Journal TTK Ciar's Journal: Paper Missiles, Oat Treats, Newspaper Pads 1

I need to get it through my thick head that journal entries aren't necessarily for really meaningful stuff. Blathering on about random things is perfectly suitable for such an informal medium.

On that note .. this has really been the month for rediscovering old things.

First, I made my first "paper missile" since highschool, just a few days ago, so I could whack the cats or the rooster from afar when they're doing something they're not supposed to.

The paper missile was something I made up in elementary school, when I realized that paper was cheap and ubiquitous, whereas rubber bands were a bit harder to come by. So instead of carrying rubber bands in my pocket to shoot from my fingers, I would only keep one rubber band (and maybe a spare), and use it to shoot paper missiles.

They are easy enough to make, and actually shoot better/further than rubber bands themselves. To make them, you simply divide a normal 8.5"x11" peice of paper into about six strips, 8.5" long each and anywhere from 1.5" to 2" across. Making them as straight-edged as possible is good, so creasing the paper and then tearing on the creases is advised. Cutting the paper with scissors also works, though I usually didn't. Then the paper strips have to be rolled up as tightly as possible (almost). To save myself some time, I usually fold them in half a couple of times, unfold one of the end folds, and then roll it up starting on the "thick" end. When it's rolled up, it somewhat resembles a 1.5" long cig butt. This is then bent in half in the middle (which is why I said it should be rolled *almost* as tightly as possible -- tighter is better, but too tight and the paper rips when you bend it, which is bad). The finished product looks like a greater-than sign: '>'

To shoot them, the rubber band is stretched between the thumb and pointer-finger, and the missile hooked over its middle. The other hand grips it by the ends of the "legs" (so that it is pinched shut around the rubber band), pulled, and then released. Zing .. MEOW!

I know it sounds like I'm horribly abusive to my poor cats, but really, I love them very much and would never abuse them. They do get into mischief, though, and have learned that they can get away with pulling some really evil tricks as long as my wife and I aren't close enough to pick them up. Clawing at window screens, eating the dog's food, licking dryer sheets -- all these things must be discouraged. The traditional behavior-modification device is a squirt bottle of water, but there are enough important paper documents and electronic equipment around here that water isn't really an option. My wife throws socks at them. I usually hiss at them, which usually does the trick. When it doesn't, I usually get up (at which point they run off -- they know they aren't supposed to be doing what they are doing!). So now I have paper missiles, which I only use when they ignore my hiss. Hopefully they will learn after a while that the hiss comes before the paper missile thwacking them in the butt, and therefore had better heed the hissing.

So that was one rediscovery.

Then, just the other day, I found myself really hungry, but unwilling to cook anything, and craving chocolate on top of it all. Chocolate on an empty stomach is a bad idea for me, and I prefer to eat something with some nutritional content, even if it's just a fistful of carbohydrates. So I made something which, again, I hadn't made since highschool, and had quite frankly forgotten about. It's basically a little chocolate mix (I used some of my wife's Ovaltine -- don't tell!), a very little peanut butter, a little honey, a little milk, a hefty dose of water, and a bucketload of raw oats. The peanut butter goes into the cup first, and then the honey. These are stirred together, and the honey softens the peanut butter and renders it capable of mixing with the milk. In goes the milk, which is mixed in, and then the chocolate. Finally, I like to add the oats and water as needed -- when the oats get too much to mix into the other ingredients, adding a little water renders them mixable again. So I keep adding them until I have an amount of food bulk that I want. It is not all that nutritious, but it's at least ninety percent oats, so it's not that bad for me. At least it's dense, filling, and satisfies the chocolate cravings. Chewing it up gives my jaw a good workout, which is good for keeping me from grinding my teeth (which is a bad thing I do when feeling stressed, which is pretty much all the time these days).

Adding the ingredients in a different order from that described is disasterous. I won't go into the details .. if you're curious, try it yourself in an order different from the one prescribed.

So that was another rediscovery.

Tonight, I'm working on a software project, and I'm finding myself really wishing for a newspaper pad so I can plot out some complex data structures properly. I haven't used one of them since .. about 1995, I think. I'd forgotten about them.

A newspaper pad is a huge sketch pad of 22"x34" blank newspaper. I used to use them a lot in college, but eventually migrated to whiteboards and composition pads. The advantage of the newspaper pad is that it is larger than a composition pad, and pages can be torn out and set side by side, so that a much bigger diagram or set of related diagrams can be laid out than is possible with even very large whiteboards (a difference compounded by the thickness of whiteboard pens, relative to the fine-pointed pens I use to write and draw on paper, resulting in smaller writing/illustrations). I also used them a lot when I was writing assembly language, since I was always having to glance back at what I had written a few hundred lines ago, and changing an editor's view back and forth (or shifting through multiple pages) was a pain in the butt. Since assembly instructions are short, I could usually cram eight or nine columns of instructions on a single sheet of newspaper.

On reflection, it is telling that I've found newspaper pads as organizational aids less useful in the commercial sector than I did in academia. Either I've gotten better at handling complexity in my head, or have adopted software development methodologies which abstract away complexity into distinct layers, or maybe some of both. Or perhaps commercial software simply deals with less complex problems than academic software development? There's a can of worms I don't feel like getting into.

Hmm .. maybe I should look for a way to manage this software project's complexity better? I'll think about that. But unless I change my mind, tomorrow morning I'm going to go get myself a newspaper pad. In the meantime, I will limp along with my composition pad, flipping pages as needed. [sarcasm] Oh, poor me, poor me! [/sarcasm]

-- TTK