Infiniti...

If you head east on NASA Parkway after you get past the Johnson Space Center, there's a several-hundred-yard stretch that runs over the water between Clear Lake and an extension called Mud Lake. Technically, I suppose, you'd call this part of the road a bridge, but if you weren't paying attention to what was off to either side of the pavement, you really wouldn't be aware you were "crossing" any such thing.

Structurally, this stretch of road is constructed in such a way as to sympathetically rock your car off the road as you drive along, which normally is prevented by the vehicle's shocks and struts.

Unless something's worn out, as was the case with the Infiniti, which needed the rear struts replaced.

A comedy of errors ensued—including dropping off the car and renting a replacement, only to find that the warehouse had misread its inventory and there were no struts of the kind needed in stock—in an attempt to avoid having to pay the local Infiniti dealer almost $400 for each device, since the price quoted for installation by the mechanic we were using (and who I trust) was already impressive enough. But between my finding the struts online for less than $100 each and Galina finding someone here in Seabrook to do the job for about two-thirds of what had been quoted for installation, and since the amount of the potential savings was about one-third of what the car is worth ("potental" being the key and dangerous word), we figured we'd roll the dice.

I ordered the parts, stuck around while the local mechanic did the replacement, and so far, everything is okay. The "acid test" (driving across that bridge) was passed with flying colors.

We'll continue driving the Infiniti for just a while longer, I guess...

A charmed third time...

I took advantage of a lull in this morning's work to visit the $10K Memory Competition page at Memrise after a three-day absence and take another crack at memorizing a 52-card deck.

Based on things I've noticed overall (and not just for this exercise), I decided to create a completely new "journey" through a familiar old haunt and to really focus on visualizing the people and actions representing cards in the "places" along the way.

Unlike previous trials, during which I had to really struggle to recall where people/action pairs were located, I was able to recall the sequence almost from the start, leaving me with about a dozen cards after the first pass. I then concentrated on going through the journey again, and yet a third time before turning to the handful of cards that were left and then "backfitting" them to the sequence (by which I mean taking, for example, the 3D, realizing this had been encoded as an action, and then asking myself exactly who is wearing a goatee and moving hands and arms like the legendary Mitch Miller?)

(Don't ask me who Mitch Miller was, okay? You'll make me feel old.)

I was surprised that the whole process of recollection took a lot less time than in previous trials, but that may be due to a greater familiarity with the "places" in the new "memory palace."

Naturally, I would not be posting a graphic unless the result was noteworthy (at least, for me :^):


And now, it's back to work (and other distractions!)

Cheers...

More fun with emacs Org-mode...

Org-mode has this interesting capability via something called org-protocol to implement interoperation between a browser and emacs. The upshot of this is being able click on a browser bookmark and have the URL of the page you're looking at appended to an Org file, and even better, to highlight something on a page, click a browser bookmark, and have the URL and the highlighted text appended to an Org file (what I call a "clipping file").

There's a pretty good explanation of how to set all this up at Worg, which is an Org knowledge base maintained by the Org community. (It's sort of like a wiki, except that pages are edited in Org mode using emacs and then exported to HTML.)

Anyway, getting the setup to work didn't take all that much time (at least not after learning that emacs had to be running in server mode). Getting it to work with Cyrillic text still doesn't work, but at least I think I have a handle on what's going on.

The basic problem revolves around emacs complaining bitterly that the characters being added to the target buffer don't play well with the clipping file buffer's character's encoding, and would I please fix that?

At first, I really didn't understand what was going on, but after a little poking around, I found that the clipping file, which had started out encoded as utf-8, had been saved with ansi encoding. I also found that, if I selected the value of "raw text" when asked how to render the text being added, the result was a series of characters encoded in octal (e.g., a value of 224 was shown as \340).

As it turns out, that particular byte value corresponds to the Cyrillic letter 'а' (lower case), and after a little comparing, it turns out that the call to the Javascript window.getSelection() function, which is responsible for coughing up the text selected in the browser window, returns text encoded in good old code page 1251, which was devised by Microsoft aeons ago to deal with Cyrillic (the fact that the page's source specifies utf-8 as the page encoding is apparently not relevant here).

So, in between this and that, I'm now trying to figure out how I might modify some Lisp code to convert cp-1251 values to utf-8.

Step by step...