google saves the day

had a scare last tue. v bad scare. my laptop at work for some reason lost its administrator account. that is, i could no longer log in as the administrator and worse, i lost all access to the files which i was working on. total nightmare. i was super super distraught..

my friends.. those computer gurus tried helping me. do sys restore lah. accessing sys progs which i nv knew of... but alas to no avail.

hopelessly, i went home and googled "lost administrator account", "administrator account disappeared" and "administrator account deleted". and lo and behold... the solution appeared! and not just dat, i also found out the cause of the disappearance... all in some computer forum.

the power of google.

and guess who are the brains behind google? (haha. if this question comes from me, there are only a few possibilities.) mathematicians. k lah... maybe some computer scientists with a strong mathematical ability. more specifically, they are called search engine optimizers.

they are the ppl who make sure crap dun turn up when u do a search on google. k... crap do turn up... but they are not horrible crap or "contrived crap". examples of "contrived crap": sites which include many popular (but irrelavant) keywords, or sites which are "made popular" (i've heard of naive pple starting a company to employ ppl to click on certain websites to make them popular). so, when u search for things on google, the companies that do turn up are usually credible and are really THE companies you are looking for.

dun ask me wat's the secret formula google has. cos no one outside google knows. but google does have an interesting way of recruiting these search engine optimizers. google labs have an unconventional aptitude test called the GLAT. and here's one of my favourite question (with a bit of modification).

Fill in the gap in the sequence: 10, 9, 60, __,70, 66,...

Hint: Google is a play on what word? highlight for the answer: 10¹⁰⁰... ten is the biggest number/word with 3 letters. nine is the biggest number/word with 4 letters and so on and so forth. GOOGOL is quite a big number/word with 6 letters.

In additional to recruiting creative ppl, the company has a simple mantra: DUN BE EVIL.

Haha. So next time, dun ask me, besides lecturing, wat can a math PHD do..

ebay order #76640450001

recently bought a book over ebay. actually second time i bought an item. the first time was this maths text from china. (nope..not in chinese. e text is the same as the original. basically, it's like some china uni co-op thing that somehow went onto ebay)

anyway, this time the item is from america. and it was reasonable 16 usd / 26 sgd... quite cheap for a hardcover book in singapore... somemore deliver to doorstep somemore... anyway...

to my surprise, when the package came and i opened it, the book looks like it's from a library. refer to the typical label (with the watever reference code) at the bottom of the spine of the book. then i notice the sticker above... it writes "New York Public Library". Haha. Then i found the following note:

oh. so, there are ppl actually sell books from libraries online. the world is getting v it-savy indeed.

dim sum dollies: history of singapore

just came back from the show and tot it was not bad. very hilarious (but v singaporean jokes) and refreshing. unlike most musicals which have a simple plot, the show has no plot at all. it's just local jokes intertwined with history.

in fact, it's v local and twds the end, quite ndp-ish... n (no offence to anyone) the show makes one feel more singaporean than ndp itself. perhaps one should learn to be more open and laugh at oneself, so that one can learn to be open to others.

anyway, i think the show's worth catching.

seriousLY.

wat a short summary of wat happened last week..
5 paragraphs, 6 sentences and 231 words...