Today’s Learning
Posted by Andre Sayre in Miscellanea on May 11, 2010
It’s important to try and gain new knowledge each day. Here’s what I learned:
- Phosphorous was discovered when a 1600’s scientist/alchemist was trying to make a ‘philosopher’s stone’ out of his own pee.
- The legal status of Western-Sahara Africa. And it’s relations with Morocco. That’s why political maps of the area always have it grayed out.
- London used to be called Londinium, back when it was founded by the Romans.
- Ball Lightning is likely a result of what essentially amounts to silicon dust.
What did you learn today?
Fundamentals of Business
Posted by Andre Sayre in Business & Management on May 3, 2010
Regardless of the industry, regardless of what you do, there’s one underlying tenant of business: To make money. But how do you go about doing this? To put it simply, you need to get people to pay you more money then you spend.
When it comes down to it, that’s all business is. For those who are unaware, me and two of my pledge brothers/friends/housemates have been in the process of starting a small business of our own: IV Greek. IV Greek will sell the finest wooden letters and paddles this side of the Santa Ynez Mountains. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, we’re going to be the only Greek store serving Isla Vista and UCSB.
We got started just over a month ago. March 24th, according to the domain records. A future post will contain the information on HOW it got started, but for now, I’ll just talk a little bit of the business model. Simply put, we’re a retailer. We don’t manufacture the products, merely sell them. We buy a large amount of stock from our wholesaler/manufacturer at a reduced price, and sell it at a retail price. Simple as that.
Some people have asked why a customer can’t just buy from the manufacturer directly. The answer to that is simple: They won’t sell to them at these reduced prices. We’re buying thousands of dollars of product in one fell swoop. An individual customer would buy only a small fraction of that at any one time. IV Greek also acts as a local distributor in regards to the supply chain.
Our launch day is set for this Thursday, May 6th. It’s going to be the start of something amazing.
Unforgettable
Posted by Andre Sayre in Miscellanea on April 24, 2010
Today, I realized what a small world this is. At his funeral, I realized that my late Great-Uncle Frank was the type of person that my Father looked up to and aspired to be. It’s realizing who the idol of your idol is. And to make the world even smaller, my second-cousin (Uncle Frank’s grandson), whom I haven’t met prior more than possibly once in my life, is in the AKPsi Merced Chapter. May both my Father and Great Uncle rest in peace.
May we live the life they would want us to live. Amen.
The following was one of my Father’s favorite songs. I’m revealing myself to be a sentimental git by saying this, but this is the one song that’ll make me tear up. It’s a duet between the late Nat King Cole and his daughter.
Code Prettification
Posted by Andre Sayre in Meta-Blog, Programming on March 27, 2010
This is a test of the code prettification feature/plug-in of Live Writer. The following Snippit is from my k-means implementation.
CentroidDelegate<Point> pointCentroidFunc = delegate( IEnumerable<Point> collection, int count ) { double sumX = 0; double sumY = 0; foreach( Point curPoint in collection ) { sumX += curPoint.X; sumY += curPoint.Y; } Point newCentroid = new Point( sumX / count, sumY / count ); return newCentroid; }; seqKMeans = new SequentialImpl<Point>( ( p1, p2 ) => p1.DistanceSquared( p2 ), pointCentroidFunc ); parKMeans = new ParallelImpl<Point>( ( p1, p2 ) => p1.DistanceSquared( p2 ), pointCentroidFunc );
The class diagram thereof. Again, will add more stuff at a later point, but for now, this is good.
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