spwnn - reading list

spwnn - the "shallow pair-wise neural network"

My articles about it in chronological order:

spwnn - 40 years in the making

spwnn - main algorithm at github

spwnn - the fundamental question

spwnn - fun with letter pairs

spwnn - fun with golang

spwnn - iterating quickly to finish this thing

spwnn - big 370K word dictionary

spwnn - awkward word anana

spwnn - fun with aws lambda

spwnn - embarrassingly parallel

spwnn - delightfully parallel

spwnn - aws sweet spot

spwnn - more cpu core scaling tests

Men!

Sign in men's room somewhere near Camano Island.

Lake Sammamish

Lake Sammamish.  In the distance, cranes building the new Microsoft campus.

Googly Eyes

I got myself a red Slimline stapler in case I get moved to the basement.

Someone put googly eyes on it.

Dog Park Food Trailer

Notice the human menu is much smaller than the dog menu.

Be a prepper too

I'm not a prepper, except, well a little bit.

I only prep for stuff that actually happens.

We lose power for 18 hours every few years when the trees get too big and take out the overhead power lines that lead into our development.  Usually ourselves and 400,000 other people lose power.

About 10 years ago I bought a gadget that you can hook up to your car to generate power but I was too afraid to try it out.  I finally overcame my fears and hooked it up to my car and our heater.  We have natural gas heating but the fan runs off electricity so big power outages in winter get very cold.

Worked!

So I've got that going for me now.

Compact

I also tossed some CDs.

Floppy

I threw out a lot of floppy disks last year.

I have to admit I miss the flying toaster screensaver.

Windows 95

I did a lot of beta testing (particularly audio cards) for Windows 95 and they invited me to the launch event!  The one that Jay Leno MC'd!  And I just recently moved to Redmond (as our neck or the woods was called back in the day) so it was just a short drive over to campus.

Ice rain results

Ice rain or freezing rain effect:

Not recycled

I used to stack these up at work.

I called them the "Towers of Addiction".

I collected them because I had every intention of reusing them but I stored them in a place where I didn't have access when I needed them.

Eventually I burned them.

Now, when I have an extra coffee sleeve, it goes into a little storage area in my door, ready for reuse!

Line it up

At Totem Lake boardwalk:

Lending Library

Neighborhood lending library near the U district:

Under the Golden Gate Bridge

 

Gilligan!

This reminds me of the Gilligan's Island boat.

Sunset

 

Blocked

Path to lighthouse is blocked when the tide rises.

 

Dial phone with push buttons

 

Sandals

We've had lots of odd swag over the years:

Beach Driving many moons ago

Pismo Beach allows driving around on it.  This is probably circa ... 1985?

 

Ferry Dock

 

Box joke

I think this box is making a joke:

Maybe it's auditioning for The Onion?

Zig Zag

My wife and I couldn't quite figure out what this jetty is about:

Boats have to zig-zag to get into the marina?

Airplane Bridge

This new bridge at SEATAC is high enough and long enough that an airplane can drive under it.

Apple spaceship

I've seen pictures of Apple's fancy new spaceship office but until I saw it in context from an airplane I didn't really comprehend how huge it is:

It's the big round thing to the right.

Google's new fancy office

Google Bay View Campus:

Lots of solar panels - the entire roof is solar panels:

They store excess heat/cold in the ground:

At a nearby briefing center, they can print your company name on your espresso:

Fake datacenter for tourists:

Driving on the beach

Long Beach, WA.

You can drive on the beach! 

The entry path from the main road was pretty sandy and I almost lost my shit as the tires spun but once past that it was pretty cool.

Bald Eagle

Bald Eagle hanging out a friend's house.

Arena Nuts

Automated phone message transcription:

Arena nuts!

Awesome.

Keeping up

My goal at the start of this year 2023 was to post on average one new blog post a day.

I'm behind.  So you might see a lot of pictures posted.  They're not bad pictures!

A fun thing is that the blog archive feed located to the right serves as a leaderboard.

Yeah, January:  great.  Now, not so good.

The basic problem is that some of the things I've written about require digging through archives of stuff.  And that tends to be the more interesting stuff.

Oh Maya, please don't crash on me

For years I have wanted to write a song about how bad I feel when certain programs crash on me.  The Maya 3D art package has a human name, so it seemed like a good candidate for a parody song.

But I could never get it to gel.

So I asked ChatGPT to write it.

Verse 1:

I was lost in my creation,
Maya was my destination,
Every stroke was pure elation,
I felt the passion, I had the vision.

Chorus:
But then Maya crashed on me,
And my work was gone you see,
All my progress was in vain,
Maya crashed and caused me pain.

Verse 2:
I tried to salvage what was left,
But the damage was too much to bear,
All my art was now bereft,
Maya had betrayed me, it wasn't fair.

Chorus:
But then Maya crashed on me,
And my work was gone you see,
All my progress was in vain,
Maya crashed and caused me pain.

Bridge:
I know it's just a program,
But it felt like a part of me,
And when it let me down like that,
It hurt more than it should be.

Chorus:
But then Maya crashed on me,
And my work was gone you see,
All my progress was in vain,
Maya crashed and caused me pain.

Outro:
Maya, Maya, why'd you crash on me,
I thought we had a connection, can't you see,
But now I'm lost and feeling incomplete,
Maya, please don't crash on me.

Cleaned!

Hey look!  In a previous post I called out the mess that was a fiber extension in our neighborhood.  After a couple of years, they finally cleaned it up.

And now the rest of the story ...

Before Covid, they ("they" is whomever owns the fiber line) were going to add this fiber line.  Contractors were prepping to run the new fiber line. We saw the big coils of fiber on the side of the street.  Most of our infrastructure, except in our little neighborhood, is above ground, on poles.  We could see where the fiber line was being strung along the poles, and where it was going to go down into the ground.  Just a little ahead of Covid they put the fiber into the conduit in the ground and ... it was TOO SHORT!  I kid you not.

Then Covid hit and nobody did any work on it for a long time.

Eventually they put in a splice and left a mess behind for at least a year.

Now it's finally all cleaned up.

Cakewalk 1.0

 

I still have my Cakewalk 1.0 manual.  It came in a plastic case which is part of the manual!  I think it was a trick to merge the packaging and the manual into one thing.

Here's the page in the Cakewalk 1.0 manual about the Cake2Asc converter:

We (Virgin Interactive) got years of mileage out of this tool.

Thing 2

When I was in high school my name was Steve Willson (Clarke- got added when I got married - I thought that would be so cute, but alas, most financial institutions didn't grock the "-"; but I digress).  Amazingly, there was also a Steve Wilson with one L. We were in a class together and so we were nicknamed Thing 1 and Thing 2.  So that's my Dr. Seuss Day story (which is apparently today).