Textured Rubik's Cube

Check out this 'touch and feel' textured Rubik's Cube. Instead of six different colours, the cube has six different textures: wood, metal, rubber, plastic, stone and textile.

Average of 10: new personal best time (26.21s)

I got a new best average! 26.21s :)

Average: 26.21s
Fastest: 18.43s
Slowest: 31.69s
Individual times: 27.69, 25.19, 26.67, 25.12, 27.08, 31.01, (31.69), 23.71, (18.43), 23.97, 25.02, 26.67.

The 18.43s was pretty cool, but it was a PLL skip, so it was a lucky solve. Still chasing that elusive non-lucky sub-20s!!

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

Other things that have happened in Brighton

When looking up Brighton in Wikipedia the other day after our day trip, I discovered an interesting piece of trivia. The Eurovision Song Contest was held there in 1974. This was the year that ABBA won, and Olivia Newton-John competed for the UK.

Day trip to Brighton

Last Sunday Peter and I visited Brighton. Brighton is a seaside town on the southern coast of England with a population of about 250,000.

It was only 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit) and almost 100% cloud cover, but they were thin wispy clouds so some sunlight was able to make it's way through. This is what counts as "summer" in England. Quite a bit different to summer in the other places I've lived.

Also, the beach was pretty different to what I've seen in Australia. It didn't have sand, just millions of pebbles! You can see what I mean in the picture of Mr and Mrs Cookie relaxing on the beach.

We walked along the waterfront and checked out the amusement park on the east pier, although didn't go on any rides because I'm not really into that sort of stuff. We also saw the ruins of the west pier which had been partially destroyed by a hurricane, and then the remnants completely destroyed by arsonists. Now it's basically just a burnt out frame of a building. BTW, you can click on any of these images to for a larger version.

We also visited the Royal Pavilion, which had lots of dragons and was pretty cool.



After this we wanted to finish off the day with a traditional Sunday roast. You'd think this would be the easiest thing to find in England, but not today, and not here! We traipsed around Brighton for quite a while in search of roast! Fortunately, we did eventually find one, so order was restored. :)

Origin of alt-ctrl-delete

I came across this cool interview with the guy who invented alt-ctrl-delete. Apparently it was originally just meant to be an easter egg and shortcut for the developers at the time, but somehow between the most famous combination of keystrokes ever!

I think the funniest part of the interview is at the end where the developer says,

"It was a 5 min job, I didn't realise I was going to create a cultural icon when I did it. But I have to share the credit. I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous!"