Category Archives: Random Blabbering

Did I ever say my computer broke like a month or two ago?

I think I forgot to say that here. To be precise, it started from like late January to February; fixed it by buying a new hard disk altogether on 21 February, thus having all my data lost. This includes a good amount of my puzzle images (I still work with Excel, yes, and that single worksheet went away), a good amount of Word documents (I usually have my PDFs published elsewhere, but without the Word it’s going to be some pain to rewrite them in case I want to edit–I’m too perfectionist sometimes), and other things.

Lesson: Back up.

Meanwhile, I’ll point you at this insanity. I haven’t matched that in terms of presentation (although I think I made a couple of insane variants, trying to match other works). Sooo… We’ll see if I have time to squeeze out something. Hey, I’m busy with college life + a future LMI test + Mystery Hunt + [insert other things here]…

Prepositions

Argh.

Which of the following words fits the best in the blank?

Words: on/in/at

Phrase: “Chaos ____ the sky” is a noun phrase.

Yes, even this blog’s title has a 2/3 chance of being grammatically incorrect. (I went with “at” because the acronym is a common word.)

On a very unrelated note, apparently some people found this blog by searching “antiderivative of tangent“. Should I write some more posts that might be hit by a random googler?

Flappy Bird

‘Flappy Bird’ is an insanely irritating, difficult and frustrating game which combines a super-steep difficulty curve with bad, boring graphics and jerky movement.
— Huffington Post

When one doesn’t pay any attention to graphics and sets the difficulty high, it means it’s intended to be a hellishly difficult game. If you’re complaining about the graphics, you’re pointing your complaint at the wrong part of the game. (Compare with Super Hexagon.)

Now let me go back to my horrible 13-point high score…

So long

…without a post. Heh. Sorry. Too many programming stuff and playing games. I didn’t even finish the solution of Puzzle 2 yet. Perhaps it will be a good activity to fill in my free time at college. 😛 I do want the solutions to be all up and running, though, so let’s just hope that I get the motivation to do it instead of procrastinating and do something else. 😛

I have a tumblr! I will post random rambles there. I think I posted this somewhere:

“tumblr to WordPress is like Twitter to Facebook in my opinion. Twitter allows short status updates while Facebook allows longer status updates; WordPress will be my place for more serious posts and tumblr will be my place for less serious posts.”

…oops that’s paraphrased from my tumblr blog which none of you should have known before this. :/

I’m developing my site too. Yes, yet another remake. That will also contain a lot of my projects, including but not limited to crossposting puzzles there and developing my Alternate Universe to be more documented (hence allowing it to be more complex). This blog will keep being my blog, with all puzzles being posted; then again, I haven’t figured out how to implement a blog system to my site and I’m too lazy to use WordPress.org or something. I’m still going without any money out from my pocket, save for the cost of internet.

Alright, that’s enough update for now, I think. I might be participating at Indian Puzzle Championship (obviously as an unofficial participant); the “might” is because it’s hard to estimate my availability. But with the participation window of 48 hours, I think it’s 95% guaranteed that I’ll have time. So, expect my name on the scoreboard (it’s still scoreboard even if I’m not the top 20 or so) 😛

Rants of Inconsistency

There are just too much of them.

English. Hopefully self-explanatory. Who on earth made irregular verbs and overloaded the words “get”, “set”, “make”, “put”, and several others to the ridiculous point of 50 meanings. On a tangential note, who made the lack of singular unknown-gender pronoun. (Or is it “it” for humans of unknown gender?) Oh wait, there’s also this stupid genders of words. As in “player” is usually female (I think; if false, just change accordingly), so if you call “That player is so smart that [pronoun] won ten times in a row”, you’re supposed to use “she”.

Time. Also hopefully self-explanatory. 365 days aren’t supposed to be divided to 12 months, and leap seconds and 29 February shouldn’t exist at all. If I’m used to it, I might say that today is 2014-269. (Year 2014 day 269; remember that I remove leap days so this is 488 days after 26 May. If I do my computations correctly.) Also, to a lesser extent, the number of hours in a day and the number of minutes in an hour should be equal, so that computing times is as easy as handling a large base for your numbers.

I may edit this later. Meanwhile, I need to have some decent sleep soon for a test for a scholarship tomorrow in Jakarta, and I should get up at 2. In the morning. Derp.

On another very unrelated note, no one has found the sunken treasure yet. Added a hint.

Better PDF conversion!

Apparently the built-in MS Word 2007’s DOCX to PDF conversion is way better than a dedicated software PrimoPDF’s.

Puzzle 60‘s solution saved under a much smaller file size. 295 kB vs 2802 kB.

Also, Deception has a 24-hour extension, so there is 30.5 hours left. Furthermore, I’m making solutions to select puzzles, depending on popularity, which will be released after the test is finalized (when the score page becomes static and not Flash).

Freedom Dive

Heh. Happy Hardcore.

Current favorite music genre: Happy Hardcore

Current favorite songs (all full versions, not including songs I haven’t found their MP3s):
1. xi – Freedom Dive (222 BPM, happy hardcore)
2. TOMOSUKE – Macuilxochitl (147 BPM, jazz-like thing)
3. Tatsh – HEAVENLY MOON (185 BPM, fast paced and perhaps happy hardcore too)
4. TOMOSUKE – Ergosphere (170 BPM, also jazz-like)
5. Mutsuhiko Izumi – Green Green Dance (165 BPM, country-rock-I don’t know)
6. P*Light – Poppin’ Showers (175 BPM, perhaps happy hardcore)
7. DJ Mashiro – Prismatic Lollipops (202 BPM, happy hardcore)
8. 3R2 – Hardcore Star (180 BPM, definitely happy hardcore)
9. DJ Mashiro vs 3R2 – Are You Ready (177 BPM, pop or something, maybe a hint of happy hardcore)
10. xi – Parousia (158 BPM, worship-like-thing)

As like my favorite Pokemon list, number one is leading absurdly far from the second and the third, which averagely tie. Fourth is not too far behind. The rest is pretty difficult to figure out, like I have about 16 songs that I’m not certain their order to occupy #5-#20… This may be revised later.

ISO 8601

Because this somehow makes me to post my response.

If this information is to be read by humans, I use 02-Mar-2013 09:58:43. The time part has a basically really universal standard (hh:mm:ss), and the date part is made unambiguous with month’s name and 4-digit year.

If this information is to be stored and sorted (yay anagrams) by computers, I use 20130302T095843. Screw readability.

If this information is for both to be red by humans and to be stored by computers, I think I’ll use 2013-03(Mar)-02 09:58:43. But I doubt I’ll ever use it.

I need something better to do. Oh ya, fixing FFF25.