Bun Length Hotdogs Posted by Jeff

I was talking with some of my family, and we came up with a great idea.  We were discussing a single-slice Toaster that I saw at a courtesy room at a meeting being held at a resort.  The length of the single slot was too long for a single piece of bread or bagel, even the fancy style bread, but not long enough to hold two slices side-by-side.  We theorized that it was maybe designed to be able to toast a hot-dog bun.  Then, we came up with this idea...

You know how they make Bun-Length hot dogs, that extend just beyond the edge of a hotdog bun so that you don't run out of meat when you get to the end of eating the dog?  Well, what if you like the extra size of the Bun-Length Hot Dog, but you prefer to have enough bun to hold more toppings on either end?   So, they should make a new item...

The Bun-Length Bun.   This would be longer than a normal bun, so that when used with a Bun-Length Hotdog it would give you the same ratio of hotdog to bun that a normal Bun gives you with a normal Hot Dog.

Ok, so that defeates the original purpose of the bun-length dog.  Now we came up with another idea that holds to the original purpose.  This time, it is for those interested in saving money.  Why did they lengthen the dog to fit the bun, instead of shortening the bun to fit the dog?   So there should instead be Hot-Dog Length Hot-Dog Buns.  These buns would be shorter, so that when a regular hotdog is put in them, it fills it the same way that a bun-length hotdog fills a normal bun.   It would have less meat, and be more economic particularly for serving large groups.

Ok, so next we came up with the greatest of all the ideas.  What if someone likes the size of the Hot-Dog Length Bun, but wants a Hotdog that fits it the same was a regular hotdog fits a regular bun?   So we invented the Hot-Dog Length Hot-Dog, which is the right size to fit on a Hot-Dog Length Bun in the standard ratio.  The Hot-Dog Length Hot-Dog is thus actually shorter than a regular Hot-Dog.   And, as a bonus, you could get a Bun-Length-Bun and put two Hot-Dog-Length Hot-Dogs in it end to end, to get a Super Double-Mini Hotdog.

My new RPG Blog Posted by Jeff

I've started a new blog to document the development of a tabletop card/board-game RPG that I've been working on.  Check it out, at 8-bit Dice.

Dragon Quest 8 Statistics Strength vs. Attack, Resilience vs. Defence Posted by Jeff

I've looked all around the web and couldn't find an explanation of this simple thing, so I will explain it here.

In Dragon Quest VIII, your character statistics include the following items:

Sex, Strength, Agility, Resilience, Wisdom, Attack, Defence, Exp

Sex is self-explanatory, although it may have an impact on how some of the charisma-based skills of Angelo and Jessica work against opponents. Your base attributes are Strength, Agility, Resilience, and Wisdom.  Exp keeps track of the experience points you've earned in battles.  These go up as you increase in level.  Attack and Defence (Defense) are calculated, as follows.

Attack = Strength + WeaponAttackBonus + WeaponSkillBonus + Misc

If you don't have a Weapon, your fists are considered to be your weapon, and your skill bonus in Fisticuffs (if any) will be your WeaponSkillBonus.

Defence = Resilience + ArmorDefenceBonus + ShieldDefenceBonus + HelmetDefenceBonus + Misc

It is the final Attack and Defence values that actually go into the battle equations which can be found elsewhere on the web.

Why are TV stations only set up for old people? Posted by Jeff

I don't know about you, but I don't subscribe to a newspaper or own a television set. I do have computers, including a laptop, and a desktop with a huge widescreen LCD panel. I've posted about the TV stations before and their web accessibility, but its been a while... and I am here again to make some observations.

While ABC's player still sucks compared to their old one which used to support Linux, it is feasible to use as long as I keep my old Windows XP running. I can't wait to get rid of Windows, so I hope they get their Linux support working again soon.

But my real gripe today is over The CW. They are supposed to be this new hip channel. Their website looks nice. The person on the home page talks to me, and it works fine. In Linux AND Windows. But I can't get their episodes to play. In ANYTHING. What's the deal? I'm a computer expert, and I can't get it to work. I even checked to make sure I have the latest Java VM installed (God knows why I'd need that!) and Flash Player. Everything is in order but when I go to their site I just get a message telling me "Your video will begin after this brief message" (or something like that) and it sits there, spinning. Forever. Firefox, IE, same thing. On Linux at least I get an error message that tells me my OS won't work.

CW - What DO you support? You are alienating the younger generation, and we aren't going to come back once we get hooked on other shows. I guess I'll never get to know what Reaper is about. Too bad, it sounded like it had potential.

Hebrew Aleph-Bet and Gematria Tool Posted by Jeff

Try this out!

It is a Hebrew Aleph-Bet and Gematria Tool that I've been working on for a few days. It can do four basic things, selected in the "Transcode" option:

1. Convert from "Compact Form" code to a Hebrew Font. There is a cheat-sheet for compact code provided at the top of the page.
2. Convert from "Expanded Form" code to a Hebrew Font. There is a cheat sheet for expanded code provided at the top of the page.
3. Convert from the currently selected Hebrew Fonts (one of the supported fonts) into the "Compact" code. In addition to the supported fonts, any modern Unicode font can be translated from by choosing any other Unicode font.
4. Convert from the currently selected Hebrew Fonts (one of the supported fonts) into the "Expanded" code. In addition to the supported fonts, any modern Unicode font can be translated from by choosing any other Unicode font.

The tool can also calculate Gematria values for the phrase entered and its individual words. Gematria is calculated using four different methods of addition:

1. Ragil. This is the standard method where each character from Aleph to Tav is given a value from 1 to 10, 20 to 100 (by tens), and then 200 to 400 (by hundreds), respectively.
2. Mispar Gadol. This method is identical to Ragil except that it uses the final forms of Kaf, Mem, Nun, Peh and Tsadi to represent 500 through 900. The Gematria calculation considers the letter to be final if it is in the word-final position, whether or not the selected font has a distinct character for the final letters.
   
3. Mispar Katan. This method uses repeating series of 1 through 9 across the aleph-bet, which is the same as dropping all the zeros in the numbers used for the Mispar Gadol calculation.
4. Ordinal. This method simply numbers the aleph-bet consecutively from 1 (aleph) to 27 (final tsadi).

In addition to calculating the "total" values, sums are given for each of those, until a single digit number is reached. So if the total is 666, the sum is 6+6+6 or 18, and the sum of that is 1+8 or 9.

I would like to continue to improve this tool so that it can be useful for many things, so please let me know what you've used it for and what you think could be added or improved.

P.S. I think Narkisim is a beautiful font, and I wish it came with the US edition of Windows XP, at least, (I think it gets installed if you add Hebrew Language Pack, though) or that there was a similar font available for free. If anyone knows of a similar free font, point me in the right direction.

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Major Plot Flaw in Prison Break Posted by Jeff

Ok, so I should have posted about this when I noticed it, which was way back in November, but I figured everyone else would catch it too. I tried Googling, however, and did not find any posts about it, so here it is:

When Bellick got arrested for suspected murder of his friend Geary it was because the body had arrived at the hospital where Bellick was already at, and he was with the police officer at that time who ended up eventually charging him with the murder.

He had been in the hospital for quite some time, with the police outside his room. He calls Geary on his cell phone and leaves the message while he is still at the hospital. After leaving this message, he was never out of sight of the police and his whereabouts are always known up until the time he is charged with the crime. All they needed to do, was verify the time on the "incriminating" voicemail to see that he could not have committed the murder because why would he send the message to Geary after he had already killed him? It makes no sense.

Oops!

(The episode this was in is entitled "Bolshoi Booze", and is Episode 11 of Season 2.)