Fixed up with Ben to play squash next Thursday at MINDEF after work. He has 2 racquets, so he can lend me. Aaron says he's free for our Sunday gym and swim session, not sure if Jasper is free. He'll be reporting back to his old unit on Monday...
So, next Thursday morning is the IPPT date. I just got my US tax refund in the mail, it's worth about 2 months my current allowance. Interesting changes afoot in our branch. Susan is now a "Mdm" because she's a Staff Officer now. Then Janet has taken up Susan's Chief Clerk position, which Janet has kind of been doing for a long while now anyway.
Janet wasn't happy about Yinglan continuously calling her "Aunty Janet" because of this. It will take some getting used to, plus there's going to be a new CO also. So now when applying for off must email "Mdms and Janet", rather than "Mdms and Susan".
Today Yinglan and I played a fun office game. He came up with the idea, but I beat him at his game. The objective is to throw these flat rectangular fridge magnets at the metal cabinet and get them to stick. In the classic variation, stand about a meter or two in front of the cabinet, then toss the magnet at it. That is like a penalty kick. There is a variation that is like a corner kick, you stand beside the target surface and try to get the magnet to stick with a glancing throw.
The canonical method of throwing is to hold the top corner of the magnet with your wrist pointing down and the magnetic surface facing the cabinet (for penalty kicks). Then toss the magnet in a high trajectory, imparting a good deal of spin on it.
For corner kicks, if you use your right hand and stand to the right of the target, you can use the same stroke. If you stand on the other side, you can hold the far corner of the magnet, your wrist pointing up, then spin the magnet with a downward flick of the wrist.
At short distances in front of the cabinet, a surprisingly effective throw is a stupid throw, where you place the magnet on your palm and just do a baseball style throw at the cabinet. It has a good chance of sticking if the magnet side hits the cabinet. The spin throw is fantastic all-round, though, I managed to make a successful toss from about 5 or 6 meters away!
Then I saw Yinglan make a toss successfully, and using that same stroke, I managed to make 5 magnets in a row! It is akin to the stupid throw, in that there is no spin. Hold the magnet in front of you by a side corner, almost as though making a spin throw. But this time throw it using a back-forward straight throw motion, and it should go straight for the cabinet provided you are relatively near.
It's a pity that in the early stages of the game, I threw some magnets too high or too much to the side, and they ended up in the black hole behind the metal filing cabinets. There is no way to save them from their depths of despair.
There's an interesting new project to do. It involves automatically assigning seats around tables to VIPs. There are m tables and n people per table, and the VIPs are supposed to be evenly distributed among the tables, with a seating arrangement within a table that goes like this: the biggest guy sits first, then the next biggest sits opposite, then the next biggest sits somewhere else, etc.
Actually it's not that hard, the tricky bit is the visualization, they want to actually see round tables and the names of the VIPs sitting at the tables. With inputs from Yinglan, I think I'm going to use Excel to generate the seating arrangement, then make a pie chart in Excel representing each table.
The website I was doing is now more or less done, I think, I'm now writing documentation for it. As always, documentation is usually the most boring part, but the thing is that I can also spice up the documentation with quirks. I'm also kinda sick of looking at the ASP/HTML code at this point.
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