Aussie Puzzling Spectaculare

SPOILERS: If you're interested in solving some of the puzzles here then don't read this; I clue in some of the answers.

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There are two essential truths to the universe.

The first is that the jelly will never spread evenly on your toast no matter how hard you try.
The second is that everything becomes more interesting during exam week.  Including Australian puzzle hunts.  Yes, me and a collective of eight or nine friends decided to take on the Melbourne University Mathematics and Statistics Society's Annual Puzzle Hunt.

This was, needless to say, a very bad idea.

The puzzles are extremely difficult, each in a different way.  Look at any of them and you'll understand why. You have no idea what you're looking for.  There are no prompts, no questions.  You have to notice that each wheel has 26 spokes and infer that each contains a letter of the English alphabet.  Or that certain Chinese letters read out as English words when rotated counterclockwise.  Last year, myself and a team of six managed to solved a total of zero puzzles.

Zero out of twenty.

Despite this, I convinced a bunch of people to participate and we (somewhat begrudgingly) assembled an odd team of some nine people.  Given last year's brilliant score, I wasn't particularly optimistic.

We wrecked.  We solved ten out of twenty puzzles, on par with the MIT team, and landed 54th place out of 219 teams.

I had known previously that a lot of those in my group were rather smart but it wasn't ever as apparent as during the puzzlehunt.  One guy identified eight buildings based on their overhead street maps.  Two others programmed bruteforce algorithms for a network.  Another guy converted 2D animations of what he described as "pokemon MRI's" and created full 3D models out of them.  Yet another recognized what sort of looked to me like a barcode to be an abstract rendition of Whistler's Mother.  Same guy took what we had of a country code (an I and a P?) and correctly guessed "Swedish Meatballs" five minutes before the deadline.

All in all a really excellent experience, and I'd encourage anyone to participate.

Awful Jokes Bot has a home!

Finally set up @AwfulJokesBot to generate a joke every four hours.

Special thanks to orange for reminding me that it's a thing.  Also thanks to Message Intercepted for an optimized rewrite and the staff of A Small Orange for some of the best tech support I've ever had.

Spambot Trap

The Earth is flat.  Obama is actually part of the Taliban.  The Holocaust never happened.  Stalin is alive and disguised as a member of Congress.  Area 51 is used as a means of contacting with an underground civilization of mole people that constantly break into people's homes and relocate remotes and car keys.  We never should have abolished slavery, and we never visited the moon; all of the photos were faked.

(This is a spambot trap.  I've noticed a recent increase in bot comments on my blog and want to see their opinions.  Should be interesting).

GitHub Dump

I needed to upload a bunch of old projects for some new employment things onto GitHub and they're not really complete or anything but here they are anyways.

NeuralAPI
FacialRecognitionHKM
WebcamDraw

More of a personal post for my own organization, feel free to ignore.

Pannenkoekenhuis (Windows Phone) : Published!

Pannenkoekenhuis : Windows Phone Store

Free for probably indefinitely.  Comment / email me with suggestions and bugs.

Starbucks

I haven't written a post in a while and this isn't particularly interesting but I thought I'd share.

Coffee is amazing.  This is old news for most of you, but I've just started drinking coffee regularly and it's the best thing ever.  After class I'll bike to Starbucks for an hour (it's right next to my school) and start working on stuff.  I do freelance programming now.  It's nice because you set your own hours and pick your own jobs and get an immediate paycheck once you finish.  I count my salary in how many macchiatos I can buy with it.  Drink coffee to work, and work to drink coffee.

Such is the life.

This one time there was a job interview happening a table across from me, and the interviewee, a male in his early 30's it looked, was trying to sell himself for a teaching position (or so it seemed -- they never said what it was for).  I had been in the coffeehouse for a few hours by then and had watched the other interviewers come and go.  The other two interviewees before him seemed very average; formal.  But this guy.  He was hard-pressed to show exactly how interactive he was and how his teaching style would be super progressive and active and super full of energy and how this was his dream job and how he would do everything for the

"Hey how are you!"

wut

I looked back down at my book, pretending that he wasn't talking to me even though he was speaking directly in my direction.  Long awkward pause -- and then I realized this was part of his "super friendly guy" shtick for the interview.  "Oh, hi."  I waved kind of awkwardly, and he returned the awkwardness with a sort of half-laugh, and I left the coffeeshop astounded at my ability to ruin the interview of complete strangers without even trying.

So that is Starbucks.

Pannenkoekenhuis (Windows Phone) : Closed Beta

None of you believed me when I said I'd actually get something on mobile.  None.  Zero.  Well, guess what?

I showed up all of you.

Pannenkoekenhuis is now in closed beta on Windows Phone.  If you own one, toss me your Microsoft Account email address and I'll send you a copy for review!

I'm expecting to release it to the general public in about a week.  Until then, I suppose.

(Many thanks to Message Intercepted for the music!)