Category: Uncategorized

I don’t understand the postal mail forwarding system. I sent out Xmas cards last month, and as usual, one of them came back. The sticker on it said that the forwarding time had expired, but had the correct forwarding address printed on it. If the USPS is going to go to the trouble of figuring… Continue reading Postal Oddities

It’s that time again… the King William’s College quiz is upon us. It rained pretty much all Xmas break, and when it didn’t rain we were cooped up in the house with “flu-like illnesses”. But I guess it was fairly restful, most of the time.

Q. Why can’t you tell a joke in octal? A. Because 7 10 11!

One of my colleagues came into my office the other day, and said to me: If p is prime and greater than 3, prove that p² – 1 is divisible by 24. Interested readers might want to try this for themselves: it’s not particularly difficult. Of course I started in right away. Immediately I thought:… Continue reading A maths diversion

Indeed. Imagine what a better place the world would be if John had been alive these last 30 years. Have a happy and peaceful holiday season, whatever you celebrate.

It is puzzling to me that in the US, that holdout of the Imperial system of measurement, schoolkids learn up to the ten times table only. When I was at school, I learned up to 12, even though the UK had been metric for a decade already. But apparently nobody of my generation in the… Continue reading Twelve times table

A quick trip to Radio Shack, and I got the components to hook up the Symbolics keyboard with Teensy. I didn’t even alter the keyboard itself as Hans Heubner did: rather I just used a standard 6-pin RJ25 socket and connected the Teensy to that, then plugged the keyboard in, and put the connection assembly… Continue reading It works!

Had a relaxing Father’s Day watching the football and went out with mini-Elbeno. We had lunch at Panda Express. As we walked in the door, the girl behind the counter said to me, “Do you want to try a sample of our new walnut-and-something-or-other shrimp?” So I thought: “I like shrimp. I like walnut. I… Continue reading Father’s Day

Simply take my old mobile number and add 1,134,866,492 to it, and you’ll have my new one.