Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Switched to Hugo

You may have noticed that this blog looks a bit different. I’ve decided to ditch wordpress and switch the blog over to Hugo. The primary reason is the maintenance cost for a wordpress installation. This cost comes is two forms: Keeping wordpress up to date Moderating comments Keeping up to date I know that the first can be mitigated by moving over to wordpress’s hosting but I liked the advantages of my domain hosted on my server.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Using Netflix DVDs to Measure The Post Office Decline

I subscribe to Netflix’s DVD by mail service occasionally (yes they still have it). I subscribe until I’ve run through the queue of movies I’d like to see, cancel, and repeat a year later. I’ve done this for several years now and the for the past few years I’ve tracked when disks should arrive and when they actually do. It’s uncommon for a disk to be late but 2022 has seen a dramatic decline in the service the post office delivers.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, April 30, 2022

GF(5^2)

I got curious about the design of a puzzle a few weeks back using \(GF(5)\), or more specifically, the extension field \(GF(5^2)\). I was hoping that I could find pre-computed examples and while I found many examples of lectures discussing \(GF(5)\), I didn’t find anything with extension fields of it. So I wrote a quick program to find primitive polynomials of degree 2 over \(GF(5)\). For what I had in mind I needed 6 primitive polynomials which could be selected for construction of this field but sadly that was not the case.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, August 17, 2021

The Appearance of Truth

I’ve had a scene from the movie “Man of the Year (2006)” rolling around in my mind for the past several weeks. For those who’ve not seen the movie, it about a comedian by the name of Tom Dobbs, played by Robin Williams, who decides to run for president as a third-party candidate. While he isn’t on the ballot in every state, he does win the states where he is on the ballot and achieves the majority of electoral votes to become the next President of the United States.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, May 21, 2021

A Litany of Netflix Screw-ups

For those unaware, Netflix still does their DVD by mail service. Both my dad and I have subscribed to this in the past. Occasionally when I would visit my parents (200 miles away), I would change the shipping address on my account to his place so my DVDs would be sent there and change it back when I would leave (relevant later in this post). We both hit the point where every movie in our queue had a wait on it so we both cancelled the service.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, March 10, 2020