for Dave Britten--get well soon

[Don Shepherd]

Dave, I can't reply to your post in the articles forum, but I want you to know that, like Katie, I wish for you a speedy recovery, and I am in awe of what you have done with your 200LX. That seems to be an amazing little machine, and I am tempted to visit Ebay soon.

My current toy is an Enigma replica I got a few months ago. It is an electrical re-creation of the original, and way cool.

Thanks for your work with that prime factor algorithm, I can't tell you how much pleasure I have had over the years adapting that for other machines.

Don

[Les Bell]

(05-06-2014 03:06 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Dave, I can't reply to your post in the articles forum, but I want you to know that, like Katie, I wish for you a speedy recovery, and I am in awe of what you have done with your 200LX. That seems to be an amazing little machine, and I am tempted to visit Ebay soon.

Dave, I'd like to echo Don's good wishes - I really enjoyed your piece on the 200LX.

(05-06-2014 03:06 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  My current toy is an Enigma replica I got a few months ago. It is an electrical re-creation of the original, and way cool.

Don, can I press you to tell us a little about your Enigma replica, perhaps in the "Not Remotely ..." section? I'm sure I'm not the only member who would be interested.

[Don Shepherd]

(05-06-2014 03:25 AM)Les Bell Wrote:  

(05-06-2014 03:06 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Dave, I can't reply to your post in the articles forum, but I want you to know that, like Katie, I wish for you a speedy recovery, and I am in awe of what you have done with your 200LX. That seems to be an amazing little machine, and I am tempted to visit Ebay soon.

Dave, I'd like to echo Don's good wishes - I really enjoyed your piece on the 200LX.

(05-06-2014 03:06 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  My current toy is an Enigma replica I got a few months ago. It is an electrical re-creation of the original, and way cool.

Don, can I press you to tell us a little about your Enigma replica, perhaps in the "Not Remotely ..." section? I'm sure I'm not the only member who would be interested.

Sure Les, I'll do a post in that section.

[Dave Britten]

Thanks everyone! I wrote/posted it a couple days pre-op, and I'm happy to say the surgery went extremely well. Despite the obvious abdominal pain, I'm feeling surprisingly good - both physically and mentally. Hoping to be up and on my feet a bit later today.

As an aside, there's no way I could have pulled through as well as I have without my wonderful wife picking me back up when I'm feeling down. And Dr. Tracy Hull is pretty much the best colorectal surgeon on the planet, as far as I'm concerned.

Anybody else at Cleveland Clinic right now and want to hang out to swap stories/programs later?

[Eddie W. Shore]

(05-06-2014 04:05 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Thanks everyone! I wrote/posted it a couple days pre-op, and I'm happy to say the surgery went extremely well. Despite the obvious abdominal pain, I'm feeling surprisingly good - both physically and mentally. Hoping to be up and on my feet a bit later today.

As an aside, there's no way I could have pulled through as well as I have without my wonderful wife picking me back up when I'm feeling down. And Dr. Tracy Hull is pretty much the best colorectal surgeon on the planet, as far as I'm concerned.

Anybody else at Cleveland Clinic right now and want to hang out to swap stories/programs later?

Here's to a speedy recovery Dave!

[lemontea]

(05-06-2014 04:05 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Thanks everyone! I wrote/posted it a couple days pre-op, and I'm happy to say the surgery went extremely well. Despite the obvious abdominal pain, I'm feeling surprisingly good - both physically and mentally. Hoping to be up and on my feet a bit later today.

As an aside, there's no way I could have pulled through as well as I have without my wonderful wife picking me back up when I'm feeling down. And Dr. Tracy Hull is pretty much the best colorectal surgeon on the planet, as far as I'm concerned.

Anybody else at Cleveland Clinic right now and want to hang out to swap stories/programs later?

Here's wishing you a strong recovery Dave.

I had an operation a long time ago although I still remember aspects of it. Suffice to say, post-op I had stabbing pain that was so intense at times I could not even sleep no matter how tired I was. And there was a medical limit to the number of times the nurses could relieve me with a jab of the pain drugs.

I wrote a semi-private blog that I shared with friends (this was before the days of Twitter I think), including writing about the pain, and it was a good way to express myself and alleviate the burden.

So, I say, write on and share if you wish! You will have the opportunity to read back on your notes journal and chuckle.

[Dave Britten]

(05-10-2014 07:56 AM)lemontea Wrote:  Here's wishing you a strong recovery Dave.

I had an operation a long time ago although I still remember aspects of it. Suffice to say, post-op I had stabbing pain that was so intense at times I could not even sleep no matter how tired I was. And there was a medical limit to the number of times the nurses could relieve me with a jab of the pain drugs.

I wrote a semi-private blog that I shared with friends (this was before the days of Twitter I think), including writing about the pain, and it was a good way to express myself and alleviate the burden.

So, I say, write on and share if you wish! You will have the opportunity to read back on your notes journal and chuckle.

Thanks for the support. I get pretty pissed off at my body when it isn't healing how I need it to despite following orders exactly, but I realize that happens to pretty much everybody with bowel problems. Yesterday was definitely one of those days, though I did pick up some nice Lotus tricks in the meantime, and streamlined transferring the PCA-pump trigger data I'm logging on my 48GX over to my 200LX. So I'm willing to call it a wash overall.

I probably won't make my wife find a Radio Shack and buy me parts to replace the manual-actuation button completely with a direct serial link to my 48, but I can only handle the same scenery for so long before I resort to that kind of thing to kill time (or potentially myself if I screw it up, but no guts no glory).

I'm CS, not med, but I'd be interested in figuring out how to determine/calculate hydromorphone levels in the blood stream based on dosage and metabolism. Then I could figure out the minimum theraputic level and have the 48 just put me on auto-pilot! It almost sounds like an irregular-cash-flow problem in my naive mind, but I imagine it's more complex than that. Right now I've settled for manually logging pain level, with automatically setting a 6-minute "Push the button again!" alarm.

[Dave Britten]

(05-06-2014 03:06 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Thanks for your work with that prime factor algorithm, I can't tell you how much pleasure I have had over the years adapting that for other machines.

I neglected to clarify this earlier, but while I didn't create the algorithm, I can take at least a little credit for finding it in the museum software library and pulling it out into the limelight. This is the original HP-67 version from Math Pac 2:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/software/67pacs/67factor.htm

I didn't study enough number theory in college to be able to provide an exhaustive deconstruction of the algorithm, but I think it perfectly captures the spirit of these kinds of calculators and computers: being able to strike the perfect balance between hardware resources and algorithmic complexity in order to provide genuine efficiency gains without losing sight of the problem domain. The naive prime factors algorithm - divide by 2 and all odd numbers, hopefully at least stopping early at SQRT(x) - just can't hope to compete with this elegant approach. And yet I'm sure there's still plenty of room for a better algorithm if silicon is no limitation.

My calculator doesn't need distributed map/reduce algorithms to evaluate multi-terabyte data sets in seconds; sometimes I just want to quickly factor a 9 digit number in less time than I would have to spend getting the answer from bigger iron.

There's your weekend philosophical discussion of why I mess with these old things.

[Don Shepherd]

(05-11-2014 03:32 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I didn't study enough number theory in college to be able to provide an exhaustive deconstruction of the algorithm, but I think it perfectly captures the spirit of these kinds of calculators and computers: being able to strike the perfect balance between hardware resources and algorithmic complexity in order to provide genuine efficiency gains without losing sight of the problem domain.

I agree. The algorithm eliminates all multiples of 2, 3, and 5 from the pool of trial factors. I modified it for the 32sii to also eliminate all multiples of 7, but that actually increased the runtime for the numbers I tested with, because the list of trial factor increments is much longer and this causes program branches to take more time. So this algorithm, for this type of approach, is tuned perfectly.