Happy birthday to me!

New personal best time: 22.23 seconds

I'm on a roll! I just broke my personal best time for a non-lucky single solve: 22.23 seconds! I also got a new best lucky solve: 21.48 seconds.

Getting closer to a sub-20s solve... one day it will happen...

Average of 10: new personal best time

In the past day I've broken my average of 10 personal best 3 times! The most exciting part is that yesterday I got my first sub-30s average ever!

Over the past month or so, my frequency of sub-30s solves has been increasing quite rapidly. At the beginning of July I recorded 100 solves over the course of a weekend, and only one of those 100 solves was sub-30s. Now I pretty much always have at least 1-2 sub-30s solves per average, often more. Now I actually really do believe that I can become a regular sub-30 solver one day! :)

Here are the details of the average:

Average: 29.56s
Fastest: 26.31s
Slowest: 36.94s
Individual times: 30.36, 32.15, (36.94), 28.72, 26.81, 31.63, 30.24, 29.06, 28.84, (26.31), 26.64, 31.13.

For scrambles and timing I used Doug Reed's iCube iPAQ cube timer on my iPAQ hx4705.

Posh Spice claims to have never read a book. Ever.

Posh Spice says that she has never read a book. Ever. I'd believe it if she said she hasn't read a book since she had kids, or hasn't read a book since she joined the Spice Girls, but hasn't read a book ever? How is this possible? Did she not graduate from high school? That's a not a rhetorical question, BTW, I actually don't know the answer, but I assume it's yes. And what about primary school? Surely she read at least one book? How did she pass English (assuming she did pass English) if she didn't read books??

I just don't believe it. I know we're talking about Posh Spice here, but c'mon, no one is that lame!

Looking for your leopard?

These guys are weird, but they certainly do love kittens. Here's story about a kitten who's leopard has become lost again. Apparently because his leopard's navigation skills are "totally crap".

Zoology dragon

Cow! Cube! Cowuuube!

These guys are rather good and also hilarious!

Rubik's Magic

Until very recently, I hadn't really played with the Rubik's Magic much since it first came out in Australia, which I think was in 1986 - a very long time ago!

Last month at the UK speedcubers meeting, the guys convinced me to enter this event in our unofficial competition. I'm glad they did because I enjoyed the puzzle more than I expected to. So much so that I signed up for this event (among others) when I registered for the Dutch Open.

Since I'm now going to compete in this event at an official competition, I thought should really do some practice. So, tonight I did a 100 solves. Here are the results:

Average: 04.15s
Fastest Time: 03.22s
Slowest Time: 06.46s
Standard Deviation: 00.63s

And here are the results for the best average based on rolling averages during the 100 solves:

Average: 03.58s
Fastest Time: 03.22s
Slowest Time: 04.41s
Standard Deviation: 00.23s
Individual Times: 03.70, 03.90, (03.22), 03.22, 03.42, (04.41), 03.23, 03.82, 03.66, 03.72, 03.58, 03.50 (yes, I really did get two 3.22s solves in a row followed shortly after by a 3.23s - I was pretty surprised too!)

All solves were timed with JNetCube.

I'm pretty happy with these results since all the solves were done without using the magic flip trick. I've kinda forgotten how to do this trick, and also I'm not yet ready to risk breaking my Magic!

South Park avatar for Peter

Here's the South Park avatar I created for Peter using the Planearium South Park avatar creator. I think it's pretty cute. What do you reckon?

Another South Park avatar

Okay, here's my second attempt at creating a South Park avatar for myself with the Planearium South Park avatar creator. What do you think?

South Park avatar creator

I found this great South Park avatar creator. Here's my first attempt. She looks a little freaked out doesn't she? Perhaps I better try again.

New personal best time: 22.76 seconds

I was cubing on the train last night and I set a new personal best non-lucky single solve time: 22.76 seconds. The scramble and time was done using Grant Tregay's iPAQ application - CubeTimes2Go.

This is a big milestone for me because it's the first time I've beaten the original world record (22.95 seconds) set by Minh Thai at the first World Championships in Budapest in 1982. That world record stood until it was broken at the Rubik's World Championships 2003 in Toronto.

The current official world record is 12.11 seconds. This time was set last year by Macky at the Caltech Spring Tournament.