New York Travel Blog

Ok, ok, I can't stay away from blogging forever. I now have a travel blog about my time in New York (by the way, I've just moved to New York.) It's called New York Geek and you should go read it.

Xx

Hi

This is a blog. I used to write on it. I don't write on it any more. You can still find me on Twitter as tiedyeina, or elsewhere if you're lucky.

Bye now.

Xx

Here Be Dragons

Whilst fiddling with some knobs I recently came across this gem in Firefox, that shows whenever you visit "about:config":



I'm also a fan of:



It's the little things...

:)

Stats

When not focusing on the important and shocking fact that it's snowing outside, the news has recently been harping on about someone failing to blow up a plane. Hysteria has resulted and people are actually cancelling flights over this - despite it being 20 times more likely you'll be struck by lightning, than be a victim of a terrorist plane-bombing (per flight).

Another comparison drawn by that link (go on, click, there's a really pretty picture) is that there's one attack per 11.5 billion miles - which is the same distance as two round trips to Neptune. Which pretty much rules out any hope of gaining public confidence up for interstellar space travel. If you didn't like that joke, you'll hate this one:

"The odds of being on a plane with a bomb on it are 1/10,000,000. The odds of being on a plane with two bombs on it are 1/1,000,000,000. So I always take a bomb on a plane with me"

Möbius Bagel

On Monday some new people moved into my office, to welcome them I went downstairs for 10 minutes, had a bit of a chat and ate some of their 'welcome' bagels. Because I'm a nice guy. However, being a nice guy will only get you so far, a real pro would have sliced and then linked the bagels to form a möbius strip.

Like this.

Even better is that this is actually practical - the increased surface area means you can fit more cream cheese onto the bagel. What a hero.

Merry Hoffmas

At some point in the distant past (presumably whilst drunk) I clearly found Facebook, Twitter et al. a touch bromidic and went hunting for alternatives. A wild night (again, I presume...I really have no recollection of signing up for and using this, but definitely did) later I was a fully fledged member of Hoffspace.

Hoffspace is a bit like Myspace, or Facebook, or other similar social networking sites, but with much more of a focus on David Hasselhoff. This is a refreshing alternative to the aimless, meandering approach of traditional social networking sites, and also leads to a much more vibrant and open community, open to meeting strangers and making new friends to undertake Hoff-related activities with.

I was only reminded of this by a couple of Christmas emails from HoffSpace (clearly David's just found out he has a mailing list, I've been on this site years and never got a mail before). In the festive spirit, I thought I'd share the benefits I'm reaping from my exclusive HoffSpace membership with you, enjoy!

1. 10% Off at the HoffShop
I think I know where I'm getting all my Christmas presents from this year. The HoffShop has "everything from HoffBags to t-shirts". I think they could do with a marketing department to write better slogans though. Just enter 'hoffshop09' to get your discount.

2. A picture of The Hoff with your own personalised message in His handwriting!
Frankly I can't say it any better than The Hoff did in his mail so:

"Tis the season to be jolly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Deck the halls with
Pics of Hoffy,
Fa la la la la, la la la la."

Why not send your loved one a nice picture of me, you choose the name and write the message (nothing too naughty!) and it will appear in an exact replica of my handwriting and autograph on a unique personalised photo print. Check it out here.

Yes, You Are On Google Street View

In lieu of having time to write up anything about my adventures, have some hookers:

_{Clicky to enlarge}

Wii Prayer

A family shouldn't have to wait until Sunday to worship the Lord...especially if they have a Nintendo Wii, complete with special Cross controllers and a Kneeler (all the fun of kneeling and genuflecting...in your own home!).

Yes, seriously, someone's making a game of this. Well, I think so anyway - if it's a spoof/hoax then it's being pretty thoroughly carried out.



If the minigames are good enough, I'll almost certainly be buying a copy of this. After all, WarioWare barely has any storyline at all and that's still one of the most popular Wii games..

Free Money

Someone recently turned me on to QuidCo.com - which offers varying levels of cashback on a superb range of online stores. I've seen similar offers before, but most involve selling your soul and/or buying lots of things you don't want. QuidCo is different, gives me lots of money, and isn't paying me in any way to say all of this.

The way it works is quite fantastic. Traditionally, retailers would offer a commission to any advertising agency or publication that sent business their way. The agency would then spend money trying to persuade people to click-through, and pocket the takings.

QuidCo on the other hand simply waits for users to come to it - and then hands over the majority of the commission. For very little work, they get their 10/20% cut, and their members keep coming back time and again for an 80/90% cut. It's really quite simple:

1. Find something you want to buy online.
2. Search QuidCo for somewhere to buy it (often the original site you found).
3. Clear all your cookies. Most stores put a tracking cookie on your computer to see where you came from, if that doesn't say QuidCo you won't get your money.
4. Click through to the store.
5. Buy.
6. Profit.

Here's my latest earnings:


Yep, that really is £100 from o2. All I had to do was re-order the very same 12 month, £20/month SIM only contract that I was just about to renew.

Enjoy.
Xx

No blacks at Microsoft Poland

Over on a certain less than savoury message board someone recently posted up this interesting observation. Take a close look at the Microsoft USA/World and then the Microsoft Poland pages for business productivity.

Notice anything?

For those of you reading this in the future, when Microsoft realise they've been rumbled and hastily pull the images, I put together this animation. Enjoy.



Note, you may say this is simply the USA branch of Microsoft over-reacting to some Affirmatve Action law. Whilst it's possible that's true, take a look at the hand of the magically changing man. Looks pretty dark to me.

Xx

Edit: Someone's beaten me to the next step of my idea: http://microlove.ytmnd.com

Making XKCD Slightly Worse

For some time, one of my favourite collections of comic strips has been Garfield minus Garfield - a brutally harsh and beautifully depressing cacophony of loneliness and angst.



In a similar vein, from the XKCD fora, comes the joyous Making XKCD Slightly Worse. I can't do any better than their introduction:

"It's time to find that little piece of magic that makes xkcd so special, and kill it."

Here's two I've lazily plucked from the first page of that thread (there's 99 pages, and many, many gems - click around for an hour or so then put it on your bookmarks for later):





And, here's my first effort, amalgamated from comics 208, 419 and 620:


_{Clicky to enlarge}

Research

Lots (read: more than one) of people have been asking what I'm up to nowadays, which has led me to the conclusion that I'm neglecting my blog. The whole purpose of this exercise is to avoid frivolous conversation by publishing the answers to questions which form the bulk of small-talk; that my conversation time may be better spent. The inefficiency of giving the same facts to different people in different conversations is amazingly annoying.

So.

Having finished university (results are out on Thursday 18^th with luck), I'm now...at university. I'm working as a research student for ten weeks, working in the same area as with my final year project.

I'll hopefully be publishing a paper in AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems), and then presenting it in May/June 2010, in Canada. Also it pays for rent and clothes shopping over summer - but let's pretend I'm doing this for the advancement of human knowledge.

We're still finalising a topic - I'll post a dumbed down (read: jargon-free) version of whatever I do up here :)

Xx

PS: I have a small office with (inexplicably) 9 chairs, yet on the rare occasions anyone stops by for a chat, they generally stay standing. Explanations on a postcard please.

One Million Giraffes

Following a (presumably) drunken bet, someone on the Internet is looking to collect 1,000,000 hand-drawn giraffes by 2011. I really can't think of any more noble aim for the future - and it'll be one hell of a puzzle for digital archaeologists in a few hundred years when they find all these pictures without any context.

You can see the (pitiful) 600 or so he's collected here and you can submit your own drawing in myriad ways; the most obvious being simply to email it to him.

For reasons I really can't explain, here's my favourite so far:



For reasons anyone who has ever seen me draw anything will perfectly well understand, I won't post my effort up here. And I think I might even submit it under a pseudonym.

Get drawing :)
Xx

Your Erdős-Bacon Number

Your Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of your Erdős number and your Bacon number. With an opener like that, I'm sure I've got your attention - now to elaborate.

I've been looking into social network topology for a paper I'm writing (more on that later) - if that doesn't mean anything to you, try and recall the time you saw '6 degrees of separation' in some junk mail; the wildly unsubstantiated and poorly researched idea that everyone in the world is separated by just 6 links.

This has been a topic of some quite interesting research by a number of fairly important chaps you haven't heard of, and it seems a few of them either a) snapped or b) had a sense of humour. I'm banking on a).


_{Paul Erdos - he could easily have been in films with a face like that}

Post snapping (or Schnapps) some mathematicians came up with the concept of an Erdős number - this is your academic degree of separation from influential mathematician Paul Erdős. Your Erdős score is 1 if you've co-authored a paper with Paul, 2 if you've co-authored a paper with someone who's co-authored a paper with Paul...and so on.

A later take on this was a Bacon number - your degree of separation from actor Kevin Bacon. If you've starred in a movie with Kevin, score 1. If you've starred in a movie with someone who's starred in a move with Kevin, score 2...and so on.


_{My favourite bacon related picture on the Internet}

Your Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of these.

Unbelievably, there are a whole range of people who actually have an Erdős-Bacon score. There's a messy list of them here - some people have Erdős-Bacon numbers as low as 4 or 5.

I think this goes to prove two points:

1. Some of your favourite actors may be closet mathematicians and..
2. The mathematicians that didn't make it into Hollywood have way too much time on their hands.

Also, consider this post a standing offer from me to buy drinks for the evening for anyone who can prove they have an Erdős-Bacon number.

Mainstream Memes

Since Christopher Columbus discovered Twitter in mid-2008, it's become pretty choked up with users who don't even know where the flux-capacitor in their PC case **I'm reliably informed this is actually called a CPU** is to be found.

It's not all bad though, it hasn't taken too long for people to realise that the 'trending topics' section of Twitter - originally intended to give an overview of the most important and heady up-to-the-minute current affairs - would be far better used for tiny tiny memes.

#geekmusic was a great one a week or so ago, as was #budgetbond (and its spinoffs). You've then got the slightly smuttier trends - #3turnoffwords, #3wordsaftersex et al., which are mostly unfunny - but it is very amusing to see how many people can't even follow the single simple rule of 'three words'.

There's also been some great efforts on Amazon reviews recently. The three wolves t-shirt is fairly infamous around the web now; but someone's just linked me to something which might actually top it: 20 inch box canvas of Paul Ross.



Here's a couple of choice quotes from among the 200 (nearly all amusing) reviews:

"If you only buy one 20 inch canvas print of Paul Ross this year, this is the one to get."

"Don't buy this picture. It looks fine on the website, but the one they send you is upside-down. My wife hasn't stopped crying for a week."

And finally, this masterpiece:

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name' sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;
Thy 20 inch print by MirrorPrintStore, it comfortest me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I well dwell in the House of the Lord with a lovely picture of Paul Ross forever"

Edit: Thanks to anonymousse for this priceless one too.

Merch

A lot of people say to me, "Ina, I'd love to get a lot of merchandise with approximations of your image on it..." (the real image would cause the lesser objects it was placed on to implode) "...but I can only find an image of you facing forwards. I'd feel foolish wearing a t-shirt with just a picture of your front on the front of it; can you do anything about this?"

To these people I can now offer the following:

_{The left-hand picture belongs on the front of your shirt, the other on the back of your shirt. Similar approaches may be taken for mugs, house-painting and underwear. The images are not licensed for mousemats. Please consult an expert before attempting to transfer the images to stained glass. By reading this paragraph you commit to paying £2 in royalties for each commercial sale featuring these images.}

Now, before you go and get this printed onto a t-shirt (a mere £5 at Vistaprint at the moment; and I can get it cheaper if I bulk order elsewhere) - there's an important point to note. Merely blowing up this small image will lead to something which looks quite boring and fuzzy. Instead, I recommend you scale it up using no interpolation at all in your favourite image editor. Alternatively, just ask me and I'll send some I made earlier (with stickyback plastic).

Enjoy. Can you guess what you're all getting for Christmas?
Xx

A dartboard

Well, my degree's over and I never have to do another piece of coursework, joy! More on that later, but for now, here's a still image from my final piece of coursework:


_{Click to embiggen.}

Unfortunately, that's a nicely rendered image and when played in real-time, the darts game actually looks a lot more...crap. I spent a lot of time choosing that word; it really is the most appropriate. Especially given that the networking (you can play the game online) is sketchy and the Wiimote controls are challenging at best.

Still though, looks pretty doesn't it?
Xx

--

Blender Game Engine, Blender Render. Grab me if interested in anything else or if you want a copy of the game.

Robot Dinosaurs..

..that shoot lasers when they roar.

Seriously, it doesn't get much better than this.

Play to the end, there's only one level and the outro is more than worth it.

Facebook's grammar tragedy

On one of my many procrastination breaks whilst my animation coursework was rendering (more on that later) I decided to stretch to the height of sociability and walk into my housemate's room.


_{Yes, I have the t-shirt}

It was there I saw this absolute travesty:



I think it's actually even worse to make an effort, and completely fail, than to simply not bother trying to use decent English in the first place. How long do you reckon it'll take the (American) Facebook team to notice?

Graze

Some vegetarians over on Twitter have been chatting away about a trendy new business called Graze (wonder how much that URL cost them) - that delivers a selection of healthy treats to your home/office at a lunchtime of your choosing. One of them was generous enough to post a free-trial promo code.

I've no idea if that code's still valid it's not, but WFF141C is, but it worked for me and today my very own delivery arrived:


<sub>More exciting than my usual post.


Beautifully presented, and some of the stuff keeps for ages..


The seaweed peanut crackers. I'm still unsure as to what these are...gorgeous though.</sub>

All the literature and packaging is charming and eco-friendly, as with every health-food service since Innocent came along (and, many will claim, before those Cool Guys too).

To get started, you simply tell Graze what kind of things you like, and then go on to rate a range of their foods with 'Love', 'Like', 'I'll try it' or 'Never send this' - schedule a delivery and enjoy!

The website's an absolute pleasure to use, there's a lot of fun to be had from the surprise of opening your box and finding what's inside and the food is absolutely gorgeous. I'm still debating whether or not it's quite worth the usual price tag of £2.99 (even with delivery included), and I'm also unsure it's quite enough for a full lunch, especially for a carnivore like me.

Still though, give it a go - I have some other promo codes if the one above doesn't work (and I like you), and let me know what you think.

:)