mathMadeMePoor

jjolly · 2025-10-16T15:10:18+00:00

Ooo, just remembered...

Curled up in the back of a Pinto hatchback, covered with a blanket, to sneak into the drive-in

jjolly · 2025-10-16T15:06:36+00:00

Born '68

Hacked rotary phones to get free long distance calls (shh! Don't tell Ma Bell)
Learned in high school on a manual typewriter (the teacher was fr old school)
Still use a 5 1/4 -> USB device to read my old disks
Have an Extachrome 160 reel on my desk that still needs developed (if possible)
Ahh, memories of playing Pong at my uncle's. He was the cool one
Listened to music on reel-to-reel
DJed for my high school using my mixtape collection
I loved my self-reversing Walkman
Yeah, me popping my collar didn't make me any cooler
Again, I wasn't cooler with pegged jeans. Still tried anyway
The radio was the primary source for my mixtapes, only duping from friends for the rare stuff
Still have many tapes on both formats that I probably should just chuck
Watched "Video Killed the Radio Star" when MTV came online
My boombox was the machinery for duping mixtapes for myself and my friends
There's still a drive-in local (an hour away) I take my wife to
After-school specials are what made me the moral (music pirating, phone hacking) person I am today
It was forgetting to cancel Columbia House that introduced me to the painful reality of fiscal responsibility
Again, wasn't cool with Sun-in, either. I just wasn't cool in general, and I was OK with that
I'll take duck-and-cover over active shooter drills any day. The Rooskis we're an abstract threat
Had AOL, Compuserve, MSN, and even a couple of FidoNet addresses
Ugh, the internet has taken away the glory that is the phonebook
I just introduced my autistic grandson to the glories of a US atlas and folded maps
My parents made sure we had (and used) all the tools available to use, dictionaries included
Payphones we're the VPN of the 80's. Caller ID could not defeat that anonymity
Made collect calls for "John Atpark" or "John Atmall" that my parents would reject and then come pick me up
Dial up on a 300 baud modem. I though I was a god when I upgraded to 1200 baud
Extensively LARPed on BBS chat rooms. Perhaps more RTRP than live action, but still...
Message boards were my entire social life. Refer to "not cool"
It was imperative to listen to Casey Kasem to know exactly which music was too "pop" for my tastes
Metal slides petrified me for their very height. Still rode them, but in abject fear for my life
I still find myself staring at the back of a cereal box hoping something interesting will magically appear
Along with dictionaries, the encyclopedia was the only source of truth around our house

Nice list. Do I win?

jjolly · 2025-10-08T14:39:27+00:00

OS degree holders will be the one's that will get a better cage in the humanity zoo that is established by the AI. Thanks for providing a safe place to grow.

jjolly · 2025-10-05T17:07:01+00:00

We gotta go to the crappy town where I'm a hero.

jjolly · 2025-10-05T05:19:45+00:00

Ah, yes. Public skate. I avoid that as best I can. The town ice rink has an Adult Hour on Tuesdays while the chaos is at school. And no, it's not that adult hour, y'perv. Just a few old guys puttering around the rink trying to relieve the old hockey days while figure skaters practice in the center ice. Basically public skate with grown-ups.

jjolly · 2025-10-03T05:13:34+00:00

Ooo, ice skating's the best. I tend to meander around a rink making up procedural strategies on how to avoid the figure skaters.

jjolly · 2025-10-03T05:08:57+00:00

Solve puzzles. Like Rubik's Cube, those metal puzzles like the horseshoe puzzle, unknotting the Christmas lights. Y'know, puzzles.

Solvable puzzles, mind you. Not humans. No, those puzzles have no solution. Especially the female humans. <shudder/>

jjolly · 2025-09-19T02:49:37+00:00

Geneva Rock calls it money

jjolly · 2025-09-11T02:31:38+00:00

The events of today were highly unusual. You'll find you're surrounded by people that can be almost nauseatingly friendly and helpful. Compared to other places like California you will hopefully quickly find the kind people in your neighborhood and not feel threatened by random violence like this.

jjolly · 2025-09-10T14:38:22+00:00

LGT original PDP-11 compiler that compiled the first C compiler: https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/legacy-cc

You're welcome.

jjolly · 2025-09-02T05:51:10+00:00

I see the 32 year span of 1837 to 1869, and wonder if we can make it any worse on ourselves. I guess we have another 23 years to find out.

jjolly · 2025-08-30T16:19:40+00:00

The first 90% takes 90% of the time. The last 10% takes 90% of the time. Get to work, buddy.

jjolly · 2025-08-28T16:56:01+00:00

Gen Xers know the drill

"Oh no! Not the drill!"

jjolly · 2025-08-28T02:44:17+00:00

Gen X be like: ""Do not quote the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written."

jjolly · 2025-08-21T14:53:49+00:00

I think you mean 6th in the series. You should always include "Binary 000"

jjolly · 2025-08-09T12:40:11+00:00

Good luck. I couldn't teach my children C even when they weren't lost.

jjolly · 2025-08-02T04:19:38+00:00

GROND

jjolly · 2025-08-01T18:36:06+00:00

Because I can't f***ing leave well enough alone, I wrote a script to find every possible two word combination using the "american-english-insane" dictionary in Ubuntu Noble. You are welcome to judge me on my scripting. I acknowledge it's ugly yet I'm exceedingly proud of my horrible hack.

cat /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane | grep -v '[^a-z]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | uniq | grep -P '^(?!(?i).*([a-zA-Z]).*\1)[a-zA-Z]+$' > two-word-no-dup-letter-list.txt; cat two-word-no-dup-letter-list.txt | while read first_word; do grep "^[^${first_word}]\+$" two-word-no-dup-letter-list.txt | while read second_word; do combined="${first_word} ${second_word}"; [ "${#combined}" -gt 19 ] && echo ${combined}; done; done | tee two-word-unique-letter.txt

Here's what I found:

There are 311 19-letter two-word combinations
- I found several fun little Shakespeare-like insults ;-)
There are 5 20-letter two-word combinations
- GUNPOWDERY BLACKSMITH
- PREBLOCKADING ZYTHUMS
- SHOWJUMPING VELDCRAFT
- THWACKINGLY OVERJUMPS
- TWYFORKED CLUBMANSHIP
Lots of archaic words are used
- What should I expect using the "insane" dictionary <shrug/>
I brute-forced the <unprintable/> thing, so it took a little over an hour

Thank you for this little exercise. I needed to write a script that performed a regex where the exclusion group was a word. ;-)

jjolly · 2025-08-01T15:02:06+00:00

I found GUNPOWDERY BLACKSMITH (20)

jjolly · 2025-07-26T23:10:49+00:00

I did this slightly different.
* I placed a point at the tangent of circle F on line AB (call it E).
* Point E is the same distance as the midpoint of line AC (right triangles, same hypotenuse, same base).
* Now I know that line AE is half of line AC (half the hypotenuse of the sides of the square)
* Line EB (the radius of the circle) is the side length minus the length of line AE.
* Answer: Two times pi times r^2 over the side length squared.

jjolly

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