Wednesday 05 Sep 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

At 7:10 AM on 22 Oct 2005, Paul Fuller wrote on povray.off-topic:

Recently however I had the opportunity to see a different but related sorting machine in motion.

Each day the collected post of my city and much of its state is delivered to a very large mail sorting centre. Trucks arrive, disgorge their contents, are loaded with other contents and they depart.

So what happens within this place?

The actual work is performed by massive sorting machines. One machine was all of 80 metres long and cost in excess of $10M. It was still being assembled and debugged by the technicians that accompanied it from Germany when I was there.

The basic operation is that tubs of unsorted letters are dumped into the machines. Their addresses (even hand written) are scanned, OCR’ed and a bar code is sprayed on their back.

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Wednesday 05 Sep 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

At 3:17 PM on 21 Oct 2005, Paul Fuller wrote on povray.off-topic:

Disk to disk you say — Luxury!

There was a time when tape was the primary processing medium for large files. As a junior operator type at a bank, I once saw the annual interest calculation and statement printing run. This required a very substantial sorting operation tape to tape.

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Tuesday 04 Sep 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Last night, as I lay in bed unable to sleep properly, I half-imagined and half-dreamed about a book. Tales of witches and wizards often involve a mighty book of spells — usually a big thick leather-bound thing with parchment for pages, and big calligraphic letters. And I thought to myself about someone actually publishing a big meaty book like that, but containing not magic spells but rather the incantations of mathematics.

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Saturday 25 Aug 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

I want to tell you a story about a little man, if I can. A gnome named Grimble Gromble. And… wait, where did that come from?!

Aaaanyway… Many years ago, when I was still at school, we had a “book week” one time. (The English teacher simply declared that this week would be “book week”. We have no idea what that meant…) As part of this supposed “event”, we had a nobody “professional author” who we’d never heard of come in and give lessons on story writing. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sunday 19 Aug 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

From one extreme, to the other. I had I really bad day at work. (I don’t remember why exactly.) Frustrated and deeply depressed, I wrote this:

(Prettier PDF version here.)

The sun is relentless. Hour after hour its cruel rays beat down mercilessly upon the dessicated earth below. Temperatures skyrocket. Horizons melt. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sunday 19 Aug 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

I’ve had this in my collection for quite some time, so I just thought I’d post it. I wrote it shortly after cycling home from college in the middle of winter, in the dark, in the pouring rain. (And, predictably, my mum told me to stop whining and that everything was so much worse when she was a kid…) This is a work of fiction, not reality though.

You can also find a prettier PDF version here.

It is a cold December night, and the relentless howl of an angry wind is interrupted only by the endless random drumming as a thousand million raindrops smash into the upper canopy of the ancient Oak forest. Read the rest of this entry »

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