When we were in Paris in April (yes, April in Paris!), I read Le Figaro every day to catch up on the election news (Sarkozy vs. Hollande vs. Le Pen) and to help try improve my French comprehension. While the latter was fairly successful, I was diverted by the puzzles page. Not only was there a Sudoku puzzle, but there was another puzzle I hadn’t seen before called Takuzu. […]
READ MOREWhen we were in Paris back in April, I picked up the latest (and final) Inspector Wallander novel. Yes, a Swedish book translated into French and read by an Englishman. There was method to my madness (just): the first Wallander book I read, I’d picked up as a French translation (it was Firewall, or, La muraille invisible) in Montreal in order to try and recover some of the French I’d known and learned when a child. Fairly successful, except I then read the rest of them in English translations. So, when I saw this in the bookshop on the Champs Elysées, I picked it up along with a couple of other books to celebrate the end of the series as I’d started it, dictionary at my side (this time with a Larousse French-English dictionary app on my iPhone rather than the physical Oxford I’d used last time). […]
READ MORERaymond Chen’s post this morning was about one of the most bizarre uses of GUIDs I’ve ever heard about. I’ll quote the relevant bit: […]
READ MOREI know the answer to this conundrum, but I still have problems recognizing the answer. If you’ve never seen it before, it is really baffling. […]
READ MOREI was getting coffee from Starbucks this morning when I looked at Pikes Peak in the early morning sunlight. There was the waning moon setting over the snow-clad mountain. (Yesterday was a day of drizzle and damp; obviously this settled as snow at higher elevations.) I laid down some rubber to return home and get the camera to take a shot. […]
READ MOREI came across this remarkable image a couple of days ago. It shows four million digits of π encoded as colored pixels, with one pixel per digit. Each digit has a slightly different color. […]
READ MOREWhile we were away last week in Paris for the Marathon, I finished The Islanders, a novel by one of my favorite authors, Christopher Priest. […]
READ MOREMy insurance company allows me to pay for our car insurance by monthly premiums instead of the usual premium once every 6 months. For this option, they just divide the total six-monthly premium by six to give the monthly premium, and then charge a $5 “processing fee” per month on top. I decided to take a look at how much this actually cost me. (For background on the Time Value of Money – TVM – see parts 1 and 2.) […]
READ MOREAs a household, we subscribe to a few magazines. Hence we get renewal notices for those magazines regularly, and, the magazine subscription industry being what it is, we usually get two or three renewal notices per magazine subscription. On average maybe a couple per month. All well and good, no problem. […]
READ MOREToday is my birthday. For the first time ever, my sister Nicola sent me a text to say Happy Birthday. Yay for modern technology, especially international texting of birthday wishes from England. […]
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