sixsigma

I am just posting this here so it will show up on Ajay's friends page. Ajay is the most dedicated LJer ever, and I can't believe he is still writing here. I wonder what residency he is trying to match in. He probably wrote it in there somewhere, but I am not too good at the reading thing.

[11:00:19 PM] ultra s00b: sticking with the same icon eh?
[11:00:25 PM] Flanker0l: yeah
[11:00:30 PM] Flanker0l: the VP?
[11:00:32 PM] Flanker0l: I like it
[11:00:33 PM] ultra s00b: yup
[11:00:40 PM] Flanker0l: and I'm too lazy to make up a new one
[11:01:01 PM] Flanker0l: I guess I could hold a contest or something
[11:01:32 PM] ultra s00b: you should
---

So there you have it. My temporary return to LJ brings with it a challenge. Out-iconize your friends, and win the prestige of being the designer of my new buddy icon.

How it works: Make me a buddy icon. Submit it in a reply to this post. I pick the winner.

Deadline: 11/26/2005.

I have pink eye. But it's almost gone.

School is hard.

I'm back at school. And I'm 20. That's all really that's been happening. Moving and unpacking and stuff. I'm going to launch a new blog in a while, I think. Because I have so much interesting stuff to say.

All right so some punk on Xanga has the first result on Google when you query "Vishal." This is pathetic. I checked the links, and it looks like there are only 8 links to his site, so the only reason that he's way up top is because he's got those "votes" and because he's a blog, so he updates frequently (Google thinks this makes you better). Well I've had enough. It's pretty well-proven that if you get a few friends with a few good blogs, you can catapult yourself to the top of Google without too much hassle. It's called a Googlebomb, and it's outlined pretty well right here.

In any case, the way this works is that you have to link to my OTHER blog, not THIS one. I don't want this blog at the top of Google's search results because . . . well this one is just for you guys. Anyways the next few times you blog, just stick this link at the bottom:

<a href="http://vishal.blog-city.com/">Vishal</a>

That's it. Please? I'd do it for you. Here I'll start off by doing one for myself: Vishal.

I hate carrying around change, so for the last few days, I've been trying to figure out exactly how few coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters only) I can carry around and still make every 1-cent increment from $0.01 to $0.99. That way I can always pay exact change, thereby reducing the total number of coins that I seem to collect and just leave in my desk drawer. So far, I'm down to ten coins in two different arrangements:
A) 4 pennies, 3 quarters, 2 nickels, 1 dime
B) 4 pennies, 3 quarters, 2 dimes, 1 nickel
I tried to search on Google to confirm this answer, but it seems that there's no information on this subject at all, so maybe I've actually come up with my first truly original idea. In any case, I'm still trying to work out a way to prove it mathematically, but I'm not really sure where to start.

Other than that, haven't really done much this weekend. Saw How To Deal with Mandy Moore. She's hot and pretty good in it, but the plot was a little weaker than in A Walk To Remember.

I worked on the BMES web site a little. It's pretty much done; I'm just doing a little cleaning up here and there.

I also started and finished Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams, the third book in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. It's pretty good, but the humor is starting to get a teeny bit predictable, and towards the end there, he seemed to get a little lazy, and started leaving some details out. Oh well, I still plan on reading the last two.

I saw Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde tonight. It was actually pretty good, I thought. When I saw the trailer, I was a little worried that it was going to suck completely, but there were some decent parts in there (along with a few lame/cheesy/predictable ones). What was nice, though, is that they threw in a couple of jokes that I'm pretty sure you would only get if you lived in DC, which is nice, because that's where I live right now. Next weekend, I think I'm going to go see Mandy Moore in How to Deal. Man she's hot.

Anyway, I have this desire to run a Linux machine for some reason. It's mostly fueled by the fact that I'm on a 150Mhz, 32MB RAM laptop right now, and Win98 is sort of crawling. It's not unbearable, but something lighter wouldn't hurt. I don't care much for Win95, and I've been meaning to give Linux a shot for quite some time; I just didn't feel like screwing up my desktop. Anyway, at home, I'll have access to my sister's computer, so if I screw this laptop up, it's not a big deal. I've chosen a distro, but there's a problem. I can download it here, but then I have no way to burn it (this laptop doesn't have a burner . . . heck the CD-ROM itself is only 4X). I could download it in Houston on my sister's comp, but she's still on dial-up, so that would take pretty much my entire 4 weeks. Here's the link to the ISO (second file from the bottom). Anyone with a high-speed connection in Houston want to burn this to a CD-R (not CD-RW), and have it for me when I get back? I would be eternally grateful.

I messed with some CSS overrides to make this thingy look cooler. Now I feel l33t. Check it out and let me know what you think -- this should be possible, because I changed the thing that controls who can post comments on my entries (Jon told me it was locking him out a couple of months ago, but I never got around to fixing it). Anyway, I think I got it all worked out, so try commenting on this and let me know what you think of my l33tn3$$.