Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

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)...