A New Addiction: Cubing

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:

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. :P

Blog Upgrade!

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.

Photo: My Watch

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

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.

Waking Up On Time

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

Keeping Tabs on Travelling

These are my two latest used Metcards. If you don't already know, the prepurchasable tickets in Melbourne are called Metcards.

On the left is a 10 X 2-hour Metcard, and on the right is a 5 x Weekend Daily Metcard.

So - what does this tell you about me and my travelling?

The first most obvious thing - is that I (being the law-abiding, rule following person that I am) am not a fare evader. I pay when I get on - and get my money's worth travelling about the city.

The next thing you notice is there's a lot of 3:00am expiry times. This is because if you validate a 2-hour ticket after 6:00pm - the ticket is valid all the way until 3:00am. So - if you're counting, that's 9 hours of travel on a 2-hour ticket. That means I travel a lot more at night to maximize my travel time. There are caveats though - trains, trams and buses run at lower frequencies at these times (at best, they slow down after 8pm instead of immediately at 6 or 7.)

So what is there to do after 3:00am? I do a lot of things, like carry cartons of Coke home, go to Crown Casino for food, travel to suburbs far away for food... and the list goes on. Most recently, I had to go to the city to have a chat with potential employers, as well as fellow students that may in the future become my colleagues.

As for the others - there's always plenty of other random reasons, maybe I needed to travel a long way to a certain embassy, I was tramming down for some a huge sushi+sashimi lunch at Sushi Ten, or I just wanted to go shopping in the afternoon and planned to cart back loads of heavy groceries before heading back for home.

Weekend Daily passes are an awesome way to save money - a single use will last you the whole day - and since now it works on both Saturdays and Sundays - you can actually go to some places in Zone 2 which closed on Sunday that you couldn't go on a Sunday Saver for cheap.

It's fun to look back at these multiple use tickets - it's like a small log of your travels, your life and plenty of other funny things you do while in uni!

(Note - you might notice I am now posting larger versions of some photos now. Hehehe. As for why, let's just say - because it's something I couldn't do until recently.)