12 Nov 2000 (updated 12 Nov 2000) »
life
Flew to Melbourne for a wedding. Travelled lightly – no baggage whatsoever. Mum freaked out about that.
Went shopping, bought a new suit and overcoat. Nice overcoat. Shame I live in Sydney where I will be able to wear it due to cold weather conditions about two or three times a year. Went to Mikasa and bought a nice wedding gift for Shaun & Rosemary.
Caught the garter. Parents don’t know yet, as I’ll never hear the end of it. The depressing thing about my last couple of weddings is the diminishing number of single women competing for the posey.
work
Work had a small geek rod-length check with a trivial maths problem. The trick is to write the smallest completely calculating and functional program to come up with the answer. Using simple algebra, it falls out in less than a few lines on a page, so that’s not an acceptable solution. It must calculate the answer.
What is the five-digit number in which the sum of the first two digits is one less than the third, the third double the fourth, the fourth double the last, the third the product of the fourth and fifth, the second five more than the first, and the first one-eighth the third and also one- fourth of the fourth?
Here’s my solution in JavaScript. The other guys got down and dirty with perl line noise and even a shell example:
% 16842
16482: Command not found
But that’s cheating, as they precalculated it.
flying
I hate getting up early to fly. I’m sleep deprived. I love flying. I like 747’s – they land just like a 400 tonne bricks shouldn’t. I don’t like 737’s – the Cessna 172 of the airline world.
My secret shame: I don’t like landings. They make me nervous and my heart goes afluttering during them, even in nice conditions. I’ve been flying all my life, at least two or three flights every year, and at the moment, it’s about 20-30 flights a year, which shits me as I don’t spend many weekends in my own bed. But I still get nervous during landings. I don’t know why. I fly FlightSim 2000 on my PC, and I’ve got landings down pat there, and I know what a good landing looks like in real life. I know all about fishing for the ground, and appreciate the true skills of the computers or pilots plonking those big babies on the ground in weather that gives me the willies, but I still find landing distressing. Oh well.
reading: Iain M Banks is a legend
Wooohoooo! mbp has the new Iain M. Banks book. That means that I have a chance of getting it as well! Excellent.
driving: mbp’s fang
The Sydney -> Batemans Bay -> Canberra -> Federal Highway – > M31 -> Sydney drive is an excellent little fang (it’s about 700 km all up from my place, and I’ve done it twice now). This drive can only be improved via going through the Royal National Park: 30 km twisty bits instead of the boring direct way. The mountain twisty bits on the road from Bateman’s Bay to Canberra is nearly as much fun as the best coast road in the world, the Great Ocean Road in Victoria (sorry, but the Pacific Coast Highway doesn’t cut it. It’s a very nice road, but the Great Ocean Road has views, is a fantastic drive in the right (sports*) car, and best of all, you can occasionally be the only driver around if you drive early or late.
* sports car == one that turns as directed and brakes that work because there are hundreds of bends and it’s over 130 km of (very) twisty bits. Bonus: acceleration. Coming out of a 25 km/h hairpin and opening the throttle before slamming on the brakes for the next 35 km/h decreasing radius sweeper is the most fun. US floaty mobiles like Probe et al or muscle cars (forward direction only 🙂 don’t cut it in this type of drive. Something nice and light, fast, responsive. A friend of mine’s Audi A4 quattro was the most hairraising drive I’ve ever done on the Great Ocean drive. He kept on taking 35 km/h corners at 70-80 km/h. It’s amazing how adhesive Geoff’s car was. I was bruised from that drive. Russ Cooper shared this particular hoon, so if you ever meet Russ, ask him about it.
Leave a Reply