Category: Uncategorized

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Competition

I think I should ask the city council to change the signs outside town, the new ones to say “Welcome to Fantasyland”. This can’t be real, though it all has logical explanations.

The minimum wage in this state is $8.40/hour, and there was a recent court case that a city could not declare a higher “minimum wage”. But here in Findlay, that cart-pusher at Wal-mart makes $12/hour. Earlier this year Wal-mart raised their basic rate to $10/hour except at the two stores here in town. Why do we get $12/hour? Well, because Findlay has more jobs than people. As long as I can remember, we have had the lowest unemployment rate – and that’s for at least 30 years, The most common sign in town reads “Now hiring”, and Wal-mart corporate decided the only way they could hire adequate staffing was to pay more. Of course, now that we are paying more, we’re taking away the people who were earning less at other jobs …

Not enough to convince you yet (about the Fantasyland name)? Okay, yesterday at my store milk was selling for $1.09 for a gallon of any variety (whole, skim, 2%, even chocolate) and large eggs for $0.49/dozen. Why? Because we need to at least match or even beat other stores in town, and there is one particular “discount store” in town that insists on undercutting us. We match them, they drop their price, then we match that – your basic “price war”.

Speaking of “price war” though, the price of gas is cheaper on the other side of town. The gas station at the Kroger (large grocery chain in this area) versus the Speedway station across the street, both charging 20 cents less than other stations here in town. Okay, not quite like the price war we had 10 years ago – here in Findlay the price of gas never got over the $4/gallon mark.

Ten years ago was when the second Wal-mart opened (the one I now work at) along with its gas station, as a grand opening special they decided to undercut everybody in town by 10 cents a gallon. Probably work well against the typical independent gas station, but Findlay has something you don’t find too many other places – its own oil company. While Marathon is not as big as BP or Exxon/Mobil, it is big enough – and they weren’t going to be undercut. So when the national average hit $4/gallon roughly a month later, we were about 50 cents below that. And yes, for a change the company stations were all below the independents.

So you see, it all has an explanation – in fact, it all has the same explanation. But I’ve had customers tell me they are certain our prices must be the lowest in the entire country, hence the new name … it just can’t be real, right?

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The sound of music

Around here, we used to have a hearing aid commercial that started “Do you have trouble understanding conversations?” I don’t need a hearing aid, but I do have trouble understanding. It’s just the way my brain is wired. I hear music.

Put me in a noisy store or restaurant, and my brain picks out the background music first. Most people can’t even tell it’s there, but I know exactly what song it is you’re not hearing. And of course, if it is one of my favorites I may even sing along – and I have lots of favorite songs. (Needless to say, whoever I’m actually with may find that somewhat disconcerting.)

I guess it’s something like stuttering – which I suppose would make sense. I’m sure it’s before your time, but back in the 1970s there was a TV show named “BJ and the Bear”. BJ was a truck driver, the Bear was his pet monkey. Anyway, in one episode they were driving around a famous country singer who happens to have a terrible stutter. Talking and singing involve different parts of the brain, and therefore most stutterers have no particular trouble singing. My parents tell me that when I was young they had to coach me to talk slowly because I had a tendency to stutter though I don’t recall it.

Along the same lines though, the store I work at has switched from disks to a streaming music. Yes, they call it “Wal-mart Radio” though it is not broadcast. The disks got repetitive for those of us who work there – even if it’s 6 hours of music (and usually it was shorter) after a few days of hearing the same songs in the same order every day you get tired of it. But the streaming music has a different problem … it doesn’t stick to the correct tempo. I’m not sure how it is actually encoded but it’s not like vinyl or the old audio tapes where if you change the speed the pitch also changes – the notes stay the same, but it just gets faster or slower. To me, that’s even worse than being repetitive as it violates the song itself – though most of the people I’ve mentioned it to say they can’t tell. It’s not sudden, but if you were trying to sing along you’d find it wasn’t quite where you expected it. (Which of course is why it bothers me – even if I’m not actually singing, I am singing along in my head.)

It can take me a few seconds after someone says something to figure out what they said, and sometimes I even have to ask them to repeat it. Maybe I should ask them to sing it?

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The eagles

No, not them …

I took my first break Friday a little after 3 PM. I came around the side of the building – where they have a bench for us to sit on – and noticed a large bird sitting on the light pole. As I continued walking, the bird took off and headed for a small tree next to the highway. I was struck by just how large it actually was – larger than a hawk, falcon, or buzzard – then noticed another leave that tree and head to one further south (closer to the river). At about this point I decided the only bird of prey that big in Ohio would have to be an eagle (a Canada goose would be similar in size but wouldn’t roost in a tree or on a light pole). Then the first one also headed for the river, and for a few minutes they were both in the same tree.

Since they seemed to be getting along, I decided they must be a mated pair (as opposed to one chasing the other to scare it off). After a few minutes they headed West along the river, and I quickly lost sight of them.

Eagles are pretty rare in this part of the country, but not as rare as they once were. There are several places where they have been reintroduced, and last I knew there was a pair nesting over near the reservoir … say, somewhat over 5 miles east of us (you could probably call it 10 km and be pretty close). Somehow, I doubt that pair would have flown so far through town – even if they were following the river – so I’m supposing this must be another pair, and that they have or will soon set up a nest somewhere on our side of town. Most likely West of here – while Findlay does have lots of trees in town I think they prefer fewer humans.

Hopefully I’ll be seeing them again – perhaps even when I have a camera handy.

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Calculators – compare and contrast

As a college math professor – 20 years ago – I made it my habit to know how every calculator worked so that if a student asked “… but how do I get that answer on my calculator?” I could answer. Mind you, if it was one of the stranger types of calculator I’d tell them to see me after class so as not to confuse everyone else, but I had over a dozen calculators so that I usually was familiar with theirs. Perhaps not the specific model, but a similar one by the same company.

While I no longer teach professionally – I was too “laid back” to handle the students who didn’t want to take this class – I still keep current, and in my old My Opera blog I had several posts about what was then a new calculator. While you unfortunately can’t look back at that blog today (I may eventually decide to repost some of them here), that doesn’t mean I won’t continue to do that.

About 4 years ago, Casio became the first company to offer a graphing calculator with a color, PDA-resolution screen with its CG-10 (also called the fxCG-10), I got my hands on one about a year later. I was quite impressed with the display and some other features, but did have some reservations … especially with entering problems when in their “textbook” mode. Mind you, it is very nice to have the problem look like in a textbook – superscripts for exponents, complex fractions (with operations and not just numbers in the numerator and denominator) and so on – but trying to enter expressions to make them look like that is another thing entirely. Okay, the HP-48G could take normal input and make it look like that over 20 years ago (yes, I had one then), but that was aimed at more technically-inclined users. The CG-10 was designed to compete with the TI 83 or 84, the HP-48 was more like the TI 89.

Anyway, fast forward to today. TI has decided to face Casio square on with the new TI 84Plus CE (as in, “color edition”). Apparently they decided to also copy the “textbook” display and its associated input method (though in fairness it can be disabled in either calculator). Not being in the classroom today I really can’t say if their target market is ready. If they’ve used some equation editor as included in word processors then they’ll figure it out quickly enough – or if they’ve used other Casio calculators in “textbook” mode. Otherwise … well, my supervisor at work was given an overstock Casio (not one of the graphing models, but with “textbook” display) and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. (I switched it to traditional mode, and she still uses it today.) So … well obviously I’ll have to compare this new calculator to the Casio CG-10, as that is clearly who TI is copying.

Okay, physical first. They are roughly the same width and height – the Casio has a slight wedge shape (wider at the top, narrower at the bottom – no idea why) while the TI is your typical rectangle. However, the TI has non-removable batteries and therefore is only half as thick: minus the slip cover and the fact it has actual keys it is typical thickness for a tablet. In fact, it is similar in size to my Nexus 7 – not actually as wide, about an inch narrower, and as the Nexus 7 was known to be thin for a tablet the TI is thicker than that. Oh, covers: the TI has a slide on cover, the Casio cover snaps into place.

Keyboard … Casio features enlarged number keys. The bottom 4 rows are only 5 keys across and are huge squares; the remaining keys are actually round and are in a grid 6 across by 5 high (excluding the gap where the cursor pad is). The TI … the number keys are only slightly enlarged and all the keys (except the cursor pad) are rectangular in a 5 wide by 10 high grid. Both calculators use 2 modifier keys, on the TI they are called “2nd” and “alpha”, Casio has “shift” instead. Keyboard layouts are completely different (as far as which functions are where), but of note: TI dedicates the top row to graphing-related keys, Casio uses them as function keys (to navigate the menu system). On the TI, alpha along with the top row keys does act as a function key, but they aren’t used much by the system.

So you turn it on, and … well, the very first time you get the setup/mode screen where you could disable “MathPrint” (TI’s name for the textbook-style display), set the clock (which isn’t normally shown anyway), change the language, and more common things like fraction format, angle mode and so on. Apparently they couldn’t resist putting everything on one screen as they use very small print. (Still readable given the higher resolution, but somewhat cramped.) Make your choices then press “clear” to go to the normal work screen.

On the work screen, you notice that text there is smaller on the TI as well. The mode indicators at the top appear kind of bland, white text on a dark gray background (while the rest of the screen is white with black text). The battery status indicator (the only actual color on this screen) is twice as large as the mode indicators so the status line is about twice as large as the text of the mode indicators. Okay, type something simple: 1+1 (enter). The answer is to the right and below your input, and it helpfully draws a dotted line below the answer (above where you’d type the next problem). Print is smaller than on the Casio and also not as fancy; things like square roots actually do look like they’d appear in a textbook on the Casio while the TI has a somewhat simpler font. On the good side, you could see up to 5 problems and answers at one time on the TI, if the problems are all on one line. If you throw in multi-level fractions and exponents, you could make a problem where you can’t see all of it at one time – well, in theory anyway. Maybe it would show an error if you get too carried away; I haven’t tested that.

Looking over the keyboard, you may notice that “EE” (exponent entry, for scientific notation) is actually a second function (requires pressing 2nd first); on the Casio it is a base key (though they call it EXP). While the TI will display results in fractions if appropriate, the actual function to enter a fraction isn’t on the keyboard (it’s on a menu you reach by pressing alpha F1). The Casio does have some editing functions similar to a text editor – cut, copy and paste – but is designed to select subexpressions rather than text. That is, if an entry were 1+2×3 then you couldn’t copy just “1+” or even “1+2” (in the latter case, since the order of operations says you have to multiply first then add). The TI is limited to copying previous entries or results then using the cursor pad and DEL (acts like Backspace on a computer).

 

I guess I’m going about this all wrong, I’ve written all that and basically only turned the calculator on. The manual on either of these would amount to at least the length of a novel, no way I’m going through all that. So let’s try listing differences:

The textbook mode on the Casio not only does fractions but also leaves square roots (up to 2 terms – after that it converts to a decimal) and will rationalize denominators, and will also factor out pi (if for example you’re in radian mode and ask for the inverse sine of 0.5). For that matter, it always writes a 0 in front of the decimal point (as my teachers insisted was proper, 0.5 rather than .5) – the TI doesn’t.

The TI can graph standard y=f(x) functions, polar equations, parametric equations and sequences – but not all at once. You can define up to 10 graphs and select from any of 15 colors and a variety of line styles. The Casio lets you mix and match types – say, graph both a function and a polar equation to see if they look the same – but only uses 5 preset colors. Though it will also draw inequalities as well (there’s a separate app for inequalities on the TI).

Menus on the Casio use the function keys F1 to F6 – if there are more than 6 choices then F6 becomes a “more” item. Menus on the TI cover up the screen, and use either the cursor keys or corresponding accelerators. In principle I like the function key approach (that is, not covering the screen) better, but I will admit some items don’t fit well in the limited space.

Both calculators come with additional “apps” – on the Casio they are on the Menu screen, the TI has a button labeled Apps. Examples include an app to graph general conic sections, an app for statistics, an app to solve polynomials and simultaneous equations and so on.

I don’t know … the Casio certainly does a bunch of things that the TI doesn’t, and (theoretically) costs less – I say “theoretically” because when I bought it, the TI was on Back-to-school sale for $88, but isn’t actually listed on Amazon or Walmart.com yet. On the other hand, I’d hate to carry around the Casio (or any graphing calculator with standard AA or AAA batteries); there is something to be said for thin and light. And who – other than us teachers – still rationalizes denominators anyway?

(Answer: if you are going on in math, you need to understand how to rationalize denominators to do some problems in Calculus. But that’s you understanding it, not some calculator.)

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Max – not the movie

I was coming from the restroom heading for my first break when I saw this big man with a little brown dog in the kiddie seat of his shopping cart. For those of you not from this country – since the Americans with Disabilities Act it isn’t all that strange to see animals in the store. You’d expect the occasional “seeing eye” dog to assist a blind person (though as dogs can’t read and labels aren’t generally Braille they’d better have some human assistance as well), and I’ve seen one dog intended to provide mobility assistance. But the most common are actually “therapy dogs” for people prone to panic attacks and whatnot. Obviously this dog wasn’t in either of the first two categories, so I presumed it was another therapy dog. It had a black kerchief with a paw print on it around its neck and some sort of harness with a red metallic tag on it on the back. I decided based on the kerchief it must be male, so I said “Cute little guy” as I passed in the other direction.

Here in Ohio you are not allowed to smoke in any place of business (unless the business primarily sells tobacco) or even within 20 feet (a little over 6 meters) of any of the doors, so there is a spot on the side of the building where we go for our breaks. I noticed an orange and black Harley Davidson (in a flame design) parked just around the corner of the adjacent building (a shoe store) and was thinking that wasn’t a great place to park … some people come around that corner pretty quick. Fortunately it was Sunday and the day after Independence Day, so there wasn’t really any traffic.

About 10 minutes later, who do I see walking over but that big man and his little dog. I make a comment along the lines of “So he’s a biker dog!” and we chat for a while about how rare it is for dogs to ride motorcycles and so forth. I find out that his name is Max (supposedly Maximus Aurelius after a character in the movie Gladiator, but Wikipedia says Maximus and Aurelius were two separate characters), that the red metallic tag reads “Emotional support animal” as expected, that Max has 4 siblings but he’s the only one who likes to ride.

I never asked the man’s name, but he says he’s a former cop who was forced to shoot someone in self-defense and dealing with that is why he has a support animal. I make a comment that shooting someone in self-defense isn’t exactly limited to cops, but I’m not a therapist so I figure I’m better off not pursuing that further.

Anyway, Max rides in a chest carrier though apparently he’ll rest his paws on the gas tank. He used to have a pair of “doggles” (doggie goggles) from a company in California of that name but really wasn’t fond of them and had knocked them off somewhere – he had another set coming. I make a comment that I do work for the store, but as long as an animal is well-behaved it’s not my business to verify whether or not they are service animals. (And yes, Max was very well-behaved.)

Obviously I last saw Max in his carrier headed for wherever, and I wish them both well.

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Christmas myths

It’s after the fact now, but I just ran into so many myths and misconceptions I just had to write something.

Whether or not you are a Christian, you know that Christmas is a holiday originally intended to commemorate the birth of Jesus, whom we call Christ (anointed one). You should also know that he was born in Bethlehem in Israel (at least, so the Bible says). There is also a reference to an event that supposedly occurred at the time – a census – and to the fact that Octavius (aka Augustus) Caesar was emperor. But there is no actual date given, and there is a lot of debate.

Consensus seems to be that he was born in what we would term 6 B.C., not in “the year 0”. There was no year 0 first off – the concept of 0 was invented later. There were a couple of astronomical events around that time – a supernova that became what we know as the Crab Nebula and also a planetary alignment, either of which may be the basis for the story of the Star of Bethlehem – and just in terms of other known events they think he must have been born then.

Was Jesus even born in December? Not likely – at least, not if the story of the shepherds is to be believed. They wouldn’t have been out watching their flocks at that time of year. Again, people who claim to be experts say that is more likely to have been in April or thereabouts.

So, why do we celebrate Christmas in December? Because they wanted to celebrate it sometime, and nobody knew when it really was – and because various “pagan” religions had some sort of celebration for the winter solstice, for the “return of the light” (the fact that the days were beginning to get longer again, in this hemisphere anyway).

I’ve heard a few Christmas songs even refer to snow at that time, but of course there is no basis in the Bible for that. Even if Jesus had been born in December, just how likely is snow in the Mideast? I suppose there’s a few mountains there somewhere which may get snow once in a while, but certainly none on the plains of Bethlehem.

I won’t even get into all the later myths surrounding Christmas – Santa Claus, flying reindeer and whatnot. It’s all good fun, but no one really believes there’s a thousand year old man in a red suit living at the North Pole.

But I mean, at Christmas Mass they began with an invocation that started “On December the 25th, in the year …” and they do know that isn’t true. I am a Christian, I certainly believe in commemorating the birth of Jesus, but I will not pretend it was actually on December the 25th.

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Presto vs. High DPI

Seeing as they are finally going to have bookmarks in Opera 25 for Android (currently in beta) I decided I should install Opera Classic on my new Nexus 7 so that I actually have bookmarks to import.

Let me mention that the (current model) Nexus 7 has a very high resolution. 1920×1200 or some such on a 7″ screen. Personally I figure once the dots are too small to make out individually it’s pretty well moot, but it had other features I wanted – like GPS and a good processor. However, Opera Classic (which uses the old Presto engine) doesn’t work well with high resolution displays.

Web pages look great, but the interface just doesn’t scale. The “O” menu is clearly an O, but is just a tiny square in the top corner for you to try to hit. The address bar? If I make a line of equals signs here that’s about how large it is.

===============

Okay, maybe a little bigger, but can you imagine trying to read the address between those two lines? Search field – same of course.

Good news is, Opera did automatically set the page zoom to 200%, so web pages do look normal. But trying to enable sync to get my old bookmarks on this device was quite a challenge. The fields and buttons in the dialog were the same size as the address field. It did work, everything synced properly, but I won’t be typing addresses into the address bar much. (I used a stylus because my fingers were too big to reliably hit the fields and buttons …)

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Not a drop to drink

Since apparently everyone has heard of it already, I suppose I should say something about the situation in Toledo this past weekend. First of all, they tell me it’s over already, and second I live about 40 miles away from the effected area. Still, I wouldn’t say it had no impact – far from that …

I work second shift, I didn’t get up until about 11 AM that day. My stepmother and stepsister were in the living room discussing it in some vague terms, so while I knew something was up with the water in Toledo I had no real idea what. I get to work at 1 PM and quickly find out there is no bottled water left in the store – and also the first customers I encounter are 3 separate people from Toledo trying to figure out how far they’ll have to drive to get some. One of them says Beaverdam (10 miles south) is also out … but Beaverdam is little more than a couple of truckstops – no major stores, and really just a small town (which is to say, they wouldn’t have much water in stock anyway). Lima is even bigger than we are and only a few miles further, they decide it’s worth a try.

Cindi (grocery supervisor of some sort – she’s not over me as she’s in “dry grocery” and I’m in fresh foods) tells me they requested 4 truckloads of water and that 2 have already showed up (and were obviously all gone already) but two more were still coming. She also tells me they initially ran out of water at 8 AM!

I know Marlene (the lady who hands out free samples and coupons) has relatives in the Toledo area, so I asked her about it. She indicated her mother got a call at 5:30 AM telling her not to drink the water, that even boiling it would not remove the problem – in fact, it would make it worse since you’d be concentrating the chemical. They also advised not to bathe small children in it. Her mother got a second call later from the Agency on Aging (the group charged with making sure older people are properly cared for) to make sure she got the warning. We briefly discuss water filters (I mention that those activated charcoal filters don’t remove everything – the only way to be really sure would be a reverse osmosis system) but of course we both have to get to work.

Over the course of the day, I manage to piece the story together. Toledo water comes from Lake Erie. Of course they treat it and filter it to keep out various bad stuff, but the system can’t handle too much toxin of the type produced by algae (similar to the type of algae that cause red tide). An algae “bloom” can kill all the fish in an area, and ironically the dead fish can deplete the oxygen in the water (ironic since algae produce oxygen, but not enough) … and the toxin can also make people sick, and even kill smaller animals if they drink enough of it.

Anyway, the third truck arrives at about 4:30. Apparently people in Toledo must have gotten there act together by then (with some help from the National Guard setting up a water purification system, and probably stores in Toledo doing the same thing we did) as that water lasts the rest of my shift – I gather the fourth truck showed up after I left.

Sunday wasn’t quite as bad … we did sell more water than usual, but we didn’t run out. I suppose it is worth noting that we didn’t get any of the gallon jugs of water in either day – only the multi-packs of those half-liter (16.9 ounce) plastic bottles. And I had Monday off – other than the news reports I can’t say what that was like.

On the one hand, we did get more business out of it than a typical weekend … they didn’t just buy water while they were in the store. But I’m still not sure how anyone can really handle water for 400,000 people for any length of time.

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Quick recovery

I wonder if there’s some sort of a record …

It’s a not uncommon scenario. You’re somewhere and you realize you lost your cell phone. Where could it be?

I was on the other end of that today – I found the cell phone. It was between the rack and the fluorescent bulb in front of the bacon display. Of course working for the store there was no question about keeping it – though it was a pretty nice phone. I don’t know models, but it said Motorola, had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and indicated it was 4G (I wasn’t completely sure we had 4G service here, but apparently we do.)

Anyway, I couldn’t leave my work cart on the sales floor while bringing the phone to the service desk, so I took my cart to one of the “Employees only” areas where it would be out of the way. Thinking about it, I decided someone would have to try to reach the owner, so I looked it over. Seeing a number identified as “My Wife <3” I decided she’d certainly be able to track him down, so I called it. I told her my first name and that I’d found her husband’s phone at the store and would be leaving it at Customer Service. I also asked what his name was so I could tell them who it belonged to. (I won’t say his full name here, but his first name was Michael.)

It probably takes 2-3 minutes to get to Customer Service from my area of the store – not like I was in any huge hurry. But as I walk up I see a guy there in a blue work uniform with a patch that says “Mike” on it, so I say “I gather this must be yours.” He’d probably gone there to look for it when his wife called on his work phone to say I was bringing it up. (Either that or he was in the checkout line when she did – no other way he would have gotten there first. But yes, he did say she’d called him on his work phone.)

Certainly fastest lost cell phone recovery I’ve heard of.