Through Charlie Gorichanaz's Eyes
My mom needed arrange for 18 new employees to meet each other via a series of group sessions of four groups meeting at a time. In order to make each session as long as possible, she needed an efficient set of combinations to have each person meet each other person in as few sessions as possible.
She ended up manually grouping all the employees and came up with a solution that required nine sessions, which is pretty good. But I wrote a program that solves her problem using only eight sessions. And it only takes a few seconds, versus the much longer amount of time to do it manually.
Barely two days after I posted about my new gym lifestyle, the Fitness SF website got replaced Feb. 14 with a cutting open letter from the company’s former designer, Frank Jonen.
“Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them. As a result this website is no longer operational,” Jonen wrote.
Anyway, back to signing up for the gym… I had e-mailed with one of the recruiter people a few times about prices, and finally went in to start a membership after they made a reasonable offer on my desired plan: $36.95 per month with no money upfront and no contracts. Most of their other plans involved paying $100-200 up front for a monthly discount, but I decided not to try a plan that would save me money a year or two down the line when I’ll possibly not live in this neighborhood and possibly be making way too much money to care. Well, hopefully. Hopefully.
I was setting up a search domain last night, and went to bed while the latest draft of my SDF file generated. This morning I tried to upload it on the “Create a New Search Domain” dialog, and got this new error.
Friday morning, after getting enough rest at the hostel, I made plans to meet Nick again so he could show me his beloved chocolate restaurant, Max Brenner. Instead of going all the way back to Saeed’s, I just showered at the hostel, using my dirty shirt as a towel and my underwear as a rag. I just used the hand soap as shampoo and body wash. It worked fine.
Wednesday, I did the library working thing again, and then met a new friend Saeed for lunch. We went to a restaurant called Mos Burger, which is apparently a Japanese burger place. Afterward I found out they have rice buns, which I would have tried. But it was decent nonetheless. The portions were a little small, but that’s pretty much how Australia has been… either smaller portions than I’m used to, or the food is really expensive, or both.
I walked inside, feeling slightly intimidated, not knowing the normal process for such places. The receptionist was a girl about my age, and she was quite nice and understanding. She explained the various types of rooms ranging from eight bed to two bed rooms. I think there was an eight bed room space available that night for around $31, but it was booked for the next day. The six bed rooms had spaces for the foreseeable future, and cost $33. So, not knowing if I’d be there one night or 10 days, I opted to purchase a single night in a six bed room. If I figured out I would be there at least a week, the rate goes down about $10 per night.
I didn’t do much other than work the rest of Tuesday through Friday. Late Friday afternoon, I made the abrupt decision after talking to Daniel to leave Oliver’s and go back to Brisbane. I wasn’t doing much other than work, and Oliver was keeping to himself, so I thought a change of scenery and getting to know a new friend would be great.
So I asked Daniel to book me a standy ticket for that afternoon, I packed up and headed to the airport. A few hours later I was back with Daniel, and he was very excited to see me.
Oliver’s day basically consisted of waiting in lines in this barn. And we waited with him half the time. They had one big section for signatures, and another section for photos. The celebrities basically walked back and forth between signing and photographs. It was not super organized, as the times were totally off most of the time, and Oliver even got the wrong photograph for someone to Felicia Day to sign. It was some other similar looking girl. Embarrassing!
Wednesday afternoon I went for what was supposed to be a lovely half marathon length run along the ocean. About halfway through, around mile 7, I started feeling a slight pain in my foot. Throughout my running experience, I’ve had lots of random pains that always went away after a while and never seemed to cause a problem. Well, this one didn’t. Another mile, I took a break to stretch my foot and see what was going on with it.
