I had only found it because someone suggested that I look into various sleep disorders. I never thought of it as a disorder, so I'd never looked for more information there. I can't say positively that it is what's wrong with me, but all the symptoms are perfect. I don't know what good having it diagnosed would do, other than I could get a nice piece of paper from a doc saying it to hang on my wall.:) I know I need to go see a specialist though. It's hard not having a job though. In talking with a few, if I were to go without insurance, it'll cost something like $1,000 for the first two sessions, which may not be enough to evaluate the situation. {sigh}
Sleep disorders are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Well, there seem to be some exceptions. From what I've read generally an employer must provide you with reasonable accommodations. So for me, a reasonable accommodation would be to let me work a normal shift sometime from noon to 3am. I know my self diagnosis won't get me anywhere, so I really need to get a doctor to confirm it for me.
I did have the warm fuzzy feeling about my last work though. They knew I was a zombie in the mornings, and didn't perform until noon. I'd stay all kinds of late hours when I was able to perform well, to accomplish above and beyond expectations. Then someone got a wild hair up their ass, and kept pushing my shift earlier and earlier, until I wasn't able to keep up with it. I'd really love to get the doctors note about it, and send a copy of it over, just to watch them freak out. My last week there, I was suffering from migraines every day, because I'd take sleeping pills (OTC varieties) every night. Pills that worked would only work for a few nights before I built up a tolerance, so I had a whole collection of OTC sleeping pills at the house. It left me unrested, with a splitting headache every morning. I had to call out on a few occasions, because it hurt so bad. The solution for the headaches was to go back to sleep, and I'd wake up bright and sunshiny at noon or so.:)
I beat them in court for my unemployment, so at least I got that. I'd rather have a job though.
My employer before that didn't care. They actually enjoyed that I could do work on the servers during the slow hours, when people wouldn't generally notice. 4am Eastern was our slowest time of day, but that was in the middle of our low time that ran from about 1am to 5am. I could take down an entire datacenter during those hours, and none of the customers would notice. No one had to ask about the mystery of how I kept things working properly, they'd just get the email notification that the tasks were completed by the time I went to bed. The normal day shift folks picked up the slack, so we only had a couple hours of no real coverage. Sleeping hours that are normal for me makes it easy to wake up whenever I need to. If the pager beeped, I'd be up and alert(ish) and fix the problem right away. So having me awake from noon to sometime in the early morning was perfect to have someone doing their duty from 8am to 5pm. We had plenty of overlap to work on things together.
I experimented with this a while back. Well, it was during the period where I was exercising hard. I had passed by that point in life where food intake has to be reduced, or it causes weight gain. Since there wasn't a nice signpost along the road saying it, I didn't catch on until I was about 20 pounds overweight. I switched to a low calorie, no caffeine, minimal sugar diet. And I will say, damn it's hard to just go get fast food and stay under 300 calories for a lunch.
I did a great job of losing weight, exercising every morning, and feeling generally good, once the soreness of hard morning exercises subsided. That lasted for a few months until I was in a car accident. The doc said no exercise, and I was prescribed a lot of drugs. I didn't care as much, so I started drinking soda again. Otherwise, I've kept my meals very small and infrequent. If I exert more, I eat more. If I'm having slow calm days, I don't eat much at all.
The only really notable side effect of eating healthy was that when my weight dropped back down I stopped snoring, and my mouth didn't feel dry in the morning.:) But the exercise was good. I substantially increased my muscle mass. I've tried getting back into hard exercise, but it usually only takes about a week of ramping up the exercises before I manage to hurt myself. Taking a few days off of the exercises because I can barely walk isn't all that helpful.
I had started one in a Google Docs spreadsheet, so I can get to it from anywhere. Since I'm not working, I don't have a "home" exactly, so I may be who knows where when I go to sleep. At least when I go to sleep somewhere, I wake up at the same place.:) I had a look at the link you provided. That looks very interesting. It's a lot better than the raw data in a spreadsheet.:) I'll give that a shot.
I used to do a heavy workout every morning. It was about 90 minutes of weight lifting. Then I'd shower and go to work. It was fun doing it, so I looked forward to it. Well, until my last car accident, where the doctor told me not to lift anything heavy for quite a while. So much for morning exercises. That didn't help get to sleep early though.
If I completely exhaust myself during the day, say doing heavy physical labor, I may fall asleep at 8pm, but I'll be awake at 11pm, and then be ready to sleep a night at about 3am.
A couple weeks ago, it was about 95 degrees out ("feels like" 104). I spent a few hours doing yard work, including cutting branches off the roof. I was done well before dark. It was exhausting work. I was tired, but couldn't actually get to sleep. When midnight finally came, I was still wide awake. Sore, but wide awake. Then at 3am, I was out like a baby. My girlfriend tried to wake me up at 10am, 10:30am, 11am, 11:30am, and finally I woke up at noon.
This morning she said I was somewhat awake and talking at 9am when she woke up, but then I went back to sleep. I don't remember anything about that conversation. The only thing I remember is her finally waking me up at noon. Over the years, girlfriends and other people I've lived with have mentioned that they try to wake me up before noon, and I sometimes babble senseless stuff for a little while and then go back to sleep. They're usually words, but they aren't strung together into any sort of usable pattern. Occasionally I'll remember a little bit of it, but it's mostly the confusion where I think I'm saying something that makes perfect sense, and they're looking at me like I'm speaking a foreign language. I'll even repeat myself slowly, and it still makes no sense to them. So in my mind, it makes perfect sense, even though it means absolutely nothing in the real world.
I usually tell people unless I'm standing with both eyes open *AND* speaking coherently, I'm not actually awake. It's not sleep walking/talking exactly. I've managed to show up something resembling working hours occasionally. That means I can shower, get dressed, operate a car without damaging myself or anyone else, and show up at the right desk, but mostly my speech is like I'm still asleep, and apparently I look it too. Most people figure it out pretty quick and just leave me alone until I'm awake. Those who don't, it takes me a while to convey what I'm trying to say. Apparently I can type pretty well though, and comprehend what needs to be done. I can do the work they ask for, and do it correctly, but it's all a blur to me.
And on that note, hello 2am. How I wish I didn't see thee.
I usually go to sleep between 02:00 to 04:00. I don't have to be exhausted, I can just lay down and go to sleep like a normal person. If there's nothing scheduled, I'll be awake between 11:00 to 13:00.
I worked one job where they really didn't care when I slept as long as I got all my work done. That was perfect. I'd send my "end of day" emails sometime around 03:00, and show up to the office bright and shiny at noon.
Attempting to work "normal" hours has been a problem for me for a long time. I talked to my mom about it, and she confirmed it. I rarely managed to sleep before midnight. I was a complete zombie going to school, and wasn't usually completely coherent until around noon.
The problem is this. If I work by my schedule (awake 11:00, sleep 03:00), I'm fine. If I force myself to wake up at say 7am, I'm a zombie until noon, and exhausted for the rest of the day. It worked fine when I was a kid. Someone was always around to make sure I woke up. Being an adult on my own for many years, if I'm living with someone I have a chance of actually getting out of bed. If I don't, it doesn't matter how many alarm clocks there are, or how loud they are. Somehow I manage to turn off some alarm clocks sometimes. I've woken up with my cell phone in my hand (I set the alarm on the phone too). When I've been with someone, they've told me that I fumble with things until they shut up. If I can't make it shut up I just roll back over and go back to sleep.
If I'm on my normal schedule, I can wake up normally to an alarm clock at odd hours. So, if there's something unusual going on at 6am, I can be awake and not groggy.
Sometimes, if there's something going on, like I have work that must be completed, I can work through a whole night, and still be perfectly coherent the next day. I won't be tired until about 3am the next morning. Something like this:
Wake Sunday at 12:00
Do early work Sunday night from 23:00 Sunday to 03:00 Monday.
Sleep 03:00 Monday Wake 11:00 Monday (Beginning of the "normal" day)
Work through 03:00 Tuesday Sleep 03:00 Wednesday
Wake 11:00 Thursday
Sleep 03:00 Friday
Wake 11:00 Friday
Sleep 03:00 Saturday
Some employers consider it a problem. If you have an employee who can work fine from Monday at noon (allowing showering and driving to work), and they don't feel the need to stop until early Wednesday morning, why complain? That gives 38 hours of work before normal employees even come in on Wednesday morning. It was pretty easy to comfortably work about 70 hours a week, but I only did it as needed.
I've tried all kinds of different sleep environments. I like the dead silent rooms best. No white noise, no outside noise.
I've slept in all kinds of places, including airliners. The time has to be right though. If I take an early morning flight (departing at 7am), I can stay awake the night before, get to the airport, take a nap in the terminal until I hear commotion around me which is my hint to wake up. No problem at all. Once I get to my seat on the plane, I can go right back to sleep, and not wake up for anything until the plane lands. Then I am wide awake and perfectly normal, even though the whole night was interrupted sleep.
At once house I lived in, I had two window air conditioners at the head of the bed. The house had terrible insulation, and one simply wouldn't cool it down. During the summer, they ran pretty much constantly, and they were anything but quiet. I didn't notice noises from outside though, because the white
That happened too when I was a kid, one winter. I wasn't there, but they finally told me later. One of my parents started the car, which was followed by an awful screech and thumping under the hood. Apparently the cat was curled up perfectly happy behind the radiator, where the fan is. The fan threw cat parts all over the place. After that, my parents usually beeped the horn once to scare off any animals that may be hiding in the engine compartment. Once in a while, you'd see a terrified cat run away from it.
When I was old enough to start driving, I got in the habit of beeping the horn before starting too, at least at home. We were far enough out in rural nowhere, so no one would care (or even notice) a quick beep on the horn, regardless of the hour. In town or at neighbors houses, we didn't do it, so we didn't annoy people.:) That's where I picked up the kitten. Oddly enough, it wasn't winter, but as I remember it, it was summer, so the cat was probably trying to find a nice shady spot to sleep.
I had a kitten climb up into the engine compartment of a van once. I noticed an unusual sound while I was driving, but nothing that worried me. I drove about 30 miles before I stopped. I took a peak and found a very dirty, but otherwise unharmed, kitten. The sound I heard must have been it meowing during the whole drive. I still have no idea where it managed to perch itself without getting toasted, or more importantly (I guess), how it managed to hold on over some pretty rough roads.
Someone did mention that NYC is planning (or doing) wifi and cell repeaters in the subways. I guess time and congestion become factors though. Is it faster to take a cab from Point A to Point B, or go down to the station and wait for the right subway to show up. I've been fond of subways for some trips, but others are just impractical. But, if you get free wifi, it may be an acceptable trade for most.
{sigh} and I'm in an area with no significant mass transit. You *could* wait for a bus, but you'd have to drive 10 miles to get to any bus stop, and then walk miles from your stop to your destination. My state has a 50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms. From March 1 through November 31, and that "50% chance" is more like a 99% chance of getting soaked if you go outside.
Well, it wasn't worthy of publication. It's pretty simple to do. I had made some code available in the past, which used a variation of it to avoid abuses of message boards.
I'm not really looking for fame or fortune, so "father of...[anything but my kids]" doesn't interest me much.
But like I said, it's not rocket science. Did someone with the same identifier [username, cookie id, IP, etc, etc] vote the same way over a threshold for the same item? If so, disregard all their votes during tabulation. It does require all the voting information to be used during tabulation, not just a historical tabulation against the current numbers.
For example, I've seen voting that just does the following (in pseudocode) $total_votes $total_score
That is fine and dandy until some schmuck has a script hit your voting script 100,000 times with the same vote. Now you can either purge the voting information, or let it ride.
The alternative is to record every vote with whatever identifying information you can. There are circumstances where you may not even record a vote, but that would only be obvious ones like if wget or curl were in the USER_AGENT string.
Now you can see if the same identifying information did the same action too many times. If you allow exactly one vote per user, disregard all the votes from any user who exceeds that threshold. To be polite, you may want to allow say 5 votes. Someone may click twice, but if they come back and do it 5 times, it's probably abuse.
Likewise, if you are confident that particular identifiers are bogus, you can prune those completely. For example, if you see inbound clicks from http://ballotstuffers.example.com/ automatically add those user identifiers to the list to disregard.
Hmmm.. There were a couple other methods. I can't remember those offhand, and I haven't had access to the code for a few years.
It could be said that this is sampling, but really it's just avoiding abuse. We aren't taking a percentage of the samples, we're taking all the votes from people who aren't likely to be fraudulent. If you take 1 in 10 samples for voting, and you have 11,000 votes (10,000 from ballot stuffers, 1,000 from legitimate voters), your ballot stuffers will still have the majority of the votes. If you automatically exclude 100 voters, who account for 10,000 of the 11,000 votes, you will likely have a fairly accurate vote. if you go with the IP as the user identification, you'll likely trim out AOL (who needs 'em) or any other group of people behind a common proxy or NAT. You'll still have the majority of voters being counted.
In real-world political elections, this would be obvious if say 10,000 residents in a district returned 110,000 ballots. Sadly though, that happens, and none of the votes are excluded from the tabulation. Herearesomeexamples. You can go find more on your own.
The real solution to this, if you needed accurate votes, would be to require authentication for each voter, and only provide them with credentials once they proved that they are truly individuals. You may still have some fraud, but it would then be based on the fact that people will give away their votes. This is true of proxy votes. A bunch of people and I
Random sampling is the worst way to handle voting.
I was doing it for a huge site, where we took millions of votes per week in. Contests (which usually ran 4 to 6 weeks). Each contest had thousands of contestants.
The original system used sampling. That was terrible. There was a 1:10 chance of taking the vote. That caused all kinds of irregularities.
The system I replaced it with logged all votes and some other fun stuff. There was no way for a person voting to know if their votes had been banned, it gave exactly the same message every time. There was a back end process that handled the vote tally and results publication. I had to put extensive anti-abuse measures in to avoid bad users skewing the tally. It's funny that they're complaining about it today, when I fixed it 10 years ago on another site. It was far from rocket science.
The article did indicate that they wanted to get all the cabs doing it. It would probably work ok initially, but once everyone is doing it, it will become trouble. You can still likely have problems with too many of them together, at such places like the airports and performance venues.
Forget that. Make the lower level into a parking garage and the upper levels into apartments. You'll make more money there than any shop will. Of course, you'll want to reserve the road facing portions to shops, so they can try to make some money on it.
Or just tear it down, and put up an obnoxiously tall building.:)
I still see huge problems with this. If you have one car per block, and they are stationary, the mesh idea is pretty good. When I've been in New York, that's not what I've ever seen. I wouldn't worry too much about a lack of signal. I'd worry a lot about too many towers in the same place on the same or neighboring frequencies. I'm sure quite a few of us have encountered what happens when you have too many access points on the same channel too close together. Apartment complexes are great for it. I've had it happen where there were too many small homes close together.
What's going to happen when you have a view like above. There aren't enough channels to segregate everyone off to somewhere different. The cars can't constantly be changing channels. There's no way to manage the cars to keep the different channels apart. If it's a mesh network, you're also going to find saturation on various cars, as the signal is bounced around between relay points. I am curious to what they expect the uplinks to be. To provide Internet service, they'll have to (oh my gosh) have a connection to the Internet.
I can think of a few solutions, but none are standard WiFi. They'd be looking at resolving the problems that cell phone providers have already done, except they're expecting to have their towers moving constantly too.
Nah. That'd be too easy. Brute force it yourself.:) Or give the NSA a call. They should have had it the same day the file was released, assuming they were in the least bit interested.
That's already been done. It wasn't that interesting. It was all a bluff.
Bluffs, unfortunately, don't always work as planned. Sometimes it's easier to call the bluff, and cover up the damage later. More often, you'll find that there was no damage to cover up. Oddly enough, extortion doesn't work as well, when the "victim" doesn't care.
I know exactly what you mean. There are two places I used to live that have drastically views from street view to satellite view.
At one place, the satellite view is years old. It's not a very interesting place to look though.
Then there's this one (West corner of Doran and Isabel). The satellite view is from within the last year. The street view is from at least 2 years ago, but probably longer.
I lived there several years ago. I stopped by a couple years ago, and the house had been torn down, and they had just began construction on condos.
The really annoying part was, that could have been a beautiful house. It was beautiful inside. The house was built in 1924, and had a notable history. The owner bought it and the house next door. We were renting it while he secured the necessary permits to build the condos. We were there for a year. Someone else moved in after us, and sometime after that it was gone. Most of the historical homes in that area were torn down, because the property was worth more with condos on it.
There are significant differences between big truck motors and car motors. Like I said, there is some crossover, but that's usually where performance isn't actually required. I drove a 26' U-Haul across the country, and it had a gas Chevy 454 in it, tied to some fairly stock automatic transmission. I didn't have a look at it, but the guy at the shop said they used dump truck transmissions, which would be similar to a standard automotive transmission except much lower gearing. Empty it drove pretty well, but fully loaded driving the length of I-10 was painful. I kept my foot planted to the floor for the whole drive. We'd hold about 65mph on flat land, 20mph going up hill, and the governor would kick in at 70mph going downhill on the other side. I cheated a little going down hill. I'd get up to 70mph and throw it in neutral until we hit the the next uphill part and the speed dropped down to 70.
A DD6v92 weighs somewhere just over 3,000 pounds. That wouldn't ever show up in a light truck. The front tires wouldn't be able to take it. Check out the max load capacity of your light truck tires.
I just checked out the Ford web site. The F650 and F750 use a Cummins ISB motor. The F350 through F550 do come with a gas or diesel automotive sized motor.
A Cummins ISB motor dry weight is 1,150 pounds. A Caterpillar C7 motor dry weight is 1,295 pounds.
Your 7.9L Ford/International Powerstroke has a dry weight of 920 pounds. That doesn't mean the large trucks do.
An International Truck, like a 9900 uses either a Cummins ISX or a MaxxForce® 15 (coming in late 2010). The Cummins ISX weighs 2,940 pounds. The MaxxForce 15 weighs 3,150 pounds. The comparable Caterpillar C15 weighs about 3,000 pounds.
So, you may see trucks bigger than a pickup with regular automotive engines, but you won't see large truck engines in something the size of a pickup truck. You wouldn't really want to though. They don't spin very fast. They make awesome amounts of torque, which would make them very hard to drive in a light chassis. International isn't just in the business of building trucks though, they've had a diverse history including engines, and for a while were building consumer vehicles, like the International Harvester Scout. Just because it says "International" doesn't mean it was a huge truck part. It's kinda like saying "oohhh, Cadillac, it must be good", and pointing at a Cadillac Cimarron.:)
Well.. International, Cat, and Detroit Diesel all make engines for various applications. I know some school buses have light truck engines, but some have the larger truck engines too. In looking at RV's and buses, I found some were gas or diesel light truck engines (like Chevy 350, Ford 351, or Chevy 454). Others had engines like the DD 6v72 and 6v92. I don't know the International motors very well, since they weren't in what I was looking at. I was told by someone that the motors that show up in pickup trucks are not the big truck motors. Pretty much, if it were a big truck motor, you wouldn't be able to see over it.:)
I was looking at both to figure out which was most cost effective. Should I buy an already complete RV that probably won't suit my needs, or build one out on a heavier chassis? Affordable RV's aren't the real heavy duty ones. To get a good class A, you're looking at 6 figures. Since I can do both automotive and construction work, I opted to build my own on a city bus (GMC RTS-04). It's 40' long, 8.5' wide, and has a DD 6v92TA motor, and only cost about $2500. It's built more like a large truck (tractor-trailer) than a light truck (pickup/van/school bus).
I guess it all depends on where in farm country you grew up. "Truck" was anything with 4 or more wheels that wasn't a passenger car. Being that SUV's were built on light duty truck frames, they were also called "trucks". Oddly enough, manufacturers also call light duty trucks "trucks"... and the town I grew up in didn't have any IP data service when I left, other than dialup in the next county. The idea of a coffee shop, other than one attached to a doughnut shop was completely foreign. As far as I know, they still don't have a Starbucks. According to the Starbucks site, the nearest one is about 50 miles away.
I agree with you, and I'd suspect a lot of other people would agree with you, but what I found as definitions of a vehicle's trunk say otherwise. Unfortunately, someone at NASA referred to the trunk of a SUV in the article. {sigh}
Auto body is one of the things I've tried to avoid doing. Maybe I should learn it someday. I've been doing auto repairs for about 25 years. If it is driven on the road, I've probably worked on at least one of it's type at some point. That's kind of funny since I don't actually do it professionally. Anyone who knows me knows I am very honest. I diagnose their problem, and have them buy the replacement parts for me. Then they pay me what they think my time was worth. Since I only do it in my spare time, if they give me anything, it's more than I would have been making.:)
Ya, you're right. I ran everything through a calculator so my mid-night math wouldn't go wrong. At least I wasn't planning a space mission with my bad math.:)
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I had only found it because someone suggested that I look into various sleep disorders. I never thought of it as a disorder, so I'd never looked for more information there. I can't say positively that it is what's wrong with me, but all the symptoms are perfect. I don't know what good having it diagnosed would do, other than I could get a nice piece of paper from a doc saying it to hang on my wall. :) I know I need to go see a specialist though. It's hard not having a job though. In talking with a few, if I were to go without insurance, it'll cost something like $1,000 for the first two sessions, which may not be enough to evaluate the situation. {sigh}
Sleep disorders are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Well, there seem to be some exceptions. From what I've read generally an employer must provide you with reasonable accommodations. So for me, a reasonable accommodation would be to let me work a normal shift sometime from noon to 3am. I know my self diagnosis won't get me anywhere, so I really need to get a doctor to confirm it for me.
I did have the warm fuzzy feeling about my last work though. They knew I was a zombie in the mornings, and didn't perform until noon. I'd stay all kinds of late hours when I was able to perform well, to accomplish above and beyond expectations. Then someone got a wild hair up their ass, and kept pushing my shift earlier and earlier, until I wasn't able to keep up with it. I'd really love to get the doctors note about it, and send a copy of it over, just to watch them freak out. My last week there, I was suffering from migraines every day, because I'd take sleeping pills (OTC varieties) every night. Pills that worked would only work for a few nights before I built up a tolerance, so I had a whole collection of OTC sleeping pills at the house. It left me unrested, with a splitting headache every morning. I had to call out on a few occasions, because it hurt so bad. The solution for the headaches was to go back to sleep, and I'd wake up bright and sunshiny at noon or so. :)
I beat them in court for my unemployment, so at least I got that. I'd rather have a job though.
My employer before that didn't care. They actually enjoyed that I could do work on the servers during the slow hours, when people wouldn't generally notice. 4am Eastern was our slowest time of day, but that was in the middle of our low time that ran from about 1am to 5am. I could take down an entire datacenter during those hours, and none of the customers would notice. No one had to ask about the mystery of how I kept things working properly, they'd just get the email notification that the tasks were completed by the time I went to bed. The normal day shift folks picked up the slack, so we only had a couple hours of no real coverage. Sleeping hours that are normal for me makes it easy to wake up whenever I need to. If the pager beeped, I'd be up and alert(ish) and fix the problem right away. So having me awake from noon to sometime in the early morning was perfect to have someone doing their duty from 8am to 5pm. We had plenty of overlap to work on things together.
I experimented with this a while back. Well, it was during the period where I was exercising hard. I had passed by that point in life where food intake has to be reduced, or it causes weight gain. Since there wasn't a nice signpost along the road saying it, I didn't catch on until I was about 20 pounds overweight. I switched to a low calorie, no caffeine, minimal sugar diet. And I will say, damn it's hard to just go get fast food and stay under 300 calories for a lunch.
I did a great job of losing weight, exercising every morning, and feeling generally good, once the soreness of hard morning exercises subsided. That lasted for a few months until I was in a car accident. The doc said no exercise, and I was prescribed a lot of drugs. I didn't care as much, so I started drinking soda again. Otherwise, I've kept my meals very small and infrequent. If I exert more, I eat more. If I'm having slow calm days, I don't eat much at all.
The only really notable side effect of eating healthy was that when my weight dropped back down I stopped snoring, and my mouth didn't feel dry in the morning. :) But the exercise was good. I substantially increased my muscle mass. I've tried getting back into hard exercise, but it usually only takes about a week of ramping up the exercises before I manage to hurt myself. Taking a few days off of the exercises because I can barely walk isn't all that helpful.
I had started one in a Google Docs spreadsheet, so I can get to it from anywhere. Since I'm not working, I don't have a "home" exactly, so I may be who knows where when I go to sleep. At least when I go to sleep somewhere, I wake up at the same place. :) I had a look at the link you provided. That looks very interesting. It's a lot better than the raw data in a spreadsheet. :) I'll give that a shot.
There's only one thing to say about that.
It looked a lot like English, but that was the limit of its resemblance.
You'd think it would work like that, huh? :)
I used to do a heavy workout every morning. It was about 90 minutes of weight lifting. Then I'd shower and go to work. It was fun doing it, so I looked forward to it. Well, until my last car accident, where the doctor told me not to lift anything heavy for quite a while. So much for morning exercises. That didn't help get to sleep early though.
If I completely exhaust myself during the day, say doing heavy physical labor, I may fall asleep at 8pm, but I'll be awake at 11pm, and then be ready to sleep a night at about 3am.
A couple weeks ago, it was about 95 degrees out ("feels like" 104). I spent a few hours doing yard work, including cutting branches off the roof. I was done well before dark. It was exhausting work. I was tired, but couldn't actually get to sleep. When midnight finally came, I was still wide awake. Sore, but wide awake. Then at 3am, I was out like a baby. My girlfriend tried to wake me up at 10am, 10:30am, 11am, 11:30am, and finally I woke up at noon.
This morning she said I was somewhat awake and talking at 9am when she woke up, but then I went back to sleep. I don't remember anything about that conversation. The only thing I remember is her finally waking me up at noon. Over the years, girlfriends and other people I've lived with have mentioned that they try to wake me up before noon, and I sometimes babble senseless stuff for a little while and then go back to sleep. They're usually words, but they aren't strung together into any sort of usable pattern. Occasionally I'll remember a little bit of it, but it's mostly the confusion where I think I'm saying something that makes perfect sense, and they're looking at me like I'm speaking a foreign language. I'll even repeat myself slowly, and it still makes no sense to them. So in my mind, it makes perfect sense, even though it means absolutely nothing in the real world.
I usually tell people unless I'm standing with both eyes open *AND* speaking coherently, I'm not actually awake. It's not sleep walking/talking exactly. I've managed to show up something resembling working hours occasionally. That means I can shower, get dressed, operate a car without damaging myself or anyone else, and show up at the right desk, but mostly my speech is like I'm still asleep, and apparently I look it too. Most people figure it out pretty quick and just leave me alone until I'm awake. Those who don't, it takes me a while to convey what I'm trying to say. Apparently I can type pretty well though, and comprehend what needs to be done. I can do the work they ask for, and do it correctly, but it's all a blur to me.
And on that note, hello 2am. How I wish I didn't see thee.
Actually, I'm fairly confident that I have "Delayed sleep-phase disorder".
I usually go to sleep between 02:00 to 04:00. I don't have to be exhausted, I can just lay down and go to sleep like a normal person. If there's nothing scheduled, I'll be awake between 11:00 to 13:00.
I worked one job where they really didn't care when I slept as long as I got all my work done. That was perfect. I'd send my "end of day" emails sometime around 03:00, and show up to the office bright and shiny at noon.
Attempting to work "normal" hours has been a problem for me for a long time. I talked to my mom about it, and she confirmed it. I rarely managed to sleep before midnight. I was a complete zombie going to school, and wasn't usually completely coherent until around noon.
The problem is this. If I work by my schedule (awake 11:00, sleep 03:00), I'm fine. If I force myself to wake up at say 7am, I'm a zombie until noon, and exhausted for the rest of the day. It worked fine when I was a kid. Someone was always around to make sure I woke up. Being an adult on my own for many years, if I'm living with someone I have a chance of actually getting out of bed. If I don't, it doesn't matter how many alarm clocks there are, or how loud they are. Somehow I manage to turn off some alarm clocks sometimes. I've woken up with my cell phone in my hand (I set the alarm on the phone too). When I've been with someone, they've told me that I fumble with things until they shut up. If I can't make it shut up I just roll back over and go back to sleep.
If I'm on my normal schedule, I can wake up normally to an alarm clock at odd hours. So, if there's something unusual going on at 6am, I can be awake and not groggy.
Sometimes, if there's something going on, like I have work that must be completed, I can work through a whole night, and still be perfectly coherent the next day. I won't be tired until about 3am the next morning. Something like this:
Wake Sunday at 12:00
Do early work Sunday night from 23:00 Sunday to 03:00 Monday.
Sleep 03:00 Monday
Wake 11:00 Monday (Beginning of the "normal" day)
Work through 03:00 Tuesday
Sleep 03:00 Wednesday
Wake 11:00 Thursday
Sleep 03:00 Friday
Wake 11:00 Friday
Sleep 03:00 Saturday
Some employers consider it a problem. If you have an employee who can work fine from Monday at noon (allowing showering and driving to work), and they don't feel the need to stop until early Wednesday morning, why complain? That gives 38 hours of work before normal employees even come in on Wednesday morning. It was pretty easy to comfortably work about 70 hours a week, but I only did it as needed.
I've tried all kinds of different sleep environments. I like the dead silent rooms best. No white noise, no outside noise.
I've slept in all kinds of places, including airliners. The time has to be right though. If I take an early morning flight (departing at 7am), I can stay awake the night before, get to the airport, take a nap in the terminal until I hear commotion around me which is my hint to wake up. No problem at all. Once I get to my seat on the plane, I can go right back to sleep, and not wake up for anything until the plane lands. Then I am wide awake and perfectly normal, even though the whole night was interrupted sleep.
At once house I lived in, I had two window air conditioners at the head of the bed. The house had terrible insulation, and one simply wouldn't cool it down. During the summer, they ran pretty much constantly, and they were anything but quiet. I didn't notice noises from outside though, because the white
Don't worry, I'll still be awake. Well, I am still awake. Damn. 1am already.
That happened too when I was a kid, one winter. I wasn't there, but they finally told me later. One of my parents started the car, which was followed by an awful screech and thumping under the hood. Apparently the cat was curled up perfectly happy behind the radiator, where the fan is. The fan threw cat parts all over the place. After that, my parents usually beeped the horn once to scare off any animals that may be hiding in the engine compartment. Once in a while, you'd see a terrified cat run away from it.
When I was old enough to start driving, I got in the habit of beeping the horn before starting too, at least at home. We were far enough out in rural nowhere, so no one would care (or even notice) a quick beep on the horn, regardless of the hour. In town or at neighbors houses, we didn't do it, so we didn't annoy people. :) That's where I picked up the kitten. Oddly enough, it wasn't winter, but as I remember it, it was summer, so the cat was probably trying to find a nice shady spot to sleep.
Really?
I had a kitten climb up into the engine compartment of a van once. I noticed an unusual sound while I was driving, but nothing that worried me. I drove about 30 miles before I stopped. I took a peak and found a very dirty, but otherwise unharmed, kitten. The sound I heard must have been it meowing during the whole drive. I still have no idea where it managed to perch itself without getting toasted, or more importantly (I guess), how it managed to hold on over some pretty rough roads.
Yet, this doesn't explain why I can't sleep at 11:30pm when the house is dead quiet. {sigh}
Someone did mention that NYC is planning (or doing) wifi and cell repeaters in the subways. I guess time and congestion become factors though. Is it faster to take a cab from Point A to Point B, or go down to the station and wait for the right subway to show up. I've been fond of subways for some trips, but others are just impractical. But, if you get free wifi, it may be an acceptable trade for most.
{sigh} and I'm in an area with no significant mass transit. You *could* wait for a bus, but you'd have to drive 10 miles to get to any bus stop, and then walk miles from your stop to your destination. My state has a 50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms. From March 1 through November 31, and that "50% chance" is more like a 99% chance of getting soaked if you go outside.
Well, it wasn't worthy of publication. It's pretty simple to do. I had made some code available in the past, which used a variation of it to avoid abuses of message boards.
I'm not really looking for fame or fortune, so "father of...[anything but my kids]" doesn't interest me much.
But like I said, it's not rocket science. Did someone with the same identifier [username, cookie id, IP, etc, etc] vote the same way over a threshold for the same item? If so, disregard all their votes during tabulation. It does require all the voting information to be used during tabulation, not just a historical tabulation against the current numbers.
For example, I've seen voting that just does the following (in pseudocode)
$total_votes
$total_score
$total_score = $vote + $total score;
$total_votes++;
$current_score = $total_score / $total_votes;
That is fine and dandy until some schmuck has a script hit your voting script 100,000 times with the same vote. Now you can either purge the voting information, or let it ride.
The alternative is to record every vote with whatever identifying information you can. There are circumstances where you may not even record a vote, but that would only be obvious ones like if wget or curl were in the USER_AGENT string.
Now you can see if the same identifying information did the same action too many times. If you allow exactly one vote per user, disregard all the votes from any user who exceeds that threshold. To be polite, you may want to allow say 5 votes. Someone may click twice, but if they come back and do it 5 times, it's probably abuse.
Likewise, if you are confident that particular identifiers are bogus, you can prune those completely. For example, if you see inbound clicks from http://ballotstuffers.example.com/ automatically add those user identifiers to the list to disregard.
Hmmm.. There were a couple other methods. I can't remember those offhand, and I haven't had access to the code for a few years.
It could be said that this is sampling, but really it's just avoiding abuse. We aren't taking a percentage of the samples, we're taking all the votes from people who aren't likely to be fraudulent. If you take 1 in 10 samples for voting, and you have 11,000 votes (10,000 from ballot stuffers, 1,000 from legitimate voters), your ballot stuffers will still have the majority of the votes. If you automatically exclude 100 voters, who account for 10,000 of the 11,000 votes, you will likely have a fairly accurate vote. if you go with the IP as the user identification, you'll likely trim out AOL (who needs 'em) or any other group of people behind a common proxy or NAT. You'll still have the majority of voters being counted.
In real-world political elections, this would be obvious if say 10,000 residents in a district returned 110,000 ballots. Sadly though, that happens, and none of the votes are excluded from the tabulation. Here are some examples. You can go find more on your own.
The real solution to this, if you needed accurate votes, would be to require authentication for each voter, and only provide them with credentials once they proved that they are truly individuals. You may still have some fraud, but it would then be based on the fact that people will give away their votes. This is true of proxy votes. A bunch of people and I
Random sampling is the worst way to handle voting.
I was doing it for a huge site, where we took millions of votes per week in. Contests (which usually ran 4 to 6 weeks). Each contest had thousands of contestants.
The original system used sampling. That was terrible. There was a 1:10 chance of taking the vote. That caused all kinds of irregularities.
The system I replaced it with logged all votes and some other fun stuff. There was no way for a person voting to know if their votes had been banned, it gave exactly the same message every time. There was a back end process that handled the vote tally and results publication. I had to put extensive anti-abuse measures in to avoid bad users skewing the tally. It's funny that they're complaining about it today, when I fixed it 10 years ago on another site. It was far from rocket science.
The article did indicate that they wanted to get all the cabs doing it. It would probably work ok initially, but once everyone is doing it, it will become trouble. You can still likely have problems with too many of them together, at such places like the airports and performance venues.
Forget that. Make the lower level into a parking garage and the upper levels into apartments. You'll make more money there than any shop will. Of course, you'll want to reserve the road facing portions to shops, so they can try to make some money on it.
Or just tear it down, and put up an obnoxiously tall building. :)
I still see huge problems with this. If you have one car per block, and they are stationary, the mesh idea is pretty good. When I've been in New York, that's not what I've ever seen. I wouldn't worry too much about a lack of signal. I'd worry a lot about too many towers in the same place on the same or neighboring frequencies. I'm sure quite a few of us have encountered what happens when you have too many access points on the same channel too close together. Apartment complexes are great for it. I've had it happen where there were too many small homes close together.
What's going to happen when you have a view like above. There aren't enough channels to segregate everyone off to somewhere different. The cars can't constantly be changing channels. There's no way to manage the cars to keep the different channels apart. If it's a mesh network, you're also going to find saturation on various cars, as the signal is bounced around between relay points. I am curious to what they expect the uplinks to be. To provide Internet service, they'll have to (oh my gosh) have a connection to the Internet.
I can think of a few solutions, but none are standard WiFi. They'd be looking at resolving the problems that cell phone providers have already done, except they're expecting to have their towers moving constantly too.
Nah. That'd be too easy. Brute force it yourself. :) Or give the NSA a call. They should have had it the same day the file was released, assuming they were in the least bit interested.
That's already been done. It wasn't that interesting. It was all a bluff.
Bluffs, unfortunately, don't always work as planned. Sometimes it's easier to call the bluff, and cover up the damage later. More often, you'll find that there was no damage to cover up. Oddly enough, extortion doesn't work as well, when the "victim" doesn't care.
I know exactly what you mean. There are two places I used to live that have drastically views from street view to satellite view.
At one place, the satellite view is years old. It's not a very interesting place to look though.
Then there's this one (West corner of Doran and Isabel). The satellite view is from within the last year. The street view is from at least 2 years ago, but probably longer.
I lived there several years ago. I stopped by a couple years ago, and the house had been torn down, and they had just began construction on condos.
The really annoying part was, that could have been a beautiful house. It was beautiful inside. The house was built in 1924, and had a notable history. The owner bought it and the house next door. We were renting it while he secured the necessary permits to build the condos. We were there for a year. Someone else moved in after us, and sometime after that it was gone. Most of the historical homes in that area were torn down, because the property was worth more with condos on it.
There are significant differences between big truck motors and car motors. Like I said, there is some crossover, but that's usually where performance isn't actually required. I drove a 26' U-Haul across the country, and it had a gas Chevy 454 in it, tied to some fairly stock automatic transmission. I didn't have a look at it, but the guy at the shop said they used dump truck transmissions, which would be similar to a standard automotive transmission except much lower gearing. Empty it drove pretty well, but fully loaded driving the length of I-10 was painful. I kept my foot planted to the floor for the whole drive. We'd hold about 65mph on flat land, 20mph going up hill, and the governor would kick in at 70mph going downhill on the other side. I cheated a little going down hill. I'd get up to 70mph and throw it in neutral until we hit the the next uphill part and the speed dropped down to 70.
A DD6v92 weighs somewhere just over 3,000 pounds. That wouldn't ever show up in a light truck. The front tires wouldn't be able to take it. Check out the max load capacity of your light truck tires.
I just checked out the Ford web site. The F650 and F750 use a Cummins ISB motor. The F350 through F550 do come with a gas or diesel automotive sized motor.
A Cummins ISB motor dry weight is 1,150 pounds. A Caterpillar C7 motor dry weight is 1,295 pounds.
Your 7.9L Ford/International Powerstroke has a dry weight of 920 pounds. That doesn't mean the large trucks do.
An International Truck, like a 9900 uses either a Cummins ISX or a MaxxForce® 15 (coming in late 2010). The Cummins ISX weighs 2,940 pounds. The MaxxForce 15 weighs 3,150 pounds. The comparable Caterpillar C15 weighs about 3,000 pounds.
So, you may see trucks bigger than a pickup with regular automotive engines, but you won't see large truck engines in something the size of a pickup truck. You wouldn't really want to though. They don't spin very fast. They make awesome amounts of torque, which would make them very hard to drive in a light chassis. International isn't just in the business of building trucks though, they've had a diverse history including engines, and for a while were building consumer vehicles, like the International Harvester Scout. Just because it says "International" doesn't mean it was a huge truck part. It's kinda like saying "oohhh, Cadillac, it must be good", and pointing at a Cadillac Cimarron. :)
Well.. International, Cat, and Detroit Diesel all make engines for various applications. I know some school buses have light truck engines, but some have the larger truck engines too. In looking at RV's and buses, I found some were gas or diesel light truck engines (like Chevy 350, Ford 351, or Chevy 454). Others had engines like the DD 6v72 and 6v92. I don't know the International motors very well, since they weren't in what I was looking at. I was told by someone that the motors that show up in pickup trucks are not the big truck motors. Pretty much, if it were a big truck motor, you wouldn't be able to see over it. :)
I was looking at both to figure out which was most cost effective. Should I buy an already complete RV that probably won't suit my needs, or build one out on a heavier chassis? Affordable RV's aren't the real heavy duty ones. To get a good class A, you're looking at 6 figures. Since I can do both automotive and construction work, I opted to build my own on a city bus (GMC RTS-04). It's 40' long, 8.5' wide, and has a DD 6v92TA motor, and only cost about $2500. It's built more like a large truck (tractor-trailer) than a light truck (pickup/van/school bus).
I guess it all depends on where in farm country you grew up. "Truck" was anything with 4 or more wheels that wasn't a passenger car. Being that SUV's were built on light duty truck frames, they were also called "trucks". Oddly enough, manufacturers also call light duty trucks "trucks" ... and the town I grew up in didn't have any IP data service when I left, other than dialup in the next county. The idea of a coffee shop, other than one attached to a doughnut shop was completely foreign. As far as I know, they still don't have a Starbucks. According to the Starbucks site, the nearest one is about 50 miles away.
I agree with you, and I'd suspect a lot of other people would agree with you, but what I found as definitions of a vehicle's trunk say otherwise. Unfortunately, someone at NASA referred to the trunk of a SUV in the article. {sigh}
Auto body is one of the things I've tried to avoid doing. Maybe I should learn it someday. I've been doing auto repairs for about 25 years. If it is driven on the road, I've probably worked on at least one of it's type at some point. That's kind of funny since I don't actually do it professionally. Anyone who knows me knows I am very honest. I diagnose their problem, and have them buy the replacement parts for me. Then they pay me what they think my time was worth. Since I only do it in my spare time, if they give me anything, it's more than I would have been making. :)
Ya, you're right. I ran everything through a calculator so my mid-night math wouldn't go wrong. At least I wasn't planning a space mission with my bad math. :)