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.

I've recently assumed my first shipboard appointment as a navigating officer. in theory, i'm in charge of navigation, but in practice, it's much more than that. was on the train when i met an old fren from ri. when talking he asked, "so you're not doing office work." my answer was, "not supposed, but..." he gave the "i understand" nod. geez. if you think there's a job which is not desk bound, then think again.

but it's not a bad thing lah. i'm more conscious of my spelling, grammar, etc.. er... maybe not when i'm blogging.

more fascinating... i realised some powerful features of microsoft office. k... maybe not that power...

1. you actually can create your own animation schemes for your slides. i wanted to a sort of test for my friends, whereby you show a picture of a thing without the name and after u guess and then u click, the name appears. a bit leh cheh to do for like 100 plus slides. then there's no standard animation scheme in ppt that does this. but the good thing is that u can create it.

refer to http://skp.mvps.org/animxp.htm for more explanation.

2. the next one is more complicated and need some programming background. there are many functions in microsoft excel, like sum, product and stats functions. but there are also others which are not there. today i ran a search and found that one can actually create their own functions. advantages: 1. can cater to individual needs, 2. hide the formula and prevent others from accidentally editting the formula.

refer to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA011117011033.aspx for more explanation.

haha. this is such a geeky entry. never expected to become such a geek in the navy.