Monthly Archives: September 2014

Change Log of September 23, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made that day. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

Major Changes:

Minor Changes:

  • none

Of Special Note:

  • none

 

~ George

Game Idea: Finger Gun

Finger Gun would be a game like the Dart Game, in which if you see someone “shooting” at you (with a finger gun?) then you fall down “dead”, no exceptions. If you don’t see the “Gun” fired at you, then nothing happens. Be honest.

This could be played in a game like capture the flag, where everyone is trying to sneak around and take everybody else out before they themselves get taken out. This could lead to some people just shooting wildly all the time and hoping to get someone, and it could lead to some people who go around looking nowhere but the ground so that they don’t notice anyone shooting at them. Once you are down, you can’t tell anyone else where the person who got you is.

A hard part might be finding out when everyone is “dead”. Maybe the “dead” go to a certain spot, or maybe the last person just wanders around until he’s 100% sure that everyone is down. This could make it harder to go around with your eyes closed, because you can’t win until you know that everybody is dead, and it’d also motivate people not to hide extremely well because they don’t want the game to go on forever. Another reason they wouldn’t want to hide extremely well is that they can’t shoot anyone unless the person sees them, meanwhile others could accidentally shoot you.

An alternate way you could play this is with laser points, and if you see a laser point on you then you’re out. The best strategy for this would then be to avoid looking at yourself. In this case though, the motivation would be to stay hidden, which would get boring. Another danger is that some people might deliberately shine the laser pointer in someone’s eyes so that the target is guaranteed to see the laser pointer on himself.

 ~ George

Picture to text in Word

Today, I decided I would just take a picture of our church choir schedule so I would have it on my phone for reference.  I remembered that Paul Thurrott on his Windows weekly podcast mentioned that the latest Microsoft Lens app could do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and put the text and/or the image in OneNote. So I tried it.  Wow! It works great!

After opening the app, I snapped a picture.  The first cool thing was that it corrected for the angle from which I took the picture so the page looked as if I snapped the picture squarely  from the front.  I then told it I wanted a word doc and to store the pic in OneNote.  I chose to share a link to the doc with a friend and sent it to myself.   I opened the .docx file on my windows phone and could see the text converted from the image right above the picture so it was easy to compare to make sure it did it correctly. It did.  I love it when technology foes exactly what I want it to do.

Change Log of September 19, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made that day. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

Major Changes:

  • none

Minor Changes:

  • none

Of Special Note: IMPORTANT!

  • School started, and the last two three weeks have been really crazy,  so I haven’t made the time to work on the blog. That’s going to/has change(d) though, I recently signed up for the 100 Words for 100 Days challenge, which started Monday the 15th. The goal is to, well, write at least 100 words every day for 100 days. It’s supposed to be for a novel or the like, but I decided that it would work for the blog. So my goal is to write at least 100 words a day for the blog, not including Change Logs. This doesn’t mean I’ll post something everyday, but I’ll  work on something everyday. A prime example of the “not necessarily a post everyday” is that I started 5 days ago and everyone of those (except today) I’ve spent on one post, which will hopefully come out soon.

 

~ George

Cortona helped me find dinner in between flights

After getting off of my first flight, I took a look at my windows phone to check on my next flight. I’ve used an app called Flight Status for a long time (upper right corner of image) but noticed that my Cortona tile was also showing me the status of my flight, although I didn’t have to enter the flight info for Cortona to do that.

I tapped on the time to see what else she could tell me and saw a link to a terminal map.

I clicked on it and she showed me a map of the terminal including restaurants which was perfect because I was hungry!

Hot food

Have you ever eaten something that was really hot but you didn’t realize it until it was in your mouth? What I find myself doing is trying to keep it off my tongue by holding it between my teeth. I then breath in through my nose and out through my mouth in an attempt to cool the food. It occurred to me that in doing that, I am trying to cool food down using air that is close to 100 degrees, or 98.6. Or perhaps, the air is cooler not having been in my lungs for long. In any case it always seems to work! Then I wondered if there was a better way to do it, which of course there is. Don’t eat really hot food!

The Ultimate Wish: Part 2 of 3 – Safety

You were just given the ability to grant wishes and have become the most dangerous person both on the planet and to the planet. With a single wish you could destroy the earth. If anyone find out about your power they might seek to control you, or perhaps simply kill you. What are the first wishes you make to ensure that you (and humanity) survives?

In bold are the wishes, and in parenthesis are my comments on the particular wish. “!!!” will be placed in front of particularly important wishes, although they are all important. Note: if you were going to make these wishes, you’d probably want to find the precise wording of the wish; these are more of the idea of the wish than the wish itself

  1. !!!!!! I wish that all the wishes I grant must be fulfilled according to my intention(so that I won’t be surprised by the outcomes of my wish. Definitely should be first, because it is critical to everything else. Also needs to be the most precisely worded)
  2. !!! I wish to need a password to grant wishes(so that I won’t accidentally make a wish that I shouldn’t; perhaps the password is a very hard word that I’ve written down)
  3. I wish that I am not able to grant a wish without consciously agreeing to it (again, I don’t want to accidentally destroy the world. The first wishes will have a lot to do with that)
  4. I wish that if I say the word/phase __________(really long, hard phrase), and then speak of a previous wish, then all the effect of that wish will be undone, apart from the knowledge that I had to say the phrase for some reason(In case I make a wish that messes everything up, despite my precautions. The last phrase is so that I’d know not to wish for whatever I was about to wish for)
  5. !!! I wish that if I say the word/phase __________(another really long, hard phrase), and then speak of a previous wish, then all the effect of that wish will be undone, apart from any effects it had on myself(In case I make a wish that messes something up, but I want to remember what happened anyway)
  6. I wish that if I die, all the effects of the last wish I made before my death would be undone if one of the consequences of the wish was my death (If I destroy the universe, then the wish would be undone (hopefully), perhaps I might want to not make it the last wish I made, in case it wasn’t the one that killed me (and the universe))
  7. I wish that if I am about to make a wish that will cause the death of someone I will know exactly 30 seconds before I make the wish, along with what the wish would have been (more backup for the “don’t destroy the earth” plan)
  8. I wish that any wish I make containing the word __________ (word that I’d never unintentionally say in a wish) will be undone exactly 24 hours after my death, unless I wish otherwise (Just in case)
  9. Having hopefully protected the universe from myself (although I may want to do something about the time stream), the following wishes will be mostly about protecting me from the universe.
  10. I wish to be able to grant wishes without speaking out loud (in case I’m in a situation that I can’t speak, such as underwater or gagged, although perhaps I should need to speak to decrease the possibility of accidental wishing?)
  11. !!!!!! I wish that I’ll automatically know and understand the answer to any question I ask, so long as it doesn’t regard the future. (This is a REALLY big one, with this power alone you could rule the world. If I wasn’t already wishing to grant wishes, this would be one of my “3 wishes”. Maybe someday I’ll do a post on it)
  12. !!! I wish to be able to stop and start time (note: unless I made wish #1 of this post, this could lead to some dire consequence, such as not being able to start time again, or instantly killing me. Also, this is important for my safety because it can help me get out of bad situations)
  13. I wish that I wouldn’t age while time is stopped. (Who knows how the whole “Time Stop” thing would work, so it’s better to be prepared)
  14. !!! I wish that if I were to die, time would rewind until exactly 5 minutes before I lost clarity of thought and start again, but I’d know exactly what killed me and how it killed me (You might want to put a limit on how many time this happens; “clarity of thought” is supposed to help against dying when I’m asleep or drugged.)
  15. I wish to be completely indestructible so long as I cannot think clearly, along with the 10 minutes following the point at which I am thinking clearly (This wish has two purposes: 1st, if someone tries to attack me while I am asleep, drugged, or confused, they won’t succeed; 2nd, if something really bad happens while I’m asleep or something, I will have a chance to fix it)
  16. I wish that any bullet, missile, rocket, dart, sword, or knife thrown or shot at me will instantly be teleported  inside the black hole at the center of the galaxy (I know that there are many other things that could kill me, some of which I might add later, but this is just to cover the basics. Besides, if I said anything thrown at me would disappear, then dodgeball and games like it would become much less fun. As for the black hole part, I figured that no matter what someone shoots at me, it isn’t something a black hole couldn’t handle, meanwhile if the person was desperate enough it might blow up the sun, or something)
  17. I wish that the moment someone decides that he/she wants to kill me, he/she will immediately forget that he/she wants to kill me (pretty self-explanatory, I think)

Notable Exceptions (wishes that I thought would be good, but upon further reflection turned out to be bad ideas)

  1. I wish to be able to teleport anywhere at conscious desire (with the power to wish for anything, I can easily wish to be any place I want. Having taken some measures to make sure that I don’t accidentally wish for something bad, it’d probably be safer to just stick with that rather than risk accidentally teleporting myself into the center of the sun, for instance)
  2. I wish to be able to know the future (or something along those lines)(I never thought this would be a good idea, but I thought I’d explain why I make the last statement in wish #10. It’s pretty simple, to be honest. In many of the movies/books, the person who knows the future often dies or something else horrible because he/she tries to change it. While that may be just in fiction, I wouldn’t want to be the first to try it.)

This post will continue to be updated as I think of more, but for now this is good. Part 3 is about the fun I’d wish for now that everything is safe.

~ George

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This post is part of a 3 post triad, each focusing on a specific aspect of “The Ultimate Wish”.

Story Idea: The Hidden Extra

What if someone got the rights to a bunch of different popular books and inserted the same extra into each book? No one would know where in the book the extra is, and perhaps they wouldn’t even know which books have the extra in it! It would become a little “Easter egg” for those who found the “Hidden Extra” in their book, especially since not all the books would necessarily have it (if it was inserted after the book became popular). Eventually, maybe the hidden extra guy could create a story that somehow links all the books and hidden extras together. Also, who knows? Someone might have already done this, but hasn’t revealed it yet. Brandon Sanderson has started something like this, inserting the (extra) character Hoid into at least three of his different book series, and (I hope) is planning to explain how they connect. As cool as it may be for Sanderson to be connecting his own books’ universes together, imagine how awesome it would be to have the universes of the books of several different authors all connected!

~ George

Change Log of September 1, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made that day. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

  • Posts by Dad

Major Changes:

  • As Dad mentions in his post DDOS and Wafs, he’s activated Incapsula on the site. See his post for more details!
  • Dad also added the Tag Cloud that you can now see on the front page! One more thing to check off the To Do List!
  • Dad changed his post list under technology to show an image next to each post along with the title, date, and a brief summary.

Minor Changes:

  • I made a slight update to the text of the To Do List, and I deleted checked off items, like I’ll be doing at the beginning of each month

Of Special Note:

  • Soon I should be able to start Certified Brilliant again! So long as school, which is starting up,  isn’t too hard, that is…
  • Updated to WordPress 4, “Benny” tonight!

 

~ George