An Experiment in Bloggery

From the people who brought us Who Owns The Fish? comes a new logic puzzle, School of Government. I just ran across this today, and the answer deadline is tomorrow, so that was cutting it a little close, but with a pen and a pad of paper I think I’ve solved it. And no, I’m not going to give you the solution (like I did last time). Go solve it on your own.

I ran across a link on SvN to an interesting logic puzzle called Whose Fish?. It purports to be a logic puzzle created by Albert Einstein, and claims Einstein said 98% of the population would not be able to solve it. So naturally, I was intrigued.

The only problem was, the logic matrix for the puzzle doesn’t fit on a single piece of paper, and I don’t have Excel installed. So what did I do? I wrote a CGI script in Ruby that generated a logic matrix using a table of checkboxes, and I wrote some accompanying JavaScript to make it easier to use. Go try it!

If you don’t want to solve the puzzle yourself, feel free to check out some of my steps. Just please, don’t submit this as your own answer. If you’re going to submit an answer, do the work yourself. So anyway, here are some of my steps:

1. Step
2. Step
3. Step
4. Step
5. Step
6. Step
7. Step
8. Step
9. Step

And here’s the final solution.

I finally saw The Meaning of Life, and it was a disappointment. The songs were great, especially the Galaxy song, but the rest was mediocre. I mean, sure, some bits were good, like the bit at the beginning about the Roman Catholic family and the Protestants, but the rest was just blah. It sure was a far cry from the rest of the movies.

I guess tomorrow I’m going to have to go watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail to restore my faith in Monty Python.

I just realized, I referenced my new job when talking about The Matchmaker, but I never actually talked about the job itself.

For those not in the know, I’m currently taking a year off from school. I left halfway through Sophomore year, and I’m planning on going back this January. In the past 6 months I’ve been looking for a job, but unfortunately nobody wants to hire somebody for less than a year for any real job, so I finally gave up and got a job as a waiter at the Colonial Inn. And then I quit 2 weeks later, because the job was so terrible.

So anyway, about a week and a half ago, my brother’s friend Jessie asked me if I wanted a job - turns out his mother works for a company called InkTec Zone and was looking to hire somebody, and my brother told her I was jobless. So that’s what I’m doing now. InkTec Zone is a company that takes empty printer ink cartridges and refills them for you while you wait (or you can drop them off and pick them up later). We also sell remanufactured ink cartridges and toner cartridges (although we can’t refill toner). It’s a pretty nice job - my coworkers are nice and the work isn’t bad. The company’s only been in existence for a few months; only one store exists yet, so the CEO works about 20 feet away from the storefront, which is neat. This means that we’re not too popular yet, but word is spreading as more and more people are made aware of the company. And it’s a good thing, too, because re-using ink cartridges is far better for the environment and for your wallet (it costs about half as much as a new one) than tossing it and buying another one. And we also recycle cartridges (both ink and toner) that can’t be refilled.

InkTec Zone is in Central Square in Cambridge, so if you need printer ink and you’re nearby, come check us out!

Well, I’m exhausted. I just recently got back from the first full run of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. This is the summer play being done by the Sudbury Savoyards. Today was my only rehearsal before the show, because it opens friday and I can’t make it to rehearsal tomorrow or wednesday (due to my job). But the good news is that since I’m stage crew, all I have to do is set changes between acts (4 acts, the entire set changes each time, so it’s a reasonably large job), which means the stage crew chief and stage manager need to know what’s going on, but I don’t. All I have to do is move stuff. But it’s all fun.

The last show the Savoyards did was The Mikado. I was stage crew in that too, and my job (after helping with build and lighting and everything) was basically to open and close two sliding doors while staying out of sight, which meant wearing long-sleeve black shirt, black gloves, and hiding behind a black scrim. I also got to run a nifty pulley system that raised and lowered 2 banners quickly, but that wasn’t my main job. That show was a lot of fun, and I’m hoping this one will be just as enjoyable.

Safari 1.3 has a nasty bug that causes it to crash under certain circumstances dealing with content collapsing. This is especially nasty because it directly affects one of the best features of PithHelmet. Since Dave Hyatt has posted an entry asking for regressions from Safari 1.2 to Safari 1.3, and since I haven’t seen any reply there by Mike Solomon (author of PithHelmet), I thought I’d bring it up here. I’m not going to repeat the bug here, instead, I’ll just link to to the page Mike Solomon posted about it.

So, Dave Hyatt, if you’re reading this, go check out this page.

So I was checking out the WWDC Events page and I noticed something interesting. On that page is a bunch of pictures of last year’s WWDC, and I happen to be in one of them. Unfortunately, you can’t see my face, and the pictures aren’t attributed. Oh well, it’s still pretty damn cool.

See if you can guess which one I am.

Well, my computer’s going in tomorrow for repairs. There’s 2 things wrong:

1. The right speaker is dead.

2. The hard drive started beeping when I installed Tiger on the second partition.

A couple hours ago I imaged my hard drive onto an external FW drive and I’m now running off of that. Hopefully I can survive the few days while my laptop is in for repairs.

Uhh, oops, I just inadvertently got linked from Applegeeks (which is a totally kickass webcomic) because I emailed Hawk this link. Hopefully the few of you who show up here aren’t too turned off by the fairly blah style and low update rate of this blog. And assuming you’re Mac users (the comic is Applegeeks) and decide to visit the software section of my web presence, I hope you aren’t turned off by its even more horrendous site layout (see previous post if you want to help!).

Anyway, if you’re one of the few who actually read this blog without visiting from outside links, then you really should head on over and read this poem. It’s pretty amusing.

It has come to my attention that, despite my last post, I’m still extremely lazy. I’m definitely going to try to fix that and blog more often.

Anyway, this blog entry is mostly just a test of the new Growl functionality in ecto 2.0 beta. I think it’s pretty spiffy. It sends a Growl notification each time it fetches the list of posts from the server and each time you submit a new blog entry.

And to finish it up, here’s what I’m currently listening to in iTunes: Screens of Memory by Philip Glass from 1000 Airplanes on the Roof.