Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

Computer Weirdness

So at work, I open up a bunch of applications and they've been running for days on end. I always do this. I have 1gb ram. It's nice to have 3 web browsers, a mail client, an aim client, 3 text editors, 8 terminals, and a smattering of other tools open.

And so today, as I was doing a diff, I dragged the huge window to the top of the screen only to hear some squeaking noise come out of the speaker. At first I thought it might have been a notification, but I listen closely and it sounds looped.

I turn up the volume only to hear what sounds like a remix of hamster dance.

W. T. F.

You heard me. Hamster dance. Or something that sounds like it since I can't understand a word it's saying. Is it an easter egg of sorts? Not in FileMerge (most recently launched app) as far as I can tell.

My coworkers come over to hear what the commotion is about. I show them. In the process, I find out it's doing that not only for dragging the window to the top, but whenever I click on anything from the top left corner to about half my screen and maybe an inch down. I'd say 640x200. And with lsof and activity monitor, I don't see anything that seems to point to some practical joke program somebody might have snuck on my computer.

Anyhow, after quitting half my apps, it still happens. And while I was reading some web pages, it all of a sudden stopped. The only thing that has changed was I closed a window with Wired.com in it.

A messed up banner ad mixed with a Camino bug perhaps? The size is right. And Camino always eats cpu power. Maybe that's it. I'll never know.

Personality Defect Test

Capitalist Pig You are 85% Rational, 57% Extroverted, 57% Brutal, and 14% Arrogant.

You are the Capitalist Pig! This means that you are less emotional than most, focusing more on logic. You are also more selfish, greedy, and care very little for the well-being of others, hence you probably hold capitalistic political views. You are also an extrovert, like most of the people in the hallmark capitalistic country of America. Despite these traits, you are surprisingly not very arrogant, tending to view yourself as equal to others. Which seems strange given that you are so mean and brutal to others at times. In conclusion, your personality defect is that you are a bit too logical, rather unemotional, way too extroverted, and also very brutal in regards to others. You may even be a bit insecure about yourself, little piggy. So stop being so selfish and calculating and learn to see people as people, man! To put it less negatively: 1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive. 2. You are more EXTROVERTED than introverted. 3. You are more BRUTAL than gentle. 4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant. Compatibility: Your exact opposite is the Starving Artist. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Smartass, the Braggart, and the Spiteful Loner. * * If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits. The other personality types: The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 73% on Rationality You scored higher than 61% on Extroversion You scored higher than 71% on Brutality You scored higher than 5% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on Ok Cupid

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I took it twice switching a few answers with ones that I felt borderline on. I'm somewhere between a handraiser and a capitalist pig, considering the only change between the two times I took it was in brutality. (hand raiser = 42%, pig = 57%) No wonder the descriptions look alike.

Kuchiyose no Jutsu

How can you not love this?

Shinteki

Oh man, I am so tired.

Yesterday, I participated with Albert, Jason, and Jason in a scavenger hunt/puzzle solving competition/race called Shinteki. If you've ever played "The Go Game" or watched "Amazing Race" on TV, it's a lot like those two games except the field is Silicon Vallley, not the world, and the events at each destination take so much more brains than the entire cast and crew of any FOX reality show combined.

Team Shock & Awe, that's us, got 505/1000 points total. That puts us at 2nd to last place and within an arms reach of the about the next several teams. There were 23 teams, I think.

It started at Stanford's stadium at 9:30am with a relay race where we had to find these little colored balls with our team's name on it and a year. We then had to go bring them to one of five people with city tags on their shirts, matching up with the city name of the summer Olympics of that year. If we got it right, they give us a sticker. If we get it wrong, they toss the ball back into the pile of balls on the field and we try again. We at least got that one done fairly quickly.

We then had to drive to Ikea, find the next clue, and solve it. I think a lot of the shoppers were confused to find teams of people running around the store and using the furniture to solve a puzzle involving a deck of cards. They got permission from Ikea to let us lounge around and use their furniture for workspace. The table and chairs we picked were pretty nice. Somebody actually walked up to us and asked if we knew anything about the chair he was eyeing.

After that, we drove off to Shoreline Lake. There we had to take a paddle boat, (I'm beginning to see where the $275 team entry fee went to.) paddle into the middle of the lake, pick up a clue in a Wheaties box, and then paddle back. It was a crossword that lead to a binary encoded message, and then to the clue telling us the next event was at Memorial Park.

The event at Memorial Park was pretty hard, and without giving it away, involved bit streams and printer technology. If you saw the solution, you'd understand even if you knew nothing about printer technology.

The funny thing was, in the Ikea one, we thought about all sorts of ways that might lead to an answer, but missed the obvious. The Shoreline lake one ended up using the obvious one that we thought up in the previous, but along the way we did think of another idea. That idea turned out to be the solution to the next one, but as expected we totally didn't think of using it again. That pissed us off so much :P

You might be wondering how scoring 23 teams of 4 was done. Afterall, supposedly the fastest team finished at 6:00pm, while we took up until the limit of ~10:30pm.

It's a Palm Zire. They call it ZEUS, short for Zire Electronic Unbiased Scorekeeper. Every team has one and it's used to supply hints and keep track of the score of the team. It also tells us the time data for how long we spent on an event but that's not used in scoring. If you get stuck, you can buy hints using the points you would have gotten from that event if you finished. Each event is 100 points, so if you buy a 5 point hint, you'd get 95 if you finished. It won't subtract from your actual score unless you finish the event. We bought a lot of hints but we didn't ever buy all the hints for any event. We're not that crappy :P

Anyways, here's a little more about the other puzzles:
5) Mad libs. Go go gadget Google "anagram solver"! To get the booklet, we had to hike up to the top of the wildlife preserve and get to Hunter's Point. We figured out so much of it, that it pissed us off to have to buy so many hints. The one adverb we didn't get was "alphabetically" and no amount of typing "easy", "simply" and other stuff into the thesaurus would have saved us. Since there wasn't a designated field, we went to the Cupertino Library's Teen Study Area. (dude, they had some major renovation since I was last there, what kind of library gets their own 8x10 foot window into a giant fishtank?) We finished it just as the library closed at 6pm. There was some chinese festival going on in the area near us so the whole place looked like Taiwan.
6) Okay, make a bridge out of straws and masking tape that holds a 1kg brick between two little stool thingies 25cm apart for 10 seconds. Yeah, we're engineers, so we thought this should have been our forte. Except none of us were Civil or MechEs. Long story short, we took 60+ minutes to design and build our bridge. We expected it to collapse fairly soon after the 10 seconds necessary. Instead we were one of two groups who had one that could hold 2 bricks and didn't have to use points to buy additional straws or masking tape. Totally over engineered. Took too much time to design. But we're proud that we got the full 100 points on this one :).
7) This one involved semaphores and a fountain. We couldn't do it because we missed the 7:15pm deadline. The deadline was probably because after 7 it started getting dark and cold, and getting wet would have been real bad.
8) Throw the frisbee into the buckets to get 100 points. We got 175, the highest possible. But that didn't give us any points, just the clue for the puzzle. This time, it really was a jigsaw puzzle. It's all colorful and we decided that we'll skip this one since we thought it would have taken us too long even with the hints. So we bought out all the hints and skipped it. (seeing the hints was a requirement to skipping)
9) At the "Olympic Wannabes" statues, they had an audio cd with a bunch of songs on them. We had to name the songs and then figure out how to get the solution from those names. Google came in real handy with the lyrics but even then we couldn't find all the songs. Thankfully, the hints we bought were enough to let us solve it without the last song. (some jazzy one where you couldn't hear the words very well, heck, for the longest time Jason Chen thought the guy was a girl.)
10) Ever played Boggle? It's a lot like that. 12 cards with related words. Find the category. Use those to decode instructions and generate one last one. 10 more minutes, and we would have solved it. Sucks to run out of time.

So that's how we spent Saturday. All the teams met up to see the final scores and pick up some goodies and return the Zires at a bar in Menlo Park. Heh, we had a much harder time finding the bar than the puzzle destinations because we were so tired. But it was fun! Gotta get the pictures from the others too...

Little Awards Ceremonies

So the lunchtime conversation earlier this week went through something called the Franklin awards. It used to be some award that was given at work for doing good work or something like that. As far as I know, they don't seem to do that anymore here. But anyways, one of the guys in my previous team (Tony) never went to the ceremonies before because he doesn't like that stuff. So one year, Tony got the award. The people presenting asked one of the managers to go fetch him at his cube. When the manager found him, Tony told her, "tell them you couldn't find me."

While listening to the story, it occurred to me that I'd probably do the same. To me, it's nice to know you're being appreciated, but the attention and fuss of making a ceremony or becoming well known about it somehow bothers me. Being the center of attention (even purely positive) both is something that makes me feel good but also really uncomfortable. Graduating from high school and college didn't fix that. Standing up at orchestra at the end of the year didn't fix that. Winning that movie contest in 2001 didn't fix that. Speech and debate tournaments didn't fix that. Heck, even having my picture be on jobs.apple.com Interns recruiting page for a year didn't fix that. (I think I only told four people about it, all family members. And it was amazing how fast word spread about it among friends. I did however make a pdf of the page and archive that somewhere. I'll dig it out sometime.)

Anyways, Jeff, as usual, told a story about how in some company he used to work for, one of the managers was really into this sort of thing. She'd give an award for all sorts of stuff and lot of people, especially the men didn't seem to enjoy it. They seem insulted. So Jeff told her, "You know, the best thing you can do for a man, is to treat him as an equal." implying that by giving an award for achievement, you're on a level higher than him because you have the authority to reward people. Like a elementary school teacher dealing with kids.

I can see Jeff's reasoning, but I'm not sure it's the same reason I have. Then again, for me, it's just a weird awkward feeling. Maybe it's the same, maybe it's not. I'd have to think about it more. But at least I'm not the only person who feels that way in those situations.

Anyways, Tony did end up going to pick up his award.

American Cities

American Cities That Best Fit You:

75% Denver

70% Austin

65% Atlanta

60% Honolulu

55% Las Vegas

WTF? I've never been to any of those except Vegas.... I need to travel more.

Mother's Day

So for Mother's Day, I also sent out a card to my grandma.

The funny thing is, I tried to put my foreign language classes to use by writing part of it in Japanese and Chinese. But after I look at it again, I can't help but think my sentences look like they came from a 3 year old. My Chinese handwriting sucks. My Japanese handwriting is okay but then my grammar and vocab suck. And since she doesn't read English all that well, I made those simple as well.

Oh well, she got a kick out of the Christmas card a few years ago written in all Chinese, so at least she'll be amused.

Ambiguous Pronounciation

5-2-2005:
So we're at the lunch table talking about spoilers on cars, 80s bands, and digital ink, while some maintenence guy is outside redoing the weather stripping on the windows. He slips and hits the window and most of us turn and look. Somebody says "That's the biggest caulk...ing gun I've ever seen." Laughter ensues.