You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Rule of (N-1)s, Productivity, No Scrubs

I sometimes forget what a big geek I actually am; and then I find myself commenting in some poor friend's blog, enthusing about binary, hexidecimal, and various other bases, and it's all I can do to stop myself talking about representing negative numbers in binary by using "two's complement" and the controversy over whether a kilobyte is 1000 bytes or 1024...

I don't know why, but sometimes I just find myself thinking about things like the "rule of nines" -- you know, the "if all the digits add up to nine, then the number is divisible by nine" thing -- and working out that it's actually the "rule of one less than the base you're counting in". So in octal, it's the "rule of sevens", and you can easily tell that 1337 (in base eight) can be divided by 7 (to get... uh, 1 x 8^3 is 512, 3 x 8^2 is 192, 3x8 is 24, plus 7 is 735, and 735/7 is 105 in base ten, or 151 in base eight). I can't remember how I worked out this was true, but I also used the same reasoning to show the rule of threes worked because three is the square root of nine -- so you'd only get it's analogue if the base you're counting in is a number squared plus one.

Hard to believe I'm single, huh? >;)

Still, as long as I can still point you towards weird tributes to Ray Haryhausen and Skeletor, I daresay most of you will forgive me. ;)

***

This is mainly for Hix, who writes an interesting blog on his experiences in television production and scriptwriting in NZ, among other things: someone at work posted a link to Best Available, the blog of a visual effects supervisor in L.A. An interesting insight into a side of the industry that I'm only passingly familiar with. They also review movies and stuff -- there was an theory in the comments about who wrote the letter that motivates Broken Flowers that I found quite convincing, for example. So, hope that there might be something of interest for you there, Hix. :)

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One of the reasons that I value coming in on the weekend is that I can actually get stuff done without being interrupted constantly. Unfortunately, today was an exception -- instead of wrapping up this project that has been hanging over my head for a couple of weeks, I've been trying to fix some stuff for the wranglers. I've got to learn not to answer the phone. :)

Actually, that's the hardest part of my job, in many ways -- being able to say, "I'm sorry, I could help you, but I'm choosing not to because I think that keeping focused on this other thing is more important." I'm repeatedly told I should be taking time out from the operational part of my job to do some of the long-term stuff that's piling up; but it's not like there's somewhere I can go where people aren't constantly yanking me out of whatever I'm doing to answer this or that "little question". Now, I have to say, they're normally completely legitimate questions, but as Joel On Software writes, you can lose fifteen minutes of productivity to save someone else a minute or two of hunting around... and the thing he fails to mention is that the person who asks probably won't remember your answer in an hour or two, whereas hunting makes it stick.

(Not that I'm any better -- I know I've asked people unix questions I could find out myself because it was easier than hunting through man pages.)

***

Here's a piece of trivia that may earn you a $20 bar tab at a pub quiz some night -- the oldest international cricket fixture is actually the game between Canada and United States, which has been played since 1844. Hey, I found it in the Wikipedia, it must be true. ;)

***

I've finished the first season of Scrubs. Now I'm really sad, because the second season won't be released until Nov 15th in the States, so who knows how long until it trickles down here? I wish my copy of the third season of Due South would arrive. :(

I've got a cousin who should have had her baby by now, who I promised that I'd send a list of the DVDs I've got (so she can while away all the copious spare time that a baby can bring). So I guess I should get cracking on making that list. :) It'll also help me make sure that I don't double-buy -- which I haven't done yet, but I know it's only a matter of time.

Posted by svend at August 19, 2005 8:16 PM