Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

Firstly, fewer than 500,000 people watched Eurovision! tsk, to all those ppl who were watching the mining disaster interview, you don't know what you missed :p ...but, if you want to find out, I now have the CD :) - On the topic of music, here's the answers from the earlier quiz (sorry for when the songs temporarily disappeared :p) ONE POINT (easier) 4. 'Love, just don't stare', he used to say to me, every Sunday morning (Dream Theater, Awake) 6. You held my hand and walked me home, I know (Avril Lavigne, Don't Tell me) 8. Lord unchain my hands - let me sing inside the crowded trams. (The Cat Empire, The Crowd) 1. And I'd give up forever to touch you - Iris, Goo Goo dolls (Bodie) 2. I looked away, then I looked back at you. - Avril Lavigne, Fall to Pieces (JAmes) 3. So we've put an end to it this time. I'm no longer yours, and you're no longer mine. - Missy Higgins, Ten Days (Jack) 5. Hast Du etwas Zeit fuer mich, Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Di...

It's that time of year again! Eurovision finals are being televised, anyone who's not doing anything - I recommend you watch them! Sure, the songs aren't great, the bands aren't great, the dancing is appalling...but, it's Eurovision, what other reasons do you need? Although I already know who wins {curse you, MSN messenger, having it in the news thing before it's televised!}, after watching the semi it's certainly worth it :) In addition - yesterday, I was watching a game where one team was trying to minimise the possession of the other, by utilising open spaces and passing it around the back to free players, slowly pushing forwards and taking opportunities in advancing by using precision passes. Sounds like (real) football, right? Well, the suprise was, it was AFL! Richmond v Adelaide, the former winning using the (real) football-style tactics to beat a team that was considered unbeatable in that match :p - it was certainly a change from the usual kick-long...

A few quick updates: 1) The person I sort-of knew was the first out of Big Brother :p (hopefully this means the rest of my family will stop watching it...) 2) Blog Watcher has hit 5000 page loads! And they're not all me! -thanks to all the members - now uni has slowed down, I might be updating it again 3) TopCoder open has just finished, congrats to Petr (algo), Pops (design) & sindu (devel). I also got asked to do a design (yes, they *asked* me personally :D) and was one of two submitters, so fingers crossed i score over 75. 4) Happy 21st to Tom ! I'm not sure when the actual day is, but the night was fun :) Now, for your literary pleasure, see if you recognise this: "This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent v...

looks like my vow to post a better summary won't be followed up, sorry - needless to say, it was fun, but *very* busy, and for most, I feel hearing about me hitting a keyboard won't be all that interesting ;) Anyhow, I'm taking this opportunity to call Today Tonight out on one of its (many) bad stories, not only was this not news-worthy, it was a shameless self-promotion, and a good example why I don't watch it - except when someone says: "look at this stupid story", which is how I found myself watching it today. To set the scene, TT were reporting on their wonderful 10c-per-litre discount they gave in conjunction with a two local petrol stations (i.e. not run by the "Big Corporations" - like Shell, BP, Mobil...). As it happens, TT advertised this fact on their show earlier last week, to make sure many people turned up to take advantage of the offers. Many people did (of course they did, it's about a 9% saving!) which, apparently, shows how hard...

Ok, I know I'm a few weeks delayed from others - being out of the country tends to do that to you - but as promised, here's my version of the guess-the-lyrics game. And remember - No google! ONE POINT (easier) 4. 'Love, just don't stare', he used to say to me, every Sunday morning. 6. You held my hand and walked me home, I know. 8. Lord unchain my hands - let me sing inside the crowded trams. 1. And I'd give up forever to touch you - Iris, Goo Goo dolls (Bodie) 2. I looked away, then I looked back at you. - Avril Lavigne, Fall to Pieces (JAmes) 3. So we've put an end to it this time. I'm no longer yours, and you're no longer mine. - Missy Higgins, Ten Days (Jack) 5. Hast Du etwas Zeit fuer mich, Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich - Nena, 99 Luftballons (Bodie) 7. Here comes johnny singing oldies, goldies - Be-bop-a-lua, baby what I say. - Walk of Life, Dire Straits (Bodie) 9. There is freedom within, there is freedom without - Crowded House, Don...

Howdy, partners! Hope y'all had a boot-scooting time while this here cowboy was off yonder in texas, yehaw! Sorry, had to get that out of my system. If you're wondering, people don't actually sound like that in texas, and most don't have 'texan' accents as such - still, it's a nice place to go, San Antonio especially, if you're into that civil war history side of things. I however was there for a rather different reason - 3 days of almost non-stop coding! Now, I'm extremely jetlagged, and have been trying to work out of it by staying up when my body tells me to sleep, so my coherence levels are mighty low - for now, I'll just say i had a smashing time, hopefully will get the chance to go again in the next few years :) I managed to survive the Sydney-LA flight, even though that's the same path as the LOST plane (I think), and I also managed to survive the as-big-as-texas meal sizes - their smallest coffee is 'tall', which is our bigges...

Currently I'm using a shared network connection, so will be pretty quick but - They had a string orchestra playing at the opening ceremony! Like, a whole orchestra playing just for us. Cool :p - although, now that one day has finished, it's a pity there's only two actual days left, it's going rather quickly. Texan / Mexican food is pretty nice, had plenty of local flavours already. I seem to not be affected by jetlag, though the others are still feeling tired at some random times, hopefully we'll all be ok by wednesday morning. Also, for those interested who are awake at midnight wednesday night, there should be a scoreboard put up around here: http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/default.htm when the final actually starts, so if ur up keep a look out for "Adelaide: KQ". Tomorrow is the "ICPC Java Challenge" - it seems to be some interactive AI bot-writing thing, we get toi find out what game is being played tomorrow, then get 3 hrs full on to writ...

In about 5 hrs i have to be awake - gotta love early-morning 6am flights :D - At least I'll get to use the new airport though, should be interesting. As you may know, I'm soon to be heading off to the United States to compete in the ACM ICPC world finals. 80 teams of 3 contestants, 5 hrs of contest, 10 questions, *fingers crossed*. I just foind out that apparently San Antonio (yes, rather like Simon Anthony) has a 'Volcanic Ash Advisory' - rather odd, I didn't know it was in volcano country. Last time I went to US was so long ago that, as I was leaving, and our bags were getting fully scanned by security (it was '03, so after 9/11), one of the people pulled out my usb mp3 stick, and asked me what it was. "It's an mp3 player, like a portable CD player with no moving parts" - "Oh, okay, I've never heard of them". Oh how times have changed :p On the topic of songs, I'm not yet jumping on the BandWagon of post-20-song-starts, as I...

That's odd.... It's 2am now....i could've swarn it was 2am an hour ago... Enjoy the extra hour everyone, I'll have an actual update soon! ;)

Results are out - ended up coming 55th. So, barring any major incident {like...Outbreak of the Asian flu virus in Poland and Russia} causing 7 contestants to not be able to attend, looks like I *just* missed out. Turns out if I had submitted Q1 a bit faster {like...a minute or so} I would've made it, and I knew a solution for Q2 it was just a slow one. However, I was glad I managed to get a working {albeit slow} solution, so that was nice :) And now my rating has jumped above 2200, which means i am "red", or everywhere my name appears it's in red. Red is the highest you can get to, and I think i'm the 4th australian to do so, which is pretty cool - just gotta try and stay there :D However, with the commonwealth games on, and AFL/NRL starting, I had to wonder: why is it that the average man-in-the-street could name the top 50 or so football players from their state, yet the #1 programming in the whole country, who happens to be also in the top 10 in the world, is v...

Sorry...news just in - got through the round of 200 for the TopCoder open, now I'm in the final 100, and next thursday get a shot at the top 48 who get to go to Las Vegas!! Oh...and the hrm...nice prize money associated with it ;) Anyway, I said I'd actually say something blog-ish this time, so here goes: Recently, I heard about a Law tute which happened at Adelaide uni :: it was a group exercise, the tute was split up into smaller groups of people, and given 20 mins to work on a problem, to see how they interacted with eachother - sounds ok so far. Trouble is...the problem was the well-known logic puzzle of the Fox, goose and bag of beans (or whatever combination of objects you like...i think it was fox/duck/grain in this case. Now, being a well known puzzle with a simple solution {at every stage, you've only got one move which is not pointless or illegal, except one where you have two choices *both* of which lead to a solution} I wouldn't have thought it unusual for ...

Quick update - i know i've been pretty lax of late, hopefully an interesting update will be coming soon. Anyway, this is just an announcement that Blog Watcher v1.3 is now in Beta :: that is, I've made all the changes I was hoping to, now it's just a matter of finding any unwanted behaviour. So, enjoy the new changes, play around with it, tell your friends, whatever :p However, news is that two contests have started at blogwatcher! #1) Bug Watcher: To encourage the finding of bugs, a Bug Watcher list has been set up, featuring the names of all the people who have found bugs in the site. If you find a bug you think needs fixing, send it to me at my gmail account, and I'll update the list. Winner will be determined...some time...and win...something. Note that a 'bug' in this case is unexpected behaviour, not just something you think I should add that I've been too lazy to add so far. #2) Stylist: The style sheet for Blog Watcher is very nice {kudos to Dale and...

Lessons learned this week: 1) Latte Iceshakes are very nice on a hot day, esp. if you want to stay awake and 2) Playing tennis for an hour in heat, then staying up to program in a contest at 3:30am til 7am, then playing soccer from 3pm that day is kinda tiring...esp. if you're unfit :D Hope everyone is enjoying being back at uni / school / work / whatever - 12 contact hours per week for me, no days off, and about 6 or so un-timetabled prac hours, but i can even do them from home so it's not too bad. This is mainly a programming-related post to say that blogwatcher is still going through its changes, but much closer to a state I'm happy with. Once I do some bug fixes, and remove the 'VIEW' buttons and make clicking on the links update the database, I'll probably take it out out of update-mode and v1.3 will be complete. Hopefully with the improvements I'll be able to release it to more people and the server will still cope. In other news, looks like I just mi...

Sorry I couldn't think up a nice blog title...it's late and I've had a lot of caffeine... Why am I staying up? Well, there's a programming contest tonight {actually...2am tomorrow morning}, with money as prizes, so I figured I'd stay up. While biding my time until then, and watching the winter olympics, I figured I should add to the ideas I said I'd post before. Here's two more: 0) Callable contacts list (CCL): This idea occurred earlier today when I forgot my phone when going into town. Simple really - you set up a contact list online, which stores the numbers that you have on your phone (name-number pairs). If you find yourself without your phone, you can still call people, by calling the CCL number, selecting which of your contacts you want to call {by using the standard 0-9*#, buttons}, and you get redirected through to them, for a small fee. 1) Cigarette Buy-back scheme: The major problem with smoking is all the health problems you can get - another ...

Australia won a winter olympics gold! yaaay! What's more, it's by a good-looking, quiet-spoken IT millionare :D Due to the recent award ceremonies around the globe, I've decided to add to my list of once-off awards, by adding some musical ones: Complete-Ripoff Award for abuse of reusing other people's tunes: Rogue Traders (Vodoo Child, taking from Pump It Up) tied with... Rogue Traders (Watching You, taking from My Sharona) I'm-Sure-I've-Heard-That-Before Award for abuse of musical technique: Advertising Space (Robbie Williams - enough of the falling bass already!) tied with... James Blunt (any song... - please, try to throw in a chord other than 1,2,4,5,6) Play-It-Again-Sam Award for blatant, pointless lyric repetition: Goodbye My Lover (James Blunt - "I'm so hollow, I'm so hollow, I'm so.." - ALRIGHT we get it) All These Things That I've Done (The Killers - "I've got a soul but I'm not a soldier" ... no, repeating a ...

Firstly, I've been rather busy recently, working on Java designs for the 2006 TopCoder Open , which runs for 5 weeks and finishes two thursdays from now. Turns out last week I my design won it's component, so the 10 points helps push me higher on the scoreboard, as well as earning a nice reward for my efforts :) Two more weeks of work, then a week of waiting and results should be out :D Second - recently there has been much turmoil and debate overseas over the publishing of certain cartoons , and the response that they brought. Ok, here's my reasoning: (the numbers are approximations, but the maths is still the same): There are 6 billion people in the world. Of all the belief systems, the one with the most followrs has 1 billion or so. This means that at least FIVE BILLION people believe in the wrong explanation for a pretty fundamental thing, which makes religion seem like the biggest con ever. Sure, you can believe what you want, but it makes no sense to force it on other...

Just thought I'd share with you the first ever winner of the "Grab a calculator" award: Recently in the mail I received a letter from a local MP (Isobel Redmond, for those curious) which contained the following: "It is certainly true that parliament usually only site for about 80 days each year. But even as a backbencher parliamentary sittings onlr represented about 30% of my job - ....... - add to that four Shadow Portfolios ... and the parliamentary sittings are probably only around 20% of my job, possibly less" Ok, so not only does it contitute both 20% AND 30% of her job simultaneously, I guess in a state of quantum uncertainty, but assuming that the 80 days are full days of work, then she works for 400 days a year, 'possibly'! Wow, that's some hard working politician - I want access to their time machine :) Back to work for me (TCO component design...), it's coming along ok, and the other news is that I've uploaded another song (heroes)...

Yes, it's that time of year again - final of the Australian Open, time to be entertained by Federer as he wins again :) - It's good to see that Mauresmo has won her first slam, even though the situation was rather Bradbury-esque (as in the skater, not the writer). Holidays have FINALLY started :D - time to start doing all those things I've been putting off...well, that and the TopCoder Open for 2006 has started - 5 weeks of designing :p - Ah, chances of me getting through to the final is very low, but as long as I pass review 3 times I'll be happy :D Ooh, another idea that probably won't be made but should: RFID driveway gates! I don't have a gate across my driveway, but I'm sure people who do could get tired of having to get out of the car to open & close them all the time...so why not get the gate to do it automagically? Easy done - put an RFID tag in the back & front of your car (or, any car you want to be able to get through the gate), such that ...

Yes! I now am in possession of a KEYBOARD :D :D - Thanks very much to Bodie for providing the keybaord, and his dad for fixing it. Sooooo fun, 100 different instrument sounds plus 30 drum beats and all these weird effects, surely will come handy when recording :) {in fact, a sample is at my music site - check the song "End of Story"} So nice to be able to record piano (or rock organ, or harmonica, or bagpipes, or.... :p). Oh, and the Boulevard of Broken dreams has randomly become popular again, reaching #69 in the soundclick charts, and getting about 5 plays a day :) On the other side of things, programming has been in full steam over the holidays, during our 'summer scholarship' = getting paid to come in most days and practice algorithm competitions. I think i'd prefer to have a bit more free time (missed out on beach soccer :( ) but it's nevertheless enjoyable and getting paid is nothing to sneeze at. Ooh, and on the computing front, I will also be spending...

Just a quick post...having watched the cricket this week and last, I've been wondering whether anyone else noticed the similarity: Andrew Symonds and Gorillaz :)