I played $2/4 Hold’em last night at a home game in Cambridge, and I ended the night down $16. I overplayed a bunch of pocket pairs, I still haven’t developed the discipline necessary to be a good player. I am still in the middle of reading poker books, so I pretty much sat down last night for fun, but I hate losing money either way.
Tonight is the Mum concert with
After work, I met up with
After we got back, Corinna went to bed and I installed the CacheCard in my TiVo. I had some trouble getting it seated, but once I did it worked like a champ. The TiVo takes about 3x longer to start (it has to copy the entire 512MB database onto the DIMM), but once it is up and running it screams. The “Now Playing” menu, which used to take 5 seconds or so to appear (due to the increased program capacity afforded by my second HD in there) now appears in “no time” (not long enough to really count). I also rearranged a season pass, and while it still took a significant amount of time, it was MUCH less than before. I don’t have any actual benchmarks, so you are just going to have to trust me when I say it’s faster. Note to
My company is cool too!
We will be having a ice-cream social on Wednesday, June 23 at 2:30 pm in the Cafeteria. All are invited.
Eye Q Optical had the same frames I had in a different color, so I now have Black and Blue frames (as opposed to Brown and Green). They gave me a discount on the replacement too and had them ready in like 30 minutes. Hopefully this pair doesn’t break again, but who knows… After getting the glasses we went to the Fenway 13 theatre to see Dodgeball, which I really liked. Everyone at the club seemed to agree that we are growing tired of Ben Stiller’s schtick though. Vince Vaughn was really funny, and there were some great gags in it. In addition, I wholeheartedly welcome the return of Jason Bateman to the screen.
I got a Gmail account over the weekend, seems pretty cool, although I’m not a big webmail user. And grahams was taken as a username, so I had to pick something else, which sucks.
“A golf video game? Why not just go out an play golf? Like, Ms.
Pac-Man, I understand, it’s not like you can go out and eat
ghosts…”
I finally posted pictures of buster from last week’s trip.
Last night I saw Skinny Puppy at Avalon. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was really impressed… They pulled off a good show and I really enjoyed it. Sure they may just be a visage of their former selves without Dwayne, but they can still kick out a brap. They played some OLD songs (Glass Houses, Smothered Hope, …) which really surprised me.. It was a good balance of new and old (and their new album isn’t too shabby either). I also got a new t-shirt to torture my mother with..
I really felt out of sorts at the show last night. It seemed like everyone was either 18 or 40, and I felt like the only guy in the middle. I guess that’s what happens at a gig for a band who is 20+ years old, but still. Plus I have given up “wearing all black”, so I was set apart once again. Tweaker was the opening band, and they weren’t terrible, but they were definitely very Stabbing Westward-level industrial blah…
My glasses broke this morning, so after
I got into an argument with someone regarding an interview question. The question is “write a function to print out the fibonacci sequence”, and then the person went on a rant about someone they interviewed who solved the problem but didn’t use recursion. His argument is that using recursion showed a bit more “programming prowess”, but the problem I see is that with a recursive solution you end up recomputing terms you have already computed (This iteration’s (n-1) is the prior iterations (n-2). In addition, with a recursive solution you have to give an upper bound to the series.
In my mind, a simpler solution would go something like this:
int main() {
unsigned int current = 0;
unsigned int previous = 1;
while(1) {
unsigned int new = current + previous;
printf("%i ", current);
previous = current;
current = new;
}
}
Voila, problem solved without inane stack growth. There are possibly other (even “better”) non-recursive solutions to this problem, but in my opinion, this would be a “good enough” answer if I was interviewing someone. Of course, I rarely am interested in making people write code on whiteboards in interviews, so I probably wouldn’t ask it in the first place, but that’s a different story. This argument reminds me of one awhile back where someone was arguing that you don’t always need to use the bounded string functions in C because sometimes you “know how much space you need”.
P.S. I do realize that without a ceiling on the calculation I will eventually roll the int over, but that’s tangential
P.P.S. Of course using new as a variable name was a bad choice (since it is also a C++ keyword), but again, that is tangential, so stop whining at me about it.
After the movie, I spent some time fixing my photos, which are now back up. If you poke around it you will see a bunch of pictures I added late last week but forgot to mention, including a few of
Sci-fi nerd-of-the-moment, Cory Doctorow, gave a talk at Microsoft about why DRM is a bad idea. It is a pretty good read, perhaps I will read some of his fiction now.
On Tuesday
Tomorrow we are going to see The Chronicles of Riddick with Audra. I haven’t seen Pitch Black, mostly because I think Vin Diesel is a tool, but I hear he plays D&D, so who knows.. Anyway, I have Pitch Black out from Netflix so maybe I will have a chance to watch it before tomorrow (another reason to consider skipping the screening tonight). Then again, Riddick is supposed to be a prequel, right, so I should survive not having seen the “first” film, no? Anyway, I have no positive expectations for this film, so I can only be correct or impressed. :)