Work has been a tomb this afternoon–those of the developers who aren’t out with new babies are out watching Master and Commander<\/i> or just avoiding the gloomy weather. I, as one of those unfortunates who’s still paid by the hour, don’t get to sneak out early, and I can’t do anything else on my project right now until somebody who’s gone gets back to me.<\/p>\n
I’m kind of stuck for content on here lately, because it’s a strongly routined November so far–time passes quickly, but there’s not a lot of excitement or danger to be had. At work I run queries, wait on those queries, try to fix those queries so they won’t fail again, and repeat; at school I learn useful things, but they’re about as enthralling as you’d expect from a graduate comp sci schedule that’s heavy on algorithms. (Well, I had fun with string search, but I’m not going to write an entry about it.) And on Wednesdays I play Grand Theft Auto.<\/p>\n
When I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for mean ol’ queries to yell at me, though, I keep finding myself at William Wu’s Riddles<\/a> (via vitanuova<\/a>). A lot of the riddles there are the kinds of problems I was given as “fun” challenges at Gifted Student stuff when I was younger, and at which I was completely horrible. I find that now, at 22 (and without a competitive atmosphere), I actually consider them fun and worthwhile. I still expend lots of time and effort on solving even the stuff in the easy<\/a> section, but it’s a great payoff when I get one. The only letdown is that I immediately want to show this off to somebody, but a) that’s lame, they’re easy and b) that kind of defeats the point of a riddle site.<\/p>\n