Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Hey, more of me wanting to break down crying about money

My internet bill has a habit of sneaking up on me because I cannot figure out what the fuck schedule it runs on.  It's due soon, the last time it was due was ... nine months ago, maybe.  Who runs on a once every nine months schedule?  Well, not them apparently because the time before that it was three months.  Alternating three months and nine months?

Actually, that looks like it could be the case and would presumably have something to do with the fact that I get a student discount so they decide to bill me when they know I'll be checking the student email to which the bill reminders are sent.  September is the beginning of one semester, january the beginning of another, if bills come at the beginning of the semester then it would be nine months (January to September) and three months (September to January.)

So maybe I've finally figured the damn thing out.  But that's not the point.

The point is this: I need to fix my washing machine.  That's going to cost hundreds and may well wipe out all of the generous donations since I started panicking.

I need to stay in my house.  I need to pay my dentist.  Those two combined (because right now they'll be sloved by paying money to the same person who will get it to the right places) are $800ish.

I need to pay for tuition + health fee.  That's $1,000ish.

Once all of that is done, I need to pay for my internet.  That's $279.60 (only figure I have right in front of me.)

Actually, wait.  I gave semi-exact figures on here before so they should be on the blog

$1,847 + $279.60 = $2126.60

If I'm really lucky the washing machine won't totally wipe out donations already recived so maybe it's more like $2,100 or even, if I dare to dream great dreams, $2,000 (I think that's impossible, but like I said: great dreams.)

Nothing has a definite date on it.  I don't know how late I can be before, for example, the plug is pulled on my internet.

But it's out there as an existential threat to Stealing Commas because without internet there is no blog.

Of course, without writing there is no blog and I've been pretty short on that anyway.

But, anyway: $2126.60 or else something --be it housing, mental healthcare, or internet-- will cause everything to come crashing down at some point.  Did I mention that money makes me want to break down crying?

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On a more upbeat note, I was introduced to the idea of quaternions ages ago and I still have yet to make sense of it.  Such is life.  I came across a description of the bicomplex numbers, mistook them for the quaternions, and realized that they make perfect intuitive sense once one realizes that j is a previously unknown square root not for -1 but for one.

Now that I know these are different things (j really is a square root of -1 in the quaternions) it means that the revelation of sense making was, unfortunately, not as much of a "Eureka! Things make sense!" moment as I thought it was.  However, it's still an expanded version of the complex numbers that make perfect sense to me which means that somewhere, deep inside, I can still math.

2 comments:

  1. I don't understand quaternions either - I had a class where I used them to describe rotations. They're handy for that purpose because you don't have the singularity at the north/south poles that you get if you use Euler rotations. (I think if I recall correctly this singularity is the equivalent of gimbal lock?) The trick is that the quaternion rotations involve an extra parameter and corresponding normalization constraint.

    Unfortunately, the class was a while ago, though, and I never grokked it at the time.

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  2. I am trying to grok this and failing, but I never claimed to math and anyway it's kinda fun.

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