STEVEN C MILLS.ca

Today's soundtrack is Angelo Badalamenti: Twin Peaks Limited Event Series Original Soundtrack. "Laura's Theme" is such an emotional piece of art. This morning's project is a bit different; my friend gave me his old TI-83 Plus, which I'll be using for my aforementioned upcoming pre-calculus math course. Today, I'll go through the manual and learn how to use this calculator. I started by doing a master reset, and found that I have software version 1.17 installed. The yellow "2

Today’s soundtrack is Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young: Deja Vu. This afternoon, I’m reading the fourth chapter of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It, “The Missing Link.” Rand begins the chapter by giving vignettes of four different people: the first is a man who denounced the liberal people who threaten his business if he does not comply with their demands, but renounced capitalism; a novelist who claimed that the art of the novel was dying because novels are concerned with re

Today's soundtrack is Mournful Congregation: Tears From a Grieving Heart. This afternoon, I'm reading chapter eleven from the first book of Aristotle's Ethics. In this short chapter, Aristotle continues discussing man's legacy. He says that misfortunes that befall our friends can impact our lives, and that there is a big difference between misfortune during life and misfortune after death. If the dead feel any repercussions at all in what happens after their deaths, it cannot

Today's soundtrack is Tim Hicks: New Tattoo. I'm going on to the next lesson of trigonometry on Khan Academy this afternoon. From the Pythagorean theorem, we know that h² = the square of the sum of the other two sides - which could be thought of as h² = o² + a² (hypotenuse² = opposite² plus adjacent²). So if we knew that in a right triangle one side was 7" and the other was 4", we could find the length of the hypotenuse like this: 7² + 4² = h²; 49+16=65; so h = square root of

Today's soundtrack is Haken: Visions. I've completed Basic Math & Pre-Algebra For Dummies, which was a personal goal that I'd set for myself before taking any teacher-led math courses. I'll be starting a month-long Foundations of Math and Precalculus course on July 3, so to prepare for that, I've signed up for two Khan Academy math modules, Algebra 1 and Precalculus, in the hopes that I will be better prepared for the course. The Khan Academy Precalculus course begins by offe

Today's soundtrack is Godsmack: When Legends Rise. I spent my time today finding a good mellotron VSTi to replace the one that I accidentally lost when I upgraded my OS, then renamed my working track titles for my metal project. I found that I have seven songs and two interludes. Only a couple of the songs need more writing; once that's done, I'll start on lyrics! It's getting closer!

Today’s soundtrack is Saor: Guardians. This morning, I’ll be reading the final chapter of Basic Math & Pre-Algebra for Dummies Workbook, and the last two chapters of Basic Math & Pre-Algebra for Dummies. These three chapters are all short and don’t have a worksheet section, so I’m just going to do all of them at once. Chapter 17: “Ten Curious Types of Numbers” Square Numbers Numbers multiplied by themselves any number of times Triangular Numbers A “sequence of consecutive pos

Today's soundtrack is Kevin Max: Serve Somebody, which features a beautiful reprise of the dcTalk song "Red Letters." This morning, I'm working on the first chapter of part 5, "The Part of Tens," in Basic Math & Pre-Algebra For Dummies Workbook, "Ten Alternate Numeral and Number Systems." The chapter opens with a definition that differentiates numbers and numerals: "A number is an idea that expresses how much or how many. A numeral is a written symbol that expresses a number"

Today’s soundtrack is Vermin Womb: Decline. This afternoon, I’m reading the tenth chapter of the first book of Aristotle’s Ethics. Aristotle here returns to the discussion of determining man’s happiness by looking at the end of his life. Aristotle questions the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning - that a man can only be happy when he is dead, since happiness is “a form of activity” (p. 45). But even if we don’t take the thought all the way to this point, even if we

Today's soundtrack is October Falls: The Plague of a Coming Age. This afternoon, I'm starting to put the artwork together for my upcoming game. I made an 80s-esque vanishing point grid box in Google Slides and then applied some filters to it in the Pixlr Editor. I'm happy with the direction that this game is taking!

Today's soundtrack is Allie X: COLLXTION I. This afternoon's session was spent with a pen and notebook in hand, working through some gameplay design ideas that I needed to sort out before I can start working on the computer side of things. I came up with a working title for the game, redesigned the NPCs, and came up with some game-ending scenarios. All-in-all, a productive afternoon.

Today's soundtrack is Timothy Brindle: The Unfolding. This afternoon, I'm reading the second chapter of Pat Pattison's Writing Better Lyrics, "Rusty's Collar: A Guide to Showing and Telling." Like in the schoolchild's activity of Show-and-Tell, we cannot talk about what we haven't first shown, because "[s]howing makes the telling more powerful because your senses and your mind are both engaged" (p. 20). So if we precede our sentiments with imagery, the sentiments will become

Today's soundtrack is Ghost of the Robot: Pair of Bulls Volume 1. This afternoon, I'm trying out my red bouncing ball in one of the platformer templates in Construct 2. It took me a while to get Pyxel Edit to export the image properly, but once I got it to work, I was pretty happy with the results!

Today's soundtrack is Richard Cheese: Lounge Against The Machine. This morning's activity was a bit different from my usual ones; my father-in-law was putting together a math placement test for his work, and he asked me to give it a try. I finished it in 51 minutes. I felt quite confident about most of the material, but ran into trouble with quadratic equations, multiplying fractions, and conversions from metric to imperial and vice versa, as no formulas were provided. It was

Today's soundtrack is The Antlers: Hospice. This afternoon, I'm working on chapter 23 of Basic Math & Pre-Algebra, "Putting Mr. X to Work: Algebra Word Problems." Algebra word problems "bring together a lot of what you know" (p. 311), which makes them a great exercise. The first thing we want to do with an algebra word problem is to make it visual "by using a chart or picture" (p. 312). There are "five steps for solving most algebra word problems: 1. Declare a variable. 2. Se