Survey posted 2004-03-24 19:26 by Morgan.

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I am the first one to post! I don't have an ISP at home, and I can't set my school's home page (not that I would want to...)?

It should be set as mine, but I have it set to google, since it's the best search engine in the world :) I might change it to ticalc.org, since it seems like a good idea (and it's the first site I visit _every_ day).

second for me
i just use the quicklink icon on the taskbar to go to the TIGCC message board

I use google as homepage likewise.

oh yeah, definately google. even though i have the google toolbar, which is funny.... I guess it just makes IE load a /little/ faster. And that google logo is eerily aesthetic

Isn't the ticalc.org logo aesthetic?

Yes, but not "eerily aesthetic."

-W-

and the google logo is most of that page...

with simpler tags and a link to froogle.google.com.

I have ticalc.org set as my NETSCAPE homepage, but not IE, because that's what the rest of my family uses and I'd get in trouble if I changed it ;) But yeah, this is the first site I visit every day as well, and it is also the second, third, and fourth...yep, that's right...I come here at least four times a day...yep, that's right...I have no life :D

Welcome to the club :-)

Is there any initiation I need to go through? Anyone I need to kill? lol j/k

*cough* chairman of Micro$oft *cough*

And don't forget Darl McBride, Chairman of the Litigious Bastards, SCO Group. (LitigiousBastards.com)

I think that having no like is punishment enough to welcome you in to the group. It is kind of like the Pot Party. All you have to do to be a member is declair yourself a member.

-W-

"having no like"? If you mean "having no one [not no_one] like you" then that means I can't be in the club...I have had about six people come up to me in the past three days saying "Say PI! Say PI! Come on!" Being a nerd has actually given me popularity...ooh the irony of it all... ;)

I believe he meant "having no life."

>> Being a nerd has actually given me popularity...ooh the irony of it all... ;)

People know me and respect me (I wouldn't go so far to say that most of them like me/are my friends) because of my immense computer/calculator knowledge. =)

It's weird for me too. Like all other nerds, I get the usual "we're better than you" kind of attitude from some people (usually the "dumb jocks"), but for the most part, nearly everybody likes me (for some reason). I assume it's because I can do everybody's Math and AP Comp Sci work. That, and I can fix anybody's calculator problems (and get them games *groan*). :) I'm also known for being "that genius kid" (though I'm only really good with math and I'm awful at everything else).

So, being a nerd CAN be somewhat positive in your social life :)

Yeah, that "genius kid" thing...I get that a lot too, even though I'm only good in the "calculating" stuff like physics, math, computer science, etc. However, I'm doing pretty well in Spanish class right now. I think it's actually a lot like math. Lots of "formulas" for conjugating words and what-not.

Wow, you people are just like me! I'm good with math, science, and languages. History and English, if it weren't for good teachers, I'd be pretty bad at! Oh, and I've got a 100 average in Spanish 1 right now, though I've been doing Spanish 3 work.

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Ay, Uds. son como mí! Puedo hacer matemátecas, ciencias y idiomas bien. Historia y inglés, si no estén buenos profesores en mi escuela, haría mal. Y tengo un average de 100 en Español 1 ahora mismo, aunque yo he estado haciendo trabajo de Español 3.

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-MrM (Yes, both paragraphs mean the same thing!)

¡Usted habla el español muy bien!

pfft. French is way better than spanish.

-W-

anata no neko ha chiisai desu ne!!!

Japanese is great <> <>
[]
'~~~~'
(Its a poor attempt at a robot)

How so? But its spelling sounds creepy. [English's spelling system is enough, thank you. :-) ]

I will give you that. It is hard to know how to spell french words, because they don't pronounce any letter at the end of words except c, r, f, and l. That makes it really hard.

-W-

That reminds me...We're reading George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in English.

French is actually pretty easy to learn (in terms of spelling). You learn the way it works after a while, just like with any other language.

Well, I still have not learned the rules in french.

-W-

Wow, I wonder how many replies can fit on a page

My message makes 15

Same here.

BTW, I also play electric guitar, which probably helps. ;-)

That genius-kid stuff gets really annoying, don't you think? People are constantly coming up to me and saying, "Why are you so smart?", etc.

I always type "like", instead of "life." sorry for the confusion.

-W-

You need to memorize 50 digits of pi. :-)

3.141592653589793
23846264339327950
28841971693993751

Are you kidding? He's memorized more than that...

hah...hahah...HAHAHAHAH!!!! 50?!?! I've had 169 before!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH...and ha.

I think a lot of people on this site know a whole lot more than that. I know 100, and most of my friends know at least 75.

I memorized a whole bunch of powers of 2 instead... very useful for programming. ;-)

In base 10, I should clarify. To memorize the powers of 2 *in* base 2, you wouldn't even have to memorize anything.

well, only if you knew what you were doing. If you told any "dumb jock" that you knew every power of 2 in base 2 and they somehow believed you, they would be impressed. But it isnt much in base 10 either, because you just take 2, and then double it enough times, which is easy enough to do in your head. I memorized the first 25 squares and the first 10 cubes, along with some others scattered around. And why does no one memorize e, except maybe no_one? ;)

2.718281828 is all I know, and I'm not even sure that's accurate...

I'm not sure if this is right, but here's my guess:

2.718281828459...

Yeah, I should start memorizing e. But the sad thing is, I bet over half the people in my one math class don't know what e is. In fact, make that, I bet nobody except me in my one math class knows what e is. And if nobody knows what it is, then it's not as impressive. Even the dumb jocks say "pi is that 3.14 thing, isn't it?"

That reminds me of when I only had a scientific calculator that only showed the first 10 digits of e. I always thought it was just a repeating decimal. :-)

No, they make crude jokes such as "Pumpkin pi is my favorite"

Heh, good point, didn't think of that ;-)

I KNOW ALL THE POWERS OF 39 (in base 39).

I wonder how you'd express that, anyway. What do you do after all numbers (0-9) and letters (A-Z) are used up?
ASCII is kinda like base 256, I guess... (if you consider each character a digit)

Maybe you could "cheat" by using multiple digits. I've heard of the time (and angles) system being a base 60 system, even though each "digit" is actually expressed using two digits. Like 30°25'59" would be like a three-digit base 60 number.

I use the fact that you can use a single character to express a number up to 256 all the time while I'm programming. It's very useful in BASIC/Flib to name sprites "sp"&char(1-256) and then use the "map" command to display a map. I am currently making a giant RPG with this method, but I will have to clear up some stability issues before I can finish it.

I did that in addition to PI...1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048...that's about as far as I ever need (1.5 bytes on most systems) but I know to about 4 bytes and can say them all in about 10 seconds or so... ;)

Heh, while we're talking about powers, here's what I have memorized (off the top off my head)

Powers of 2: 1-18
Powers of 3: 1-8 (but I forget 7)
Powers of 4: 1-9
Powers of 5: 1-5
Powers of 6-9: up to about 3 or 4
Powers of 10: (10^100) :-D

I just did a quick check and was able to go up to 262,144 without recalculating the next one in my head. I used to have a bunch more memorized, though.

Before I graduated from school, I remember some times where I made a quick BASIC program that I used to memorize the powers of 2 (I just kept typing them in and when I was wrong, it would show the correct answer; then it would start over and I'd try again). I would do that in my free time for fun.

Oooh! Me too! In fact, I was really interested in that particular sequence when I was really young. Before second or third grade, I think I had it memorized up to 2^14. I think knowing up to 2^16 is all you should need for programming, but I do know a few more than that.

I know that 2^24 is 16777216 (there are that many colors available with 24-bit color).

LOL! Same here.

Well, ticalc isn't my homepage, but both Mozilla's and IE's autocomplete already suggest 'ticalc.org' when I've typed just 'ti', does that count? (Sorry TI ;) )

actually, the official TI site should come up when you type "edu" or something like that unless you still do "www.ti.com/calc" which just redirects you to the "education.ti.com" site anyway...

And here, I thought it stopped redirecting you years ago....

-W-

What's shorter to type "education.ti.com" or "ti.com/calc"? So what do I use? ;)

That's what happens to me. :-)

Google is set as my homepage too because multiple users use my computer and it's just an easy search engine, alltheweb is a good one too though. DA is the first favourite I go to, then my ticalc userpage, then ticalc.

I have my computer set so that I can just press Ctrl+Alt+T at any time, and ticalc.org will open.

that's cool! how do you do that? i have win xp.

With a macro creator. I used to use one called MacroMaker, but now I use linux, and I can't find one for Mandrake.

Actually, this is how I did it:
1. Put a link to ticalc.org on my desktop.
2. Right click on it and choose 'properties'
3. Under the 'Web Document' tab, click on 'Shortcut Key' and press the combination that you want.
4. Click okay

it works!! sweet.

Then if your like me and don't want the IE icon you can save the ticalc.org favicon and used that instead!

Where can you get that icon? I think I'll do that...that or I'll use a screen shot of it for my buddy icon in AIM... ;)

There are a few ways.
1) If you want a bitmap then goto http://www.ticalc.org/favicon.ico and then do a "Save Pic As".
2) If you want the .ico file then after you have made it a favorite and visited the site open up "Internet Options", click "Settings" under the "General" tab, then "View Files" in the new window and scroll down until you find all the 'favicon' files and copy/paste it somewhere.

I would definitely use #1, personally.

How big are the .ico files, typically? (I mean in dimensions, not KB)

I'll do both ;)

Darn... it's a little small for AIM (they're 48x48, right?)... though you COULD enlarge it by 300%.

and without excellent photoshopping skills (and photoshop of course) it would look pretty bad...maybe i'll just screenshot the logo at the top of the page...

I have photoshop! :-D Of course, I don't have excellent photoshop skills. I have been experimenting around with it a lot recently to see how it works. I've also starting reading a few tutorials. You never know when you'll suddenly need the skills to impose somebody's face on somebody else for blackmail ;-) (actually, I can do that and make it look real with MSpaint but it takes __FOREVER__)

They're a measly 16x16, but they come out looking surprisingly well when you make them the icon for the shortcut.

Icon files for your desktop are 32x32. However, if you belong to one of those families with a half blind mother, you are probably going to see a 64x64 desktop icon.

-W-

Wow, 64x64 is pretty big... especially if you have a 640x480 screen resolution ;-)

I have tried that several times, and it never worked. That could be due to a rogue registry key.

If you're uysing KDE(default on Mdk I think...), you should be able to make one in Control Center -> Regional & Accessibility -> KHotKeys.

I'm using KDE 3.2.1, so if you're still using a 3.1 or newer version, you may need to look elsewhere...;)

My computer has TICalc set as the home page on all 4 browsers (IE, Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, and Safari, but I only use Safari and Firebird). I also set all the school's computers that I use (in the stufent login) to ticalc.org.

I never change settings on my school's computers anymore. I severely slowed down my counties server last year by downloading 2 Gigabytes worth of stuff onto the school network, and I made several macros which the technology person didn't like, and I got banned from the school computers for a year.

A fun thing to do is to use ctrl-alt-printscreen (i think) and screenshot the desktop with icons and task bar. Then set that as the background and hide and minimize the taskbar and icons. People get really confused when nothing seems to work...

hehe...that's hilarious! I have to try that some day....

Wow! That IS great! Now, how would you go about hiding the desktop icons? I didn't think that was possible. Heh, and I also don't know how to hide the taskbar, but I can kinda shrink it (if you know what I'm talking about there)

In 98 (what I'm on here at school), right-click the desktop, go to the "effects" tab, and check the box next to "HIde icons when the desktop is viewed as a wb page. I assume it's similar for ME, XP, etc..