Wedding: Champagne Pyramid

The substitute cake at Simon and Ana's wedding - a champagne glass pyramid. There's 56 glasses which take 12 bottles of champagne to fill! The number of glasses in row n is equal to:
glasses(n) = glasses(n-1) + n, with glasses(0) = 0.

The non-recursive version is:
glasses(n) = n²/2 + n/2

I still haven't figured out a non-recursive formula for the total number of glasses given a row number yet.

If you want to try this at home, there is a game called Champagne.

George and I at Simon and Ana's Wedding in Sydney

They've found me!

Today at work Mikey pointed out that he'd found my blog! My initial reaction was surprise and I asked him not to link to it from his site. I think the reason for this was that in my mind my blog was still just a small private thing that wasn't intended for public consumption.

When I first started in Dec 04, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to blog at all so it was really an experiment. It later turned into something that was useful for family to keep up with what I'd been up to and to see a few photos. I didn't really want it to be a public affair. The first shot of publicity occured when a friend of George's from work (Jasmine) asked George for photos of the wedding reception place. Now it is becoming more and more public and really, I don't think it is such a bad thing.

For a start, I have been particularly careful not to make any posts about my work, to avoid situations like this MS employee and even this Google employee, who were fired for blogging about their work. I've also been careful not to put pictures or many comments about other people on my blog to avoid upsetting anyone or even being sued like this guy.

Will changing my 'frame of reference' from private ramblings to slightly more public comments change what is written? Probably not, but it will definitely signal a new approach to the writings. Stay tuned. Oh, and Mikey please do add a link to my site if you read this.

Socialtarianism (A.K.A vegish)

A friend of a friend of mine called Lindsay coined the term 'Socialtarian' to describe himself. He explained that he was a vegetarian, but only when it was not inconvenient for others. For example, if he was going over to someone's house for dinner he would quite happily eat meat, but when there was an alternative vegetarian option or he was cooking for himself he would be vegetarian.

To me, this made a lot of sense because being a vegetarian can cause significant worry for concerned hosts who are not accustomed to cooking vegetarian meals. It also seems to be a lot more polite to just eat whatever your host has cooked rather than making them go to extra trouble.

At the time I was not inclined to convert to socialtarianism, but in the last few months I've adopted his philosophy. In keeping with the tradition of vegetarian naming (vegetarian, vegan) I've changed the name of this food choice to vegish. This indicates my preference for vegetarian food without an exclusive eating regime. I may change my mind about the naming again sometime soon.

So why am I going vegish? Well the main reason would have to be the thought that nobody ever got food poisoning from an undercooked carrot. There also seems to be various reports of longer term health risks associated with eating different types of meat. Then there are secondary considerations like the treatment of animals (like the chickens abused by these KFC workers). There are sites like goveg which take an extreme point of view and suggest that we should remove meat, dairy, eggs, fish etc. etc. from the diet. Some of their statements include:

• Anyone who eats fish for “health” reasons should think again The flesh of fish can accumulate toxins up to 9 million times as concentrated as those in the waters that they live in, and the flesh of some sea animals, like shrimps and scallops, contains more cholesterol than beef
• There’s no reason to drink cow’s milk at any time in your life. It was designed for calves, it was not designed for humans, and we should all stop drinking it today, this afternoon

I haven't gone to the extreme of not having cow's milk, although I do often take the Soy option. Then again, they also have a quite promising claim that "Vegetarians and vegans live, on average, six to 10 years longer than meat-eaters."

In any case, I'm taking a more moderate approach to vegetarianism for now.

The Wedding: The Photographer

We've started doing some more planning for The Wedding and have been in contact with Beth, a photographer that we've known for a few years. Her website shows some of her work from previous weddings. In talking with Beth tonight we realised just how much we'll need to do in the next 6 months or so!

The 9th hole at Narooma where we went to play golf on the weekend. The course was in very good condition and it was wonderful weather. The golf wasn't even that bad.

George and I at Anthony and Sarem's Wedding (from 12th June 2005)

This is my reflection taken in Adelaide at Rundle Mall's 'Malls Balls'. We were in Adelaide for George's Nan's 90th birthday!

Hiring is Obsolete

A friend of mine pointed me to a site by Paul Graham. One of his latest writings is Hiring is Obsolete. It discusses the role of startups in hiring and how there is a trend towards companies buying startups to get new people rather than hiring directly.

Its a very interesting read by a guy who has done the whole startup thing and succeeded very very well. He started a web company called Viaweb which was bought by Yahoo. Now he spends his time looking for new startups to inject money into in Y Combinator.

Google Code: Summer of Code

Google Code: Summer of Code is a cool new idea from Google. They have managed to convince a whole bunch of open source groups like Samba, Wine and KDE to offer some projects which students can try to complete over the American summer break. Each student that successfully completes a project will be paid $4500.

Google states that they are doing this because:

"Google believes that there are more Open Source Developers out in the world waiting to be discovered and that this program might help reveal who they are."

Do they have ulterior motives for offering these sorts of projects? Possibly they have selected projects which they consider might be useful in advancing their search and other future technologies. Then again, they must just be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts? Hmm, probably there is a mixture of the two. Anyway, it sounds great for students...