Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Locked out

Well, this weekend I went to my office to get a few things done. When I left my office to get something to eat, I shut the door behind me and realized that I had locked myself out. So… I called UPD, and they told me that they could not let me in unless it was a police or fire emergency. I then just resigned myself to just walking home and getting back in on Monday. Then I realized that both my truck and apartment key were on the same keyring, sitting on my desk in my office. I eventually ended up calling the Secretary for the Computer Engineering group and she was gracious enough to let me borrow the master key so I could get my own keys. Just at the moment I needed to get a ride to her house, I saw John in Zachary, which worked out nicely.


Interview

Well, today I had an interview with Microsoft. I can’t say that MS is high on my list of places to work, but there is no harm in working for them. I was given two puzzles to solve while I was there. A friend said that it would not be a good idea for me to present the solutions, but I can’t pass up presenting the problems themselves.

  1. Write a function that when given a linked list returns a list with every group of 3 (or n) elements in reverse.
  2. Place the numbers 1 through 8 in the following grid such that no two neighboring cells contain two consecutive numbers (I can’t draw worth anything in HTML, so numbers go where the X’s are) _XX_ XXXX _XX_

Anyway, I think that things went well. We will see if they contact me.


Is Valentine's Day too commercial?

When I was helping a student move a computer on Valentine’s Day, she asked if I was doing anything special for the day. I mentioned that I generally hate Valentine’s Day, and she asked if it was because of having to go out of buy something. Well, those who know me know that this is certainly not the case in my situation, simply because there is no one to give anything to. This did however, give me pause.


Long Day

Ahh… Been a while since I had a day like this. Yesterday, my partner and I spent a solid 7 hours, minus about 30 min for lunch, on homework. We had seven problems. I had solved the first one about a week before (the easiest one), and then we managed to complete 2 and 3 in the first four hours. 4, and 7 took us the remaining 3 hours that we worked on it. That leaves 5 and 6, of which I managed to figure out 6 last night in about an hour or two.


.Mac is not worth it

OK, I was listening to the MacCast and heard a review of iWeb which is part of iLife ‘06. This reminded me that I need to go on .mac rant, as I promised before:

Introduction I have had my .mac account for quite some time now. I had it back when it was free (and called iTools), and continued to use it when it was no longer free. I was content to pay for it at the time since I was reluctant to lose my mac.com email address.