The Blog: The Battle of Five Countries

Well, four, really. 

Statistics time!

So, at the time of this writing, my blog has been viewed 231 times. 

Most people are viewing it on Chrome. 

The most used OS is Windows, which is probably all my intern friends and various Intern Managers at Microsoft. Guys, get off my blog and back to work.

I have about equal views from Australia and America.

43 Australian views - all my friends from Down Under.

50 American views - interns, you know what it’s like, you’re in half this stuff. Can’t imagine you’re getting heaps out of it. Plus my Intern Manager, who will probably fire me soon.

Then there are views from Alaska, Germany, UK. The European ones may well be legit, as I know people currently in these countries. Alaska? Probably not.

Yes, I know that doesn't add up. I am doing a math degree, ok? I'm probably just reading labels wrong. 

Computer Vision

This isn’t anything serious, just stuffing around with OpenCV briefly. It really is a trivial trick. But still cool. Bluescreen program!

Space Needle

plus desktop screenshot

equals blue-screen in the desktop
behind the space needle!

Basic pixel replacement. Python is fairly slow with it. I need a better algorithm. Apparently it’s a lot faster with HSV instead of RGB arrays. Photoshop and After Effects probably have a more efficient way of doing it.

Formatting sucks. That should all be in line. 

This is a cafe in Bellevue. I was hoping that giant robots would be serving up Kaiju meat, but in vain.

I believe they do serve Jaeger-meister, though

Christmas!

We had it later than everyone else. 

Christmas rainbow
(Trivia: this is actually christmas eve)

This was christmas

It did not snow. I understand that snow is rare for the populated areas, but still … 

There was mistletoe. I did not stand under it, for those wondering. 

Toes of missiles

I had Christmas with some relatives here. Mum’s cousin. I think that’s my second cousin, or second cousin once removed. I don’t know. 

I ate clams. These were actually nice. 

I cannot think of a clam

I also had ratatouille made by Karl. This was also good. 

We had giant marshmallows. None of them ate Ron Weasley (bonus points: without checking, tell me which exact book this reference comes from and the surrounding context)

seriously, this thing would eat Aussie marshmallows for breakfast.
Or roast them on a fire.

Liz burnt the turkey and ruined christmas, and people seemed to blame Karl. This was less good. 

I went for a bike ride around Lake Sammamish. Clearly my sense of scale requires calibration, cos it was way bigger than I expected. But it was nice. Here is a photo:

We went to church Christmas eve. I really should have taken photos. 2/3 churches I have been to so far have a mandolin player. Is there some deal about mandolins here? Are they a thing? 

I realize this has been out of order, and that ‘realise’ was autocorrected to 'realize’. I do not like this. Americans, you do know that ’s’ can make a ‘z’ sound, right? That’s ‘zed’, by the way, not ‘zee’.

American roads

Ok, Aussies, you know Spaghetti Junction and how that is just an unbelievable mess of civil engineering? Or the roads around airports? Well you know what? That sort of thing is a regular occurrence on American highways.

You know how we get warning of merging lanes? You don’t get that here. 

Lake Serene

How’s the serenity?

This place was truly serene. Just beautiful. 5 hour round trip, spectacular views across the valley to other snow-capped peaks, and the lake itself … amazing. This was Christmas. 

My Sherpa

The walk up: a bit of a trek on the steeper more rocky sections, when you were climbing high. Apart from that, it was a walk in the park. 

This was the forest pass that we had to display in our car. Those who know me well need hardly guess what amused me and why. 

Bonum comunitae comunitatis

Supermarkets

Seriously. Costco is on the order of IKEA size. Safeway and Target approach Bunnings. It’s ridiculous. And buying in bulk? Step right this way ...

This is a Costco. It is a small country. 

This is a standard-sized wine glass.
Go get a standard Aussie wine glass and compare it with your hand.
Yeah.

These come in packs of six ... 

See the bottom of the packet? That's my elbow.
That thing is the length of my forearm, which is ~0.5m

2+kg of peanut butter

They have Tim tams here! But don’t call them by their true name. Backwards country … 

That's all, folks.

The Blog: An Unexpected Post

Get it? Cos you didn't expect me to do another one this quickly?
..... yeah, ok, no ....

So yeah, my HR Intern Manager (or some title like that) reads this blog. Better make sure I don't Google say anything Apple potentially Facebook dodgy, or she might fire torture have stern words with me my manager. Everything needs to be Microsoft approved.

Anyway, The Hobbit: The Film about Four Armies and the Eagles (Microsoft Approved)

He's a little short on good puns right now.

Firstly, let's get it out of the way: Azog kills Dumbledore, and they're both Tyler Durden.
There, I spoilt it for you.
You should have read the book, anyway. Nothing in that movie surprised me, cos you know what? I read books. Books have good content (approved by Microsoft).
Meh.
It had a Hobbit in it, true to the title (as approved by Microsoft).
The book does not go into heaps of detail for the actual battle, so one cannot complain heaps, but I think tactically all those armies were awful. No back-up guard. No 'insurance policy' snipers on the rooftops. No one using Bing to search details of the Orcs, or Binging the weather for the upcoming battle, or using Bing maps. No one else seems to have caught onto the idea of a juggernaught except the Orcs, who dominate with them.
Bilbo arrives home. Plot spoiler (recommended by Microsoft)
His house is emptied, including his Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and his Microsoft Xbox One. Thankfully though he still has a connection to Azure and manages to track down most of his stuff on the Google Play Store Craigslist.

In other news, Christmas!! (Allowed grudgingly by Microsoft)

Blog 2: The Dark Post

Yeah, bet you didn’t see that title coming … 

Alright, random small points before we hit the storyline of this movi- I mean blog. (I just watched some honest trailers and now I’m reading this in his voice)

Scotch: woah. People willingly drink this stuff? And lots of it? Man, it burned.

James Whittaker: so he’s this bloke who gave us a talk about success. It was really good. Seriously. I learned a lot. 

Main point: it was 3 hours long. Yeah. 3 hours. You could watch a 3rd of the Hobbit (book) in that time. Or just read the whole book. 

But it was that good that I paid attention for the whole damn time. 3 hours!!

I’ve sat through a lot of sermons by ministers, and frankly, a lot of ministers that I’ve heard are totally rubbish at public speaking (not all). Honestly. I can’t pay attention for the whole 30 minute sermon. This guy spoke for 3 hours. 

Why do ministers not take public speaking courses?

<Political rant time>

#illridewithyou

This was fantastic. Good on you, Australia. Seriously. It’s restored some of my faith in humanity. 

However … 

This is an action that Jesus would endorse, and, furthermore, he did this sort of thing himself - standing up for the marginalized (he stood up for tax collectors, prostitutes, women, poor, sick … pretty much everyone marginalized). 

And yes, Christians did get into this, which is good. But it wasn’t started or made huge by Christians - just by the general public (as I understand).

On another note, I saw an article about an event that was a secular community gathering filled with motivational anecdotes, singing, etc. 

Community. Fellowship. Standing up against oppression and discrimination. Secular people are doing this, and doing it successfully. And I’d wager that a lot of these people dislike/don’t believe in Jesus … why? Thanks to the work of Christians, making him out to be an exclusive, dogmatic, stickler for rules fun-police guy. 

Clearly we have done a good job.

(Disclaimer: not all christians have done this terrible a job. Many I know are actually doing the right thing, but unfortunately the public paid more attention to the other people)

</rant>

Apparently this guy is famous, but I don’t know who he is. Someone, enlighten me.

Some famous guy in the Microsoft store

Is this an outpost of Barad-Dür? No, it is publicly available rock-climbing. Which is better, and safer. 

Minas Morgul Play Equipment for young orcs

Ok, get ready for photo spam.

Skiing

Man, this was just amazing. I love skiing. 

Skiis and boots. We're GOING SKIING WOOOOO

So to clarify, I had never skied before. And I learnt quickly. And then went down this really steep hill with thick snow. I can’t turn well, so I went straight.

This is what I love about skiing. 

I’m going so fast I’m starting to worry, which is pretty darn fast, and things are getting crazy, so I bail. 

It was a spectacular crash, and had it happened on a bike I would have broken bones rather seriously, I bet. 

But nope.

Skiing, you just stack and it’s all fine cos you hit snow, which IS SO POWDERY AND FLUFFY OH WOW.

I was just over the moon THE WHOLE DAY COS IT’S SNOW OH MY GOODNESS SNOW SNOW SNOW OH WOW.

Here is some snow: 

Snowfields. Like cornfields, but with less corn. It is snowing in this picture, but it's hard to tell.

Our car was covered in snow. I thought it was just a light covering, maybe a couple of centimeters. 

No. 

4 inches. 

Woah. That’s seriously thick. (maybe it isn’t to North Americans, but I’m an Aussie, right?)

Somewhere under there, a car awaits ... 

The EMP

No electronic device worked in this building, it was really annoying. 

It’s the E* Music P* Museum.

It had a whole lot of music inside, and some fantasy, scifi and horror. Oh man, did I get geek tingles in those parts of the building. 

So …. 

They had a whole exhibit on Nirvana, cos that’s like the one famous band from Seattle. They had a whole lot of Cobain’s guitars.

EDIT: someone pointed out to me that Nirvana is not the only famous band in Seattle, and linked me to some lists of bands. I knew of more than 3, which considering my musical taste (not grunge, nor anything widely known) is surprising, so I concede: there are many big bands in/from Seattle. On a totally unrelated note, one of the Microsoft people who has to deal with (or in my case, 'put up with') us interns reads this blog. This could get interesting ...

And some of Hendrix’s guitars too. Or what was left of them. Some of these guitars were a little damaged, for some reason … 

They had a whole lot of guitars in general, actually. 

I understand that this is an unusually large number of guitars to own

They also had TARDIS’s. This is Harley and Will, each with a separate TARDIS. 

Let's do the Time warp again! ... that was the movie with TARDISs, right? Right?

It was Occulus Rift, with a GoT type showcase thing. It made you feel like you were falling, which was actually rather impressive in the end. Apart from pixelated graphics, I’m impressed with Occulus; I moved my feet and leaned my body to get a look at something before I realised that that wouldn’t work.

They had available jam rooms in the music section, with a drum kit, guitar, and bass. That was a lot of fun. That was obviously prep for our real band, of course. 

I wanted the band name to be "Bing it on!", but this was still good. I got to be the lead guitarist

They played the song and you mimed. We played to “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore, who is famous for some reason. They didn’t have any quality songs, of course. 

Moving on to fantasy … 

You have my sword ... 

And my ... other sword? And my axe!

"Do you have six fingers on your left hand?" "Do you always start conversations this way?"

And now horror … 

You've got red on you

They had some good ones here, like an almost life-sized Alien. But that photo was not the best.

And some sci-fi … 

Mr Anderson ...
(oh man, that cassock is just so damn cool. Movie sucks, cassock awesome)

They basically had props and info things hanging around, which was so cool cos man, the props. I don’t know if they were the originals or not, but it was cool either way. 

Then the Science Museum

You know what? I would like to be a scientist, so that when people ask me what I do for a living, I can say, “Me? I do science.” (for bonus awesome, become a scientist working with holes, so you can say “Science. Aperture science.")

We went through the Ripley’s believe it or not section. I still do not believe that it is not in fact butter. 

There were the usual things, like Robert Wadlow, a four-legged chicken, a two-faced cow, a snake that was seriously too damn big (think basilisk size, from HP2. Seriously. Apparently they found skeletons), and faces made from weird things.

A toast to Albert Einstein!
Seriously.
Someone made his face out of toast

This is a cast of a shark skeleton. Those are regular humans for comparison. I hope, I really hope, that this shark was Australian. And that somewhere, deep in the Pacific, there is one left … waiting …. 

That thing is just ... wow. It's the T-Rex of sharks.

I found out that T-rexs actually are ginormous and powerful. It isn't just the movies. And oh wow, they could run at 45mph? Granted, that's a guess, but seriously, if they could do that ... man ... 

Inception-style paradoxes are always a good hit at a museum. 

::whispers:: "Paradox"

Then food. Or drink. This, apparently, is how Aussies have “A Bundy in a stubby, mate”.

That really should be a german beer stein

We had pizza for dinner. 

Yes, that is pizza. It is about an inch deep. It is pizza, Chicago-style. My goodness. It was a serious effort to eat this thing. It looked like a pie. That’s one hell of a pizza.

It was about 3.14 times the size of the average pizza

]

Blog America: The Winter Poster

Some of you by now may have figured out the name schema for the titles. Well, maybe you actually haven’t.

To start out, here’s a few small things I found amusing: 

Canada is hilarious.

Some of my colleagues and fellow interns are Canadian, and from what they say, Canada is like Australia, except with the temperatures negated, and American-sounding accents. People live round the edge, and there’s squat in the middle; they use the metric system, they’re allowed into Cuba (I didn’t know this was a thing), etc. They think Americans are weird. 

Root beer is weird too. 

Root Beer. It is not in a mug. I find this can misleading.

You know that medicine you had to take as a kid, and it had that particular taste?

Yeah. 

Add fizz, and that’s root beer. Can’t say I’m a fan. 

Solar bins. They don't even waste light here.

They have solar panels on their bins. Why? To recycle light, of course. 

Pronunciations. 

Oh man.  

Meggan. Not Meeegan. Meggggggan. Meg. Gan. I think this is funny. And we say Harley like Hahhley. And they hear it as Hailey. 

Bar-nar-nuh. Bair-nair-nuh. 

To-may-to, to-mar-to. 

I keep trying to get Americans to copy my accent. This is so entertaining, as half the time they say “G’day mate” really well and it’s hilarious, or they sound british, which is hilarious. 

Literally rings of onion. It makes more and less sense than a doughnut.

Onion rings.

So apparently these are a thing. I heard of onion rings, and thought, “Surely not. That must just be a name, or they are synthetic, or something." 

But no. 

They are literally rings of onion. In batter. 

Of all the things they could put in batter, they chose one single ring of onion? Seriously?

That’s just weird. 

This is so cool. I want everyone to address me with that number.

According to Microsoft, my name is David John McKinnon the Second. I don’t know how this happened, but it is legitimately true. I am the second David McKinnon of my paternal line since the migration of John McKinnon in 1853.

It is indeed a room that is red. 

The Seattle library has a room called the Red Room. It is entirely red. This surprised me, for some reason.  

A Golden, Exemplary Book

So I finished reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. There goes my brain. 

Never before have I read a book so dense and well-planned as this. Even Eliezer Yudkowsky would have trouble reaching this level of nesting. 

In short, read it.

In long, read it now.

Well … 

Only read it if you will commit to it. This is not a book that can be read in little bits, here and there. You’ve gotta take significant chunks of it at a time, and those times cannot be too spaced out. Try and finish it within a four week period. 

According to Hofstadter, it’s sort of a statement of his religion. Fair enough. From what I can determine, on one level it’s a case for strong AI, or AI that can be sentient and reach our level of Actual Intelligence. It speaks of formal systems in mathematics, provides a case for them in biology, details recursion, strong and weak, in math, physics, biology, etc. It speaks of neuroscience and how our brains function, on varying levels of complexity and depth.

This all builds and builds and builds, and one can slowly start to see what Hofstadter is getting too, and you reach the climax and …. and then it ties them all together in one fell swoop. BOOM!

All this integrated with dialogues actually makes for a rather good read. 

Give it a try. 

My description is probably a little strange and not accurate. Sorry. 

Pike Place

So many people recommended I go here, so I went on Saturday with Melbourne coffee-hipster intern Sam. Wowee. 

Basically, we hung around downtown Seattle for the day. Here’s another shot of that funky needle thing they have here: 

Try sewing with that thing. 

Seattle. Some of it. It looks like Sydney.

Seattle is a great place. It’s like Melbourne, but cold, and with the most annoying and stupid driving system in the universe (to an Aussie). But there are many wacky people. So we saw a Segway gang. A bunch of people, riding around on Segways, all with hoodies that had some skull and crossed something on the back. Anna then told us that there were Segway tours of Seattle. Seriously. Google it. I’m not joking. 

A Segway gang. They had gang hoodies. We barely escaped before they changed topic.

Speaking of segues, Pike Place is fantastic. So it’s a street, plus this whole building that has several levels of just shops. Aussies, think Patty’s Markets type thing. There’s a cheese factory, the original Starbucks shop (shop, not vendor), and all sorts of the standard homeopathic crystal remedies for sale. 

Pike Place

I bought an Legend of Zelda Ocarina, to add to my collection of strange wind instruments to play whilst riding a unicycle. It sounds exactly like the game, funnily enough. Speaking of unicycles, there was a busker. He had a six-foot unicycle (see, I’m already talking in Imperial) with a chain, and he juggled knives whilst riding it. And when I say knife, I don’t mean a little kitchen I’m-mugging-you knife. That’s not a knife. This is a knife. Yeah, that sort of knife. He juggled them. 

Then he juggled a ball, a knife and a chainsaw. What a boss. 

Speaking of buskers, there were a few others. One guitarist had an enormous crowd all singing along to some popular song he was playing; another bloke had brought along a piano. An upright piano. Out onto the street. 

There was also a guy playing the UFO. 

There is no other way I can describe this. He was playing a UFO. And it sounded good. 

Unfortunately I don’t have photos of these marvelous things because my phone ran out of memory taking photos of other wonderful things. I hate you, iOS 7, for being more bloated than iOS 6.

Pike Place also has this store where they throw fish. Now, that’s awesome enough in itself, and I could leave the story there and it would be good.

Seriously, they throw fish around. It’s fantastic to watch. Sydney-siders, you thought that candy place in the Rocks was fun? Pfft. 

Normally, you get served fish by the fishmonger taking it from the ice and placing it on a board and wrapping it. This is one of the few times Seattle one-ups Australia in a contest of awesome involving animals: some bloke with a Ned Kelly-grade beard chucks a three-foot Pacific salmon to the other bearded bloke behind the counter, whilst they all yell in unison. It’s priceless. 

Literally. It doesn’t have a price, you just go and watch. (Sorry, I had to make that one. I hate that word along with worthless. Why are priceless and worthless opposites? They shouldn’t be, syntactically. Or semantically. One of the two)

Americans are crazy. I love this place. 

There is also this wall of gum. Standard back-ally brick wall, probably has a few bloodstains on it, but you can’t see them because it is covered in literally more than a centimeter thick layer of gum. If that doesn’t sound like much, chew some gum. Flatten it into your table. Do this until it’s a centimeter thick. You will now regret doing this, but you get the picture. It’s a lot of gum. It’s gross. It smells. And I really wanna know how it caught on. 

There was a music store, and wow man, it was old school. CDs from the 20th century - ACDC, BeeGees, Beatles, Rick Astley (his other songs). Cassettes. VHS tapes. Vinyl. So much vinyl. Or maybe the same amount, but it tends to look bigger on a  shelf. 

Bainbridge Island

It’s some island across Puget Sound. It was pretty cool. We took a ferry to get there. 

This is Andrew Peacock. The man, the legend. 

Andrew Peacock. In the flesh covered by a jacket.

We went to an art museum, which had some seriously dark and twisted paintings, and some children’s storybooks, which lightened the mood. 

Storytime with Omair!

We stopped at a 'beach'.

This is a beach on Bainbridge Island. This is reminiscent of England. 

That's not a beach, that's a beach

Notice that there are mountains in the distance. I didn’t notice this at first. Then I saw that they were not clouds. This blew me away. 

You’re just looking at the clouds on the horizon, and then you see some blue that isn’t the same, and you see that it’s a mountain, and you think trigonometry and distances and angles and holy cow that thing is huge. 

Far over the Misty Mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

 The sun went down while we were on Bainbridge Island. It would have done this anyway, I suspect, but I can't know for sure. The sun does many strange and wonderful things.