Category Archives: Insanity

Half-Baked Idea?

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Most ‘normal’ (point-and-shoot) cameras use really small sensors, no bigger than your thumbnail. In fact, probably smaller. They’re easily at 8 megapixels.

The sensor in my digital SLR is roughly the size of two postage stamps side-by-side. It’s six megapixels. (There are big quality advantages to this, but momentarily disregard them.)

Now consider if you had the ‘pixels per inch’ of the small sensor, but blew it up to the size of the APS-C sensors. I’d estimate you could get at least 50 megapixels.

Necessary? No. Would it require all sorts of upgrades (e.g., buffer) to work? Yes. And would the image quality be on par with an SLR? Nope. Would the lens be the limiting reactant? Possibly. But would it be awesome?

You bet.

Social Skills

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I’m hardly in the upper echelon when it comes to social skills, but I’m going to post this anyway…

I’ve come to the conclusion that a person’s social skills are one of the most important things they learn. The problem is that they seem to be learned solely through trial and error and observed experiences: no one ever teaches you anything formally. Some people are naturals. I just read an article about Obama, and he’s definitely one of them. Most people here, being a business school, have pretty good social skills. But we’ll periodically mingle with other schools. At a big convention we went to last year, I realized that some of the people there had terrible social skills, to the point of being somewhat creepy.

I think it’s somewhat industry-specific. In the business world, you need strong social skills. If I’d gone on to become, say, a programmer as I once considered, it wouldn’t have been as important, but it’d still be very important.

I view this as a sort of crisis. Too many mal-adjusted people are passing through our schools. In my opinion, it’s one of the most critical skills, and they’re just never getting taught. Let’s cut out history and replace it with Socializing 101. I never did like history anyway…

Vandalism

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I’d really like to get into the mind of vandals.

Tonight I was poking around Wikipedia and noticed that someone had just vandalized one of the pages. I reverted it (super-easy!), and then did what all good denizens of Wikipedia should do: I looked at the guy’s changes. He’d vandalized several other articles, all basically stating, “I’m going to keep vandalizing until you ban me.” (He got banned about 3 minutes later.)

It’s incredibly easy to revert vandalism. Do they not realize how easy it is to undo what they do? (Some guy at work one night wrote in Sharpie all over the bathroom. I was so disappointed that he wasn’t there to see that it took us about three seconds to completely remove it.)

But why do they do that? It’s Saturday night. I feel kind of pathetic for happening to poke around Wikipedia. But it’s not as pathetic as pointlessly vandalizing Wikipedia articles. In fact, of all the pathetic things I’ve done, none have been as pathetic as that. What makes these people tick? Do they like the attention? Do they take delight in it?

Politics

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One thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but never really had the energy to do, is write letters about big issues. Alone it probably doesn’t make a huge difference, but when people get a deluge of letters either supporting them or condemning their stance on something, it most certainly can sway their opinion.

I think the first of the series of letters is going to Orem, Utah’s city council and police department, after their police department knocked down, handcuffed, arrested, and jailed an elderly woman… for not watering her lawn. The city attorney, most of all, should be written to, as (s)he still plans to prosecute her.

Nutjobs

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You are a nutjob if:

  • You refer to government conspiracies. (Actually, let me qualify that. You refer to government conspiracies without showing compelling evidence.)
  • You refer to “the homosexual agenda” or use the word “infiltrated” to refer to homosexuals.
  • You believe income tax / the IRS are illegal, and/or have voted to abolish them.
  • Most of your savings are in some format other than, err, money. (I suppose there’s some logic here, if the economy were to utterly crumble. But if the economy utterly crumbles, who wants your gold / rubies?)
  • You are an anarchist. (This is 100% irrelevant to supporting smaller government, which is far from being a nutjob. I’m talking people who truly think we should have no government at all.)
  • You vote to permit torture.
  • You support an immediate and complete withdrawal from Iraq.
  • You support staying in Iraq indefinitely with no exit plan.
  • Your plan for ‘solving’ illegal immigration consists primarily of “build a really big fence.”
  • Your plan for ‘solving’ illegal immigration consists primarily of deporting all illegal immigrants.
  • You write an “erotic fantasy” novel about police officers being gunned down.

Douchebag

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Last night around 1:30, I was almost asleep when someone in a neighboring building began banging on drums and screaming very loudly. After about 15 minutes, I was getting really annoyed.

A few minutes later, it stopped abruptly. It would appear that someone who was almost asleep when they began playing the drums at 1:30 in the morning called the police. I of course won’t know the details until I’m at the station on Monday to do police logs, but it was probably anonymously reported at 1:45 a.m. by a disgruntled student in a neighboring building. And whoever that anonymous student might be, I salute you: Hero of the Day!

Police: A Lifelong Career

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I may have posted this on the old site, but I don’t remember…  Taking my Forensic Science class here, taught by a retired detective, reminded me of the thought.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a police officer who has changed jobs. I’ve heard of military people ending up in office jobs and cooks becoming teachers and janitors becoming construction workers, but I’ve never, ever heard of a police officer who become something else.

I’m sure it happens sometimes, but it seems to me that it happens much less frequently. And I think that’s a good sign of when you know a job is something you might like: when no one ever stops doing it until they’re forced to. Of course I haven’t interviewed thousands of people to develop this theory, so it could very easily be inaccurate.

But it’s also supported by the fact that policework is one of those things people always seem to love talking about. I’m not even sure what one of my uncles does. He works in the financial industry and doesn’t seem to like his job. He’s never said, “I have to tell you what happened last week!” But run into a retired cop and they could talk all day about their time on the job. Again, I’m drawing on limited experience talking to retired cops, so I could be wrong. But I’m not so sure I am.

I wonder if there’s a place that compiles statistics on this. I’d be interested to see what other jobs have low career-change numbers. Which are the highest? Waiters? Does that count, though? Not many people expect that to become a career. Is it linked to training? Being a police officer takes a lot of specialized training that won’t help you at all if you decide to become, say, an accountant. But being an accountant takes lots of specialized training, too. Do accountants have mid-life crises and become construction workers often?

Today’s Crazy Idea

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I’m constantly coming up with ideas. Much moreso than I suspect is normal. (At any given time I have about half a dozen ideas for new businesses floating around in my head.)

A lot of the times after a few minutes in my mind I’ll reject an idea for one reason or another. Other times I realize that it’s a really good idea and act on it. But today’s idea I’m not so sure about.

I think it’s very important that have a good retirement account. The money you earn is basically time times interest rate, and, while I can shop around for a good interest rate, you just can’t beat 40 years time when it comes to interest earned. ($2,500 today, with no money ever added, earning 10% annual interest, left alone for 40 years, would be a $113,000 retirement fund.)

I also noticed that I had a pretty ‘good’ schedule that I constructed back when I was on my ‘late’ sleep cycle: go to bed late and wake up late. I’m currently not on that sleep cycle, which means I’ll have lots of free time during the days. Mostly joking, I proposed that I should get a job to fill the time during the days.

And then these two random thoughts collided. The obvious result: why not get a ‘light’ part-time job during the days and earmark 100% of the earnings for contribution to an IRA?

Realistically, I doubt I’ll carry through. But I wanted to share the idea, because I really like it.

Combo

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Since we’re living somewhere else now, I think I can finally say what I’ve wanted to say for a long time:

The combination to our apartment last year was 12345.

We didn’t pick it. And it wasn’t quite 12345, you had to press two of the numbers at the same time. It was awfully unimaginative on the part of whoever set the combination, though.

My roommates looked at me like I was an idiot when I complained on the first day that there was no way I’d remember the combination. That was before I realized that it was 12345.

Suffice it to say, our combination next year is not 12345.