I'm Not Dead, I'm Just Employed

Hey Internet Friends,

How are you all going? I know it's been quite some time since I last posted on here, and I just wanted to send some kind of reassuring message that I'm not dead - I have just got a job.

I've been trying to gain employment for quite some time now, and I'm glad that I finally got one. I think that, had I stayed at the level of "Oh god I'm running out of money faster than it comes in" panic that I was experiencing, then Spud would have killed me and fed my body to the masses in the form of some kind of delicious pie. So, after experiencing the crippling agony of financial stress and "YOU ARE MEANT TO BE AN ADULT, YOU CLOD"itis, I finally got my stuff together and badgered a friend's mother into giving me work - woo, go me, and so forth.

I work in I.T. Customer Service Management. Basically, my job consists of sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day (although 1.5 of those hours is spent on Lunch/Morning or Afternoon Tea) and saying the same thing, over and over again, until I suffer some kind of debilitating aneurysm (at least, I assume that is the purpose, it hasn't happened yet, and I'm still saying the same thing over and over...)

Now, I've seen the IT Crowd, I know how people think of IT divisions and help desks, and I know just how bad some of the people there are at social interaction. I wanted to be different from that - I wanted to break the curve. I have an honours degree, for goodness sakes, and I'm a skilled linguist - I can be polite and eloquent and there's nothing they can do to take that away from me!

So what I started out saying was something along the lines of:

"Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening, C.S.U. D.I.T. Service Desk, this is Dwaine speaking. How ma..."

"Yes I wa..."

"y I help you?"

This was all said in the most chirpy and chipper voice that I can muster, and if you've ever heard me get excited about something, you know that I can be pretty damned animated in the vocal chords when I want to be.

Of course, my greeting was followed by something along the lines of:

"Yes, hello Glenn..."

"Sorry, it's Dwaine."

"Oh, sorry...Anyway, my problem is just that..."

And then they launch into a spiel about how they cannot access the internet, or how they need to install some esoteric piece of statistics software that no other human being has ever had to use, but they need me to grant them installer rights.

Since then, however, I have noticed a growing pattern in two areas:

1. People are so excited to tell me that they have a problem that they're willing to cut me off mid-sentence to let me know about it.
2. Nobody will ever get my name correct over the phone

Thus, my greeting has now devolved into the following:

"Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening, D.I.T. Service Desk, Dwaine speaking."

"Yes, hello Glenn..."

"How may I help you today?"

At which point they launch head-first into their pointless spiel, and I inevitably take control of their PC using VNC, and solve their problem my restarting I.E.

Still, no amount of not-knowing-my-name rudeness will ever stop me from being so chipper I cause their ears to bleed. I consider it part of my payment, knowing that whilst they are in PC hell, I can maintain a level of happiness shared only by Santa Claus and hyperactive children.

I almost consider it better than the money.

Almost, but not quite.

44.1 - Catch Snow On My Tongue

Hey there Internet Land, let me tell you the story of my day.

I woke up this morning, came to my PC and hit up FaceBook (as I usually do) and was hit by a torrent of status updates about the fact that it was snowing in Bathurst. I've not seen snow that I can remember, and so I rushed to my backyard to catch a glimpse. I was hit, however, by a blizzard of green!

Given that I've lived here for almost seven full years, and I've not once seen snow, I was kind of ticked off. Also, given that it's freaking Spring I am amazed that it was snowing in the first place.

So I sat at my PC, dejected, talking to my friend Trevor (who lives in Canada, and thus sees snow all the time) when, all of a sudden...WHITE! FALLING FROM THE SKY!! So I rushed outside and looked up - the wet coldness clung to my face! So I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and caught some on there.

It sounds small, but it's something I've always wanted to do, and it was really cool to experience it.

The only things that would have made it better would have been if my friends were there, or if the snow was settling (then I could have made a snow angel!)

Anyway, Internet Friends, thanks for sharing this with me ^_^

Catchya later

6.1 Watching Cosplay Complex

Ahoy-hoy Internet-Land! So this afternoon I completed the anime series Cosplay Complex, a three part anime (four if you include the 'special episode') focussing on the training session of the cosplay club at East Oizumi College, Japan. The series really offers very little in terms of what anybody could call a cohesive story; the "focus" of the series seems to be the various situations that the girls get themselves into whilst training to better their cosplay abilities.

The training sequences however, seem to be used simply as an excuse to show the girls in a variety of skimpy outfits (admittedly all pulled from various anime/game series), and for quite a bit of yuri fan-service to be pumped out (pun totally intended) to keep the predominantly male audience salivating. Why, then, did I keep watching so intently? Well, Internet-Land, I must confess that I found myself completely engrossed in attempting to determine the characters that the cosplayers were attempting to emulate - a feat made quite difficult by the fact that none of the characters ever change their hair.

Over-all I'd probably recommend giving Cosplay Complex a miss, unless you fall into one of the two categories:

a. You're really into cosplaying, are looking for some good ideas
b. You're a horny male in your teenage years, or early twenties, and you're only able to get off by watching surreal, soft-core henai.

Final Rating: 2/5 (it was uplifed by the 'weird factor', and the fact that they showed me what each of the cosplay attempts were meant to be in the final "special" episode.)

For those of you wondering about the finer details of the series (which I will be providing for everything I watch) it was brought to us by Wonder Farm (the same company responsible for Hand Maid May), and was brought out all at once on the 25th of May, 2002.

Death By Cheesecake

Tonight's challenge, whether I choose to accept it or not, is to finish this post without having to run to the bathroom to throw up. Not from a lack of delicious, mind you, but instead the exact opposite. I am, if you will, suffering from what shall now forever be known as delicious overload.

Tonight I decided to tackle the first item in List 24: 100 Foods Recipes To Make - the Nutella Black & White Cheesecake. I decided that the first recipe I would make had to be a cheesecake because, after all, cheesecake was the impetus for the hundred hundreds challenge. So I went through the cheesecake recipes on food.com, and discovered that one can (supposedly) combine the cheesecake (something already delicious) with Nutella (possibly the most delicious spread on the face of the planet...)

So, the cooking process itself wasn't nearly as scary as I thought - although there is a heck of a lot of cleaning up to do (tomorrow, though, as I'm about to fall victim to a dairy coma) - and the most annoying thing was the fact that my beaters lowest setting was still not slow enough to stop mixture from flying onto my walls. And my friend Andy was around to give me some assistance, and to show me some of the basics of cooking, such as how to fold cream into a mixture, so big thanks to him.

So, how did the recipe turn out? Well, it was delicious. So. Very. Delicious. Very rich, too. The only comment I'd make is that the recipe calls for 1 hours chilling time, which (given that the Nutella mixture is basically just ganache) I would probably increase to more like 24 hours to get a really good firm going on, as when I took it out it was still very runny in the Nutella portions (the remnants are in the fridge, so I'll update this tomorrow with how it looks after more chilling time...)

I'll post some pictures of the finished product below, as well as a link to the recipe that I followed, but for one final word I shall give the honour to my best friend Alydd (the person who I mentioned in my very first post, the one for whom I was initially cooking the cheesecake)...Of this cheesecake he says "It was fantabulous!"

Indeed it was, Alydd...Indeed it was....

 How To Make This Cheesecake

The Finished Product

The Slice I Ate

List 24: 100 Food Recipes To Make

I don't have much to say about this list right now - I just finished my slice of the richest cheesecake I have ever tasted and I don't know how much longer I can hold out for...

I shall update with something that makes sense later :P

1. Nutella Black & White Cheesecake

Why 0.(9) Is Equal To One

Hey there Internet-World, today marks a kind of special day for me, as it is (or will be, when I press that "Publish Post" button) the day when I achieve the first of my ten-thousand goals!

The goal I'm kicking in the pants today is from List 40: 100 Mathematical Theories To Learn, and comes to you thanks to a set of rather...um...heated discussions I have with friends about the fact that 0.(9), which denotes 0.9 repeated (0.9 with an infinite number of 9's following...) is in fact equal/equivalent to 1.

Typically, when I assert the fact that, yes, 0.999999... = 1, I am met with various cries of "Get the heck out of here" or "No...No it isn't...", mixed (of course) with varying levels of obscenity. However occasionally I am faced with a different type of opposition - instead of decrying the fact itself, they respond along the lines of "Oh yes, that - of course it is, and here is the proof as to why..."

What they then proceed to thrust into my face is, in fact, not a proof of this fact at all. Well, rather, some of them do offer me a proof, but the mathematics behind it is flawed. So, if you don't believe that 0.(9) = 1, or if you think that using the "1/3 = 0.(3)" method is the best way to quash resistance to this fact, then read on, and be informed!

0.(9) is a number that is expressible as what is called a Geometric Series - this basically means that we can take 0.9999... and split it up into a series of numbers where successive terms have a common ratio between them. In the case of 0.(9) the common ratio is a power of 1/10 - example:

9*(1/10) = 9/10

(9/10)*(1/10) = 9/100

(9/100)*(1/10) = 9/1000

0.9999... = 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + 9/10000 + ...

Now, even though this sum is infinite (that is, if you tried to add it together, you'd be going forever because there are always new terms to add) there is a mathematical nicety in the fact that if the terms of the sum are approaching zero (which ours are) then the sum is finite (I will offer a proof of this later.)

The sum of such a series is given by:

S = (a)/(1 - r)

Where S is the sum of the series

Where a is the initial term of the series

Where r is the common ratio

So we have:

a = 9/10 = 0.9

r = 1/10 = 0.1

Which all lead us to...

0.9999... = 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009

               = a/(1 - r)

               = 0.9/(1 - 0.1)

               = 0.9/0.9

0.9999... = 1

So, there you have it - a pretty simple proof to what is, to most people, quite an astonishing fact. What follows now is just the proof of convergence I promised earlier (that is, the proof that the sum of a series is, in fact, equal to a/(1 - r))

So, if you're not interested in reading that (and you've made it this far...) then I say to you the following: congratulations for making it through the post; thank you for sharing my first achievement with me; and later days Internet-Crowd!!

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PROOF OF CONVERGENCE

The sum of a geometric series can be written as the sum of a geometric progression of the form:

SUM[k=0, inf] ar^k = a + ar + ar^2 + ar^3 + ar^4 + ...

Which we will write, then as 

lim[n->inf] (SUM[k=0,n] ar^k)

If we look, first at:

SUM[k=0,n] ar^k = a + ar + ar^2 + .. + ar^n

If we multiply both sides by (1 - r) we obtain:

(1 - r)(SUM[k=0,n] ar^k) = (1 - r)(a + ar + ar^2 + ... + ar^n)

(1 - r)(SUM[k=0,n] ar^k) = a - ar + ar - ar^2 + ar^2 + ... - ar^n + ar^n - ar^(n+1)

(1 - r)(SUM[k=0,n] ar^k) = a - ar^(n+1)

Dividing both sides by (1 - r) now:

SUM[k = 0, n] ar^k = (a - ar^(n + 1))/(1 - r)

Substituting that back into our original equation we get:

lim[n->inf] (SUM[k=0,n] ar^k) = lim[n->inf] (a - ar^(n + 1))/(1 - r)

We can separate the fraction to become:

lim[n->inf] (a/(1 - r) - ar^(n + 1)/(1 - r))

We can then use the fact that lim[n->inf] a - b = lim[n->inf] a - lim[n->inf] b to obtain:

lim[n->inf] (a/(1-r) - lim[n->inf] ar^(n + 1)/(1 - r)

Now, we are restricting the problem domain here to values of 'r' that are strictly less than 1 (if you remember, in our example, r = 0.1, which is less than 1)

When r < 1, and as n approaches infinity, r approaches zero, thus

lim[n->inf] ar^(n + 1)/(1 - r) = a*0/(1 - r) = 0

Which gives us:

lim[n->inf] a/(1 - r) - 0 = lim[n->inf] a/(1 - r)

And because there are no terms of n in this, it is easily calculated to be:

a/(1 - r)

So, we have just proven that:

a + ar + ar^2 + ar^3 + ar^4 + ... = a / (1 - r)

in case you didn't believe me blindly, in which case - good for you! And congratulations on making it to the true end of my very first accomplished post!

List 40: 100 Mathematical Theories To Learn

I really love maths. Maths maths maths. I would pick it from the highest trees and bake it into a maths pie if I could. Alas, maths is slightly less physical than that - and anyway, everyone knows that the only science that tastes any good in a pie is Chemistry.

Not really much to say about this list, other than the fact that I'm really really into maths (duh), and that I wanted to share my love for it with the world, and hopefully teach you some nifty things along the way. I'm positing this list out of sequence because I have just finished typing up my very first accomplishment ever (well, OHH accomplishments anyway) and it is the first addition to this list.

This list is, then, also the first I'm posting where the contents aren't predetermined, and are added as I achieve them...

1. The Proof That 0.(9) Is Equal To 1