So my mom bought herself a bike - a very nice commuter bike. She did this because she suddenly had a flash of inspiration - she would get in shape by riding her (new) bike to work . . . it's only about a mile and a half and there's one short but steep hill. How many times did she ride this bike to work? Perhaps twice. And now she had donated it to the "Maybe Kara can ride to work" fund. She and my dad couldn't figure out how to pump the tires and they were very flat so I screwed up the paint on the bug I'm leasing and took it to a shop last night for pumping advice and a helmet. Turns out that not only is this a nice $1200 commuter bike, it also has gizmos the bike guys had never even seen before. There's some kind of built in lock on the back tire that they've only seen from bikes on Europe, a headlamp that is powered by friction from the front wheel, a similar tail light, and - get this - a fancy-ass pump that is attached to the bike. I'm not sure what I'm most amused by - the fact that my handy parents either didn't see this attached pump or couldn't figure out how to use it, or the fact that I was just donated a bike that was ridden twice and costs more than . . . well, just about anything I own. Good stuff. My smooth move was to get home, pull the bike out, and ride around without the helmet I had just gone and purchased. Duh. I've been almost hit by enough cars that I was awestruck by that lapse, such as it was. Especially after spending the last hour mocking my parents with the teenager at the bike store. =P
A month or so ago I drugged him up, bought him a steel drum set and a one way ticket to Guatemala, and had him shoveled onto the plane in a stupor . . . I haven't heard from him since. His condo is great, though, and I'm enjoying complete domination of what used to be his weblog. Yup, living la vida loca in Redmond, WA, driving my new-used purple Volvo and enjoying singledom.
Anybody up for a Margarita?
Thanks for everyone's help on that little equation. As it turns out it wasn't hard at all . . . I was just being profoundly lazy when I posted it. I'd like to think I could have solved that out in no time, but I figured since I knew the answer I wasn't going to be a good judge. Probably not true, but like I said, I was being a lazy ass.
On a totally unrelated note, I'm going to get to do some writing for Otak! We hired a "connection" (one of the principal's girlfriend's daughter) to do a bunch of fancy booklets about our services and upon looking at her work I was forced to inform the people asking my opinion that she sucked. She was trying way too hard . . . like when someone is trying to use words and sentence structures that they think will be neat but really make them sound like amateurs because it ends up forced and overwrought. Anyhow, she was getting paid $50 an hour for this totally sub par work, so now they're putting the task on me. Whee! I'm going to buy the Chicago Manual of Style from the Elliot Bay Bookstore at lunch in celebration. :)
In high school I was a total and complete stress case - kind of like Nick is now. I stayed up till 2am finishing 8 and 10-hour homework marathons almost daily, I had several minor emotional breakdowns, I drank 2L of Diet Coke a day, ate candy bars for lunch and (go figure) had IBS. I was involved in everything - and I was leadership in everything. I did NOT have time for a job. When I got my first B+ (in physics as a sophomore, which I was taking concurrently with honors chem because I had skipped earth science and taken bio freshman year) I thought my life was over. When we had to write a thesis paper over 12 pages junior year, mine was 18. I'd scream at myself when I was practicing flute and repeatedly screwing up, and my room - all 500 square feet of it - was always immaculate.
And then I changed from a Type A personality to a Type B.
I'm mellow, I'm (hopefully not always) messy, I don't really mind being a receptionist, and even under pretty intense circumstances my stress level remains low. I don't know if this could be a result of two years of antidepressants, New Age reading, or a very conscious decision to change my own behavior. Whatever the case though, I like it.
If I were a member of the Bush administration I would probably want to keep changing the topic too. Job loss, stagnant economy, nothing to show for the last 3.5 years, abandoned campaign promises (like education, for one), torture, international humiliation, giving our buddies billion dollar contracts sans competition, lies, lies, and more lies all for a purely self-serving agenda that has disenfranchised more Americans than their fraudulent registered-voter-counting information company can count . . . oh wait, GAY MARRIAGE!! Everybody look!!! GAY MARRIAGE! Protect traditional marriage, cause . . . uh . . . it's good, and stuff! Look at all those perfectly well adjusted, er, WARPED children of gay couples! How can we stand here and watch this horror?!? It's our responsibility to protect religion, er, I mean TRADITION. Cause of the founding fathers and stuff! Because if gay people can marry each other, then I will be forced to love my wife less since it'll be less special and stuff. If gay people marry and then can make medical decisions for one another, and put partners on their benefit plans and adopt children, gayness might get more popular! And then what!? The very fabric of our relig . . . er, SOCIETY would crumble! Quick, somebody change the constitution, all these loving relationships getting recognition is making me sick to my stomach.
I don't know the capacity of software types to solve something like this with a computer, and I need to know if it's too hard.
You have a combination lock with 0-39 as possible numbers (think high school locker) and you know that the combo includes the digits 2, 2, 3, 4, and 6, and that the combo, x, y, z, can be described as x-(z+2)=y
z%y=0
How hard is this to solve?
_________________________________
Okay, it's looking too easy, perhaps. If you're trying this, don't read the comments yet. :) If you want to suggest a better constraint I'm all ears (but let's make sure you have the right combo first). This doesn't need to take more than 2-5 minutes, but it shouldn't be too obvious either.
So, whoever had the clever idea (read: insanely stupid idea) of putting our phone server box thing in the kitchen should perhaps be shot. After 4 or 5 hours of phones calls, remote trouble shooting, T1 testing, CPU looping, and repeated hang-ups on clients, we have determined that our phone are buggy because someone tossed coke or more likely DARK BEER all over the system last Friday. Our service prodiver is down there right now assessing the damage. In fact, I think I'll go see how he's doing . . .
Alright, he wasn't there. But our IT guy came around the corner and started making an argument against us paying for the damage - clearly a puddle of dried pop over the two most important drives does not necessitate damange from the pop. It could be purely coincidental that someone's Guiness landed right on the stuff that imploded! I think he's the culprit and he's trying to cover his guilt-stained tracks. I even told him that - he laughed, but didn't deny it.
I'm dying to know how much this is going to cost. I am quite adept at banging myself into walls, corners, and desks, as well as spilling my foods and beverages all over surfaces within 10 feet of me, but I have yet to cause more than $80 in damage, and even that was just clothing that I permanently stained.
Drum roll please!
Doh, still no quote. But IT guy has now determined the trajectory of the flying liquid. Good times at Otak, Seattle. I'll get back to you on the cost of this folly.