Super User User Appreciation

Synetech 2 Comments

I just checked Super User and noticed that I had broken 19K rep. I checked my profile to see which of my questions/answers was upvoted and noticed that someone had apparently gone on a tare.

It seems that someone saw one of my questions or answers and really liked it, then looked at my profile and saw my other questions and answers and decided to upvote a bunch of them. I’ve seen this happen before (someone even went so far as to create a profile with the name SynetechFan) but never to this extent. I just hope that it isn’t seen as some sort of suspicious activity and subsequently deleted (everybody seems to be vulnerable to backfiring good intentions; especially my mother).

What’s particularly interesting is that whomever did it stopped at 40 upvotes, that’s 200 rep which happens to be the Stack Exchange daily rep-cap, meaning that had they done one more, it would have been recorded, but not applied (i.e., I would not have gotten any more points). What’s particularly odd is that they upvoted only questions which are worth five points as opposed to answers which are worth 10 (which would have meant only 20 upvotes before hitting the cap). I can only deduce that the person who did it is not a novice and is familiar with the Stack Exchange sites, but there is no way to send private messages and the user-facing logging functions are limited, so there is no way for me to know who did it or why.

Either way, I’m not complaining. 🙂

The UFOs that weren’t

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Years ago, when we were living in an apartment building, one night we saw a group of three faint, white lights floating and dancing around in the night sky. We watched them move around each other in circular patterns from the balcony for a while and wondered what they were. We considered UFOs and were excited and scared at the thought. We then started looking around to see if we could find some sort of terrestrial source but saw none. We thought of possible explanations and it suddenly dawned on us:

The new IKEA that had just opened across the street was having a grand-opening ceremony and they had one of those animated (skyward facing) spotlight systems.

My Mother Hates Everything

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My mother does not enjoy any shows or movies (well, nearly none; a show or movie she likes is rarer than a leprechaun). The reason is quite simple: she cannot be surprised. Any show or movie that she watches, she figures out and predicts early on, so she is always bored and disappointed. That is why the small, small handful of shows or movies that somehow did manage to surprise her are the few that she likes. Fortunately, there are an even more rare, select few that she does figure out and predict, yet still likes because either she was not certain she was correct, or because it was still amusing enough that the predictability was irrelevant.

A few examples of movies she likes are Primal Fear, and Above Suspicion (and old epics of course). As for television shows, she still likes SVU for the time-being, and has started watching Criminal Minds again (and some British shows like legal dramas; and I’m expecting she’ll like Game of Thrones).

Perfectly Straight Freehand Lines

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I was recently debugging an AutoHotkey script I was writing for someone on Super User. I was testing it in a copy MSPaint and at one point, I noticed that I happened to somehow draw a perfectly straight right-angle as seen below. You’ll also see numerous attempts  (some close, but all failed) to repeat it on the right. I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode “The Handicap Spot” in which Jerry draws a perfect, freehand isosceles triangle on a napkin. (Apparently Kramer likes the word ‘isosceles’ so much that if he had a child, he would name it Isosceles Kramer.)

Perfectly_Straight_Right_Angle

Theme Season

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This past television season has had several shows that were very similar, falling into a few themes. For example, The Ringer and The Lying Game both involve a down-and-out female taking the place of her affluent identical twin, investigating a mystery involving secrets and murder, and finding that the new family likes them much more than their twin. In fact, these two shows are ridiculously similar, the difference being that The Ringer is orders of magnitude better. Another new show this season falls in the same theme. Switched at Birth while not about twins, is about a couple of girls who switch (to some degree) families after finding out that they were, well, switched at birth.

Another theme this season has been oldies. Trying to follow in the shoes of Mad Men (for some reason), there have been several shows that take place in the past this season. There was the short-lived Playboy Club, the more successful Pan Am, and the Canadian (and older-set) Bomb Girls.

A third theme this season was that of fantasy. Both Once Upon a Time and Grimm are about fairy-tales in real-life.

Not surprisingly the whole vampire-werewolf-etc. fad continued its presence on television with the release of The Secret Circle and a TV adaptation of Teen Wolf.

I don’t know if it is just coincidence or studios trying to cash in on fads while they can (the way that they all release low-budget movies that have the same theme as a current blockbuster). Either way, this season was very theme-heavy compared to usual.

Antiques Shows

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Even though I love knowledge, I was not too fond of the History Channel because the shows tend(ed) to be kind of dry and boring. However, recently (particularly during the winter holidays since the flood of normal shows has paused), I have been watching the History Channel a lot and it is growing on me. It also helps that I have recently become quite fond of antiques type shows and History Channel has a couple of them. At this point, I like the following shows quite a bit.

ShowNetwork
Auction KingsDiscovery Channel
OdditiesDiscovery Channel
American/Canadian PickersHistory Channel
Pawn StarsHistory Channel
PawnathonHistory Channel
Deals from the Dark SideOutdoor Life Network

Worst SpaceChem Solution Ever!

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I was doing relatively well in SpaceChem until something went terribly wrong on the “Applied Fusion” level. For starters, my solution uses all six reactors available. The massive pipeline is because things keep getting so backed up, that the whole assembly stalls, so I had to extend them enough to keep the molecules flowing long enough to finish the level. If more than 40 molecules of phosphoric acid were required, the assembly would fail (stall) and the pipes would need to be extended further, which is clearly next to impossible at this point. Not surprisingly, this monstrosity takes up quite a few cycles, 20,179 to be specific! In fact, on the graph, it blows far past every other result that has been submitted. Surprisingly however, while it has quite a lot, this assembly-line does not break the record for most symbols.

Assembly-line for “Applied Fusion”

Reactor 1Reactor 2Reactor 3Reactor 4Reactor 5Reactor 6

Applied Fusion_End

Applied Fusion_Stats

Discovery Channel Shows

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Good ShowsNot Good Shows
Auction KingsAmerican Chopper
Cash CabAmerican Loggers
CuriosityBreaking Point
Daily PlanetBreakout
Destroyed in SecondsCanada’s Worst Driver
Dinosaur RevolutionCanada’s Worst Handyman
Future WeaponsDeadliest Catch
How Machines WorkDesert Car Kings
Inventions that Shook the WorldDirty Jobs
Junk RaidersFlying Wild Alaska
MythBustersGold Rush: Alaska
OdditiesHow It’s Made
River MonstersMan vs. Wild
Shark WeekMayday
Smash LabMegaWorld
Things You Need to KnowMighty Ships
VerminatorsNatural Born Dealers
Worst Case ScenarioSons of Guns