2006 sucked. Sure, it could have been worse, but I think I wasn’t very lucky throughout the year 2006. Most of the things that could have gone wrong indeed did go wrong. I hope it will be better in 2007 (and I am quite sure it will).
Happy new year to everyone! :woot:
I like TeX. It suits most of my needs and it’s overall quite nice (let’s not talk about the directory structure, ok?). I use pdftex because most people can easily read pdf files.
I want to do a really simple thing: make a page that is 148mm wide and 210mm high. Not so difficult with \pdfpagewidth and \pdfpageheight. Then set the “text area” to 170×115, not so difficult with \hsize and \vsize. And finally, as I’d like to have the text horizontally centered, I count that 148-116=32, divide by two and we get 16mm borders.
Now the big question arises: how do I tell TeX that it should start typesetting 16mm from the left side? \hoffset cleverly starts 1 inch from the left and any value that you input adds (or substracts) to the 1 inch.
I think I must be missing something… maybe there’s a way to write it differently? Or I can somehow tell TeX: “substract 1inch and add 16mm”?
Of course it would be the best if the “reference point” (or whatever it’s called) was at 0, 0, not at 1inch, 1inch. Or it could be at least reset to 0 when you call \hoffset.
Any help, anyone? (don’t tell me to count what I need to substract from the inch, that’s what I’m currently doing and it’s completely inelegant and pain in the ass).
Reading comics is a very pleasent way of wasting one’s time, therefore, I’d suggest you a few time-wasters that I really enjoy:
Nerd boy is a very geek ascii-art comics created by Joaquim Gandara. It has about 600 strips and is currently stalling. I suggest you to read the strips in order, as they don’t make much sense otherwise (you can also view all nerd-boy comics on one page (warning: it is rather big, about 1mb)). Also, it would probably be a good idea to use “courier” (new) for viewing it, nerd-boy looks kinda weird using my favorite fixed-width font “terminus”.
Questionable content is a comics I stumbled upon just recently. The creator has some seriously interesting ideas, good points and the comics is quite funny. You can also see the art getting better and better all the time, I find it kind of funny to watch.
Garfield is the comics of choice when you don’t want to think too much. I think everyone knows Garfield and there’s not much to say about it. Maybe just… if you don’t enjoy all the flash shit^H^H^H^H ads and stuff, you can use my excellent bash scripts that will download all the Garfield comic strips for you and create html pages for more comfortable viewing. The script puts all 365 strips from one year to one html page, while you might think it’s weird and it takes too long to load etc, I assure you that scrolling is way more faster than clicking “next” or something. I always prefer to have real long pages and not to have to click at all, just scroll. Scrolling heaven.
I’m really happy to have finished second in twixt.ch.13.2.1 (I explained it many times but here it goes once again: 13th championship, 2nd league, division 1 (that doesn’t really matter)). It guarantees me participation in league 1 during 14th champ. A few words concerning the games:
The game against Loren was a disaster. I am not sure what where went wrong, but the only move that seems weird is 6th move. After Loren’s 7th move it already looked very weird and after move 9 it was game over. So much for any chances for the first place.
My game against passenger, who will probably finish third, didn’t look very promising for me, as I mentioned in a previous post. It was after my move 11, his move 12 was a surprising and devastating mistake. Playing I13 instead, forcing my I12, would lead to a winning game for him. Of course, after J5, I13 no longer needs to be answered locally. Omitting this exchange practically gains white a very important move for connecting the right side string to the lower area. Fast forward to 22, that’s a pretty much forced exchange. I am not sure if my 23 is good, but I felt it would be enough. 24 should imho be played at K18 (kosumi, for those of you who know go 
). After that I can’t play H17 (because of L16), so I’m forced to follow I16, I19, E18 (I’ll leave the subsequent variations for the kind reader to explore :licknose:). After 24 it’s quite easy already, but overall I was pretty lucky that passenger missed 12.i13.
My game against maraca was surprisingly easy. I got a good start (which is unusual for me) and managed to follow through. He’s not in his top form I guess, because otherwise he’s a very tough competitor.
The game against Robin was a disaster because of my move 5 (I mistook the sides and was trying to connect horizontally instead of vertically). This mistake is almost equal to omitting a move and it’s usually game over. But you haven’t seen ferocious tasuki yet! :cursing: I started playing left and right and making the game into as much mess as possible. Robin was scared: having a won game of someone who has almost 2000 when you have 1750 is quite difficult on nerves. I managed to get a very good position, but then he played move 24 which confused me to a point where I missed ultra-simple F14 (sometimes it makes one wonder what else is possible to miss). Connection on the right side wasn’t difficult though, so I connected there. Phew.
Another not so great beginning was the game against Syl, but his move 19 is completely without sense. After that it was pretty much over (and he was very polite and resigned quite soon).
The game against pete was fast, I don’t really understand it but managed to win easily.
Michael Engels managed to scare me, but he missed my move 14 (took me a while to find it too, after seeing his move 9 I almost got a heart attack, it scared me quite a lot).
Petr Trojek didn’t put up much of a fight now, although last time he kicked my ass in a very interesting and unusual game.
Finally I made much more complex analysis than I’d planned, it’s yet another “blog post gone wild”. If you read this far you certainly deserve congratulations for patience.
Winter is pretty quiet time of a year. Considering birds, crows sometimes caw, but there’s almost no beeping (except PC speaker (especially for vim beginners)) during winter.
However, on my way to school I walk past this bush, that is very, very loud. The beeping is particularly intensive during morning, my educated guess is that it keeps people living in radius of about one kilometer awake.
I have always wondered where all the birds disappear when it’s winter – and now I finally know…
I was really surprised when I was getting my system password at school. I got a paper with all the students’ names, and was told to rewrite mine. Noone would really care if I wrote down several others. Then I was required to sign the paper confirming that I got the password.
This whole process is so utterly ridiculous, I had to sign the paper, which makes it look like something important, but on the other hand I was shown passwords of dozens of other people (together with usernames, of course).
W00t!
I have finally reached rating 2000 in TwixT, my second favorite game. Although I used to be in top ten with rating around 1950, I am not in top ten (12th currently) with 2000 now… the times are a-changin’…
On a less positive note, I am currently playing twixt.ch.13.2.1 (13th championship, second league), and I need to finish second. Which basically means beating passenger, with whom the game is not looking really well after 11 moves.
Many people who have ever taught go have experienced it: someone comes and asks “is this move good or is that one better?”. You seriously don’t know but are pretty sure that the difference is not big, at least not on your level, even less on the level of the person who asked.
And you also notice that the person has made a totally catastrophical mistake just two moves ago. So you go ahead and tell them: “well, that move you had made before, it could have cost you 30 points”. But they don’t give a fuck, they just want to know the answer to their question.
You tell them that their question is irrelevant, that it doesn’t matter at their level, and that they had made a horrible mistake just before. They conclude that you are not strong enough to answer their question and go searching for someone stronger who could answer it…
A similar thing is someone not really strong showing a lot of rather deep variations very fast. They always make a horrible mistake around the second move, making all subsequent analysis useless. Yet they continue showing dozens and dozens of variations that have hundreds of mistakes…
These people can’t focus on the important things, they keep theorizing about things that are way beyond their ability and keep forgetting to keep their feet on the ground. I sincerely hope I’m not like that.
I noticed that there are people coming to my homepage by searching for loretta swit nude. It surprised me, because there’s nothing on my homepage about loretta swit (I never even heard that name before). After looking into my guestbook, I noticed that it got heavily spammed. Well, that’s sad, but the nice thing is that the spammed page ranks much higher than the spammer (actually there are more spammed pages in the search results around mine). Also, the spammer didn’t manage to make links work, so there are just his keywords, and I’m ranking higher than him, which is rather funny…