Some people need to get over themselves

Ok, I was just reading some comments on a random blog, and I realized that one had a familiar theme.

What kind of jackass leaves a comment on someone's personal blog that accuses that person of making trivial, meaningless posts?

It's THEIR blog! They can make posts about whatever they want. If they want to rant about something that they find annoying, well, that's what a personal blog is for.

If, for example, I start actually caring about politics and want to make serious, deep posts on the current political climate, I'll start a blog specifically for that.

If, on the other hand, I only make such posts when an issue happens to touch a nerve, it will go on my personal blog, along with anything else that happens to stike my fancy.

So I just want to say, in advance, to any person who thinks my blog is to insignificant to exist:
"Go fuck yourself."

Later,

Lazy Saturday; Strange Dreams

It's Saturday, and I'm really bored. For the first time in a long while, I actually have nothing that needs doing. It is amazing how fast I lose interest in my normal activities when I am not procrastinating over something important.

I had some weird dreams last night. I usually do remember my dreams, but I don't talk about them because they are either about as interesting as my waking life or really out there.

Most of my dreams fall into the category of anxiety dreams - about things that no longer apply to my life. For example, I dream about not remembering my high school locker combination (or even which locker is mine). I never dream about these sort of things when they actually apply, only years after the fact. Apparently my subconscious mind is a cesspool of imagined neuroses.

The rest of my dreams are narrative, kind of like watching a movie and starring in it at the same time. They are almost always in science fiction or fantasy genres. I don't talk about them because I am aware that I am already on the fringes of what society seems to consider "normal," and telling them would carry me way over the edge.

Last night's dreams were strange for me, in that I think most people would consider them pretty normal.

The first one was about attending my twenty year high school reunion (it's in 2010). I didn't go to my ten year reunion, and have no plans to go to the twenty year either. In my dream no one recognized me with the beard. Oddly enough, the dream reunion was about as dull as I would have expected a real one to be.

The second one involved my friend Kevin preaching at me (I am an atheist, he is not). And also me somehow coming into posession of a huge, rundown, creepy house (I mean Gormenghast huge, rundown and creepy). Enough said.

Well, I'm bored again. Time to find something else to do.

Later,

Couldn't stop tinkering

I couldn't stop tinkering with the root basin program.

New features:
All mouse control: no keyboard means no illegal input to crash program.
Reset coordinates button: returns bounds of image to initial values
Save image: save the basin image as a JPEG.

screen cap of program







saved images












I may do the same for the Mandelbrot program sometime. I've been in hardcore geek mode the past few days. I even started to re-read "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" by Benoit Mandelbrot. Yes, I own a copy. I've had it since high school.

I told you, I'm a geek.

Later,

Perfected

I've perfected both the Root Basin and Mandelbrot programs to my satisfaction.

I got rid of the black specks completely in the Root Basin Program.

I added a feature to both that lets you select the zoom area with the mouse.

They're pretty cool now.

Later,

I found the problem

The black specks showed up because I was too precise in my routine to determine which color the pixel should be.

I am not sure what caused the overflow error, but I can avoid it by offsetting 0+j0 from the exact center of the image.

Check these out:




















Oh yeah, I solved the slowness problem, too.

Those black specks are actually kind of cool. I may put them back in.

Later,

Ooh, pretty...

Here's an enlargement ot the corner I posted yesterday.

You can really see the fractal nature of the bounadry between basins.


















I still don't know why I'm getting those black specks.

Later,

Programming

I've been trying to rewrite my old root basin program in Borland C++ Builder 6.

Right now it sort-of works. It's slow as hell, I get floating point overflow errors, and for some reason some points don't compute right (the black specks in the image). I'll keep working on it off and on.
Here's what I managed to get so far: (it would take days for the entire image to draw, so this is just one corner)

















Here's a sort of extrapolated image:

















I got frustrated and wrote a Mandelbrot program instead. It was easy. Here's the result:












I once wrote a Mandelbrot program for my HP-20S graphing calculator, because I was bored in class. It isn't that I'm all that good, it's just that a Mandelbrot program is that easy.

Later,