logic

Do you know those 'logic' puzzles where you have to choose which item 'logically follows' in some sequence, or which item 'doesn't belong' in some group? You can do them for fun ('brain training') or they can be administered to you in certain situations such as a job interview. People would normally be employed based on their relevant skills, but it seems some 'progressive' management types think that they should be 'logical' too. That's an idiotic practice and should stop, because:

A. My logic can be different from the author's logic, and that doesn't make it any less correct:


In hindsight, it should have been obvious to me that 25*25 is 625 and that 30*30 is 900, but at the time it was obvious to me that answer A is the only number not divisible by 3. Fuck you, gbrainy!

B. The question text can be ambiguous:


'Frontiers between different sheets' means that where there's a line a sheet ends and another one begins (like with countries, you know, they don't overlap). In that case it's impossible to build that shit because there are non-square 'countries' in it. So it's clear that (a) the question is wrong and (b) the sheets must overlap.
Now there's a question of what the author meant: whether that's how the figure is seen from above or the lines are just paper edges (like sea borders or something where there's no other country there) and maybe the paper is semi-transparent or something. Of course, if that's what's seen from above and the paper is perfectly opaque, you need 5 sheets, but if those are just (possibly hidden) paper edges somewhere you only need 4, which is less than 5. You might say that I'm stoopid and of course paper is not even conceptually transparent. But then why can you see the brain in the background through the sheets? Fuck you, gbrainy!

C. The questions can simply be annoyingly stupid:


Yeah thanks for lecturing me on how P is 5 letters away from K which is 5 letters away from F which is 5 letters away from A! I knew there must have been something like that, but I didn't even bother counting*, because the answer was obvious from comparing the three squares: A-B-C, F-G-H, K-L-M, P-?-R, gee, what letter could that be? There was a similar question with some clocks where they put forward a similarly contorted explanation, while the minute hands on each column were all pointing to the same number. Fuck you, gbrainy.

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* some of my friends know all the letter indices and ASCII codes so they only need to subtract. They can also read binary T-shirts.

fail

Recently the ubuntu guys decided to move the buttons to the left of the window and eliminate the icon, like so:Worst idea ever. When I browse in a maximized browser or when I keep my Pidgin on the right edge of the screen it seems like the window is falling off into the void, because the space on the top-right corner is so empty.
Fortunately, this being an open system, you can change this, but not from some user-friendly application like the theme selector (where by the way, the sample window decorations are still drawn the classic way -- double fail), no, you have to use the gconf-editor, a kind of registry editor for Linux (ugh) and modify the button_layout under apps/metacity/general:

foolcoffee doubleclock

I had a Digital Computers course where we had these logic design and implementation lab classes. We had to implement various modules in Verilog and run them in a low-end FPGA. But during the first lab we weren't yet familiar with Verilog, so we were supposed to enter a digital schematic graphically. The schematic was designed the hardcore, old-school way, by building a state machine on paper, assigning bits to states, writing equations, translating them to flip-flops and gates et cetera. The state machine was for a (famous with past and current students at our faculty) "coke vending machine". It never worked as supposed and I suspect (being too lazy to prove though) that the equations suggested in the lab documentation were wrong. Years have gone by and, while having a break in the faculty hallway, I found that maybe one of our graduates, now employed at a vending machine company, has finally got it working: