on speed cubing

Somehow I just know I'm gonna be called a nerd for this. I'm one of those speed cubers. Or maybe I'm a speed cuber wannabe. I have a Rubik's cube, yeah sure everybody has one. I can solve it in under 5 minutes and I haven't met anyone who can do the same. Sure there is somebody who can solve it in 11 seconds but that somebody isn't anywhere near me so I'm still the one.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be super smart to solve the Rubik's cube. You just need to know how the cube works, learn about a few hundred algorithms and you're good to go. Nothing big really. If I really want to do it I probably can, I just need to memorise about 90 more algorithms. The 20 or so algorithms I learned a few years back allow me to finish the cube in about 2 minutes and that is a feat. If you don't know how to impress people at a new highschool, learn how to complete the Rubik's cube. It worked wonders for me at my first highschool.

And no, I wasn't granted direct entry into the school's popular crowd or anything, it worked wonders because people didn't pick me for their team during PE classes for fear of my "nerdiness" would interfere with their chances of winning dodge ball. Who wants to be thrown balls at by brutes? Certainly not me!

So everyone was happy, I was happy because I didn't get to play, they were happy because I wasn't on their team. Well, everyone except the PE teacher really. She went on and on about everyone had to do something physical in PE classes for the whole year. Luckily I changed school and never had to be in any PE classes from then on.

on my long absence and other misc. issues

Wow, that was the longest time I've gone without posting anything. So what happened? Well nothing really, it's just one of my new year resolutions.

Before I blabber on, no, my new year resolutions don't contain an entry that says "stop blogging for 3 weeks". As a matter of fact, there's one that says "blog regularly on meaningful stuff" (yeah, I'm really very articulate).

I've got this intense urge to read all the time. It all started last year with a wonderful book and I ended up reading 120+ books in 2005 alone. A fact that I don't really know to be proud of or not. I'm pretty sure my VCE results did suffer somewhat from my addiction. Anyhow, at the start of the year I made this resolution to read 200 books in 2006. So far, I've read 191 books. What happened during my 2-week absence was, I couldn't stop reading to blog.

So there, my excuse for not blogging. The strange thing is, I decided to postpone posting anything because I'm convinced that this blog doesn't get much traffic. And now I find out that during my absence there's been more visitors than ever! What the hell is going on here?

To the misc. issues or rather issue, I've been asked by someone who didn't leave an email address for me to answer about my UMAT results last year. No I can't possibly blog my results, however, I can sort of tell you the average UMAT results that people in Pharmacy @ Monash get if you give me your email address. I promise I won't give your email address to spammer.