Nick's Double Coconut Lamingtons!

Ok, so I didn't innovate all that much, but I'm proud of using coconut cream in the icing to make them double-coconut (and lactose-free) lamingtons! (and I wanted to name it after myself :p)
I made this batch for Tanya, but let Sarah go down in history as the first person ever to try Nick's Double Coconut Lamingtons!
I reckon they turned out pretty darn delicious for a first effort :D

So, without further ado:

Nick’s Gluten- and Lactose-free Double Coconut Lamingtons

Sponge Cake

• 4 eggs
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup caster sugar
• 1 cup cornflour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp custard powder

1. Preheat oven to 180C.
2. Split the egg whites and yolks. Beat whites until stiff, then add yolks and beat until thick and creamy.
3. Beat in the caster sugar gradually.
4. Sift the cornflour, baking powder, and custard powder three times, then sift into the egg mixture. Fold through without delay but gently.
5. Spread the mixture into a baking tin. Pick the tin up and drop it back onto the bench from about 10-20cm a couple of times to get large air bubbles out.
6. Bake for 30-40 minutes (until a knife comes out clean).
7. Stand for 5-10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.
8. Refrigerate overnight before slicing into lamingtons.

While baking the sponge cake will rise lots, but it collapses back down afterwards. Apparently no flour is quite as good as wheat flour at making fluffy cakes. It makes a slightly denser than usual sponge cake, but still delicious and adequate for the task at hand!

Lamington Icing

• 1/3 cup cocoa
• 4 cups icing sugar (be careful, icing mix has wheat in it)
• 1 tbsp butter (or margarine for non-dairy)
• 2/3 cup coconut cream
• 2+ cups desiccated coconut

1. Mix cocoa and icing sugar.
2. Melt butter in the coconut cream in a pan.
3. Stir in the cocoa and icing sugar over a low heat.

It's much easier to coat the lamingtons when the chocolate icing is warm. I managed to do a batch before the icing cooled too much.

Lamingtons!

1. Cut off the crusts to the sponge cake and cut it into squares.
2. Set out the icing in one bowl, the coconut in another (wide) bowl, and a tray with baking paper to set the lamingtons on. Using two forks, dip a sponge square first in the chocolate icing and turn it to coat it evenly. Then quickly put it into the coconut and turn it over. Finally set it onto the baking paper.
3. When all are done, refrigerate in an airtight container to set the chocolate icing.

PhD Comics

As a finally-starting-my-thesis present, Melanie bought me the first two volumes of Piled Higher and Deeper! Not only that, but they're both signed by the author, Jorge Cham. The way Melanie explains it, she had to send a U.S. cheque by mail (you know, paper and envelopes and stuff) to pay for it anyway, so she included a letter asking if Jorge could sign the copies as well. I even got an original drawing of my hero, Mike Slackenerny :D

In an ironic yet probably-not-unexpected twist, I am of course reading my finally-starting-my-thesis present instead of, you know, actually finally starting my thesis :p

It's very scary how dead on these comics are :|

Selbunster's Last Days

It's done, I've cancelled my World of Warcraft account. Things aren't so drastic though; it'll stay open for as long as Sarah wants to pay the subscription to play.

I saw this on the account management page:

You can use this link to terminate your subscription online. Before you do so, we would love to hear from you by telephone. There are many steps that our representatives can take to address any problems you may be experiencing. Please call us at 1-800-59-BLIZZARD.

Why did I first think of psychological counselling rather than technical support? :p

Coconut Rice

Just in case anyone wants to make this easy rice variation themselves (Y)

a = 1x cups basmati rice
b = 1x cups coconut milk or cream
c = 0.5x cups water
d = 1x teaspoons salt
e = 1x tablespoons sugar

where x ~= 0.33 (recurring) per person.

If you want fluffy rice, rinse a a couple of times in water to wash away the rice flour.

You can vary the amount of b for a richer or more subtle taste. It doesn't matter whether you use of milk or cream: they're both just coconut + water, and cream just has more coconut than water in it. Just make sure to satisfy the constraint b + c = 1.5x cups of liquid.

Algorithm:
Add a + b + c + d + e to a saucepan and mix.
Bring to boil on high heat, stirring occasionally. Immediately cover and reduce to a gentle simmer.
Leave on low heat for 12 to 15 minutes.
Remove from heat entirely. Leave covered for 15 minutes to sit.

This algorithm returns delicious cocount rice!

Raid on Mt Jim Crow

We successfully raided Mt Jim Crow on the weekend with no wipes - actually without any deaths at all, though there were some close calls.
The raid was partitioned into to roughly three parties - Tanya and her friend Erin forging ahead along the main path; Nick and Sarah scouting alternate routes; and Brett and Melanie considerately escorting Carey, who was undoubtedly the one holding them up :p

Sarah insisted on proving that humans descended from apes by monkeying around in a tree on the side of a sheer drop. It would have been quite impressive, too, were it not for the it-just-had-to-happen moment:
"Sarah, come down now, you've succeeded in making me nervous," I called up to her in the upper branches of the tree.
"Nick, I've been climing trees all my life," she replied in exasperation, "And I've never fallen out!"
And of course, at that moment she reached out for a slender branch that sheared away from the trunk, and Sarah lurched forward, wrapping her arms around the trunk to save herself from plummeting straight down. She took a scrape along her upper arm, but besides her pride thankfully sustained no further injuries :p

And then of course we must also thank Tanya and Erin who between them, on the descent down the slippery slope, did an outstanding job of identifying the tricky sections :p

Ah, whoever thought nearly falling down a mountain could be so much fun :D

Circus Oz

Wednesday night, Circus Oz came to town for one night only, and Tanya and I went to see it. Circus Oz (a quick web search tells me) has been around since 1977. It's a world-class, human-only stage performance similar to Cirque du Soleil - but a bit rougher, more down to earth, and funnier.

For their performance here in Rockhampton they used the Pilbeam Theatre, and I was impressed by how well they set up such a dynamic array of acts on such a small stage. I thought for sure there would be times when someone would accidentally tumble off the front of the stage, but no-one ever did :)
Speaking of which, only one acrobat made one misstep through all the performances, and even crashing down from missing a trapeze was covered so smoothly that I was left wondering if it was intentional - the act was certainly all the more amusing for it.

I'm amazed by what humans are capable of doing with their bodies. Over the course of the two hour performance, the different acts awed, inspired, and (sometimes sickly) fascinated. I would so much love to have some of the gear that they play with - especially the cylindrical frame in which a person stands spread-eagled, Da Vinci posed, and rolls effortlessly around the stage. That looks like so much fun :D

It was so much fun, I wish I had of learned of Circus Oz coming to town earlier and had time to invite anyone who wanted to come, but I only found out about it the day before. (The Pilbeam Theatre's online ticketing system works really well, by the by - we got great tickets the night before the performance! :) )

Logic Puzzle

Here's a puzzle that Zbigniew Michalewicz gave at the Complex Systems 2004 conference in Cairns, though I don't know where he got it from. It was phrased with a lot of redundant information; here's the essential, stripped down version. I think it's quite clever and has an elegant solution (even though I didn't solve it myself :p )

You and a number of other people are seated facing each other in a circle in a plain room, with no prior knowledge of what is about to happen. One person, the host, enters the room, blindfolds everyone seated in the circle, paints a dot of some colour on everyone's forehead, and then removes the blindfolds.
Looking around, you see that multiple colours have been used and that some people, seemingly spaced at random, share the same colour dot as one another.
The host tells you three things:
"You may not communicate in any way the colour of a person's dot."
"I will ring this bell at regular intervals; when I ring the bell, stand up and leave if you know the colour of your dot."
"At some point, you will know the colour of your dot."

The question is, how can you know what colour dot you have?

Hints (in order of revelation - highlight text to read)

1. It is crucial that everyone knows that the problem is solvable.
2. There are an infinite number of colours (but assume for the sake of the problem that you can still tell when two people have the same colour :) ).
3. Can you know what colour you have if you are the only person with that colour?
4. Goto 1.

Yeah, I think everyone who reads this blog has heard this problem anyway, but I still think it's good :p

Useless doctor quota

Brett has had some troubles with doctors. I recently had my useless doctor quota filled at a bulk billing medical centre, too.
I wanted to check on what I had previously thought were two calluses on my foot, but that I had come to suspect may be warts. The doctor, a young timid indian woman, was useless beyond confirming that they were plantar warts.
I asked her what she recommended I do; she said that most people would ask to have them surgically removed; I said I didn't care what most people asked for, I wanted to know what a qualified (I use that term lightly) doctor recommended I should do. I said they weren't causing me any discomfit; she said I could leave it be if I wanted. I said I was concerned about spreading them, given that I do kendo; she said she didn't think that was a problem. I said I'd read that they were contagious and as such there was a small chance of spreading them. She didn't answer my question and instead agreed that normal warts were contagious, when obviously I don't care about normal warts, just plantar warts.
I stopped in exasperation, and flat out asked her "what do you think I should do?". Her answer, which was no answer at all, was that I could do what I liked and if I chose to have them removed I had to make an appointment.
Gah, utterly useless, I still don't know what to do. Ordinarily I'm a very easy going person and don't fault someone for being timid at all. But I think that a doctor cannot afford to be that indecisive. It's one thing to not know the answer; that's perfectly fine, admit it and go find out the answer. It's another thing entirely to try to avoid giving one.

What I Learnt Today

Actually, some cool things I learnt from the first issue of New Scientist that I received the other day:

• Don't use any security measure you can't place on the ground and walk away from.
• I want a brass water bottle if I go travelling to exotic countries.
• Robotic exoskeletons are cool.

Thanks for the subscription mum!

My latest paper

Here's the latest paper I've written, co-authored with Carey!
It's even about MMORPGs in some way (that I don't understand :p ). Check out the links at the very top to write your own.

Blogging under duress

I'm being forced to make this blog entry against my will. Melanie insists that it's time for another entry.

I've been educated in CSI whilst a guest at Brett & Melanie's place. I like the original show best, with the Gil Grissom and Greg Sanders characters. I just saw the first episode of the CSI: New York. I didn't think so highly of it. I was more interested in the secondary storyline, which doesn't say much for the show.

I've also been watching episodes of Numb3rs as well, which is an interesting twist on the crime investigation genre - all the cases are solved using mathematics! It's a bit corny sometimes, but good watching nonetheless :)

Melanie has just walked past and patted me on the head, so I consider my blogging obligations fulfilled now :p

Sunglasses

I finally bought some new sunglasses to replace the ones I lost in Harvey Norman. I learnt the difference between cheap sunglasses and OMG expensive sunglasses, too - admittedly from a biased saleswoman, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

The cheapest lenses you can get are acrylic. They have the worst optics, and if they're polarised the film will sometimes just be on the inside of the lens. Although it may not be apparent from trying them for a few seconds, you can get a good idea of the distortion by holding them up facing you and looking at your reflected face. Move them around and see how the face distorts as it moves across the lens.

I looked up lens types on the web... it seems that acrylic lenses are discounted in all comparisons. Comparisons appear to be between polycarbonate, CR-39, and glass lenses only. In order of price:

Polycarbonate lenses are a big step up from acrylic. They claim to be "distortion free", but there must be some room for improvement to justify the more expensive lenses. Polycarbonate lenses have the advantage that they are the lightest and most resistant to shattering. However, they are the most prone to scratching, and have worse optics than CR-39 or glass.

CR-39 lenses are right in the middle. Optics are better than polycarbonate but worse than glass. They're heavier and more likely to shatter than polycarbonate, but lighter and more resistant to shattering than glass.

And finally, glass lenses are the most optically correct, the heaviest, the most likely to shatter, and the most resistant to scratching. It's also the most expensive :|

The glasses that I lost were polycarbonate Zenith sunglasses. The ones I bought look almost the same - they're polarised CR-39 Zenith. An excellent replacement!

Just a big kid

  A man came to my block of units to mow the lawn the other day and his young son, who'd be about 6 years old, was with him. I guess mum was busy and couldn't watch the kid.
  Earlier in the morning I'd been out the back cleaning and caring for my leather kote gauntlets for Kendo, shoes, and sandals. It was the day before we were to go to Great Keppel: I wanted in particular to waterproof my sandals, and while I was about it I might as well do my other leather goods.
  So it was while I was inside and my kote were drying outside that I heard an exasperated "Hey, put those down; they're not yours!" over the droning buzz of a whipper snipper. I looked outside to see the curly-haired kid beating up the neighbour's boxing bag with my kote. I walked out to pick up the kote that had been hurriedly dropped to the ground, smiling at the little boy. His dad, satisfied our property wasn't in any immediate danger, carried on mowing.
  "Are these yours?" the boy asked curiously and I squatted in front of him to talk face-to-face.
  "Yep, they're my kote - for kendo." He looked blank. "Do you know what kendo is?"
  The boy shook his head.
  "It's Japanese sword-fighting - you know, like samurai?" I said, pretending to chop something. The boy nodded his understanding.
  "What does it look like?"
  "The sword?" I asked. "Wait here, I'll show you!" and I ducked back inside to bring out my wooden bokken.
  "This is what a katana - a Japanese sword - looks like." I was smiling amiably, happy to share some of my hobby with this young lad.
  "Are they all like that?" the boy asked, his head tipped to one side quizzically and his eyes screwed up in confusion.
  "Yes, pretty much all katana are like this... oh wait!" - realisation - "No, they're not wooden. This is just for practice, so no-one gets hurt."
  I pulled one kote onto my hand and offered him the bokken. "See, you can hit me without it hurting," and he whacked my hand hard with the wrong side of the blade, but I nodded encouragingly and he grinned in satisfaction. He waved the sword around for a bit and posed dramatically over an imaginary fallen foe, before giving the sword back to me.
  "Are you a man?" he asked.
  I blinked, trying to process the question.
  "I beg your pardon?"
  "Are you a man?"
  "Am I a man?" I repeated slowly, to make sure I understoood the question. Do I look like a woman, I thought to myself?
  "Yeah, are you a man or a boy?" the short fellow patiently clarified for me.
  "Oh!" I said in my hearty, manly voice, "Of course I'm a man!"
  "No you're not," he said giggling.
  "Er... I'm not?" For a postgrad, I was not maintaining a good grasp on this conversation.
  "Men don't play with toys like this," the boy explained knowledgeably. "They go to work and earn money and stuff!" His dad, who obviously qualified as a real man, was wiping the sweat off his brow and emptying the grass catcher into his trailer full of clippings.
  "Ah, right. I guess I'm a big kid then."
  "Yeah," agreed the boy. "Do you want a whale sticker?" he asked, producing from his pocket a sheet of paper with four little whale stickers left on it, two yellow and two pink.
  "Sure," I said, pleased that I was apparently accepted. "Can I have a yellow whale? I like yellow, and anyway, pink is only for girls."
  The boy nodded sagely and peeled off a yellow whale for me.
  "Thanks... what's your name?" I asked.
  "Timothy," he replied, and "Timothy!" his dad called, starting the car.
  "I'm Nick. Nice to me meet you Timothy!"
  Timothy laughed and ran off to his dad waiting in the car. "Nice to meet you too, dunder-head!" he said over his shoulder.
  Damn kids...

Nick no longer in Cairns

Thursday:
Took a 45 minute ferry to Green Island for the morning.
I wanted to go snorkelling. I convinced Rinku to come snorkelling with me, while Deepani just wanted to go on the glass bottom boat.
I thought Rinku was exaggerating when she said she couldn't swim... but after floundering in waist deep water I believed her :) Fortunately, half an hour of practice and a life-vest later, we were exploring the coral.
I saw:

• Lots of seaweed
• Lots of fish of all sorts, including a breed that took offence at my flippers and kept charging at them. Better the flippers than me.
• A big blue starfish!
• A huge great turtle, in about 1.5 metres of water, from a couple of metres away! It was so big it had small fish swimming in the shelter between its shell and flippers.
• Bright clams; waving anenomies; deep banks of coral - cool stuff!

We ran out of time and had to bolt back to the ferry, getting split up by the mobs of Japanese tourists. The mobile reception was patchy, and we couldn't find one another, but eventually we all made it onto the ferry - the last ones on board, with the deck hand looking at us impatiently as he waited to cast off :)

Sat through rest of the day's conference sessions in sandy beach clothes.
Realised that night that I was sunburned in interesting patterns where I'd missed putting sunscreen on. Thankful for longsleeved shirt at formal dinner :D
Went to casino with Jason afterwards and won $5! Must spend winnings on Sarah to placate her ;)

Friday:
At conference all day. Good Nick.
Xiaolong and Rinku presented well - very well for first time conference presentations!
Mexican food for dinner. Yum.
Off to pack and sleep. Have to get up far too early to drive back!

Saturday:
Up at 3am, leave at 4am, and sleep through most of the really interesting leg of the journey from Cairns to Townsville. It's called The Green Passage, and it's pretty much lush rainforest the entire way. It was so eerily beautiful in the predawn mist. I'd love to explore that area more - sometime when I'm awake ;)
Alternated driving every few hours with Kerry. We made excellent progress, even stopping to pick up her sister in Townsville. I expected heavy traffic this time of year, but the road was astonishingly empty. Made it back into Rockhampton at 7pm.

End of trip to Cairns. It was a really fun week, and the best conference experience I've had :D

Nick in Cairns 2

Tuesday:
Attended bad tutorial.
Had sushi for lunch. Got to sit at one of those low tables where you kneel on cushions!
Attended awesome tutorial. Got games on CD as part of handout. Good stuff :)
Welcome function in evening. Julius got plastered on free champagne; had to take him stumbling back to our hotel, scenic route via the docks and beach to tire him out. Moment of panic when he realised he left his backpack at the convention centre, but it was ok; he had keys in his pocket.
Went back out for dinner. Note: Don't let Rinku order indian food for you.
Fell asleep reading over slides. If it sends me to sleep, what's it going to do to the audience? :

Wednesday:
Paid price of stubbornly finishing curry.
Met Julius at breakfast. Informed him that vegemite was good for hangovers. I don't know if it is, but it was worth it seeing him try it :D
Morning technical sessions at conference.
Buffet lunch, inc. potato skins. Brillig :D
Absenteed myself from afternoon keynote speech, to "prepare presentation".
Went shopping for toys.
Practiced presentation. Good enough :)
Back to conference. Gave presentation. Excellent feedback from friends. Careful not to talk to anyone unbiased...
Hang around for poster session. AI'04 delegates get free drinks. Complex'04 delegates don't. World not fair.
Off to hotel internet cafe...

It appears I'm driving back to Rockhampton. Kerry Hand and Alanna North drove up in a Uni car, and on the way they had a near accident with a semi that's apparently shaken Alanna up badly, and she won't drive any more. Russel volunteered me to drive back with Kerry over the weekend.
I would have done it anyway (and I did agree to), but Russel's also arranged that I be paid for doing so. I'm not insured to drive the car unless I'm being employed by the Uni, so they have no real choice but to pay me to avoid liability :D
That'll pay for some Christmas presents :) And anyway, I've never driven along the coast north of Rockhampton, so I'll try to think of it as an experience rather than a chore.

I'm planning on going snorkelling off Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef tomorrow morning, so long as it doesn't rain. It broke out into a downpour earlier this afternoon. Here's hoping for good weather!

Nick in Cairns

This is the first time I've used an internet cafe. There is one free internet cafe (attached to a tourism shop) down the road, but it's always crowded so I'm paying by the hour for the convenience of using the hotel's internet cafe.

Speaking of tourism shops, there are so many of them in Cairns. I don't just mean shops selling discount plush koalas, either, though there are enough of them as well. I haven't seen this sort of thing before.
Every street on every block has one (or more) of these. They're shops that just organise packages for tourists. And they're always full of people. There are so many tourists here. Some of them try to masquerade as official information points, with the blue "i" symbol, but they're all the same. They're all small, one-room, hole-in-the-wall shops, but they're thriving here.
I'm going to try counting them all sometime...

I arrived in Cairns yesterday evening after a 2.5 hour delay at Rockhampton airport (make it 3 hours total wait at least, since Brett and Melanie did such a good job of getting me to the airport early :) ) . Thankfully I brought Fluxx, so I initiated Rinku in the game to pass the time.
Rinku, Deepani, and I met up with Russel and cohorts for dinner last night at a woodfired pizza place. Very nice food of course, but they're pretty much all the same (same for just about any cuisine, I guess).

Today, I got up early (hear that, Sarah?!) to help out at the conference opening - some big problems there that I'm not going to rant about because other people are going to be doing more than their fair share of ranting in the days to come.
Rinku, Deepani, Xiaolong, and I spent the rest of the day wandering about Cairns, which I'm getting the hang of. That's not hard though, because the city centre is very well laid out. It's just a grid of roads bordered on two sides by the sea, that's very easy to get around.
We went swimming in an artificial lagoon in the afternoon; went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. I love being spoiled on conferences :D
There wasn't anything else (productive) for me to do though, so no guilt. Today was just workshops, and I only registered for two tutorials that are on tomorrow. So tomorrow it starts.

I've got some good present ideas already though. In that sense I've been productive today :D

Time for me to give Sarah a call. I have to make sure she hears all this from me instead of reading it in my blog ;)

Aluminium sumps are expensive too

I took my car in for a routine service yesterday, and when Sarah took me back to pick it up at five o'clock, I was surprised to see my car still hoisted up in the garage. I was greeted at the desk with a friendly "You've got a big problem, mate. Come with me..."
As it turns out, years ago at some point, someone used a steel bolt to seal the aluminium oil sump, and with repeated oil changes the steel bolt has stripped away the thread on the sump. I had two options: either drill out the existing thread and glue in a replacement hole with new thread, or replace the entire sump.
Drilling out the existing thread was a less than attractive proposition, because there's no saying how long the glued-in thread would last and it would introduce metal shavings into the inside of the sump - this is the thing that holds oil for lubricating the engine; hardly someplace you want metal shavings.
So I'm replacing the sump. The guy initially quoted me around $300 or more for the sump, but after grimacing a bit I decided to go with it. Fortunately he managed to secure me a second-hand sump for $170 - much more managable.

Sarah's been driving me around while I wait for the part to come, which I'm very grateful for. She even helped me put my new computer chair together, this morning - because I realised after I got home that my tools are in the car at the garage :)

Silver Linings are Expensive

It's been expensive lately... and I haven't even gotten around to Christmas shopping yet!

My loyal Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite has finally succumbed to the evils of corrosion and one circuit of keys stopped working irreversibly. *sniff* That keyboard has been with me since my Gateway Pentium 300Mhz, and has been my favourite keyboard ever.
Sadly you just can't buy them anywhere; everything is a "multimedia pro deluxe" keyboard these days. The best I could find was a Fellowes split keyboard, which has an almost identical layout. I'm happy with it :)

Tainting my satisfaction with the keyboard though, I lost my sunglasses somewhere in Harvey Norman whilst buying it. Searching turned nothing up, and no-one's called me back to say they've been handed in.
They weren't extremely expensive - $80 - but I'd counted on them lasting several years. It's a pain having to buy new ones now, but it's an opportunity to get polarised lenses; Sarah delights in telling me how clear and colourful everything looks through her sunglasses any time we go to the beach.

And finally, whilst leaning back on my computer chair watching Seven Samurai, I was surprised to find myself tumbling off it backwards following a sharp CRACK! - The backrest had rusted and snapped away from the base.
I guess I have an excuse to buy one of the cool mesh-back chairs I've been envious of my brother having :)

Games

World of Warcraft beta has ended and the Warcraft universe has opened to the public. I played a bit during the beta, but I'm trying to resist playing the game now - I don't want to spend that much time on it; I don't want to spend that much money on it; and it's a hassle to play it on my computer, which is usually without internet access.
For now I'm quite content to watch the others play it :)

I have more than enough games to play right now anyway; I just got Half Life 2 and that's been enthralling me lately. When that's finished I have endless Neverwinter Nights content to play, Far Cry, and if I get through all that, Thief 3. It's tough gaming!

Grumgar the Orcish Jedi

Meet Grumgar, my new orcish jedi friend :D

Click for full size ;)

In between slaying mottled beasts and scorpids in the barren wastelands of the Horde, Grumgar enjoys shopping and modelling his new clothes. But when it's time to kick some arse, nothing beats his 1337 jedi robes (pictured above, rrp 13 copper available at The Den).

Thanks to Brett for letting me try WoW! :D

Kung Fu

I went to Kung Fu on Tuesday night. It was just a couple of guys and the instructor, Kot. Kot has recently come back to Rockhampton after a few years in Brisbane, and is only just restarting the club. Only a few dedicated students from before have currently rejoined, but they're in the process of trying to build it back up.
The rain, which had arrived suddenly earlier that day, held off for the couple of hours that we were in Kot's back yard, but it left the ground muddy causing kicks to be particularly messy. It was different training outdoors through the fading sunlight into the darkness held at bay by a single floodlight. Apparently they also train at a local park; that would be fun.
I didn't actually do much during the 1.5 hours Kot could be there. I got a quick overview of the art and what Kot taught. I stood in a horse stance (thus named because it's like you're riding a horse, not because you look like a horse... I think) until my quadriceps couldn't stop shaking. I did a bit of body hardening - strikes against bone, muscle, solar plexus, and abdomen - while at the same time learning some basic arm and foot movements. I was quite content to just stand back and watch when the knives and sticks came out though.
All in all I found it very interesting. I'll go back, but I don't know exactly how I'm going to fit it in. It seems to be a very real, effective martial art. I had a lot of fun doing Tae Kwon Do as a kid, but as a practical martial art I don't think it compares. One piece of advice I was given about sums it up - "What do you do if you're in a headlock? The easiest thing is to go straight for the balls." (Thankfully, testicle toughening is no longer part of most kung fu curriculums, Kot informed me with a straight face.)

Confusion

If you're reading this and you:

• Talked to me about the "milk run" flight from Rockhampton to Cairns;
• Work as, or know someone who works as, a 3d modeller for an aerospace company;
• Recommended the band "Depeche Mode"; or
  
• Saw "The Bourne Identity" with me 2 years ago

... could you please leave a comment?! There appear to be some inconsistencies in my memory of late. :)

Three Rings to Bind them All...

You can buy ring-binder CD wallets of various sizes from OfficeWorks. They're the tiniest bit bulkier than ordinary CD wallets because of the need for the click-open rings, but they're soo convenient.

• turning pages in a filled up wallet is much easier because the pages just flip over the rings
• you can take a page of CDs out for convenient access or to loan to someone
• you can rearrange the collection easily
• you can buy extra pages
• it looks cool :D

I've had one for my games for a while, and I just got one for my music cds. It makes it so much easier to find the CD you want while driving in the car.
They're relatively cheap compared to other wallets too, for some reason. I'd willingly pay more, but I'm not complaining :)

Blog Fu

I just ran into a friend who conscripted me for the Uni's Kung Fu club - all they needed was a nominal member to up their numbers and get club status with the student association.
But, curious, I took a look at their website.

Kung Fu (or Gung Fu) is a Cantonese Word which has meaning of: “a skill achieved or attained through long hard dedicated & diligent effort and study over a long period of time” or simply “ a skill achieved through time and hard effort”, in the west it has come to mean especially the Chinese Martial Arts which are more correctly termed Mo Sut (“Martial Arts”)
...
One can have “Kung Fu” in any art or discipline such as cooking or dancing. For example a Master Chef would be said to have Cooking Kung Fu.

Cool.
What kung fu do you have?

"MOE" upside-down = "WOE"

I should have listened to the people telling me not to let ITD install the Managed Operating Environment (MOE) on this computer, but I foolishly believed that it wouldn't be too bad. I was placated by promises of local administrative rights to my machine.
But I should have bailed upon hearing the first warning bells, when Conrad informed me that...
"ITD likes staff having MOE. It makes it easier to fix problems."
"Oh, how so?" I enquired.
"We blow away your machine and reinstall MOE." <- actual words

Now, just recently I've been trying to convert my paper (written in Word) to PDF. ITD have this "great" new system that lets them cut back on Adobe Acrobat licenses: instead of installing (and licencing) the software on your local machine, they've set up a network printer service that "prints" to a PDF file for you.
Unfortunately it just doesn't work for my paper, and we don't know why. Chriss Lenz was able to print the document to pdf perfectly from her computer, and since she was using Office 2003 she suggested that I try that.

MOE has other ideas. Conrad has just informed me that you simply cannot install Office 2003 with MOE. If MOE detects that you don't have Office XP installed, it will automatically uninstall whatever you do have, and leave you with nothing. It doesn't even have the grace to put Office XP back for you - you have to do that yourself.
Gah.

Now I don't know how I'm going to convert documents to PDF :|

Vote [1] Honours Room!

So there's an election this weekend. Ordinarily I'm apathetic about elections because I rarely pay attention to the news, let alone anything political. It's not that I don't care what happens to Australia - rather that I'm uninformed and don't know which parties most closely match my values.
A few days back I was bemoaning the fact that there was no easy way to compare the policies of different parties. Well, in the process of having an entirely unresolved but nevertheless entertaining political argument in the virtual Honours Room, I learnt about comparepolicies.com.au - exactly what I needed!

I'm now looking forward to Saturday's election for the for the first time in, like, ever because I know who to vote for :)
And, er, because we're having a LAN and a nothing-to-do-with-the-election celebratory dinner afterwards (birthday for Melanie, graduation for Tanya, hello for Roland - have I missed anyone?)!

As an aside, reading the policies of parties I disagree with really scares me. :|

Weekend Update

I went to Bundy on the weekend to collect my presents and see my family (note priority). I got a pen holder from my brother Carey; a cool Japanese styled set of bowls, saucers, and plates from my sister Michelle; a much wanted New Scientist subscription from mum; and two bags of pork sausages and a bag of spare ribs from mum's boyfriend Russel, who coincidentally owns a pig farm ;)
Other notable loot from the weekend included a cool magnetic arrow-rest and fast-flight string for my bow from John Hans, and my collection of Magic cards from my brother that had been on loan to one of his friends. The collection is quite a bit smaller than I remember it, but it's been years since I played with them so I can't remember what's missing. Oh well.

My mum is quite the entreprenuer now! For a while now she's had her psychology practice, which has taken off recently and she's now booked out three weeks in advance. That's excellent news, but apparently it's not enough. She and a friend have taken out just about an entire arcade in Bundaberg's CBD, and are in the process of transforming it into a health club / weight loss clinic / coffee shop. It sounds very ambitious to me, but they seem confident it will all work, and it certainly seems the market is there. The weight loss industry is huge, especially because of all the recent media attention on certain fast food chains. Furthermore, Queensland Health are apparently very interested in the project and if it works out well there could be funding/endorsement - that sort of thing - to take it state wide.
I'm not exactly sure, but I gather that the unique thing about this project is the way it combines a physical exercise programme (that's the friend, a fitness instructor cum psychologist) and cutting edge psychological counselling (that's mum! :) ) into a comprehensive package targeted at overweight to unhealthily obese clients.
Good luck to mum!

Gah, Blogger hasn't been letting me post this for the last 2 days... *fingers crossed* *clicks Publish*

Woo! Good results, finally.

Mood: happy, relieved

In the last few days, I've been running some function approximation experiments that, in a nutshell, have given me exactly the results I needed!

I wasn't happy with the paper that I submitted to Complex 2004, because I thought I had a good idea but it just didn't work. The results I got from the experiments I included in that paper were statistically inconclusive and I was left grasping at straws to justify the worth of the paper.

Well, I've done two more experiments based on what I've learned recently, and both of them have given excellent results!
I couldn't ask for more conclusive data - it shows that (for fully specified fuzzy logic rulebases) multi-dimensional representations are better than single-dimensional representations. That statement comes with an iron-clad statistical significance of 0.001 - for anyone who doesn't know stats, anything under 0.05 is acceptable and lower is better.

This comes at the perfect time, because I have the opportunity to edit my paper to include the new results, and submit the new version as the final submission. I am quite satisfied with the way things have turned out. My paper is worthwhile, and my intuition has been vindicated :D

On Buying iPods

Now that it's Sarah's birthday and she knows what present she's getting, I can blog about my iPod hunting experience in Rockhampton.

It's been something of a long-running joke (started and maintained mainly by Sarah, of course :p ) that I should buy her an iPod for her birthday/christmas/random day of the week. Well, after tossing the idea around I decided an iPod would actually make a jolly good birthday present. The moment that sold me on the idea was when I was in the Mac Choice store and Trisha passed this tiny pink brushed-metal iPod mini across the counter for me to look at. They're so slick!
That was also the moment that I decided it had to be an iPod mini in particular, even though I could get a fully fledged 20GB iPod for only $40 more.

The only problem was that Trisha only had 2 blue iPod minis in stock, and I didn't really want a blue one for Sarah. So I asked her to let me know when she found out what else she was getting in stock soon, and I went off on a quest for iPod minis elsewhere.
To cut a long story short, there practically aren't any iPod minis elsewhere.
The Byte Centre had a single blue iPod mini, and no plans to get any more in because apparently they get a $20 profit margin on each iPod and the hassel of getting them isn't worth their while. With that attitude I would be reluctant to buy from them even if they did plan on getting more stock, but the bloke I talked to was at least happy to suggest other places I could get one.
Target don't stock or order iPod minis at all.
eBay had a few on auction, but the auctions close to closing were going for more than I could buy one from Mac Choice for.
Dick Smith don't stock or order iPod minis at all. The obnoxious salesman treated me like I didn't know anything about computers or music players (after I repeatedly showed that I did), and tried to sell me a Creative Nomad Zen instead ("but look... this one holds, um, TEN thousand songs!").
Finally, I called the online Apple Store and asked about availability: Minimum waiting time of about 4 weeks.

So in the end, it looks like I'll wait to see what Trisha gets in her next shipment and pick the best colour out of that. Should be sometime this week! Woohoo :D

And, after all that, Sarah didn't realise that the paper cutout iPod with "Sorry it's not here yet, it's coming!" written on it meant that I was actually getting her a birthday present and not just a card with a paper iPod :p

Paper Accepted!

Well, the paper that I submitted to the AI / Complex 2004 conference - held in Cairns with an Asia-Pacific attendance - was accepted!
(for the record, it was "Multi-Dimensional Encoding to Reduce Bias in Fuzzy Knowledge-bases"... You can stop yawning now ;) )

I guess I should be happy. I honestly didn't expect the paper to be accepted, because the results it presented were somewhat inconclusive (BS... they were almost *entirely* inconclusive :p). Still, I'll do my best to polish it up and improve it where I can, and do a good job of presenting it at the end of the year.
In a way I almost wish it wasn't accepted, because now I have the pressure of making it acceptable in my own eyes! I was kind of hoping to just mostly forget about this research and write it off as a footnote in my thesis.

It raises another question, though, namely: what are the other reviewers thinking?! I reviewed a couple of papers for this conference myself (extra to what I mentioned in an earlier entry), and I spent a good 2-3 hours per paper making sure I understood it and giving a meaningful critique. Two of the three (anonymous) reviews I got were reasonable (if generous IMO), but the third review was just "Excellent" for every criteria and a somewhat trivial comment on presentation at the end. Now, I *know* it didn't deserve that review, and I have to doubt that the reviewer read much of my paper.
To be fair, I guess a lot of the reviewers are very busy and can't give the 2-3 hours per paper that I spent, but still...

But all's well in the end. After all, I get a free trip to Cairns for an interesting conference! :D

Puzzle

This sentence is just so tricky it deserves a post of its own. Can you solve it? There are apparently two valid solutions.

In this sentence, the number of occurrences of '0' is __; of '1' is __; of '2' is __; of '3' is __; of '4' is __; of '5' is __; of '6' is __; of '7' is __; of '8' is __; and of '9' is __.

Self Referential Sentences

Here are some sentences that make you chuckle, do a double-take, or just plain scratch your head in bemusement. These are a select few culled from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.

Structure

• This sentence no verb.
• because I didn't think of a good beginning for it.
• This sentence was in the past tense.
• A preposition this sentence ends in. (Yoda might have said this...)
• This sentence is a !!!! premature punctuator
• It goes without saying that
• When one this sentence into the German to translate wanted, would one the fact exploit, that the word order and the punctuation already with the German conventions agree.

Identity

• It feels sooo good to have your eyes run over my curves and serifs.
• Do you read me?
• If I said something else, would it still be me saying it?
• If I were you, who would be reading this sentence?

Prophecy

• The reader of this sentence exists only while reading me.
• In the time it takes you to read this sentence, eighty-six letters could have been processed by your brain.
• This sentence will end before you can say "Jack Rob
• Does this sentence remind you of Agatha Christie?
• You have, of course, just begun reading the sentence that you have just finished reading.

Truth

• (Here's an interactive sentence! Can you solve it? Fill in the blanks with any digits.)
  In this sentence, the number of occurrences of '0' is __; of '1' is __; of '2' is __; of '3' is __; of '4' is __; of '5' is __; of '6' is __; of '7' is __; of '8' is __; and of '9' is __.
• This sentence contains exactly threee erors. (Get it?)
• This sentence is false. (But it says it's false, so it's true! But if it's true...)

Er... I'm not quite sure what to make of these two quizzes... I haven't done anything Sarah, honest! :|
But online quizzes are fun :D

What book are you?

You're Love in the Time of Cholera!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like Odysseus in a work of Homer, you demonstrate undying loyalty by sleeping with as many people as you possibly can. But in your heart you never give consent! This creates a strange quandary of what love really means to you. On the one hand, you've loved the same person your whole life, but on the other, your actions barely speak to this fact. Whatever you do, stick to bottled water. The other stuff could get you killed.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.


What country are you?

You're Thailand!

Calmer and more staunchly independent than almost all those around you, you have a long history of rising above adversity. Recent adversity has led to questions about your sexual promiscuity and the threat of disease, but you still manage to attract a number of tourists and admirers. And despite any setbacks, you can really cook a good meal whenever it's called for. Good enough to make people cry.

Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid