sunspot cycles

I discovered that deep within the submenus of Photoshop CS is a tool called Photomerge for putting pictures together as a panorama. I put a couple rough panaoramas from my recent Oregon vacation together. The best part is that as long as you have Photoshop open you can smooth over the seams. I tried putting together a 360 degree panorama from La Jolla, and it looked like it was going to blend pretty well, but Photoshop complained about RAM and quit so I will mess with it tomorrow.

I also wrote a Java program that solves Sudoku puzzles. I needed the practice in Java and I wanted to see how hard it would be. The code is hideous but it can solve the last problem in my Sudoku book in 129,000 operations, which is a trifle for the computer. I guess the algorithm I made up isn't that bad after all.

The rest of today was spent playing Ratchet: Deadlocked and We Love Katamari, but I did register for ECE 417 so I can claim a little progress for the day. More jury duty tomorrow.

charged with battery, pt. II

I set aside some of the batteries my camera refused to run on and checked them with a DMM. They still have 1.5 volts on them. If anything this makes my problem more confusing. If I put them back in the camera they will work for a while again, but not if it's right after the camera refuses to take them. Maybe the batteries are heating up and the camera won't work until they're cool again?

charged with battery

My digital camera, while awesome in most respects, has recently developed a malfunction that causes it to use up batteries at an alarming rate. As in, they need replacing several times a day.

Even with this handicap I still managed to take quite a few good pictures in the past few days. My parents came out to visit me and I gave them a crash tour of Oregon as I have so far come to know it. The Columbia River Gorge was great. We were lucky to see Mount Hood because parts of it are on fire and this apparently presents difficulties for tourists. We also checked out the wine country to the north, and Newport to wrap things up. It was pretty cool overall.

gone fission

So today I got to apply an important grad student skill - raiding free stuff. Some prof retired and left a bunch of old books for people to take. This was last week sometime, but apparently not many people have bothered because there's still piles of them. I went through them today and got a bunch of good stuff. I found an instructor's solutions manual for Marion/Thornton and Halliday/Resnick, but they are 2 and 3 editions out of date respectively. I just like acquiring what used to be contraband - they have the answers to every single problem in the texts.

There was a lot of miscellaneous stuff too, like microcomputer manuals from the late 70's and early 80's, and some books on the nuclear arms race. I took a couple books that opposed Reagan's SDI. I also took a book called "The Discovery of Nuclear Fission" which looks very interesting because it has excerpts from the original research papers. That book is from 1971 though, I think it underplays Lise Meitner's role. I'm still looking forward to reading it

In other news, my dumbass neighbor moved out yesterday, so I'm pleased with that. I also went in for jury duty orientation and got assigned to the circuit court's grand jury. I have to go in two days a week for eight weeks and here about all the horrible stuff going on in the county, but at least it's not hard and it fits in my schedule. I even get a little bit of cash out of it, though that probably won't show up until early November.