Random Ideas

Last Friday - I decided to finally buy a Rubik’s cube. Amazingly, I’ve never owned one of these standard cubes in my life. The closest I’ve gotten to one is a Pyraminx - which I have never gotten down to learning how to solve.

So I went to the shop - and found the Rubik’s branded cube to cost AUD27. That’s a lot of money for a toy I know I’m gonna break at some point. So I decided to splurge on a cheaper alternative that cost AUD10 - and claimed to be the world’s smoothest cube:

My cube - solved slightly more than 100 times at this point.

It is indeed smooth - probably smoother than a Rubik’s out of the box (judging from forums and Youtube) - and after about a day of playing, it was good enough to start practising finger tricks on.

I’m of course not particularly fast, currently averaging about 2.5 minutes per solve - compared to the 10 minutes when I started, I’d say that’s a massive improvement. I’m using a very basic method with minimal algorithms (about 10 or 11, I think) - I’ve however expanded that repertoire to roughly 20 at this point - and I expect to have it to double to about 40 by the end of the year. (Hopefully, I can get below 1 minute before the end of the year. :D)

(As for  how slow I am - it takes me 9 seconds to do the M2 U M2 U2 M2 U M2 H-perm.)

Short rant: Didn’t feel like putting this in the sidebar so I’m gonna say it here - I’ve decided photos are a good compromise since I don’t have time to write long rants and articles - I know I’ve still got that part 3 to write.

And I just know that I’m gonna not post anything next week again. -__- And switch to something else. I guess this is why I called the blog Random Ideas.

I’ve done some shuffling here and there to the category hierarchy, updated to WordPress 2.6.3 - and most importantly: NEW THEME! Do report any bugs you find.

Update: Modified new theme to remove tag related material - I intend to use tags eventually, just not yet.

(Just to continue my post earlier - I took a photo of my watch.)

My loyal timekeeping device. (also phone number keeping device)

Yes, I’m aware my watch is old, the colour is peeling, the strap isn’t the original strap, and it’s dirty. But hey - it’s my watch, and it’s been with me a long time.

The device I rely on to wake me up.

Despite this, my timezone is still GMT+8. (For those who don’t know, Melbourne is now GMT + 10 plus another hour for DST - that means I’m 3 hours off.)

T_T