Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 224)

This is a short series of quotes about learning from the book, A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript. (With 947 reviews, that may be the most-reviewed technical book on Amazon.) It reminds me of the old quote by Sophocles that I learned in college, One learns by doing the thing.

And that’s a wrap on the 2015 MLB regular season. The Cubs finished with their best season in years after a pretty amazing second-half run. Now it’s on to Pittsburgh for a one-game playoff between the two wild card teams. (Image via espn.com)

Time Will Come looks like an interesting Android watch face design.

I just found this page on O’Reilly’s website about their “Head First” book series. I’ve been reading a book lately named A Mind for Numbers, which is a book about learning, and the O’Reilly Head First page basically summarizes what’s in that book.

Wow. According to this chart of performance benchmarks, Apple’s A9 ARM processor is 57% faster than its own A8 chip in single-core performance, increasing from a value of 1,605 to 2,522. (Without digging into it I don’t know what the “unit” is in these numbers. I only know that they are Geekbench values.) Single-core performance is usually the important metric for most applications, and that’s a huge gain.

I bought an HTC/Google Nexus 9 back in January — which is pretty speedy these days thanks to Android 5.1.x — and the new A9 chip is 29% faster than the Nexus 9 in single-core performance.

Without doing some research I don’t know when we’ll learn how many shares of their stock Apple, Inc. (AAPL) bought back during this last fiscal quarter, but it looks like they will have bought back about one billion shares of their stock since 2013. (The last data point on this graph from ycharts.com was July 10, 2015.)

The current buyback amount is roughly 13.9% of the shares that were outstanding in 2013, so even if the company performance was flat, AAPL should have risen by that amount during this time. So, no surprise, their EPS has risen quite a bit, as shown on AAPL’s EPS history on ycharts.com. (Be careful to compare Q1-2013 to Q1-2105, Q2-2013 to Q2-2105, etc., on that graph. When you do that you’ll see how their EPS has risen.)

During this time, AAPL’s adjusted stock price has nearly doubled, from a low around $57 in 2013 to a value of about $114 right now. (Whether or not the stock has doubled depends on which date you choose to look at in 2013.)

Fairbanks, Alaska, September 25, 2015. Snow. (It’s about 50 degrees warmer here in the Boulder, Colorado area.)

(I found this image on Sourdough Jack’s Twitter page.)

I just started reading the book 10% Happier by Dan Harris. Mr. Harris worked at ABC News when he suddenly had a panic attack on television in front of more than five million viewers. This is the story about how that incident led to him discovering meditation, and how meditation helped him become “10% happier.”

One of my nieces got marries recently, and I created this “cartoonized” image from a wedding photo using Gimp. It probably took about ten steps in this case, but I had to significantly reduce the light coming in the large window behind them; pump up the color a lot; apply several “artistic” filters to it (Van Gogh and Oilify, several times each); and then kept applying different levels of the “cartoon” effect. I didn’t really want a cartoon image, but I couldn’t get the Oilify image to look the way I wanted in the time allotted, so I applied the Cartoon filter, and I was happier with it.

I don’t know the original source of this image — I just saw it on a friend’s Facebook timeline — but it’s a clever way to demonstrate that fonts matter, that they can help to show feelings or emotion.