Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Keep Santa Airborne
November 30, 1999

This year’s already typically smally crop of magic corn feed shrunk even more as a result of the strange greenhouse-effect climate changes. Being that the magic corn feed is in atypically short support supply, Santa needs to budget his flying feed appropriately so that he can stay aloft for the entire evening of toy delivery.

A fact of reindeer flight that is not too well known is that it only takes three of the reindeer to move Santa and his sleigh full of toys through the sky at any given time. The other reindeer use this time to rest while still keeping aloft with the residual effects of the magic feed, but are not actually pulling the sled. Due to this, Santa figures he can budget the use of his magic corn feed to time it perfectly to coincide with these rest periods. But how?

Lateral Thoughts
November 30, 1999

I hate lateral thinking.  The answers to the puzzles usually don’t
make any sense.  How can you answer a question when all of the facts
aren’t presented to you in the beginning?  There are a couple that
make some sense, though.  Here’s one that isn’t too bad:

A man lives in an apartment on the 35th floor.  He gets in the
elevator to leave his building for work.  He hits the button for the
first floor, gets off there and goes to his office.  At the end of
the work day, he returns home, gets in the elevator and hits the button
for the 32nd floor.  He gets off on the 32nd floor and takes the
three flights of stairs to his apartment.  If he didn’t do it for the
exercise, why did he get off the elevator to take the stairs up?

Life in Review
November 30, 1999

I heard on the radio today that resolutions for the new year are not things that you should enter into trivially at the last moment if they are something that you truly wish to accomplish. Being that I’m a firm believer in 20-second pop psychology, I decided just now that that I would take some time to briefly ponder the year and see if there was any lesson worth taking with me on into 2006.

Love-Hate: The PHP IDE
November 30, 1999

I’ve been coding in PHP for quite some time now, and I’m still trying to come up with the best editor for my workflow. I have even written about this particular issue before.

For the past few years, I’ve been using PSPad as my editor. PSPad is a great text editor, and has practically everything I need, but lately due to the sometimes hectic pace of some projects, I’ve come to miss actual debugging with breakpoints and such.