all things me

Often one of the co-workers who lives quite close to me gets on the same bus to/from work. This morning, for instance. She started talking about work stuff — in quite a loud voice — and suddenly said one of our clients’ name (or is it clients’ names?) out loud. I couldn’t believe it! I have a very tight filter in work related things and couldn’t be caught dropping names. Client information especially is confidential. I told her she shouldn’t be talking about those things. (And she said, “nah, it’s ok.” Well, no, it’s not.)

She’s kinda annoying (oh, 2nd person I don’t really like) because she talks very loud all the time and sort of dominates the conversations around the lunch table. In one-on-one conversations I don’t mind it because I just nod and hum but in bigger groups I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts (and chime in myself…), too. Oh well.

or “the D’oh Moment”

As I’ve been laughing at , I have to tell about a computer-related blooper of my own: Last week I received a PDF that wouldn’t open. I tried both the Adobe Acrobat/Reader versions I have installed – no luck. Then I went to one of the other tech people and asked “Which PDF versions you have?”

…

Today I was putting the finishing touches to a complex Excel sheet and noticed that some translations were missing in formulas. The cells looked empty, so I understand it was easy to miss them although I mentioned about it in my instructions. I wrote the translator asking translations to the missing words; one of them was a place where calves are fed (with milk, probably). The word for feeding with liquid (juottaa) is the same as ‘weld’ in Finnish and the translator had used that in the translation. I asked if it meant ‘to feed’ as well and pointed them to a word list I had found and suggested some translations, also asking that I didn’t accidentally suggest some sort of machine that feeds calves to some other being! (As a sort of joke that would make the email not so serious and finger-pointing.)

The reply was, “Why are you asking me about animal feeding? I have no idea what it should be!”

Suddenly this started to bother me a lot. I surf to WordPress.com and on the front page it says: “Why Blog? All the cool kids are.”

That doesn’t make sense, does it? All the cool kids are blogs? Is this correct language in some young and hip native-English speaker sort of way that is designed to baffle the non-natives, or should it in fact be “All the cool kids do.”? In my mind, ‘are’ requires a gerund: “Why should I be blogging? All the cool kids are!”

There isn’t (luckily?) a “Click here to nitpick” link on the site, so I’ll just complain about it here.

I, like many others, have taken a liking to Sudoku puzzles. I started with some simple scanning techniques (examples 1-3) which worked with the easier puzzles. Angus Johnson’s Simple Sudoku program has a delightful Help containing many strategies to solving a puzzle. I haven’t got the hang of (or memorised) the most advanced techniques but recently I finished even the “Ultimate Challenges” in two Sudoku books (about 200 puzzles each) with the following strategies that I’ve found the most effective — and enough.

1. I always start a puzzle by looking at the smallest area possible which is the 3×3 square. I check the missing numbers starting from 1 and see if I can put a number anywhere.

2. After I’ve gone through each of the 9 small squares so many times that I can’t add numbers anymore, I check each horizontal row.

3. After horizontal rows don’t help, I check each vertical row.

4. I repeat steps 1-3 until I can’t add any numbers. Then I write down the “candidates” in each square. Often this reveals new numbers to add when a square has only one possible candidate.

When the candidates are written down it’s easy to see pairs or small groups so I can strike out candidates in other squares. In the example there are three squares that have to contain the numbers 1,4, and 5 so I can discard them in the square that is outside the group. I do this scan on horizontal and vertical rows, too.

5. With the candidates in view it’s easy to find numbers to strike out when I go through the rows horizontally and vertically and notice that a number has to be contained in one of the 3×3 squares. Then I can strike out the number in the other 3×3 squares on the same row. Also, if a number is restricted to a 3×3 square and a vertical or horizontal row, candidates can be struck out within the 3×3 square.

In the example numbers 3, 6, and 9 have to be found on the first row so they can be struck out elsewhere in the second 3×3 square.

Before I learned the strategies 4 and 5 I had trouble finishing the tougher puzzles. I suppose I had thought of checking the pairs but not the larger groups.

Perhaps next I should take on making the puzzles because I tried that on Simple Sudoku and couldn’t get a single one pass the check (= only one solution).

Disclaimer: The examples are not trying to be realistic situations or solveable puzzles, they’re just diagrams.

On Tuesday morning I went to pick up my passport. Luckily this time I didn’t have to queue at all (I went to the police station at 8:30 am). The lady asked me for my current passport that needed to be cancelled. I stared at her a bit and said I didn’t have a passport (I did have a 1-year passport in 1997). She still insisted, “it expires in January”. I said again I didn’t have a passport. Then she noticed that the paper that was attached to my passport had a wrong, but very similar, name. She apologised and said “I’m glad I didn’t rough you up more.”

My photo is still bad but it isn’t as noticeable under the plastic. This time I don’t look like I’ve escaped from prison as I did on my first passport.

Next step: ETA (Electronic Travel Authority) and plane tickets…

For the whole story, see category Tourist of Oz.

This was waiting on a chair — not mine — this morning:

There was also a long USB cord that hung between the bulb and the ceiling lamp where that bulb is from… Apparently some of the tech guys were a bit bored the night/evening before (so I heard).

A crocodile-shaped lollipop holder gets its share of jokes, too. (For a long time there was a rotten-ish mandarin/tangerine in its mouth. That was around the time when there was some grief with our Chinese vendor.)

Today I went to the new Nokia Flagship store here in Helsinki. (I wonder if they sell phones there, or only flagships…) — correction, I went there and dragged my sister along. The place was pretty crowded (tomorrow’s the official launch party) so there wasn’t anyone I could’ve started bombing with questions; and we were pretty tired anyway. I searched for the N73, looked at it a little bit, took a tiny brochure, and we left.

The price there was higher than what I’d got as a package deal from somewhere else. I went to ask the price for the phone, a 512Mb/1Gb memory card, and an audio adapter (to be able to use regular earphones) in a store close to work and the price they offered was less than what the phone costs at the Nokia store. (They did offer only 3€ less than the normal price so I’ll have to go in and haggle a little more.)

I don’t know which will happen first: being able to drag myself to the centre again to go in and properly try out the phone (well, University starts soon) or buying the phone.

My newest justification for not feeling too bad about spending so much money: I’m getting a lot of this year. But you know what, I won’t feel bad at all! I’m gonna love the phone to bits!

I had received the following spam comment which was sort of refreshing after the “Hi Jane! I like your site!”, “Best site I ever seen!”, “May we exchange links” comments that come in the dozens.

HiHi
I’m really stupid
Yestarday I’ve got married and
today Im going make money online
So stupid
O-O-_ohh Mein Gott really you can see

Mein Gott, I’m so glad to have spam blocks.

I don’t really understand what this means:

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

What is a ‘cognitive’ site?

But this is the most idiotic of all:

I just don’t have anything to say right now.

In senior high (or 10th grade) we got a 3-year assignment to write down and review with a point system of our choice every book we read. This was probably a sub-assignment to reading ten Finnish classics.

My memory in these sort of things (what I’ve read, what movie I’ve seen, what did that character say in that series, what did I do yesterday, what did I just say…) is infamously bad and because I like reading, I took liking to this routine. So, since 1998 I’ve written down every book I’ve read except for the books I read for school (unless we’ve had to read them cover-to-cover and only when I’ve remembered to write them down…).

The most embarrassing year was 2001 when I only read four books. I did have my finals, entrance exam to University, and my first year of Uni then so I guess I can forgive myself. In 2003 and 2004 I read twenty-seven books which I haven’t been able to top yet. I guess that was thanks to my half an hour bus ride to/from work. Last year I read only thirteen books which was kind of embarrassing (after the twenty-seven of previous years, at least!) but yesterday as I finished reading Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation I reached thirteen. It is not humanly possible that I don’t finish a single book in the remainder of the year so — luckily — from now on the only way is up!