6*9

Google's answer to life the universe and everything.

It is meant to be.

More puzzles!

Thanks to grande, this has taken up a good amount of my time last night and today. So now that I've completed all the grow puzzles, I'm going to get some useful work done. I hope it wastes as much of your time as it did of mine :).

Guess what I discovered today... II

Today I didn't discover a new button on my laptop, but I discovered my cat under my desk when it started purring. And my cat's Russian name means thumbtack, which is also a homonym for button...

Guess what I discovered today...

...a new button on my laptop, well technically it's probably a switch. It was exciting. It turns on and off all wireless radio signals!

What's in a name? II

The Olgas - Mountains in Northern Territory, Australia.

Solid like a rock.

It was sooo nice and warm in Thailand...

That even J.R. wore shorts (or at least on one occasion!)



I've spent all day dreaming of the Thai weather, since it's yet another gray, rainy day in Ithaca. 

Archers and knights and wizards, Oh My!

Check out our graphics for Lambda-Craft (some of them courtesy of War Craft 2). This is just a mock up and not the actual GUI, which is currently under construction. And we'll probably make them bigger, but they're still pretty awesome!

Puzzles!

Today I'm buried in work. This is probably due to the fact that I spent literally all of yesterday, from 11am Saturday morning to 1:00am Sunday night, on the Engineering Quad participating in the Microsoft Puzzle Challenge! (Beware: if you value your time and like puzzles, you probably shouldn't click on the link.) It was a lot of fun, though 3 of the 4 people on my team (myself included) have never done this before so it took us a long time to get the hang of it, but we warmed up towards the end. In any case, it's 11:30pm on a Sunday night, I have 2 problem sets due tomorrow morning so I have to go and finish those...

Maybe next year

Maybe next year, if I pass the naturalization interview that is, I'll be allowed to vote. But for now, I can enjoy the simple freedoms of living in the US like seeing 'Borat' in movie theaters.
So all you Americans with your blue passports, would you be able to answer the interview questions today? I'm just kidding, of course you could, I don't let stupid people read my blog. But let me tell you I remember learning about these topics in middle school and high school, but the time to access the answers to some of the question from the depths of my brain probably exceeds the patience of the interviewer. Though, I'm proud to say that I've got the answer to all the flag questions down!

• What are the colors of our flag?
• What do the stars on the flag mean?
• How many stars are there on our flag?
• What color are the stars on our flag?
• How many stripes are there on our flag?
• What do the stripes on the flag represent?
• What colors are the stripes on the flag?

Some questions are very philosophical. For example what would you answer to: "What is the Constitution?" Apparently, it's simply "the supreme law of the land". Probably not how I would have answered. Or what about: "Where does freedom of speech come from?" I need to ponder that one for a while...

Some of the questions are trick questions, like "How many times may a Senator or Congressman be re-elected?" Well take the upper limit of the life expectancy of humans and divide that by the number of years in a terms, that comes down to about .... 42?

And maybe this Thanksgiving over a filling Turkey dinner someone will finally explain to me why the pilgrims really came to America!

I haven't forgotten...

...about my blog, but honestly there's little to write about between classes, homework and yes, trying to get a job. But to catch everyone up to date, here are things I've been busy with this semester:

• countless interviews on campus and a few in NYC (another one coming up this Friday)

• thinking and talking about, but not actually implementing (yet), a secure bulletin board service that is highly available (i.e. many servers)

  • a lot of the talking has revolved around the most important feature of the system – its name. Specifically whether or not k will come up with a good acronym so that I'll consent to naming it O.L.G.A. So far he came up with: OnLine Guaranteed Availability. Our other candidate is Mythos.

• solving hard data structures and algorithms questions, including proving a problem is NP hard during an on campus interview.

• doing a little decision theory economics here and there, which made me realize how many CS terms and definitions I take for granted.

• working on the satellite, which so far has involved lots of meetings and lots of arguing about design.

• designing "LAMBDA-CRAFT!" - the final project for the class I'm TAing. Two armies, the Red and the Blue, each with an all powerful wizard that can freeze his opponents, archers that can shoot arrows and knights that ... well ... they just sort of ram into other army units. The point of the game is to capture the enemy wizard, where 'capture' means 'walk into'.

• this has also involved a lot of arguing, all in good spirit of course and mostly with the professor about how many types of army units we should have. Now I want to see how many people agree with me on this: from the point of view of the students, would you prefer one type of army unit (i.e. only archers or only knights) or both?

• I'll post some graphics when we have those.

• and finally, being sick for most of last week. The story goes like this:
• JR's mom: "Do you want to go see your newborn baby niece on Thursday?"
• JR: "No, O is going to be sick."
• A couple days later, surely enough I had a fever and conveniently enough for JR he was quarantined from seeing his niece.