With My Eyes

25 Horses, 5 lanes, no clock, top 5 (not 3)

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:20:00 +0000

This is a logic problem I got from BruteForce.

The idea is that you have 25 horses, a 5 lane track, no timer, and want to find the fastest 5 horses. How many races can you do it in?

NOTE THAT THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM WANTED ALL 5 IN ORDER, AND THIS WAY JUST GIVES THE FASTEST 5 POSSIBLY OUT OF ORDER AND NEEDS A 9TH RACE TO ORDER THEM PROPERLY.

I stayed up all night once to come up with an 8, and thought i did, but in the morning realized that I had made a mistake. BruteForce found a description of a solution for 8. It was on the same track as me, but he didn't make the mistake I did. I take no credit.

Anyhow, here's the write-up so it's a little more visual and easier to parse than the text answer he found.

You start by running 6 races. 5 races let every horse run, and the 6th is the winner's race. You're left with:

Note that "1" is clearly the fastest horse, since he was never beaten, and we have some information about every horse relative to at least one other horse. We can also remove some as hopeless, since they're too far back along the known relative speed graph to possibly be in the top 5.

Let's remove those.

Now what? Well, if we want the top 3 in order we'd race 1.2, 1.3, 2, 2.2, and 3. That's 5 horses and the answer to the "top 3 in 7" problem. That's not what we want, though.

We're going to instead race 1.3, 2.2, 3, 3.2, and 4. Why? We know that at least one of 1.2 and 2 are in the top 5, and can figure that out based on the result of our race 7. Here's our race 7.

Let's take the easiest result case first. 3 and 4 are the top 2. 3 had to have beaten 4, since we knew it was already faster. 2 is therefore in the top 4 in second position, and the final horse is one of 1.2, 2.2, 3.2, 4.2, 5. That's 5 horses and we can just race them. Brown indicates horses to be in race 8.

Now let's look at a complicated result. 1.3 and 2.2 are the top 2, in that order. What do we know?

The key piece of information is that since 2.2 beat 3, 3 cannot be in the top 5. Why? For 3 to be in, 2 would have to be in, as well as 2.2. Both beat 3. But that also means, since 1.3 beat 2.2 that 1.2 is in there too. We ran out of places. The same logic rules out 2.3. Depending on the result of race 7, you might have to flip the graph but can then apply the same reasoning as it ends up being symmetrical.

So in this case, which is an example of the most complicated situations from race 7, ends up looking like this:

1.3 and 2.2 run again, and 1.2 doesn't need to run because it has to be in the finals anyhow. The top 3 from this race are in the top 5 with 1 and 1.2.

This was a much better problem than the "top 3" version.

Flame on!

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:06:00 +0000

I'm sure this won't be controversial at all.

Mississippi vs Vermont, and everyone else

The standout seems to be Utah. Go Mormons!

RIP Professor Moody

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:10:00 +0000

Nothing more to say about this, just that Professor Moody is no longer alive.

RIP

Grinching TSO

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:51:00 +0000

This is going to be a bunch of bitching, but it gets nicer at the end.

So last night we went to the Trans Siberian Orchestra Christmas concert at the Honda Center in Anaheim. I guess it's where the Ducks play, but I've never been there for any reason in the past. I shall never go there again, since even Cindy can't fit comfortably in the seats. You can imagine how ridiculous it was for me. Imagine the middle seat on an airplane if there were a wall where you typically put your feet under the seat in front of you. It's actually painful to sit there.

The concert started late, and they quickly informed us to stay until the end for a special treat that would only be happening in LA. I was wondering why they'd need to encourage people to stay when the show started.

For over an hour they played crappy Christmas music interspersed with someone telling a boring story about a bar and vodka in rhymed verse. By rhymed verse I mean that someone swapped out words from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and used the same meter. Instead of whoville we have a bar, too bad the writer wasn't hit by a car.

Anyhow, this all pretty much sucked with perhaps one decent song. I'm typically amazed at live music performances, since it's something that I can't do. Not this time, as at least half of the parts could be learned by a 10 year old in a week - assuming that they hadn't ever played before. A few hours if they had any experience at all. The hardest thing for them to learn would be the incessant head-banging/hair twirling that seemed to be the primary job requirement. Think "The Exorcist," but the heads spin more quickly, and the vomit is coming out of the instruments (except in the case of the singers).

But the simplicity and spinning heads of it wasn't the worst part. That's reserved for the constant applause whoring that the performers were carrying out. They'd randomly hold crappy notes for way too long and then do the "gimme some cheers" hand gesture to get people to acknowledge their misplaced feat. Even if they were as good as they seemed to think they were, I would have still been annoyed after an hour of that crap. Sustains that weren't meant to be are more annoying than a screaming baby.

So this stuff finally ends. Hardly anyone actually walked out yet, and they decided to have a sort of awards show for the members of the group. "Let's have a round of applause for the Orson Welles, nay James Earl Jones of our generation, the guy who wouldn't shut the fuck up between the songs!" And the crowd roared. And they roared for all of the performers in due time as they were so slowly announced.

So after this mini ceremony, the show actually got decent. Not great, but at least listenable. They played some new non-christmas stuff that sounded neat, and then played the famous songs that they're known for. There was far less speaking and singing during this "better" part of the show. If you ever buy one of their CDs to hear one of the neat songs (like Wizards in Winter, or something) and hear some random crappy singing on a track after or before the one you're wanting to listen to, realize that that is most of their music and that the cool songs are the outliers.

So anyhow, after a while of this better concert the owner comes out and says that our treat is ready for us. By now at least 10% of the people had walked out in disgust, so they missed out on the best part of the evening. Joe Walsh was there to play a few songs (obviously "Life's Been Good to Me So Far" or whatever it's called). He was definitely the best performer (despite being 62 or so) and I had more fun in his 15-20 minutes than in the rest of the concert combined. I felt that in a way I got my money's worth since he did so well.

Walking out, we heard others echoing our sentiments that the show definitely got better as the night went on, but it was about an hour and a half too long - the first hour and a half. As was told to Amadeus in the 1984 Best Picture of the same name: "Too many notes. Cut a few and it'll be perfect."

"Which few, your majesty?"

"The first 15,934."

But there was one man who loved the show, and he was sitting directly to my right. He was clapping in time with the music, and at one point he and I shared a moment together as only we were clapping. Later, he began slapping his hand against the cup holder to let us know how much he still liked it. Note that the cup holder is connected to the arm rest, and the arm rest is connected to his chair, and every fucking chair is connected to every other chair in the row. I looked at Cindy as we were shaken by quarter notes at 140bpm and she whispered "just let him have fun and enjoy it" to me while smiling at the atrocity we were stuck witnessing.

The only show that I liked less than this one so far in my life was some crappy art show in Laguna where actors posed to reenact famous paintings. By famous, I mean that if you looked them up you could figure out what they are but you'd never have heard of them otherwise. That's how famous these were.

Cindy is going to be concentrating more on the absurd "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" dramatic reading (I can't call it a song) that one of the singers chose to attack our ears and sensibilities with.

Been a long time

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:12:00 +0000

So in the last month or so I've been pretty busy with next to nothing to blog about. The biggest change that I've made is that I bought a motorcycle. It's one of those things that is nowhere near as dangerous as the stats make it out to be due to the activity attracting maniac retards who end up killing themselves. The biggest things to worry about are intersections and traffic moving in other directions.

Anyhow, it's fun as all hell. I got an Aprilia SL 750 Shiver, mainly because it was one of 3 bikes that felt right when I sat on them. The other 2 options had a lot more power, and a 750 seemed "weak" enough to both learn on and to be powerful enough even in the future after I feel more comfortable with my riding. The other 2 options were also 4 and 9 thousand dollars more, which was also part of the decision making process.

The computer controls the throttle, and there are 3 modes. Rain, Touring, and Sport. I spent several days in Rain mode getting comfortable since the throttle is nerfed. I've now upgraded myself to Touring mode, and I doubt I'll ever use Sport mode except on track days. I tried it for about 30 seconds and went back to Touring mode. It turns the bike into a rocket.

It's pretty damn relaxing to be out there riding on empty roads. I always hated automatic cars since I feel like I have absolutely no control over what the engine and transmission are doing. A motorcycle is always a manual, plus the way you handle it is far more immersive. Plus you're right there in the wind, zipping along and loving every minute of it.

My goal now is to become a decent rider, and after that I'll try to get good, and then better than that. At the same time I'm hoping to demonstrate that it's really not that hard to be safe on a bike and avoid death - just don't be a retard, and actually work at getting good with handling it.

Denny's and special menus

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:20:00 +0000

So I took a nap today and got up at 10:30. Denny's is always open so I
went there and they handed me the special limited after 10 menu.

When I asked for a salad the guy looked at me like I was a retard and
said that it's after 10 so there is no salad.

Why would you have a special late night menu if it weren't calibrated
with what you actually serve anyhow?

The Phantom

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:21:00 +0000

So apparently Phantom Entertainment finally got the initial (small) shipment of lapboards from China.

Look for them next month, and buy thousands of them.

Brandon Sanderson

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:54:00 +0000

This guy is the author who was picked to finish off the Wheel of Time series since Robert Jordan died (amyloidosis took him out).

Anyhow, the reason I'm posting is because he's just published a book that is also available as a free download. It's called Warbreaker, and I haven't read it yet.

I think it's awesome that he offers the book for free, and was still able to get a publishing deal out of it.

As a guy he seems awesome. I wrote him a while back about some random stuff relating to his books and he replied within a few days with a longish e-mail that made it clear that he read my message. He's super involved with his readers and still finds time to write his ass off. He's a solid writer, and has some fairly interesting magic systems (it's all epic fantasy, so if you don't like that genre then it's not for you). He shows his morality by having scantily clad women running around instead of full on naked ones.

I actually pirated every book he's written, read a bunch of them, and one weekend I went to a bookstore and bought copies of every book of his that they had in stock (they didn't have them all, but whatever). Why? Because I wanted to support an author who is both "in tune" with the new way of doing things (internet, making digital copies available for free since they end up pirated anyhow) and also a genuinely nice "geek" who actually interacts with his readers.

Anyhow, the book is available for purchase via most outlets if you like that sort of thing, don't like reading on a computer or digital device, or like to support ideas like the ones that this guy represents. He'll get pretty rich no matter what you do (there's no way that he's not going to get some cut of his WoT contributions, and those will sell like mad), but I personally like to vote with my dollars and "invest" them in ideas and ways of doing things that I think are awesome. Feel free to google for him to find his blog or whatever. I think he has a twitter too.

Korea Update

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:25:00 +0000

So last night I went out with some of the people in my classes, and it was pretty entertaining. We went someplace called hong dae (sp?), and I drank a lot but did not get drunk.

Random things I noticed:

No rae bangs with glass windows on them, so people on the outside can see in

Cafes with the same sort of setup

Do not touch the cotton candy guy's dog. Go away! I did not try to touch said dog, but someone else in the party did

I suck balls at darts

One of the FinKL girls grew up to be a Soju model. There's my contribution to the universe of "where are they now" updates. I highly doubt that anyone who reads this ever heard of FinKL, but that's OK.

Saw a band playing Hanson songs in a park with people dressed for "Happy Days" dancing around in a park. It was actually really neat.

It was a good time, though I don't think I'd do it again. I felt like I was watching a movie of a past life or something.

Stupid interwebs

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:18:00 +0000

So there's this thing that your browser sends along to web sites to let them know what language you speak. It's called a language code. The one that mine sends is "en-us," and not the "ko" that they should be looking for to ship people content in korean.

Google and Youtube completely ignore this useful string and assume that because I'm hitting their sites from Korea that I can somehow speak Korean. Google is better in that since I have an iGoogle page I can actually search for things and not get gibberish in return. Youtube shows me several recommended videos in Korean every time I go to my home page there, so that's pretty much retarded. Do no people travel around the world? I don't get it. Someone, somewhere, is stupid. Maybe they thought that they'd help me out in case I didn't know how to set my language code. Thanks, morons.

That could actually be related to some advertising scheme. Hell, maybe there are videos there that aren't OK to play in Korea due to some ridiculous copyright restrictions.

Yay copyright. Copyright is basically saying that it's trivially easy to do something these days (make copies of things) so you'd better make laws to protect people having their work duplicated. It's on par with making calculators illegal to protect jobs for people who are good at math. Long term it will disappear, and people in the future will have a hard time understanding how stupid some people could have been. Pretty much every argument in favor of it presents the dubious claim of it being an incentive for innovation (you can sell what you made for a certain amount of time exclusively), or tries to frame it as "how would you feel if you never got compensated for your work?"

The first is bullshit because people would be forced to innovate even more (just in different ways), and the second is bullshit because any viewpoint that relies on you having been injured personally or imagining that to be so is an irrational and emotional response - not a good way to determine policy.

To every phone company: fuck you.

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:02:00 +0000

I started getting pissed about this a while back when I heard about "expiring minutes." If you didn't use something that you paid for, you would just get it taken away by the person that sold it to you. They turned making phone calls into a sort of option buying exercise with expiration. It's one of those ridiculous things that I can't comprehend people accepting, but since a critical number did every other company followed suit.

So I'm in Korea. I only need to use Skype when I'm in Korea, since it allows me to call the US for 2 cents per minute. A while back I put $12 on there and it's been lasting me ever since. I still had $8.41 cents left last time I checked, and now that I'm in Korea I tried to make a call to the US. My balance was zero. I checked my history, and they decided to expire my balance in February. Apparently there is a policy that your money is only good for... a year and 6 days after a currency exchange? It's either that, or 16 months and 22 days after you put it in there.

I'm not mad about the money. I'm mad about the inconvenience. I effectively paid about 4 times as much as they advertise since I had the rest of my money arbitrarily stolen from me, but it's still cheaper than the phone companies for international calls. Since I'm in a foreign country, they won't even let me add money with a credit card so I had to inconvenience a friend to send me money on paypal.

Like, I didn't buy minutes from Skype. I deposited money with them for future use, allowing them to garner whatever interest that money allowed them to get instead of leaving it in my own accounts. It's only 8 fucking dollars, but it's the principle. I'm back to realizing that every single phone company is a piece of shit run by con artists. Don't even get me started on charging for SMS.

Korea Update

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:03:00 +0000

Back to Korea for work. Staying in a new place this time instead of one of the 2 places I already knew. Took some notes on my iPhone (using airplane mode all the time just so I have a pip-boy) while I was exploring and trying to figure out the best way to get where I need to go tomorrow.

Do not get off the train at Yongsan Station unless you want Electronics or a prostitute. I figured that it should be relatively close to where I need to be (the military base) and was the closest stop on my line. I was confronted with a street of hookers behind glass doors. I'll say that they had better bodies than typical koreans, but I'd rate them a poo out of 10.

A lot of people wanted to talk to me today, apparently. Talking "at" me is more like it, but that's OK. Probably 15 people made comments to me at various times, and 3 people said that I was very beautiful. Their word. I don't think that they know other words for "good looking," since one of the 3 was an old man (2 others were typical girls - no they were not prostitutes). This was 3 distinct encounters on different subways. Every person commented on my height, and maybe 8 commented on my build (wide shoulders).

I would not stay at this hotel again. The room is fine, but for some reason my throat keeps randomly getting itchy so I think there's something in the air. This is a fairly industrial area. I'd actually stay closer to Seoul Station next time since that's kind of like a hub and not super far from anything that I give a crap about seeing.

Anyhow, go Korea. For some reason I'm not liking this place as much as I did the last 2 times I was here. I don't know if it's just the area I'm in, or if I'm finally sick of it. People get sick of everything, and I think I'm probably sick of Korea. It's tiring to have to spend a while walking around to find a restaurant with nice pictures up of the food so I can point to what I want to eat. I should try Outback. I wonder how similar it is to the same place in the US? All of these korean barbecue places are the same, and I can't try random stuff since peanuts are in a lot of stuff.

OK time to get a little work done and then get to bed. I'm tired. I think I walked about 12 miles today (seriously). My dogs are barking, and if they had a place here that sold comfortable walking shoes in my size I would buy them. I think my driving shoes are dead. They did their job for a few years, but now they just hurt. It's almost worse than walking barefoot. Their replacements are too dressy (and uncomfortable) to use for daily wear. I ordered some shoes online, but I won't get them for another few weeks (when I make it back to Vegas).

Religulous

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:28:00 +0000

So I finally watched this Bill Maher documentary about religion, and it got me thinking. No, there's nothing earth shattering that they "reveal" in it, it's just pure entertainment.

The thing that it got me thinking about is the replication of the Horus story (from egyptian lore) with new names as the foundation for christianity. A couple people that I talked to had never heard about that, so here's a summary: Jesus' story is the same as Horus'. Horus' came first (by a long long time). Some characters even have the same names.

So anyhow, in this documentary Bill finds a bunch of people who are affiliated in kinda powerful positions in various churches, and asks them about this stuff. Nobody offered any sort of rebuttal. "So isn't it weird that the Jesus story is the same as the Horus story?" "Who is Horus." It ended up making the religious people look ignorant and nothing more. This could very well be true, as many people believe without really knowing what it is that they believe in aside from a high level concept like "good" or "evil."

Anyhow, I would have liked to see a legit answer to this question. Maybe:

"Gee, that's a hell of a coincidence."

"It's a cycle, and ours began anew with Jesus right around the time when Egypt faced their own apocalypse."

"That's just a big lie like those dinosaur bones that God put there to throw us off and make them look really old."

Any sort of answer would have been better than the ignorance expressed. What I was left with was looking at a train wreck but seeing nothing that shows why the wreck occurred or any data about the wreck itself.

Hooray for the DMV

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:09:00 +0000

So Nevada randomly changed a law this year so that I have to wait for my new license to be mailed to me in 7-10 days. I purposely got it early because I travel a lot for work and find myself in random places, and in 3 months when it's my birthday I didn't want to have it expire while I'm on the road.

Anyhow, I'm not even sure why there would be a "law" regarding this at all, as it seems to be more of a policy that an agency would abide by, but maybe it's some bullshit terrorist screening thing.

My hope is that the people at the gates on military bases (where I do some work) won't notice the hole they punched in the middle of my "old" license (the piece of paper they handed me as an interim is not valid photo ID), or else I'll be unable to do any projects until it comes.

Now, 10+ years ago it was common to have a license mailed to you, but when they changed that a while back I wouldn't have expected them to go backward for no apparent reason. If I had an inkling that they'd revert a policy in such a way that it would do nothing but inconvenience people, I'd have looked into it before going through the process at this time.

Little annoyances like this (big to me, but I'm an outlier) make me wonder why everyone isn't a libertarian anarchist.

Battlestar Galactica

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:21:00 +0000

I'm midway through season 2, and figured I'd share some comments just far.

1. The writers seem to be attempting to comment on every single social situation in the last 100 years, but I think the overarching premise is going to be "racism is bad."

2. I like the acting and a lot of the characters. It's certainly not Firefly, but still worth watching thus far.

3. Grace Park is perfect for television. She looks "meh" at first sight and gets hotter over time. This is in contrast to the cylon in Baltar's head who runs the opposite course.

4. So that's where Ensign Ro's been for the last 10 years. Hello Admiral.

5. Between this and Blade Runner, I'd like to give Mr. Olmos some sort of "thanks for doing sci fi" award. The same goes for McDonnell and Sneakers.

6. Here's to hoping that the writers stop going down this course of crap plots (the last couple sucked). They already did whatever it is they were going to do, so I suppose I just have to wait and find out.

7. I looked on IMDB because I had forgotten the name of the doctor on Deep Space Nine that is playing Baltar. I was absolutely shocked to discover that it's not the same person. Good work, Deep Space Nine Guy, despite not being from DS9.

So say we all

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:19:00 +0000

I haven't ever seen Battlestar Galactica (the new series) but I've read the novelization. Anyhow, I thought that this was pretty awesome. I'm not a fan of race or culture bullshit. People are people, and we're all people.

Anyhow, the cast got to speak to some students at the UN building and this is what Adama had to say: So say we all

So says me too.

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:29:00 +0000

and TEACH ME THE PROPER ORDER OF OPERATIONS.

So I never heard of this mnemonic until today when a math teacher buddy of mine shared it.

I had decided to teach my niece about order of operations, seeing as how she said "Hours of operation?" when I asked her if she had heard of it.

Anyhow, I came to a problem when I realized that 3÷3*3 is either 1/3 or 3, depending on which operation you do first. I was like "damn, is there a rule for that?"

Like, in practice it never comes up since you likely won't see a division sign in college and the fractions make the division completely obvious as to when it happens.

Anyhow, I looked it up, and with a chain of division and multiplication you just do it left to right. That's fine, it makes sense. Cool.

Then my math teacher buddy gets back with the "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" mnemonic, and I was like "wtf that's wrong." And then he pointed out that you then have to say that multiplication and division are the same (my feeling as well) and subtraction and addition are the same (agreement here), and in those cases you just do it left to right.

Anyhow, I think that this mnemonic is retarded since there are only 4 classes of things and that's trivial to remember anyhow. Parens, exponents, multiplication, and addition are all we need to talk about. PEMA. Please Excuse My Aunt, if anything. Then Equivalent operations are done left to right, and multiplication is equivalent to division, which is not tough to explain since it's just a multiplication by the inverse, and subtraction is the same as addition - just adding a negative.

PEMA forever.

Teh 31337

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:01:00 +0000

So a buddy of mine was pasting me some AH action on AAPL stock (I have some shares), and I noticed something in the numbers:

18:11 $ 88.63 31,337

Someone either bought or sold about $2.75MM of Apple stock. Based on the feed I can't tell for sure which side dictated the 31337 share count, so I don't know how 31337 this guy really was, but either way it's the 31337est thing I've seen in a long time.

Update: My buddy blogged it too

A rose by any other name

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:42:00 +0000

I've been following the Pirate Bay trial pretty closely, as I am of the opinion that it is important for the near future of the world. Long term there is no way to prevent it so laws will only be a temporary barrier to it happening anyhow, but I'd be much more content with the nature of the present world if the Pirate Bay won this round.

Anyhow, Roger Wallis was apparently berated on the stand (he was a witness for the defense) by the prosecution's attorneys, and there was even a recess for everyone to "calm down." After he was done, the judge asked him if there was anything he could do for him. "You could send some flowers to my wife" was the reply.

Now, I'm not the only person following this trial. Many around the world understand the importance, and are following even more intently than I am. Anyhow, here's a list of who has sent flowers so far.

Things like this make me smile. This lets me know that there is some good in the world.

A Blank Slate once more

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:29:00 +0000

So you probably never heard of the game Tabula Rasa, as it's an MMO called something other than World of Warcraft.

Don't worry, hardly anyone else ever heard of it either, despite it being marketed by Lord British himself (Richard Garriott, Ultima), which is why it's shutting down tomorrow night. Nobody played. Hell, Garriott even went into space as a sort of publicity stunt for the game. Still nobody played. You can't beat Blizzard.

Anyhow, the only reason I bring this up is that instead of just quietly shutting down the servers and telling subscribers to fuck off, they haven't been charging them to play for the last 3 or 4 months. They just ran it free of monthly fees, as everyone knew that it was dying. And well, at 8 pm tomorrow (4 hours before the servers quiesce), they've invited everyone to the last battle. Every player in the world will be part of it, and it'll apparently be epic in scope, as a sort of "goodbye" to the (apparently small) player base.

Details can be found here.

I don't know. I guess I'm a sucker for sentimentality, and this reeks of it. I'd at least try out any project that this team was responsible for in the future, as I like how they handled this a great deal. Sometimes you learn more about people by how they handle failure than how well they win, and if I knew what I know now about this team, I'd have played the game even if it sucked, which it probably does.

RIP Tabula Rasa.

Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:31:00 +0000

So I decided to start using twitter since I found an iphone application to take voice dictation. If you know my e-mail address then feel free to follow me on that.

I'm posting this from my computer in one of my 10 minute windows where the internet at my hotel actually works.

Holiday Inn has terrible internet access so I wouldn't stay there based on their claim of Free Wifi. The company that handles it is horrible and unreliable at the last 4 locations that I stayed in.

PS3 review

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:39:00 +0000

I wrote this up a while back, and wouldn't change anything so here it is.

After having had a PS3 for a whopping 4 days now, I figure I'm qualified to rant a little bit about the system.

The Good:

Clean clean picture
Quiet
Solid Blu-Ray player
I can swap in my own larger HD if desired without it needing to be a specially branded one
They even give me a menu option to ease installation of a different OS, and I don't even have to imagine a beowulf cluster of them if I feel like setting one up

The Bad:

Placement of the "P" button (to bring up the system menu) was determined by a retard. Everyone that's played our system hits it by accident every 5-10 minutes (or more in SSF2HDREMIX), which is a huge pain in the ass.
Don't even bother with the Blu-Ray remote. I screwed up and bought it since it's only like $20 anyhow, but when it's going to be a one use device (can't even control a TV as far as I can tell) that one use device may as well be one of the controllers that need to be there anyhow.

The Meh:

If it detects a keyboard it would be neat if it were smart enough to allow merely tabbing between fields of data that you're trying to enter, instead of forcing an additional "enter" press to pull up the "put info into this field" interface.
LittleBigPlanet is entertaining, but it's annoying that the best parts of the game are the mini-game race things and not the game itself (which just ends up being monotonous).
Also in LBP there are little lag jumps at the beginning of some levels. Right after you go through the gate on the Skulldozer thing there's a little pause and then it corrects for the rest of the level. Put some more RAM in these machines or something (you're already losing money on them, gimme another gig or 2 of RAM) so that there doesn't have to be that sort of hiccup.

Anyhow, I have a Wii and the PS3 now, and one reason I never bought a 360 is that every single one I've played has been unusably loud. For reference, I can barely think right now because we're at my GF's sister's place and they have a fish tank bubbling or whatever it is that fish tanks do and it feels like someone is shattering glass. If I had guitar hero for the PS3 the Wii probably wouldn't get turned on again.

The other reason I never bought a 360 is the absurd failure rate and I'm not a fan of supporting manufacturers that sell such shoddy machinery.

Firefly

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:12:00 +0000

I can't think of anything bad to say about this series, aside from wishing that there was more, and that the River backstory could have unfolded in due time instead of all at once. I'd also like to see Inara naked (my GF even thinks she's hot). Hell, River too - she has that Fifth Element weirdo ninja quality about her to make up for whatever making up they did to have her look screwed up. Great character - she's Wolverine, Dr. Xavier, Snake Eyes, Carrie, John Nash, Robocop, and Tetsuo rolled into one.

They paid homage to so many great series' of the past that I don't know where to begin, the dialogue was very good, and the acting was good enough that I was sucked into watching the entire thing over 2 days while working at the same time.

A++

Carpe Diem

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:52:00 +0000

This post is about things that I would have liked to do at some point in my life, and now will never get to do. Putting things off is fine and all, but sometimes you push them back a little too far and they're gone.

See a George Carlin show
I teach a class every month at the Orleans in Vegas, and he was performing there fairly regularly for a while. Seeing him was something that I'd wanted to do, but never got around to it. Last year he died, and now I never will.

Go to Macworld and watch the Jobs Keynote
This month I found out that Apple is pulling out of Macworld, and Jobs isn't even giving this final Keynote so a last minute plane ride to get out there and some fake press credentials won't do me much good anyhow.

Go to the Star Trek Experience thing in Vegas at the Hilton
They closed it a few months back for good, and I was always meaning to check it out. Not anymore.

Go bowling with my dad
My dad hates bowling, but is a pretty solid bowler. Once I called bullshit when he was trying to give me bowling advice citing his lack of bowling ability (I had never seen him bowl) and he picked up a house ball, rented some shoes, and rolled a 211 on an adjoining lane. Last year he got his right arm crushed by a truck, and while it's as healed as it's going to get, he won't be bowling ever again.

This is it for now, but as things pop up I'll add some posts about things that I missed the boat on. Perhaps it'll encourage some people to do some things that they've been meaning to do "some time."

I went through the fire and flames

noreply@blogger.com (Duke) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:25:00 +0000

If you aren't a guitar hero player, then this probably won't mean a lot to you. If you've ever played the game at all, then you already understand how ridiculous this song is. If you already beat Jordan in GH2 before playing GH3, then it wasn't so bad for you. If you have Guitar Hero 3 and have not yet done so, go to quickplay and try to play Through the Fire and Flames on expert. You will probably laugh at how absurd the beginning of the song is.

Backstory: I had about 20 expert FCs (full combo - no misses or overstrums) in the game, and had never even passed Raining Blood. Then I passed that one, and even 4*ed it. After about 4 more months of learning enough of this song, I finally eked out a pass. Actual practice time on this single song (note that I was already better than the vast majority of guitar hero players, judging by my FC count) was probably around 150 hours. This is counting 40+ hours of learning to tap (use 2 hands and just never miss since they're hammer-ons) the intro before I could do it, and then more time than that figuring out the rest of the song and doing multiple playthroughs.

Here is an old video of me failing right at the tough part that was my nemesis forever

Here is a video of the best score yet on the song (there are 2 other full combos)

Anyhow, here is my proof, and I'm a moron for not filming this run, but I didn't think I'd pass because I hadn't played in a week.