2008-10-18 Mandelbrot

Song of the week: Mandelbrot Set by Jonathan Coulton. Not your typical boy meets girl kind of song.

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A couple of nice things happened since I last blogged.

I got a bike for free. Kind of. From now on I'll be saving real money every time I use it. I'll be rich! Soon I'll have my own hockey team!

Telecom upgraded my broadband plan from 6 GB to 10 GB with no additional cost. My previous experience with Telecom New Zealand was that they're just like Telekom Germany in terms of brains (none), response times (pre information age) and customer satisfaction (low). Putting an additional name on the phone bill for example would cost $40, because it's practically the same as getting a brand new account with the same old phone number. In an ideal world it would take no more effort than UPDATE customers SET name='foo' WHERE id=123456; would. But we're not living in an ideal world and all sorts of things could happen if adding names to phone bills would be easy.
But hey, 10 GB, that's not bad! In fact, "it is almost twice as much as your old plan", to quote their letter...

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These are pictures from the Da Vinci Machines exhibition. It was the most random thing. I wanted to see this exhibition for the longest time, but for one reason or another I've never gotten around to going there. So they closed it down before I went to Canterbury Museum again. Or so I thought. But guess what... they extended it! And when I went there, they even had Leonardo himself giving a little tour! He told us all about how he was brought up, how he got his first job and what exactly he thought of Michelangelo. He made lots of little jokes and anachronisms, and I had an excellent time.
Fate shouldn't reward me for being so lazy.

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Speaking of rewards: our patience is going to be rewarded in 227 hours!