Some people who barely know me greet me with "how are you?". Now it's not that "how are you?" is a bad phrase, or a bad thing to say. Just that it's a filler for a situation that requires a sentence, without giving it any thought as to what you are saying. It's fine to say "how are you?" if you mean it. But otherwise it's pointless. And if you ask this person the same question "and you?", they won't say "oh today I'm excited cause I'm doing this" or "today I'm a little depressed cause I gotta do this". They just say "fine". So what's the point? Every time you ask the question, no matter how the person actually is, they will say "fine".

On the other hand, "what's up?" is just a little less pointless. The answer to "what's up?" is usually "oh nothing much", but there's a greater chance a person will tell you what they're doing than how they feel, because the latter is more personal. In fact, some people answer "what's up?" very sincerely, they will actually tell you.

Tennis is a funny sport. I've started playing recently, after a long, long break. I've never actually 'played it' in the proper sense of the term, never belonged to a club or anything like that. I used to play semi-regularly for a while as a kid, and it was fun. But tennis not being a popular sport in Norway (to put it mildly), I never took it any further. I guess I could have, but I preferred football and basketball. So now I live in Utrecht, there are plenty of courts in the student sports club and it's affordable.

But not having played for half a decade shows very well, I'm very awkward with tennis these days. The weirdest thing is having too much time. When there's a rather weak ball coming across, I have all the time in the world. I can chill for a while before I have to move into position. My technique, of course, is horrible, I need practice. But this period of 'free time' is very unsettling, it throws me off the rhythm. Just a moment ago I was in action hitting the ball, now I'm taking a break before the ball comes back. It's totally the kind of situation where I don't know if I should walk or run, I'm sorta on the fence about that decision. Tennis can be very dynamic, but it can also be very slow. And when you're not playing well, it's mostly slow. So I'm taking my time, I'm not rushing and I'm not getting the practice for using my time well. So when a fast ball comes at me, I can't cope with it, suddenly it's too fast. Not because I *couldn't* have reached it, but because I don't have the proper rhythm to react fast enough.

Interestingly, I don't play well under pressure. And in tennis there is no reward for a good performance overall, only the last ball counts. So even if I have a good exchange, I usually mess up the last ball and lose the point. Today I was taken to the cleaners, 6-0, 6-0. :D I didn't really feel up to playing a match, I'd rather just get more practice. Practice was going much better, much higher play to wait ratio. But sometimes you have to accommodate people.

Still, the biggest problem is finding people to play with. My tennis partner put up an ad to attract players and I responded to it. And apparently the other handful of people who did had no clue what they were doing, much worse than me even.

I would like to get a regular schedule going, but at the end of the day I'm still wondering if tennis is dynamic enough for me.

On the way home I stopped by these people who advertised they wanted to get rid of some tennis balls. Good lord did they hook me up, 4 boxes, 2 never even opened. Not only that, they wanted to give me a plastic bag full of old balls. All for just €3.5, which is a pretty damn good deal. I took the boxes, already a lot more balls than I need. They also had lots more golf balls, but I don't play golf. Super nice people too, Pakistani would be my guess. Apparently the husband used to play, but now they have a baby, so there's no time.

I love this word. I don't even remember where I saw it (it may have been some blog discussing language), but I feel a strong urge to use it. And I haven't found a context in which it would apply yet, but it's a wonderfully confusing word. It also sounds wonderful. Say it out loud to yourself, slowly, to really appreciate its elegance. :proud:

I received a letter today which contained the word irrespective and it immediately reminded me of a word I saw some time ago and wanted to use. It took me a while to remember irregardless, but now that I've blogged it, it's unlikely to escape me again. :cool:

Irregardless, one must do what one must, mustn't one?

I caught about 5 minutes of this fascinating cheapo aircraft reality series program on tv as I was waiting for my noodles to get ready. You've probably seen one of these shows, called "Heathrow <something>" and they try to make it very dramatic and exciting. "Will Jill get on a flight at all today?" "How will Mark resolve the tense situation with the pissed off customers?" Not exactly award winning stuff.

Anyway, they mentioned in passing that Easyjet has just merged with Go Ahead and so they had to turf all the Go Ahead planes to repaint them in Easyjet colors. This job, consuming 12 people around the clock for six days is worth £26,000. Which is interesting. Easyjet, unlike Ryanair, is a dotcom company, every advertisement where you'll see their name it says "Easyjet.com". I guess they were banking that the dotcom suffix would get them more business, because they're so state of the art.

That got me thinking.. putting aside for a moment the advertising costs, if it takes £26,000 to repaint a plane, and Easyjet has... what... probably 100 planes, that's a lot pressure on the shoulders of the guy in Easyjet's IT department who's responsible for renewing the domain name. If he let it expire and the domain sharks got it, he would forever be known as the guy who lost in excess of £2,600,000 on four letters.

Now Ryanair, they're smarter. If they should one day, god forbid, lose their domain name, they can come back with ryanair.net or ryanair.com.nc or whatever. But Easyjet can't, they're committed. Better not let it expire, domain guy.

If you're one of those people thinking "there isn't enough computer science in this blog", today's entry is for you. We deal in applied computer science.

As I was on my way to the supermarket, I was thinking about an algorithm for a coding project I'm working on. Just as I arrived, it struck me: shopping is an M:N problem. It is isn't it? When you're at home thinking "I need to get some food in here", you make a list of things to buy in your mind. Then you arrive at the store and you have your list, but you're confronted with a longer list - the list of things in the store. So as you go from to display to display, you have an option of two fundamental algorithms:

• for each item in the display, compare to everything on shopping list
• for each item on shopping list, compare to all items in the store

And whichever you choose, you have to loop that around the other list, so it's a heavy computation. In reality, our methods are somewhat more refined, we associate milk in the diary section with milk on the shopping list without having to compare it with all the other items. But memory remains a problem. How many items can you remember when you go shopping? For me it's about 5-6, anymore and I get very error prone.

Another way to shop is just not make a list at all, just go in the store and for every item, run a heuristic to estimate the need for this particular item at home. The heuristic will accept as arguments many different things, like:

• current price vs average price for this item
• the existing supply of this at home
• the need for this in the first place
• the craving for this item, if any

So you see, fundamentally, it's a complex system. No wonder amateurs can find it daunting.