My new camera

I have a new camera!! yay!! It is Canon IXUS 850 or ELPH SD800 depending on your location - the former is the european name and the latter.. wait for it.. yes american. But .. magic.. they are the same.
Anyway It is a very cool camera, because of several features - first it is wide angle in a subcompact - though it is maybe a bit bigger than the average subcompact. Meanwhile it has a 3.8 optical zoom. Now the really nice features: it has image stabilizer so it compensates for shaky hands. Then there is the face recognition - the software is on the camera so it recognises the face(s) and focuses on them - for example when i was taking the above pic with my mac - it found the image of my face on the mac and focused on that!! how cool is that!!
I think we are going to have a very nice relationship :-)
For those who are interested, i got it from Dell for $280.
I love new gadgets!!

Porn Clerk Blogger

This is the blog of this woman who worked as a clerk in a porn video store. It is actually a very interesting and entertaining read, well written and a lot of interesting comments about life, social order and anthropology. It is just a blog with no pictures or anything so you can open it anywhere. So far what i have read hasn't even been too sexual..

So it seems that the blogger is now a part-time actor and this is her new blog.

Chocolate Rain

Talk about an ear worm!! I heard about this song on Digg, that it had become a huge phenomenon on you tube - so i went and listened to it and kept thinking what is everyone talking about - it doesn't even make sense.
But oh no - after half an hour after i closed the video, i realized the song just kept going on and on and on in my head - "chocolate rain..."
It is addictive!!!

Update on Puzzles:
So how did people do on the puzzles? I put a link to the solution in the comment section of the first puzzle post. I still haven't seen the answers and not sure how you do the 2 and 3rd puzzles. Jeerjeerak's hint that you have to use only 10 people makes me think that we have to use some kind of a tree structure as follows:
- give a drop of 500 bottles to one prisoner and a drop from the other 500 to a second.
- see which one dies and so limit your search to 500.
- then given a drop from 250 of the suspicious 500 to the second prisoner and a drop fromt he other 250 to a third prisoner. See which one dies and so limit your search to 250.
- And so on. Except you need a lot more time than a month.....
So.... anyone have a better answer?

Why do people get married?

I heard the following quote from the snippet of the movie "Shall we Dance" when i was channel surfing. Susan Sarandon first asks "Why do people get married?" to which she first says not because we love each other but rather...

"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'."

Is that true? but what does it actually mean? because we can';t simply pick anyone as a witness right? to stay with them, we have to love them. Anyway maybe the quote is not as deep as i first thought. It is true though, marrying means getting that witness right? :-) bonus!

Puzzle 3: The Switches

The warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, "You may meet today and plan a strategy. But after today, you will be in isolated cells and will have no communication with one another.
"In the prison is a switch room, which contains two light switches labeled A and B, each of which can be in either the 'on' or the 'off' position. I am not telling you their present positions. The switches are not connected to anything.
"After today, from time to time whenever I feel so inclined, I will select one prisoner at random and escort him to the switch room. This prisoner will select one of the two switches and reverse its position. He must move one, but only one of the switches. He can't move both but he can't move none either. Then he'll be led back to his cell.
"No one else will enter the switch room until I lead the next prisoner there, and he'll be instructed to do the same thing. I'm going to choose prisoners at random. I may choose the same guy three times in a row, or I may jump around and come back.
"But, given enough time, everyone will eventually visit the switch room as many times as everyone else. At any time anyone of you may declare to me, 'We have all visited the switch room.' and be 100% sure.
"If it is true, then you will all be set free. If it is false, and somebody has not yet visited the switch room, you will be fed to the alligators."
What is the strategy they come up with so that they can be free?

Puzzle 2: Bad King

A bad king has a cellar of 1000 bottles of delightful and very expensive wine. A neighbouring queen plots to kill the bad king and sends a servant to poison the wine. (Un)fortunately the bad king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. Alas, the guards don't know which bottle but know that the poison is so strong that even if diluted 1,000,000 times it would still kill the king. Furthermore, it takes one month to have an effect. the bad king decides he will get some of the prisoners in his vast dungeons to drink the wine. Being a clever bad king he knows he needs to murder no more than 10 prisoners - believing he can fob off such a low death rate - and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine at his anniversary party in 5 weeks time.

Explain how....

Puzzle 1: The $21 question

Mike and Todd have $21 between them. Mike has $20 more than Todd. How much does each have (you can't use fractions in the answer)?

3 Logical Puzzles

In the next few posts, I will upload three different logic puzzles which I thought were interesting. I won't put up the answer and people can reply in the comment sections. If you have already seen these puzzles, don't give the answers. I don't know the solutions to two of them yet myself!! :-)
Are you ready... get set?
GOOOOOO!!

Not for the Faint Hearted!

Here is a song that Justin Timberlake did with Saturday Night Live people, that seems to be up for an Emmy for best original song.
It definitely is original!! and it is not for the faint hearted! :-P
ps. Maybe I am started a new earworm! :-P Dcik in a box, woo ooo,...

The Ohrwurm of Jeerjeerak

This was the best blog post i have read in a long time - and it is from non-other than our own Jeerjeerak!
and I think Alvaro, Juan and Chris will all like the WWW very much :-)

My Birthday

Is my birthday soon? Why is it that during the time of my birthday I had no idea what I wanted.. oh no, I had everything I wanted. And when my mum and my husband asked me about what i wanted i couldn't say what. But now.. alas, I have something i want. So can my birthday be next week? :-)Check out this beautiful female binary watch .. which is ultra cool. or is that ultra geeky? I don't know and I don;t care. This is one watch that I want! :-)
The only thing is that I saw this watch on the wrist of thi guy at the conference last week.. and it is pretty big watch. It kind of engulfed his hand. So I just have to make sure it doesn't swallow me up... but to be swallowed up by a binary... may be that won't be so bad! :-P

My photo

It is so funny how people keep telling me to change my pic!! I thought it was funny but others think i look mentally challenged! :-P
Ok next project change photo! What do you think of my new photo? I personally miss the cross eyed, crazy look of before.

Day 4

This was the day of my talk - the night before it, although I had gotten home late about 11pm, I managed to go over my slides before making myself go to sleep at 1am and then i kept waking up in the middle of hte night, because i was so worried i was going to oversleep. My talk was straight after lunch so lets just say i didn't eat much lunch either. It went ok, not the greatest but ok. People asked lots of questions and I think did ok answering them. But I wasn't expecting much anyway. The worst part was when in the middle of the whole thing i forgot the word 'space' so after I said 'key' I paused and my mind was frantically trying to think of the word 'space' but I couldn't remember it and everyone was just looking at me and omg, probably thinking what an idiot!! I could see at least one person smiling at me, probably thinking poor girl!!
Afterwards I was so relieved my mind was numb. It is funny how I never realize how nervous i am until afterwards when the pressure is off. We had the conference dinner that night and then I went out with a bunch of people from ETH and another German named Leif and a Polish studying in the Netherlands named... damn!! I knew I was going to forget at least one name. That is why I am making myself write them down. In case I forget.
And I ended up talking to him a lot of the night as well. He was an interesting guy with lots of interesting commentary about Poland. Here are some of the funny things I learnt from him:
- The president and the prime minister of Poland are twins. Really?!! and they are ultra-conservative.
- They were trying to make Jesus Christ the king of Poland. It didn't work out though. I think what with him missing from the coronation and all...
Really are these things true? can somone check for me??!!!

- omg he asked me what the top two largest countries in Europe were and I said Ukraine and he said that was the second and France was the first. HUH!! According to the following Ukraine is bigger than France!!

Day 3

I left London for Cambridge. I got here (Cambridge) after a lot of hassle - I was worried about my adapter problems and so once i got to king's cross i decided to try to buy another adapter before i get to cambridge because who know how many shops are open in a small town - seriously i was walking around kings cross with all my baggage and then i found out the train to Cambridge didn't leave from there on sundays and i had to go to another station and..
anyway I finally caught the train which takes about 50 minutes to get to Cambridge - once i got there i caught a bus to the city center and walked to the place i was staying at - it was one of the colleges called the Sidney Sussex. I dropped all my baggage in my room, exhaled a sigh of relief because i actually had gotten there! Then the next worry was what time the conference people were meeting to go punting. I wanted to meet some of the people since i didn't know anyone and I also wanted to try punting actually :-) and I thought afterwards I will walk around the city of Cambridge. Oh my how glorious Cambridge is. I will get to it, but I loved it so much. It is wonderful and beautiful and ....
anyway so I went to the office to see if the conference had left any info about the punting at the Cannes river. I got to the office and I saw a bunch of people standing in front of the office - I thought can it be? can i be that much on time? Most of the people were Europeans who did not look that geeky so I wasn't sure if i was in the correct place - but then i saw one or two geeky looking people and they were mostly men so I thought can it be? so I made myself go and introduce myself. Now that was kind of scary!!
anyway so it was them and i joined them and we left for the punting expedition. I ended up getting into a punt, punted by Stajano himself! :-P on my boat there was an Austrian Rene, a German Christoph and a Japanese of the unknown name who worked under Prof. Imai. Our group was a lot of fun - and we all took turns at the punting. It is actually pretty hard trying to maneuver the thing, make it go in a straight line while you still have some speed. After the punting, we all went to dinner and some drinks. I met another German guy Ulrich with his Brazilian girlfriend Luciana who was studying in Germany. She was in EE and the paper being presented was a joint paper. ooh how romantic!! :-) It reminds me of my two lovely papers with dazbend!! seriously how geeky do i have to be to find this SO romantic!
Actually getting into this topic, dazbend and I had two papers together the year we got married. We made sure we were joined for prosperity!!!