AspieDad's New Writeups

May 19, 2009 (essay)

2009-05-19T15:51:40Z

It's now been over a month since I wrote describing my frustration and anger at my employer's decision to cut salaries by 10 percent.

Things have moved on.

A week after that writeup, I wrote another letter to my employer, requesting to work from home. Today, (May 19, 2009), that proposal was accepted in full, with just a few conditions on their side.

While UK employment law is strong in comparison to the US legislation, it is relatively weak when compared with France, Germany and other countries in mainland Europe.

There is one area, however, where this government has been pro-active, and that is in the area of work-life balance and promoting the idea of flexible working.

Six years ago the UK introduced laws which meant an employer has to take seriously a request from an employee with young children to work flexibly.

Within a month of the change in legislation, I applied for flexible working arrangements under that…

Content filtering (essay)

2009-05-17T11:49:02Z

This is a description of how one person enabled content filtering on his home network. The aim is first to protect his growing family from the worst excesses of the internet. The second is to protect himself from teenage visitors who might want illegally to download music and/or other copyright protected materials.

I realise that some people think content filtering is evil. I know other people download music and games without paying for them as a point of principle, in the belief that the publishers of games and music are profiteering.

I have some sympathy for these ideas. Nevertheless, I have implemented content filtering on my network.

Why content filtering?

There are some pretty nasty sights on that thar intarweb. And I'm not just talking about Rick Astley and Goatse. Pedophile grooming and child pornography are the headline dangers, though in all honesty, I think they might be a bit over-hyped. Lesser…

April 15, 2009 (personal)

2009-04-15T09:32:30Z

Just now I agreed to take a voluntary pay cut of 10 percent.

I can't afford it.

The decision was not, of course, in any real sense, "voluntary." The only sense in which is was voluntary was that I allowed the company to extract the money from me without the hassle and expense of resorting to legal measures.

Make no mistake, my employer will cut by ten percent the pay of all employees in the UK office, whether we volunteer for the pay cut or not. They claim that they do not know what they will do. I don't believe them.

My employer is a privately-held US-based magazine publishing company. They do not reveal financial figures, even to employees. The company is heavily exposed to the automotive and advertising industries and to the North American market. I don't think anyone questions their claims that advertising revenues have fallen sharply over the last six months.

Back in February, the company closed three magazines, all of which had been sustaining losses for some…

Asteroid 2009 DD45 (thing)

2009-03-02T12:13:35Z

Later today (at 13:44 UTC), a small piece of space rock will pass close to earth.

The piece of rock in question is known as K09D45D, or 2009 DD45 for short, and is classified as a small asteroid.

In this context, 'small' means about 30m across. That's a fair-sized chunk of rock, and at a closing speed of around 10 km/sec it has a lot of kinetic energy.

Nevertheless, the rock will be up above most communications satellites when it flies by, roughly 65 000 km above Tahiti.

The rock was only discovered a couple of days ago, on 27 Feb, when it was barely visible, even to a large telescope. Then, Australian Rob McNaught alerted the Siding Spring Survey team, after finding the object using the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia.

This early warning gave us, the earth-bound inhabitants of this planet, about three days' notice to identify the object and then take action.

That…

Tetractys (thing)

2009-02-06T15:58:29Z

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This pattern of ten dots arranged in four rows to form the outline of an equilateral triangle, is known as a tetractys. Some call it a decad, which seems somehow less appropriate to me.

The word Tetractys comes from the Greek root Tetra- (four rows), whereas the word decad — as in decade — means ten.

To some, it's a magical symbol. To others, it is the basis of a special kind of poem. Mathematicians see it as a representation of the triangular number, 10, while (some) musicians see it as a representation of the pentatonic scale. Yet others see it every time they go bowling.

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How to trisect a line (idea)

2008-12-05T18:37:45Z

Just in case you don't believe that the line AB above is trisected, I can show that it is.

For this, I'm going to rely on Cartesian coordinates. I've chosen not to use standard Euclidian proofs, simply because my geometry is not good enough to do that.

Take point A as the origin of the Cartesian coordinate system, (0,0)

Assume point B lies at (12,0). Call it (12N,0), if you really want to be pernickety.

ABC and ABD are equilateral triangles, so point C is at (6,6√3), while D is at (6,-6√3).

ABDE is a rhombus with side 12*, which means that G is the mid-point of AD. So if D is at (6,-6√3), then G is at (3,-3√3).

* It is easy to prove this using the lengths of the lines and the angles. We know that AE, AD and AB are the same length (they are all radii) while the angles DAE and DAB are both exactly 60°C. This means the two triangles, ABD and ADE are both equilateral, which makes…