I ordered an engagement ring from Glamira (part 2)

As it often happens, I got severely delayed with writing the follow-up article.

TL;DR

Pretty OK. The delivered ring matches specifications. Customer service not on the highest level.

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I took about a week for a ring to get made, and then couple of days for delivery. All things considered, the delivery is quick.

I took the ring to a local gemologist and they confirmed all of the ring stated characteristics. This was a free of charge appraisal and they did say that I might have gotten a bit worse color than stated in the specifications but also that it isn't something to be worried about because it happens very often it's practically normal.
Overall, an expert opinion was that I got good value for money, which was all I came to hear.

Moving on...
It turned out that I ordered the wrong ring size, it was too big. I contacted Glamira to arrange the return for resizing.

Also, after discussing it with my fiancée, we decided it would be better to have 14ct gold instead of 18ct, and to have a slightly larger stone. The price would remain the same. So, we explicitly stated these requests in the form that we sent back along with the ring.

I spent around $50 for shipping to return the ring.

Here we encountered some problems.
The ring originally comes with a black tag attached to it. Without carefully reading the instructions, I cut the tag when I was about to present the ring to my girlfriend.
It turns out that was a mistake. I should not have cut the black tag.

After you cut the tag, you can no longer exchange the ordered ring for a different one. You can only resize the existing one.

This would not have been such a big deal, but for the way they have handled this entire situation. My requests were very clearly stated in the form paper I attached with the package. There couldn't have been any ambiguity about what I wanted from them.

What they did was, they resized the ring, and sent it back, and without contacting me completely disregarded half of my instructions.

I had couple of phone calls with Glamira about this after they've already shipped the ring back to me.

Anyway, I was pretty angry at the time.
But the ring came back in perfect size, so I kind of made peace with it.

Hope this helps.

I ordered an engagement ring from Glamira (part 1)

Introduction

First of all, a few introductory words. This is not an active blog, I am not a blogger. This blog dates back to 2011 and I have since written only several posts, some in English, some in Croatian. I'm from Zagreb, Croatia. You can check some of the old posts, they are highly uncorrelated :D.

The reason I created this blog is so I can have a ready place to put content online if I ever need such an outlet. I opened it on Google's service because I knew it will be crawled the fastest so the content will soon after publishing be reachable from the Google search engine.

Glamira

I decided to propose to my girlfriend. And thought that I could get a decent value for money if I bought the engagement ring online. I quickly learnt about the ways to rank the quality of the ring and the diamond (4C scale).

As I started searching, Glamira was one of the most aggressive advertiser. Going through their site, I saw that they also have the most diverse offer. There are literary hundreds of different rings to combine with dozens of different stones. They have a nice web app that lets you customize your ring very nicely. I also quickly went through:
77diamonds.com
bluenile.com
jamesallen.com
ritani.com

The listed ones only had very classic rings, about one fifth of the Glamira offer.


I made a shortlist and finally picked the winner.

Certificates

Going through the customization menus, I started having more and more questions.
With a diamond you get a certificate that proves that the diamond has all the characteristics that you payed for. The thing is, the institution that is issuing the certificate is the same one that is selling you the ring. Naturally, I was pretty suspicious about that.

However, if you pick a dimanond of 0.25 carats or bigger, Glamira offers you a GIA (Gemological Institute of America) certificate. GIA is, as I understood after some googling, the most trusted independent authority on diamonds. This option will make your ring cost up to 50% more.

Later I asked around with some friends who bought engagement rings in local retailer shops and asked them if they received the certificate along with the diamond they bought. They said "yes". When I asked about who issued the certificate, they looked at me as if they didn't understand what I was asking - "well, the shop, who else?!"

I went to couple of shops myself and asked about the certificates. Besides having only 5-10 rings to choose from. They assured me that the diamonds go through rigorous inspection by the state institutions. Since Croatia is a country with lots of corruption, I asked myself would I really trust some bribed paperpusher's approval more than a website apparently trusted by thousands of online shoppers.

Besides, I am thinking: "If I buy a ring with Glamira's certificate, what are the chances that they will deliver something 50% worse in quality than what they advertised?" (Because, that is the price difference)

Now, about the "apparently trusted by thousands of online shoppers" part...

I figured I will find dozens of different experiences of people buying from Glamira. But no.
Reviews on the glamira.com I didn't even read... Every site will pump its own reputation this way.
I found a collection of reviews on trustpilot. Most of the reviewers only had 1 review on their account. And the site warned me about how they deleted some of the nasty comments recently on account of being fake. I didn't know what to think of it. So, I guess this is the reason I am writing this post now.

Order

In the end I ordered a 0.1 carat diamond version of the metioned ring so the certificate option was not even on the offer.
The order was placed today (June 21 2017). I wait to see whether they have it on the shelf, or they need to make it first.

Fingers crossed.

Results

I ordered an engagement ring from Glamira (part 2)

Intersection of two 2D polygons in Javascript

If you are dealing with 2D graphics, you must have dealt with polygons. Polygons such as:

Polygons under a are called convex polygons and those under b are called concave. There is also another kind of classification: simple and complex polygons. All of the above polygons are simple. If you draw a following polygon using 5 straight lines, then it is a complex polygon.

The same shape can also be drawn with more lines. In that case, this shape can represent three triangles, that is, three separate polygons that are merely positioned together.

If you wish to calculate intersection of two polygons, this can be relatively simple for convex polygons but a little bit trickier for concave and especially for complex polygons.

Convex polygon intersections:















Concave polygon intersection:
















I created a javascript library that take 2 polygons and return a third polygon that represents an intersection of the given 2 polygons. It works for both convex and concave polygon, but probably not as expected for complex polygons. Polygons are javascript arrays of Points. 'Point' is any javascript object that has both x and y numeric properties. The order of points in an array that defines a polygon is very important. The same set of n points can produce n! different polygons. Most all of them will be complex.

The .js file can be downloaded here:

Polygon.js

Library depends on jQuery for creating shallow copies of javascript objects - $.extend({}, object). Also for various utility functions like $.grep()

Društvo

Što je društvo?

Za mene je društvo čovjeku isto što i šuma stablu. 

Šuma nema neku vrhovnu ideju što bi trebala biti i kako bi trebala izgledati. Ako se dogodi devijacija na jednom od stabala, u istom trenutku ta devijacija ulazi u definiciju šume, i prestaje biti devijacija. Neće nitko probirati u šumi samo ravna vertikalna stabla i reći: "Ova stabla sačinjavaju šumu. Ostala su samo nametnici." Ideja o tome što šuma jest, prilagođava se svakom pojedinom stablu. 

Tako da mi apsolutno nema smisla kako se ponekad govori o odnosu čovjeka i društva. Društvo u mojoj okolini je sve ono i samo ono što ja odredim. Ako odredim da ću od sutra hodati isključivo na rukama, onda od sutra i društvo radi minimalni pomak u tom smjeru. Pa ja jesam društvo isto kao što kap vode jest more.

A very interesting contraption

A very interesting contraption. Driven by the force of gravity the ball’s movement is forming an interesting trajectory. Consecutive runs show that, however interesting this trajectory may be, it will be exactly the same every time we run it. This device can therefore be considered as a deterministic machine. Every time we produce the same input (the ball), it produces the same output (movement of that ball across a predefined trajectory).

Let’s look at something a bit more common.

Anyone who has ever played this game must have witnessed a situation where 10 some balls are simultaneously moving, bouncing of each other and falling into holes. During this brief moment (until the balls settle down) you can sense a childlike feeling of exhilaration and anticipation because your surroundings are set in motion in such a way that the outcome cannot be predicted. Observing exclusively one of the balls and disregarding everything else gives us no choice but to acknowledge that the ball is moving in a nondeterministic way. Taking, however, the whole table into consideration, it is obvious that it's not the case.

Seeing these two examples being put in the same basket of deterministic systems, a person can say: “Well, in that case everything we observe is deterministic, since everything that happens was triggered by a cause and will become a part of the cause for the upcoming events.”

This attitude is so deeply sown into the fabric of modern science that it has become a standard practice that every observed nondeterministic behavior is automatically accredited to inadequate modeling of natural laws as they are probably not taking all the factors into account. And rightly so. After all, this approach has brought more good to mankind than most of the philosophical ramblings of which some you will find in the following text.

Humans allegedly possess what is commonly referred to as self-consciousness. I tried to define that term as thoughts that lead to behavior that does not match a simple stimulus->reaction model. Stimulus, in this case, would be everything we perceive now and have perceived in our lifetime.

Human race went through various stages in history. Each of these stages was accompanied by self-conscious thoughts about the nature of the world. In these thoughts there was often a rooted idea that the world has two aspects. These aspects were considered to have so little in common that they were often referred to as two worlds: spiritual and material. This was pretty much a constant thing in human history. Only the contents of these two worlds were never finally agreed upon. For example, in prehistory, the material world would include a wooden tool, a rock in a field, a leaf in a pawn… while birds, stars, snakes and moon would all be considered spiritual. Over time, most of the stuff from the spiritual world “migrated” to the material world. These migrations lead me to believe that things and events that are considered unpredictable (nondeterministic) are often associated with the spiritual world. A story about “Once upon a time everyone thought the Earth was flat…” would fit nicely here, but why go that way? There is immeasurable eagerness in revealing all the tricks the universe has cleverly designed to disguise its true nature, but zero in revealing even one disguise in our everyday lives.

Majority of people regard themselves as spiritual because of their self-consciousness, free will and the inherent nondeterminism. If a man were to behave strictly according to stimulus->reaction model that would allude that his behavior is deterministic, therefore he has no free will and his self-consciousness (if he had any) is not of much use.

With development of neurosciences, we acquired some insights about the man’s driving mechanism – the brain. Sensational news saying that scientists discovered regions in the brain controlling motor skills, balance, long term planning, stress management and even the parts that are active during contemplation and meditation. Things started to be a little less abstract so the new protagonists became neurons, nervous system, electric charge inside human body carrying information.
So, I guess a simple version of how-does-human-body-work would be the following. A certain neuron that is designated for arm muscles transmits an electric impulse through nerve pathway to the arm and informs it what to do. Then, of course, we traverse back and ask “Who triggered that muscle neuron into doing what he did?” After that, we find out there is a hierarchy inside a brain, so a “superior” brain region ordered muscle neuron to do its thing. If we continue down this path, we will probably find out that the main perpetrator for arm movement is most certainly something perceived from person’s immediate surroundings combined with long term (probably subconscious) memory. Both of which were stated in the definition of stimulus in the stimulus->reaction behavioral model.

Still feeling spiritual?
“This is all nonsense”, you might say. “I have a free will. I decide whether to turn left or right. I control whether to blink once or twice. I am not a robot with hard drive, RAM, CPU and I/O devices.”
To cut the long story short, there is no way to prove that something is deterministic or nondeterministic. Regarding spiritualism, it might ironically turn out that the word “I” you use extensively to reclaim your spirituality is the one thing that’s keeping you away from it.

If a human being is a deterministic system, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the entire universe is also a deterministic system?

This would imply that if someone knew the exact current state of the universe, he/she would know the exact state of the universe in any given point in time. This first person to formulate this idea was Pierre-Simon Laplace so this hypothetical all-knowing creature was later given a name – Laplace’s demon.

Quantum physics deals with the smallest known building blocks of the universe - quarks. Oddly enough, nondeterminism turned out to be not only accepted but an integral part of this science. Werner Heisenberg was the one who has proven that it is physically impossible to determine both exact position and speed of a quark. This is known as the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and as Steven Hawking put it: “It is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world”. Since these particles are the fiber from which everything is built, uncertainty principle is, in a way, applicable to the entire universe.

There is no agreement in the scientific community as to what is really going on in the microscopic world of quantum mechanics. There is agreement with the results of quantum experiments and observations. The problem comes when those results are interpreted. (Herbet, 1985.)

Quantum physics went on and discovered that not only is the world fundamentally nondeterministic, but also that the observation of quantum-scaled experiments affects the results of those same experiments.

My study of quantum physics made me realize that it is a psychological science as well as a physical one. This realization followed from the fact that the observer had a dramatic effect, as a result of choosing what to look for, on the results of his observations. (Wolf, 1984.)

The world of quantum physics in a large part still remains a mystery. One thing we can be sure of is that on a certain level our world is interconnected in such a way that we cannot anymore perceive reality as a set of separate objects interacting in accordance with a bunch of strictly predefined laws. Quantum physics reintroduces nondeterminism in human understanding of nature, at least for time being. Curious thing is that this nondeterminism takes place on a tiny scale and seems to have a very limited (if any) effect on a “normal” scale events and objects. Nevertheless, if humans wish to pursue their identity of self-conscious, spiritual beings, this is where they should look for clues. If they possess any nondeterminism in them, this is where it’s coming from. How would that be possible? As we said, quantum effects are limited to the atomic scale and we as humans are operating on a scale where quantum random glitches have no influence.

Well, I guess what we would need is sort of an amplifier that can transform a tiny quirk into an avalanche of consequential events. Something like this.

A tiny push in the beginning managed to produce a drastic outcome. It wouldn’t have been possible if the entire machinery hadn’t been set up the way it was. Each of the machine's parts is very unstable and sensitive to any kind of stimulation.

As you might have assumed, we already possess such a device. It is the human brain. Or any brain for that matter, only the human brain is the most sensitive of all we have encountered. It operates by transmitting information using electric charges and its neurons therefore must be pretty sensitive to the random glitches occurring on the electron level.

Like science has taught us so many times before: “If it’s nondeterministic, we are not looking at the whole picture.” We can abstract the quantum level nondeterminism as the influence of another dimension(s) that are not a part of our space-time continuum on the ones that are observable to us. If we wanted to be poetic, we could say that these “random” glitches are in fact messages from that other dimension. It is clear that these messages are happening everywhere across the universe, only we (life forms, especially humans) are capable of amplifying their effect on the observable dimensions. Like the complex machine from the video above amplified a slight push of a metallic wheel into something much more noticeable.

Like I mentioned before, the word “I” might become a stumble stone in your quest for spirituality. It is difficult to assign a meaning to that word if you start seeing yourself as a “mere” amplifier. Quotation marks on “mere” imply that everyone should still prefer to be a amplifier instead of a guy banging on his chest quite deterministically: “I am a master of my own destiny!”

The shift in the perspective causes you to see that the life is living through you and not that you are living a life. Death no longer seems to be a big deal. If life is not mine, then I cannot lose it. Life will always be the same across the universe and in some way I will always be a part of it.

Looking at other people as "portals" to other dimensions also changes both your attitude towards strangers and your current relationships. Suddenly you feel privileged to sit in the bus next to another person instead in the empty section. Even if the person is an ugly, fat, sweaty, homeless guy. Because you know that he is essentially same as you, a self-conscious stream of unobservable life into our observable universe.

Erasmus student exchange in Porto part 2

It has been more than two months since I wrote my last report. Life started rolling on in it's normal way. Only while writing this blog I regain the feeling that nothing is actually normal. Everything is refreshingly different from home, but it was due time for me to get used to it.
I still live alone in two-bed room, but I was told that one student is coming in June to the residence and that they will put him with me in the room.
One piece of information: the protocol for downloading torrents is blocked from university network. I tried a lot of workaround, and managed to get some download but it was very rare and the speed was awful.

Life is Porto is very relaxed. People here are immune to stress. Whether it is a positive or a negative one, they don't tolerate it. Everything can wait. That is most evident in Portuguese administration. I have three friends already complaining how Portuguese administration managed to make their lives very complicated. Two friends waited for several months for their grants to be paid in full. This could all be some coincidence if I didn't personally know a girl who is also on exchange and works in the International Office at the Rectorate of University of Porto. She explained to me in details how student e-mails stay unread for several days and unanswered for several weeks without any cause other than the people there don't feel like working.


FC Porto
(recapture your love for football)
Porto's finest football team enjoys a great fame and united support of all its citizens. And rightfully so, considering that despite Benfica (Lisbon) having better predispositions for football success (bigger city, better financial background), Porto still year after year demonstrates domination not only in Portugal but also in European championships. I've actually met Slovakian students on Erasmus that have been living here for an entire year. They started visiting Porto home matches within months after they moved here and they were really passionate about it.

Futsal is also very popular in Porto. For me it is actually one of rare occasions to speak and interact with Portuguese people over longer period of time. Neighbourhood's futsal playground is the place where I learnt most of the Portuguese language I speak.

In May, there is a traditional celebration called Queima das Fitas which lasts one week. All students walk around the town yelling and wearing black harry potter outfits with funny cylinder hats and sticks in various colours. They are often kicking each other on the head with a stick, so probably the purpose the hats is also to protect the head. Only the senior students who are finishing college get hit on the head because it is actually something like a knighting ceremony here. Only difference is that here everyone is drunk. In Matosinhos there is a big area surrounded by fences, where concerts are being held all week. Inside that area, every faculty has its own stand where they sell alcohol. Every stand has its own theme and its own music. Each year, a lot of even internationally famous singers, DJs and music groups make an appearence on this annual Portuguese festival.

Sea is very cold. Temperature of the sea can go up to 18°C. Higher than that maybe in extremely rare occasions. Surfing is very popular in Porto. For Erasmus students there is a special discount on surfing courses and a lot of students use it. I went surfing only once and it was great. I always forget to go to ESN office to apply for some more surfing classes.

Another great thing about Porto is that it's very well connected to other European cities via low-cost flights. RyanAir, Transavia, and probably many other companies travel to Porto. It is normal to find a return flight to Barcelona, Madrid, Paris for no more than 30€.

Food here is slightly different than what I was used to. Portuguese people eat a lot of fish especially Bachalau. They have a lot of different recipes for this fish and it is considered traditional food here. Other characterstic dish is Francesinha. I tried it in couple of places and the taste was very different, so if you don't like it the first time, you should try some other place, every restaurant has different recipe. Near the river, there is one restaurant called "Verso em Pedra" which has a special "Mega Francesinha" in the offer. This is sort of a competition, because whoever successfully eats a mega francesinha alone within one hour, recieves a prize: an electric guitar. I forgot the brand of the guitar but I know it is very high quality. It should be, because nobody has ever won the prize. I would say it's close to impossible because I actually saw that meal. They say it's 3kg, but i think it's even more. The price of mega francesinha is 35€ so it could be a good idea to order it regardless of the competition for 7 or more people to eat. A normal meal to order if you are hungry and don't want to experiment much is "prego em prato". That's a steak with egg and potatoes. Pastel de nata is my desert of choice. It's so creamy and delicious and you can buy it almost anywhere, including in supermarkets.

Camera Toshiba Camileo P10 - "MEMORY FULL" Problem

I was using the camera for several months with no problems when suddenly after a few weeks of inactivity I tried to use it and I couldn't take pictures anymore - the camera reports "memory full".
I took out the memory card, plugged it into my laptop and deleted all pictures and videos, put it back into the camera and still the same message appeared even though there is no picture nor videos on the memory card.

FIXED:
All I did:
1) extract the memory card
2) put the camera on charging (to recharge the battery)
         -> try to take pictures while the camera is charging without memory card, this should work
3) when it's fully charged, put the memory card back in and everything should be ok