This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

Categories

Calendar

January 2006
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

Goodbye Nacho

One more post for today though. Yesterday (Friday) just as I was getting up, Brandy called me to let me know that Nacho had died overnight. Narcho was a very old budgie. When I first got her she was already a number of years old and had a big fatty tumor. She refused to eat when I first got her she spent two of her first three weeks with me at the vet. But then she got better, and she did well. I’m not even 100% sure when it was that I got her, but I suspect that the year started with a 1 instead of a 2. OK, I just looked it up…

It was June 1998. I still had Moira and it was right after Kiwi died. Nacho had been a breeder bird and was already a grandmother and several years old, but after three clutches had decided she didn’t like boy birds any more and would peck them when they came in her cage, so the breeder didn’t want her any more, so I took her. When Nacho was so unhealthy her first month or so with me, I honestly did not expect her to live very long. Instead, she got better, lost a huge amount of weight (she was a really fat bird when I first got her) and not only continued to live for another seven and a half years, but outlived Moira and Pinky and Brain who at one point or another all shared a cage with her. (And she outlived Kiwi too, but Nacho never met Kiwi.)

She was a grumpy little bird and didn’t like human attention. But she and her cage mates got along well. As she got older, her current cage mates (Cheese and Skittles) would sometimes help feed her or preen her. They took good care of her in her old age.

She was a good bird. Goodbye Nacho. :-(

AAAAAHHHHH!!

I was going to post a quick picture of my office from my cellphone, but then I saw this and had to post it instead:

The ahhhhhh page

This page plots the number of results obtained from google for words of the form a{n}h{m}. For example aaahh would be represented by 3,2 and is found on the grid below at 3 down and 2 across. Hover over the square to see the number of google results, you can also click to see the results in google for yourself. The actual numbers that you will see will vary from what I found over time.

The results are coloured based on the log of the value. Cells that are bright red have more than 8000 google results.

There are a vast number of different variations of this word on the net. Even though I have examined so far up to ah(50,50), I have not reached the region where zero hits are common. In fact in the whole 50×50 grid there are only 16 zeros. Update: I’ve extended it to 60×60 now and at last there are places where there are several zeros together. Still there’s seven results at ah(60,60).

(via Digg)

That is just awesome. It reminded me someone of one of the old Abulsme charts I used to have up on my wall in college which is now in a box in many pieces after it got wet, dried, and started to crumble. I really do have to get some of those charts from back then online sometime. Or new versions thereof that are even better. Yeah, that’s it.

In any case, this post will make 10 days in a row of posts. Which is better than I have done in a long time. I figure I should savor that, as I will probably miss tomorrow (Sunday) as I will be back in Florida for a quick visit and will be spending as much time as possible with Brandy and Amy, and as little as possible online. But we shall see.