/dev/null/kevin

Dave Brillhart posted a few logic puzzles that came from job interviews. They are quite interesting and I encourage you to try them.

Here is another puzzle from a job interview that my cousin received. It's not as hard as Dave's but not as many people get it as you would think, especially in the confines of a job interview.

Using the integers 1, 3, 4 and 6, and using only the four basic arithmetic operators + - * / (add, subtract, multiply, divide), create an equation that equals 24. Each number is used only once. The operators can be used as many times as you want. There is no "trick" to this, there really is a basic equation that produces 24.

I will post the answer in a few days.

Update: You must produce 24 exactly, no integer math. Like I said, no tricks.
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February 24, 2005 08:54 AM PST Permalink | Comments [11] |

Would you pay to read someone's blog? This article about this blog says Jason Kottke plans on doing just that. I wish him luck.

So, this begs the obvious question, what is my blog worth? I have some suggestions below, but feel free to leave a comment on the value of this blog.

• $1 / day
• $1 / year
• Gimme my dollar back!
• A promise not to punch me in the face.
• The same as the residuals from the movie Gigli.
• A McDonald's Happy Meal, minus the toy.
• A good laugh.
• I'll pay you to stop writing.

First I was cloned. Now it's my dad. Sort of.

My name is Kevin Chu and my father is David Chu. I'm reading the San Jose Mercury News this morning and see a big headline "Who is David Chu?" Well, I had to find out. Apparently there is a David Chu who works at EBay and he is the next William Hung or something. There are crazy people buying and selling David Chu stuff.

Well, my dad wants it known that he is the original David Chu: Distinguished engineer at Agilent who wears a long sleeved collared shirt (with many pens) to the beach. I love my dad!

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February 19, 2005 11:00 AM PST Permalink | Comments [2] |

I find this both sad and hilarious: Sony and Pizza Hut cut a deal and now it is now possible to order pizza from inside Everquest II.

From the CNET Article: Type in "/pizza" while playing the fantasy role-playing game, and a browser window will pop up where you can order a pie for delivery.

It goes on to say that you still need to pay with real money, but wouldn't it be funny (and also really sad) if you could pay with online money.
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February 18, 2005 07:50 PM PST Permalink | Comments [1] |

I recently started seeing a strange problem with Firefox: it would hang for about 20 seconds every time a new window (frame) was created. It was one of those situations where "nothing changed," as I used to hear so often in my customer support days. I only saw the problem on one of my PCs and not my Sun. Rebooting didn't help so my first suspicion was a virus or spyware.

Lots of virus checks later, I found nothing. I bit the bullet and reinstalled Firefox. Fixed! So I readded my old profile. Ooops! Problem returned. OK, go back and add things one at a time. Bookmarks, nope. Themes, nope. Prefs file, nope. But when I got to the extensions, SwitchProxy caused the hang. Strange, since I have this on all my versions (I VPN into Sun a lot, Sun uses proxies, so it's nice to easily turn proxies on and off).

To make a short story long, the problem is that SwitchProxy has a setting to check for new updates automatically. This is turned on by default, but is turned off on all of my other installations. I can only guess that the SwitchProxy web site went down and SwitchProxy doesn't nicely do its update check in the background (boo!!). Turning this feature off in the options window fixed the problem.

My wife is going away for week, leaving me with my 21 month old daughter. I'm actually going to take the week off from work, so don't expect much blogging. It's going to be a challenge because my wife had been an integral part of the sleeping and napping routines.

On the plus side, whenever she lets me, I'm going to be playing Knights of the Old Republic II.
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February 11, 2005 04:11 PM PST Permalink | |

While watching the Superbowl I heard a commercial for "Business VOIP." The annoucer pronouced VOIP as a word, "voip", rhyming (sort of) with John Voight. That was the first time I've heard that term pronounced like that. I've always read that in my head as "voice over IP" or spelled out V-O-I-P. Voip, as a word, just sounds funny to me. In English, nothing even sounds like voip, as evidenced by my lame John Voight rhyme.

Am I off in the weeds on this one? Does everyone else say "voip" but me? I still say U-R-L instead of "earl" and V-I instead of "vi" because I'm just not that lazy. At least on those, I know that I'm not alone.
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February 07, 2005 09:45 AM PST Permalink | Comments [9] |

No, not Daily Show with John Stewart, but the commercials for the Wetminster Dog Show on the USA network. This commercial features Europe's The Final Countdown, quite possibly the cheesiest song from the 80s hair bands. The level of tongue in cheek pretentiousness strikes the perfect balance for those who laugh at such "competitions" and those who are so into it that they get pumped up by the music! I'm in the former category.
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February 06, 2005 10:39 AM PST Permalink | |

Good News/Bad News.

The good news is that cows only produce half the air pollution as previously thought. The bad news is that we're all breathing more cow burps than we thought.

A study at the University of California at Davis (my alma mater, Go Ags!) concluded the following:

Read the full story here.
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February 03, 2005 05:28 PM PST Permalink | Comments [2] |

A&E has bought the rights to show edited version of The Sopranos. According to the article, "A&E will likely clean up the sex, violence and bad language that contributed to grittiness of the show." Uh, what's left? Should be lots of nice footage of Tony talking to his shrink.
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February 01, 2005 10:32 AM PST Permalink | |

Call me Miss Cleo, just not to my face, but I've got some predictions for this year. Use them as you see fit. Just remember Kevin's Rule of Predictions: "50% of all predictions are correct and 50% are incorrect." Your job, is to figure out which 50%.

And remember, as always, no wagering.

Kevin's 2005 "Sure Thing" Predictions

• NBC's new reality show, The Contender, will fail miserably. I'm a little late with this prediction, and with the failure of Fox's "The Ultimate Chump" (or whatever), and the demise of reality TV in general, this almost seems too obvious for a prediction. But in my defense, I did predict this back when they announced the show, seemingly years ago. To me, boxing == boring. Also, reality TV survives (*pun*) on its casting. It's the people that viewers end up bonding with and boxers are not going to make compelling cast members. If in the unlikely event that this show is a hit, I will punish myself by watching Rocky V.

• On the subject of failed new shows, let me add the following: Committed, Numbers (aka NUMB3RS), Point Pleasant, Jonny Zero, The Will (oops, too late, already gone), Blind Justice, Cuts, Fat Actress, Revelations, The (Americanized) Office, and "Untitled John Stamos Project" (please keep that name!). None of these shows will live past 2005, most dying well before summer. I also predict that Eyes and Grey's Anatomy will fail, even thought they're getting big hype. Consider those my "upset" picks.

• A few stupid people watching Star Wars Episode III will be "blown away" by the plot twist in "Revenge of the Sith." No, I'm not talking about Anakin becoming Darth Vader, I'm talking about...
  spoiler for the clueless

  ...Senator/Chancellor Palpatine also being Darth Sidious, aka the Emperor. I really hope you knew that already (if you care about these things), but if you didn't, pay more attention! I mention this because I was recently berated for "revealing a spoiler" to someone. As someone who absolutely hates spoilers (I won't even watch previews or trailers), I am very sensitive to revealing them. But a spoiler is something that you're not supposed to know prior to watching a movie. A plot detail that you missed is not a spoiler. Sorry. Just checkout the IMDb entry for Star Wars Epidode III and look at who Ian McDiarmid plays.

• The Superbowl hype and news coverage will feature way too many references to last year's halftime show. Considering that one is too many, this is another slam dunk prediction. Blah, blah, blah, wardrobe mal... AH! Just stop already! Oh, and New England wins.

  Update: And so it begins...

• Metadata is the next big thing in IT. Like I tell my packrat wife, there's no point in saving something unless you can find it when you need it. Everyone knows this and everyone's doing it, whether you call it "metadata" or "tagging." Start thinking about it now if you haven't, lest you get left behind. That one's not really funny, but this is a company blog.

• Entertainment Tonight will run a segment about getting low cost versions of the dresses worn at the Academy Awards. This show will air on March 1, 2005, the Tuesday following the Oscars. The dress maker is called "A.B.S." How do I know this? Because this Groudhog Day story runs every year, like clockwork. Have I mentioned that I hate Entertainment Tonight?

• The lotto numbers will be 2-5-6-11-14 with "mega" number 15. I just don't know which lotto. Or when.