TODO for 2008 - Revisited
Revisiting my 2008 to-do list: amateur radio license and Mt. Rainier are done, the Rubik's cube is down to 78 seconds, and McKinley, Half Dome, the balloon project, and a back flip are still ahead.
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Mt. Rainier Photos
My Rainier photos are online. I still haven't pulled the video off the memory cards. I ordered Final Cut Express, so I'm sure I'll love that learning curve. That's me on the left.
Factorial
I added factorial support to BigMath on a flight, trying to count the permutations of a 3x3x3 Rubik's cube. I got 19.313 trillion; Wikipedia says 43 quintillion. Turns out I was forgetting the orientations of the pieces.
How to Lose Seven Pounds in Seven Days While Eating Candy Bars
I'm back from Rainier, and I've taken several showers. I think the smell is almost gone. We all smelled a lot nasty at the end of the week. A lot. Pictures later.
BigMath
More candidates than I'd expect show up to interviews with no sample code to share; it was all proprietary. The code I gave for my own interview was BigMath, now 4th on Google. Here are the randomized arithmetic tests and timings.
Free Rice
There's a national crisis nobody is addressing: freerice.com. I ran the numbers. At roughly 24 cents of donated rice per hour against minimum wage, you'd do more good shoveling your neighbor's driveway.
Days Until....
Nine days until Rainier, seventy-four until McKinley, one hundred twenty-seven until Half Dome. I'm thinking about crevasse rescue, how to shave for a month without hot water, and whether q-tips have been quietly ruining my ears.
Florida
I think Google Maps is trying to find the geometric center of the Florida-shaped polygon, maybe? I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm switching back to MapQuest. 1998, here I come.
Pining for the Fjords
A Monty Python parrot sketch, reworked for the PC store: a man returns BeOS half an hour after buying it, insisting it's dead. No no, says the clerk, it's not dead, it's pining for the fjords. Beautiful boot time.
Consolation
Nothing consoles like a box of mountaineering gear in the mail. Snowshoes with re-designed bindings (does that mean they messed up the first time?), carabiners, booties, a Petzl helmet, and mitts marketed as absolute zero.