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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in
pennyw's LiveJournal:
| Monday, October 15th, 2007 | | 1:32 pm |
| | Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 | | 1:50 pm |
Puzzle Hunt is Awesome
A bunch of friends and I spent the weekend doing Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 11.0. It involved 71 teams of geeks, each working on solving a bunch of puzzles before the other teams did. It also involved large amounts of food and very small amounts of sleep. It was way cool. Our team - BoxFort Brigands - came 24th out of 71 teams, with which we were very pleased; many of us were first-timers and we treated it somewhat casually (most of us actually slept!). We solved 55 out of 70-something puzzles and even had the fastest solve time on three or four of them. The whole thing was set up with a Tron theme. At the opening ceremony we were all kidnapped and trapped inside a computer by the evil AI Outermage. He forced us to solve puzzles to break into systems to allow Outermage to take over the world. Meantime, NORT, an anti-virus AI, sent us puzzles to solve (without Outermage's knowledge) to strengthen us in the final battle against Outermage (in a mech simulation game; each puzzle you solved gave your mech a powerup). Although our team didn't finish, 14 teams did defeat Outermage, so thankfully we were released from the computer on Sunday night. The puzzles involved everything - crytograms, braille, morse code, semaphore flags, sudoku, text adventures, cryptic crosswords, anagrams, chess, and Monopoly. There was also a real-life choose-your-own-adventure game in the car park, and a huge maze in a cavernous building that you traversed on scooters. Each puzzle gave a word or short phrase as the answer. Here's an example puzzle (a reasonably easy one): Nuclear Wasteland Our hero has been de-rezzed and scrambled at the atomic level. His constituent elements have undergone substitution and re-arrangement. Please find our hero’s basic elements below in order to restore him to his original form. BPST FPPS BPQSS BHPSZ BEPQSZ EJPSTTX EEJKNTZ BEKNNRST BFGHPPST Good luck :-) | | Thursday, May 10th, 2007 | | 9:28 am |
A Small Snippet of My Life
Imagine the scene... A townhouse. Downstairs, it's all neat and tidy. However, upstairs is a different storey. (Sorry!) This floor is full of boxes - none of the books belonging to either occupant of the house have been unpacked. Unloved, they huddle in corners, longing for the day that they are returned to pride-of-place on a bookshelf. Except... what's this? In the bedroom, placed for rapid access, sit three large, hardcover books: Two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. One copy of Webster's Dictionary. Spelling disputes are too important to leave unresolved. Current Mood:  amused | | Monday, April 9th, 2007 | | 3:39 pm |
Outback Steakhouse
I need help. My Yank mates and my Yank boyfriend (Michael) have colluded to take me to Outback Steakhouse for dinner tomorrow night. If you're lucky enough not to have heard of this place, it's an American restaurant chain that claims to be Australian yet actually has nothing in common with Aussie culture whatsoever. To show how cringe-worthy it is, here's an example of the "Aussie-Tizers" ("appetisers", that is, entrees) from the menu: Bloomin' Onion Bushman 'Shrooms Aussie Cheese Fries Kookaburra Wings Tassie's Buffalo Strips Grilled Shrimp on The Barbie Gold Coast Coconut Shrimp Darling Point Lobster-Crab Cakes Now, it seems that I have only two ways to handle this. One is to just go there and eat and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. The other is to out-cringe them by going completely stereotypically Aussie. I'm thinking of doing the latter. I have a hat with corks on it, and a T-shirt with a big Aussie flag on it. I could even wave a boomerang around and wear a pair of thongs. Anyone got any brilliant ideas? Help me win the cultural cringe war! Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Monday, February 12th, 2007 | | 2:21 pm |
Movie Ratings
I went with my colleagues to see a movie the other day. The plan was to pick a movie when we arrived, based on the length of the preceding lunch and session times. When we got there, no-one had any strong preferences and we didn't know much about any of the movies, so we picked one that had an interesting poster (Smokin' Aces) and watched it. In Australia, movies can be rated G, PG, M, MA, R or X. I have a simple rule for ratings - anything that's R and over I know I definitely won't enjoy. If the group I'm in decides to watch an R movie, I'll gracefully opt-out. In the US, movies can be rated G, PG, PG-13, R or NC. Their R rating includes everything that we'd separate into M, MA and R. Hence, everything on the board except for the kids' movies was rated R, including this particular movie. It really wasn't my kind of movie. While the characters ripped into others with chainsaws, I averted my eyes and made a mental note to look up the Aussie rating for any further movies. Current Mood:  disappointed | | Thursday, February 1st, 2007 | | 12:50 am |
Changing Suburbs
The office numbers in my building at work are four digits long, with the first digit signifying the floor. I'm on the second floor, so my office numbers have all been in the format "2XXX". This, of course, is the same format as Sydney postcodes, so whenever I move offices I like to look up which suburb I'm moving into. I started in North Parramatta, then moved to St Leonards for a year. Next week I'm shifting out to Horsley Park (SW of Prospect Reservoir). I'd like to get Turramurra one day. It's a window office. Current Mood:  silly | | Monday, January 29th, 2007 | | 3:25 pm |
Customer Service
I dropped into a local supermarket yesterday to buy a bit of food. As I wandered past the meat section, there was a bloke - an employee of the shop - cooking up a sample of their latest fancy marinated steak, so I stopped to try a bit. He asked me what I thought of it. "It's a bit spicy", I commented. "Spaucy?", he asked. "Spiiicy", I enunciated even more clearly. "It has a lot of spices in it." I walked away but he chased me and asked "What's spaucy?". I muttered, "Forget it". By now, other Yanks standing around were starting to smirk. But he persisted - "What's the opposite of spaucy?" "Mild", I answered in frustration. Understanding dawned. "Oh, spicy!". I nodded, embarrassed, and tried to escape again. Undeterred, he pointed out a steak and said, "that one has peppers in it to make it spaucy, you'd probably want the teriyaki one, which doesn't have so much spaucy in it!" He then grinned around at the other shoppers to share the joke. Yeah, thanks mate. And making fun of my accent is really going to encourage me to buy your products... Current Mood:  angry | | Monday, December 4th, 2006 | | 3:15 pm |
*groan*
Q: Why do Computer Scientists get Christmas and Halloween mixed up? A: Because 31 OCT == 25 DEC Sorry :-) | | Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 | | 3:40 pm |
| | Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 | | 11:37 pm |
A travesty! A disaster! The breakdown of modern society!
On Sunday, I bought the full set of Wallace and Gromit episodes from the local Borders (as you do). I settled down on the couch to watch the lot. All went well until I started watching The Wrong Trousers, when I noticed that someone had made blatant changes to the soundtrack. Near the start of the film, Gromit receives a musical birthday card, which plays - unsurprisingly enough - "Happy Birthday To You". On this DVD, however, the card played "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow". And, I might add, it did so in a very tinkly manner that was quite dissimilar to the timbre of most musical birthday cards. Furthermore, the songs played on the penguin's (Feathers McGraw's) favourite radio station were totally different tracks from those to which I am accustomed. Same style of music, but different songs. WHY? Why, I ask you? What possible reason could there be for such a mutilation of something that was already perfect? Or... could it be... that the version shown in Australia is the modified version and the Yanks have the original? (I suspect the removal of "Happy Birthday" might have been due to copyright reasons). |
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