corollary

I’m a sucker

I have a Twitter identity: I am mn200, meaning that you can follow twitters of mine by looking at the web-page, or by setting up an appropriate client. (On the Mac, I’m trying Twitterrific.)

Stair-climbing

As I virtuously climbed the stairs back to my office this lunchtime, and even more virtuously watched someone else go for the lifts, I realised that mine has been a life of easy virtue: I have never had any long-term job on anything higher than the first floor of a building.

Student job at Ministry of Commerce (1990–1994):

Ground floor

PhD at the University of Cambridge (1994–1998):

First floor

Post-doc at the University of Cambridge (1998–2002):

First floor (in the Bill Gates building)

Current NICTA job, in RSISE building (2003–2007):

Ground floor and first floor

Current NICTA job, in London Circuit building (2008–)

First floor

Exceptions: one month working for Inmarsat in London (quite high up), and roughly six months enrolled as a Masters student at VUW (second floor). With Inmarsat, I took the lift. At VUW, I took the stairs.

God I hate computers

I am attempting to install Windows on a partition of my Macbook Pro laptop. It’s turning into a real hair-pulling-out experience. My current task is to burn a copy of my Windows installation disk, because some opinion on the web has it that the optical drive doesn’t read Microsoft’s media very well. (This did seem to be the case just attempting to read the README files on the disk.)

But now I have a disk image ready to burn, and the drive is having fits over the blank CDROM I just put in it. I’ll try a blank DVD instead. That’s better I think: I guess my drive is getting picky about everything it’s doing. (And don’t get me started on getting Macs to eject things.)

With a disc it’s burnt itself, I’m hoping that the Windows installation process won’t get its knickers in such a knot.

But! What has really been exercising me is the general inadequacy of the Web as a reference vehicle. If you do a Google search on your problem, you will in all likelihood be led into a deep thicket of web-fora. If only the Web had somehow kept Usenet alive, so that there would be one good source for all this sort of discussion instead of zillions of little ones. In this brave new world, one just has to hope that Google’s algorithms for assessing the worth of the pages it finds are up to scratch and taking you to web-pages with answers that aren’t completely bogus.

My new disk image is just about burnt, so I will bring this entry to a close and cross fingers, toes and any other extremities I can find.

Currently engaging us...

Bored with normal sudoku? I recommend the killer sudoku variant. There’s a nice page of daily puzzles available at killersudokuonline.com.

I have also written a cheat sheet for the puzzle, which you might find helpful.

And if you want something really different, you could try the Masyu (ましゅ) puzzle. It’s a bit harder to find these on the web (I think this is because the puzzles have to be hand-made.)

(Digression:) For some reason the Anglicisation of the puzzle name has gone for the accurate but misleading masyu. You should actually pronounce this mashu. (End Digression).

There are some samples here.

A Realtime Election Prediction Widget

The attached is the Intrade prediction market’s current view of the US election.