Propigated Quizzes :)
I'd like to normally think that I don't go straight for the answer 'the following questions' kind of thing, but the way this was posted on Courtney's Blog meant I couldn't really resist:
...and after all his serious posts on ACTA I want him to write about his favourite colour
Also, it's partly it being a Sunshine Award. I mean, that just sounds too nice to ignore. Little rays of sunshine everywhere.
Excuse me, I'm just going to go be nauseatingly poetic in the corner for a few minutes...
So, time to shuffle my writing schedule around slightly (thankfully, I have posts queued for at least the next week, and a number of already quite lengthy drafts on the EEE PC I've reclaimed), and get stuck into the auto-trivial knowledge. Naturally, I'll have to continue writing in extended paragraphs, looking at the issue from a number of different angles, and punctuate my work with1. I'm also not going to be able propagate it (sorry) - or maybe I am, but I'm too close to a neutron absorber for it too make a difference.
What's Your Favourite Colour?
Firstly, Oh, this is such a question. I've run off a quick colour swatch to guide you through the answers (the RGB-space points are referenced for convenience) - they're organised in the order I mention them, so it should hopefully help understand the shades I mean8.
Only a few years ago, I would have been able to answer with either Green or Orange, and be done with it. Now, however, I'm a lot less certain. When I started having to wear shirts - and it was permitted that they were not white, I naturally drifted towards what has been called Web 2.0 blue, which is roughly the link colour on this blog! I suppose these days, I'm doing so much work in the console that I'm drifting back into a 16 colour space. These days, this probably represents itself through the silvery colours backing this very page, and off black and off white for text
What is Your Favourite Animal
As I expect every person who reads this can guess that I'm eventually going to reach cats. But I could spend some time looking at others? No?
Fine.
Cats. =^.^=
What's Your Favourite (non-alcoholic9) drink?
Having not that long ago (about a year?) had the entire underside of my desk filled with empty 2L Coca-Cola bottles10, I am pleased to announce it is no longer Coca Cola! I have happily gone back to my English11 roots in the consumption of Earl Grey Tea. By the litre, for preference!
Facebook or Twitter?
I'm drifting away from both - the usefulness of mass social media, especially with active two-way communication (commenting) went down in my estimation following the total lack of intelligent, thought-out discussion on any of the political issues. This is probably the reason why I've been posting here a reasonable amount - and as I mentioned earlier, there's something of a queue of posts scheduled for posting12. That said, this is drifting towards a kind of intellectualism superiority. And, if there's one thing that Hollywood's taught me, it's that this leads to no friends, getting drunk, and then a romantic comedy where I start looking better once I stop wearing glasses.
On the other hand, I don't have a twitter account. So: facebook?
What's Your Favourite Number?
Hmmmmmmm...this is a tough one. I used 17 as a placeholder as a habit, but that doesn't really say anything. Ok, yes, I use kittens as a placeholder for everything else, but: kittens! I don't really think that picking a derived constant is a valid answer - e is the limit of a series, pi is generally given as a physical constant - as are almost all the other known constants. i is strange to define, and has ridiculous properties13. So, I don't really know where to go from here; numbers are really all very similar tools - and I don't have a favourite hammer either.
What's Your Favourite Day of the Week?
Saterday14
You probably haven't heard of it. Being a somewhat extreme programmer, I don't really do days, sleep cycles, of dealing with real-time in general. I have, therefore, had to develop my own words to describe what's going on. Firstly, I define a day as a period of time between two sleeps. A sleep is required to contain a REM cycle. Similarly, the first meal of any day is Breakfast - regardless of the clocks in my room might tell me15
The days of the week I use are based off of the work I'm doing. Monerdays are days on which I work, but did not the previous day; Frierdays are the last working day in a series of working days. Midderday is for any working day that it not a Monerday or Frierday. It's interesting to not that some days, like today, are both Monerdays and Frierdays.
The rest days used to be Saterdays for any which is not the last rest day, and Sunnerday for the last one. These fell out of use in 2010, when I had a total of 5 days when I was not working, and it was easier to just remember the dates.
My Passion
Two answers, quite strongly linked in my mind - Problem Solving, and Seeing people smile. Or knowing that they are. Surprisingly, I consider the programming and the writing about politics and things to be more of a hobby - most of the programming I've talked about on this site came about because of a suggestion someone said - sometimes silly, sometimes sensible - such that soon I'm spending time on it16.
Do You Prefer Getting/Giving presents
I don't really know. Finding presents that I'm actually interested in these days is rather difficult, as I don't have that much use for physical stuff. I have a collection of CDs, and a computer and...er...some kitten plushies17. Likewise, I often found it difficult to get presents - mainly striving for any level of equality. I do often see things, and just know that they should belong to certain people. Or, that certain people could learn better ways of humour18.
What's Your Favourite Pattern?
Ooooooh...I have a couple of these. Some avid readers (hey you three...maybe four) might remember the post 0'00", which contained a script for drawing one of my favourite patterns. It's a simple geometric function - take a unit square, put n markers equally spaced on each edge (each side shares two markers with the adjacent edges, at those points sometimes known as corners. Then, join every point to every point.
The other is not, as one person might expect, something to do with prime distribution. I actually decided to change this after initially typing this up. Neither is it any of the expected to fractals. I'm going back to my base instinct which is the diffraction pattern of the double slit experiment.
What is Your Favourite Flower?
I don't really know much about flowers, and most of the ones that spring to mind come with quite a bit of emotional baggage. So, I wrote a script to explore the flowers category on Wikipedia for me, so I could look at all the pretty flowers. I then remembered that I can't currently get WiFi, as I'm a) in a basement lecture theatre and b) having issues getting the wireless to work in college19. So, having failed at the nerdy solution to the question, I'm going to have to fall back on the last available option: Batman!
Edit: Having got home, I decided to solve this by taking the "What Flower are You? Quiz" which gave me Iris. So, there we go.
Looking through my blog lists, the only active blog that I can push this question list onto is Angela's Angineering. That doesn't quite make the recommended 4. I'll have to get all my other regular readers to start writing ;)
- 1 ↑ footnotes
- 2 ↑ rgb(255, 140, 20);
- 3 ↑ rgb(20, 226, 20);
- 4 ↑ rgb(195, 217, 255);
- 5 ↑ rgb(200, 200, 200);
- 6 ↑ rgb(32, 32, 32);
- 7 ↑ rgb(240, 240, 240);
- 8 ↑ Note that there were selected and tested on a calibrated 4500K screen - your mileage may vary
- 9 ↑ I'm tee-total, which kind of makes this pointless
- 10 ↑ This is the first time I've ever wished that I took a photo of that...
- 11 ↑ Yes. English. Not British. I'll come back to this at some point - and, if I don't, remind me
- 12 ↑ I'm not going to speed them up, because I should probably pay more attention to my degree!
- 13 ↑ consider the values of ii; they are real numbers - an infinite number of them. That's if memory is serving correctly.
- 14 ↑ Sometimes, Caterday
- 15 ↑ This is also, actually, an accurate rendering of the word from its etymological roots.
- 16 ↑ Also, accidental alliteration in an answer always activates an ache to advance a avant-garde arguments, as opposed to an actual adage
- 17 ↑ Do you see something of a kitten theme forming?
- 18 ↑ Not that they read this blog [sadface.png]
- 19 ↑ Which shows my lack of knowledge about how to do a large number of things from the command line