I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

... as far as i know, but if i were...

	I'd be part Michelangelo. I am laid back and all about having a good time. Cowabunga!
	I'd also be part Donatello. I am reserved and intelligent. I favor the use of brains instead of brawn.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

what a shame i'm not a turtle, i'd get to switch between orange and purple headbands. and i wouldn't have to worry about bad hair days. now, wouldn't that be great :-) of course, being the coward that i am, i think i prefer battling hair to battling shredder... maybe i can yell cowabunga! next time i'm in front of the mirror. wonder if that'll scare my hair into behaving. it might do, anyone who'll yell cowabunga! at the mirror could be capable of any kind of random behaviour, including chopping at misbehaving hair with a pair of kitchen scissors... not that i'm likely to do that, it would only make things worse. just don't tell my hair... ;-)

ps: since i'm now trying to link properly, brainfall.com turned up on facebook cause bex posted her results to her profile. hmm, not sure whether i should link to her blog, the last post is from 2005. so i'm not gonna. ah well

Labels: facebook, i'm special, links, random

another wonderfully productive afternoon for me (watch out: sarcasm!!!). at least this morning was ok. and btw, i managed to fix the division by zero without losing the ability to divide by one. no nobel prize after all, i guess...

anyway, spent the afternoon bloghopping (don't tell my tutor!) (or my mum...) *g*
came across quite a few interesting links. among others the brazen careerist blog, which looks fascinating and has told me (well not just me, all bloggers) to link properly. so here goes ;-)

the coolest link i found is
   www.freerice.com
(which i found on the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks) it's a word-gamey thing (so of course i got hooked at once) where each time you get it right, they donate 20 grains of rice through the united nations. so, obviously, you have to play it lots and lots to make a difference ;-)

my vocab level is 47. what's yours?

Labels: blogs, charity, fun, links, uni

i just had about two seconds of 'hurray, it finally divides 1:1 correctly!!!' until i realised that instead it's decided that dividing things by zero is no problemo... wtf? :-(

perhaps i've found a new kind of maths. it's a bit like complex numbers. until someone came up with complex numbers you couldn't get the root of -1, before i came up with my revolutionary new divider you couldn't divide by zero. now you can! maybe i'll win the nobel prize...

76:0 = -5 rem 4 for example. it's very complex mathematics, way too difficult to explain... ;-)

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, uni

cooool :-)

i've just gone online on one of the general EE students computers and remembered that the crappy system screwed up my bookmarks when they migrated it :-(

however, this time a friend was at the computer next to me and she's introduced me to del.icio.us. what a great idea!!! you can save and organise all your bookmarks online, and import them to whatever browser whenever you want hurrah! :-)

another addictive thingy for me to get stuck on. i know, i know, it's not actually a game, but i'm having fun with it anyway ;-)

only thing i wish is that i'd found out about it before i started looking for jobs: i've got about fifty semiconductor company websites bookmarked that'll have to be transferred. although, come to think about it, it's such a clever thingy, i'm sure it'll have some function for importing bookmarks from browsers :-)

Labels: i'm special, links

i just opened one of the books on computer arithmetic i'm using for my project. turning the pages towards the index, i see the dedications and read 'this book is dedicated to my wife, zava... , the mother of my parents.' i carry on turning the pages until the hang-on! moment finally hits.

so i go back and find it says 'the memory of my parents', as in
'this book is dedicated to my wife, zahava,
my sons yuval and yaron,
and to the memory of my parents,
jacob and dvora.'

so i ignored a couple of lines. ah well, same difference really ;-)

Labels: i'm special, uni

i'm just getting miserabler and miserabler (yes i know that's not a word. eff off). i'm in one team where they won't listen to me, just carry on doing the most ridiculous things quite happily. aggravates the heck out of me. and in the other team i'm one of the worst players. now this would be fine, in fact for me it should be the ideal setup, cause this way i can learn the most from them. the problem i've got is that they're insisting on playing me, no matter what utter crud i play. and the coach won't bench me until we're 22-something down in the final set, even though the middle hitter on the bench is wayyyyy better than me! thank god we've officially completed phase one of building up the team with this match today (3-0 defeat). now, the aim is no longer to let everyone get some court time in to build up the team, but to actually start winning stuff so that we don't get demoted... if that doesn't mean more bench time for me, i'm gonna have to fake an injury. oh no, wait, no need to fake one, i can pick: the bust elbow, bust fingers, chronically screwy right (i.e. main) shoulder... stupid sport.

and apart from the not being benched, he keeps giving me the same instructions over and over again. fuck, that drives me mad! if i'm playing so badly, that he has to give me the same basic simple instructions in single syllable words 10 times, surely anyone can see that either i'm the biggest moron ever to stumble onto a volleyball court (in which case i should be benched in case i start trying to score goals) or I CAN'T DO IT, I'M FUCKING TRYING AREN'T I!!! and again, SHOULD BE BENCHED, telling me the same thing ten times makes things WORSE not better. fuckit.

Labels: arrgghh, rant, volleyball

as you can probably tell, i've been trawling funwalls (this is the fourth video i'm posting tonight). the one before this was meant to be the last one, but this one is so incredible i just had to post it. only thing is, it starts off quite boringly, but then it gets... ...i don't know, just watch it and decide for yourself...

Labels: YouTube

i had to watch this two or three time to be sure what just happened :-) can't stop laughing

Labels: chuckles, YouTube

what an analogy :-D

Labels: chuckles, drinking, YouTube

Labels: chuckles, YouTube

my wonderful division block is really beginning to worry me. in latest news, one is too large to be divided by one. maybe the fundamental basics of maths changed last night and that's why i now get an overflow for 0001:01 which even in binary representation is still one divided by one (but it no longer equals one...)

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, uni

i'm trying to translate my dad's text about the region around their appartment in klosters for the german holiday homes website cause my mum has suddenly decided it's a priority (after about a year of not worrying much about it) now that i'm stressed silly by my final year project. just gotta love the timing...

i hate translating anyway, it's horrible, sometimes i wish i only spoke one language, then everyone else would just have to translate for me if they cared enough and i'd be happy either way ;-) but my dad seems to think he's a frustrated literary genius, you wouldn't believe the stuff he comes up with. and it just makes translating soooo much more of a nightmare!

anyway, i'm looking for some online machine to give me german antonyms (opposite of synonym *g*) for some words where i can't find anything that won't make the translation of dad's oh-so-beautiful prose sound even more ridiculous, only some word that means the opposite. after searching for ages for some 'gegenteil-wörterbuch' i stumble across the word synonym, which jogs my memory and i start looking for an 'antonym-wörterbuch'. a hit! hurray!
...
   Antonymwörterbuch {n}
              dictionary of antonyms

Gaaahhhhhh!!!


@14:37: crap! i was certain i had it now! it said 'Wörterbuch der Gegenwörter' so i was going 'yes! that's exactly what i'm looking for!'
...
   Wörterbuch der Gegenwörter (n.)
              Antonymwörterbuch

google's just having me on!!! i guess i might as well give up now. especially since i've forgotten what word it was that i wanted the antonym of... :-(


@15:27: arrrrggghhhh!!! i thought i was almost done, only 10 more lines. and then i read the next sentence. it's getting worse!!! listen to this:
'If you want something a bit more special, you can take the train through the tunnel and over the world famous, and simply stunning, Bernina Pass line down to Tirano in northern Italy...and of course, being Switzerland there are plenty of trains so you won't have a problem getting back again on the same day.'
da-ad!!!
it just makes me want to lie down and wail! why am i having to translate this tripe?! :-((


@15:38: i think the rest of the people in the room are beginning to get a bit worried. every so often i start (silently) growling and swearing at the screen, hitting my forehead and trying to pull my hair out in frustration. so far i've got 'Für einen ganz speziellen Ausflug' as translation of 'If you want something a bit more special'. crap, damn, buggrit, fuck, fuck, fuuuck!!!
so much for swearing less.

Labels: arrgghh, literary genius?

i can't believe it! hubert (my tutor) and i spent ages scouring the web for a table with taps for maximum length LFSRs (linear feedback shift registers, if they're maximum length they cycle through every sequence of 0s and 1s except for the all-zeroes sequence, which is very useful for generating random test vectors for an exhaustive test). we found this incredible looking table, gives a solution for LFSRs of width up to 786. and when i saw the date (26th oct 2007, i.e. two weeks ago) i thought, wow lucky for me they published this just before i needed it :)

but now the very first LFSR i try fails! 13 bit, seriously! crap! it's supposed to have a period of 8192, guess what i get... seven!!! seven different vectors!!! i could have made seven different vectors on my own, thank you very much!!! gah!

now the question is: have i made a really stupid mistake (really stupid cause from the document it should be so easy to implement that even i should have got it right first time) or have these geniuses in new zealand managed to get the 13th vector of 786 completely wrong?! craaaaaaaaaaaaap!

maybe they weren't very good at counting: 1, 2, many, lots...


[edit@19:16: oopsy, i've found my devastatingly stupid error: i originally just wrote an LFSR with random taps so that my code would compile before i worked out where to get some sensible maximal length taps. when i wrote the proper LFSR, i forgot to remove the other one, so everything was being done properly and then overwritten... i'm a moron, i know...]

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, pratchetty, uni

had a match tonight with the meilen team (my other swiss volleyball team) and of course we lost again. at the moment we're just practicing playing together, since only about half of us have played for this team before this season (i hadn't, i used to play for the mixed team, but we ran out of guys and gave up). and we almost won the third set (lost 27:29 in the end), which was quite cool.

but once again i managed to hit the floor and have the floor hit me back :( my elbow is killing me and i've got a driving lesson first thing tomorrow morning! with the exam coming up!!! buggrit, millennium hand and shrimp! and i didn't even get the ball (as usual...) crivens! i shoulda kicked meself in ma ain heid!

Labels: arrgghh, pratchetty, volleyball

i'm no longer quite as stressed as i was when i wrote the last post, and so i have been able to work with my ipod on at normal volume and ignore other people chattering. thank goodness for that. obviously, my reaction was a lickle bit extreme, but i was loosing my mind from the stress of being a lazy sod who wasn't doing half the work she was meant to do. no kidding, for me that's one of the worst forms of stress, cause the more stressed i get, the less work i do (to not get more stressed. don't try to introduce the concept of logic to me, worthier men have tried and failed...), more work piles up, i get more stressed... it's a downward spiral.

so who's wassP and anonymous? had a while of worrying it was one of the very people i was slagging off. but i've decided it's not. sometimes you just have to be optimistic ;-) ich han's ja nöd bös gmeint. hmm, what do i mean in english? it wasn't personal. i was just maddened with stress... ah well.

on sunday i accidentally took a teatowel upstairs after drying a bowl in the kitchen and said to myself 'why'd you bring that?!' was i ever surprised to hear myself answer (in a rather whingey voice) 'i dunno-o' (hear the drawn out whingeyness) i often talk to myself, but i've never accidentally answered myself before! uh-oh, i'm developing a split personality! eeek!
maybe i'm still a bit more stressed than i'd thought... ;-)

Labels: i'm special, uni