October 2004 Archives

I finally wrapped up this years halloween costume. Given the amount of time I put into it I think I'll definately do a writeup, though it's going to be a little more complicated than the duffman one. No one was around to take a picture of me in it but I actually like the look of it just hanging up.

Anyway, Doc Ock:

It'll be interesting to see if how well I fit through smaller doorways.

I just wrapped up my 4th and final interview for microsoft for the full time position. There are mixed thoughts on the position in general but the interview process was kind of fun.

There were some personal introspection questions, how you'd fit in the company, why you want to work here, what your weaknesses are, etc. That didn't interest me much and I think I did fine in them. I was really looking forward to the famous microsoft puzzle/coding questions. So I thought I'd share them with the world (or my tiny slice of it).

The coding challenge was sort of interesting. Implement FindString. First time was just determine if a string exists in another string when both strings are treated as arrays of characters. Then part b was determine how many times the first one appears in the second. I had one "off by one" error that was quick to fix and was very close to how the internal workings of find string really work so that went well. The guy interviewing was pretty cool.

Now the brain teasers!

1) You have a 7 foot long bar of gold. I'm going to work for you for 7 days and at the end of every day you pay me one unit of gold. You can cut your bar of gold only twice however, and each cut is a straight line (no spirals). How do you do this?

2) Three men are standing in a line such that the last man can see the two in front of him, the middle fellow can see only the man in the front and the guy in front can't see anything. A woman with a bag of 2 black hats and three white hats comes along, mixes up the hats, and places one randomly on the top of the three men's heads. She then asks last man if he knows what color hat he has on, he says no. She then asks the middle fellow, he says no. Finally she asks the man in front and he says Yes. How does he know what color hat he's wearing?

3) You have 12 sticks laid out at right angles to form four boxes as follows:

 _ _


|_|_|


|_|_|

Moving exactly and only 3 of the sticks, having none remaining and none doubled up, rearrange the sticks such that only three boxes are formed, all of equal size and all of the same size as they are now.

Nothing like filling a glass canyon with an infinte amount of rope or anything, but pretty good puzzles. The stick one was the most challenging for me oddly since spacial reasoning was what I used to kick butt at.

Man I'm such a nerd :)

I got to meet an interesting fellow last night. For annonymity - and the fact that I didn't get his name - we'll call him james. he struck me as a james. Anyway.

Took addie down to Queen Anne to have a walk with Jennie, grab some pizza then watch a movie. While jennie was in Pagaliacia I hung outside with the pup and there was a fellow playing a gorgeous resonator (steel guitar) on the corner so we sat down and listened. Since it was 9 at night and no one was coming by he stopped to talk with me. Said he comes up to seattle about once a year from florida, "just long enough to get the florida out of me" he put it. Usually makes enough on the trip to pay for the trip but this year has been slow; that and he'd "squandered too much money on things I shouldn't have squandered it on" - I liked that line. The weather and the election has been keeping people a little tighter with their wallets so he wasn't doing as well - yeah that was probably a pitch to me, but I didn't mind. He told me some stories of the glory days at Pike's Place when seattle had millionaires to spare and the money flowed freely. Jennie came out and we said goodbye and he started packing up for the night. A backpack, a sleeping bag and a guitar case. Nice guy.

I could try and draw some grand conclusion about freedom or travel or prejudice and assumtions, but that seems a little... cold I guess. Just a cool guy to meet.

Finding Forrester was good as always, I especially enjoy the conversation about using conjunctions at the beginning of a sentance because - as should be well established by now - I am a complete geek.

Chicken strips, they're like peyote for dreams. Peyote's the one that gives you halucinogenic visions of the future, right? Anyway, they told me that Blade 3 is going to suck horribly. And that it will involve vorpel blades (slice through walls), that will lead to a giant vampire library full of Cthuhlu books where chinese vampires fight japanese vampires in a videogame involving thousands of bubble bobble characters. And it's always noon. And that's because it's really a virtual reality game. So it's going to suck.. at least according to the peyote.

But that wasn't the conversation point of the dream - the Language alluded to. No, see earlier on I had to get away from several "bad guys" in a nuclear powered sailboat as they chased me in a similar one. they shoot up ours and an innocent passerbys and as the reactors breach and the boats are about to sink the passers by ask if we're going to get a new boat. A little odd, but yeah, we talk and settle on me borrowing a boat. Then the strangeness happens.

See, we're in a comunist country. Or socialist. Something where everyone owns everything. When I say that I'm going to borrow the boat the communist asks how can I borrow something when the boat is already mine. You just use it as you need it. When you don't need it someone else will use it. Fine, so where will I park the (nuclear powered sail-)boat? I can't just park it in front of some guy's garrage, he'll be pissed. But it's your garage too, just as much as it is his.

So then I started to wonder. In a theoretically pure communist/socialist/utopian/zionist/whatever society do things like loaning and borrowing and debt exist? Do the concepts themselves just not exist or would new words have to be invented to describe them since "Borrow" and "own" and "some guy's garrage" are clearly inadiquate when the concept of ownership doesn't exist.

Then blade showed up and stared hacking vampires. Strange ass chicken strips.

First off, I don't sell out. Or if I do, I'm going to do it for a whole lot more than $150.

With that out of the way, I was fiddling with Google yesterday and got an odd little surprise. It turns out someone sold their Duffman costume from last year on ebay to the tune of $157. Actually, they didn't sell their costume, they were selling the service of making a costume. You send the size and he'd make it for you. It's actually not that bad of an idea, and his costume turned out pretty nice so he's obviously got some seamstress skills :) No problem with that. But I got curious. How many more duffman costumes are out there?

Okay, only two, not that impressive. What was a little shocking though was to see that auction number two (starting bid of $100) was apparently selling me. Yup. Me dead center between Tyler Durden, Satan and Naughty Snow White are now apparently pimping ourselves out on ebay:
Item #5526593279

Oh, you can't believe how much I wanted him to just be linking to an image on my site, but sadly he has it hosted somewhere else. You lucked out there "Jean Luc Picard", your auction was about to feature some donkey porn. Instead he just got an email asking to take it down.

And no, I don't have a ready supply of donkey porn or anything, it would have to be specially aquired just for this. Hmm, that would have meant looking for donkey porn. Yeah, maybe I lucked out a little on that one too.

But I'm rambling - it's what I do. Any other future duff costume makers or duff entrepenaurs (there's no way that's spelled correctly), feel free to make and sell the costume to your hearts content. You'll get more trouble from Fox's legal department than me I'm certain :)