in usability every time I want to do something offsets the monetary expense of the transaction. So, maybe I’m a “best bang for the buck” bastard. No matter this post is about how I finally fell for the allure of the promise of salt and vinegar chips.

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Being Unspecial

Scott Adams is a genius. His blog on specialness is right on target. My research centers on the use of machine learning to solve some software engineering problems. One of the first times I described a few of my ideas to another person I was told that they would not work because only humans can “really do software engineering” for reasons that amount to humans are special and computers aren’t. Now I have further developed the approach and shown accuracies close to ninety percent. By comparison excellent baseball players hit a baseball into play only thirty percent of the time. When we humans go to school we get A’s for achieving ninety percent accuracy within a subject.

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Blog bullshit

Ok, so this is a blog. Not sure how useful this will be. It occurred to me it would be a good place to capture information on projects that are in-progress, etc. Plus I’ve wanted to stay on top of putting new stuff on my web site but never have the time. If this can allow me to add stuff easily in 15 minutes or less then maybe I’ll do it.