A Little Magic This Week

I have had some big things happen at work this week. This is always a welcome change, as I am sure everyone has felt the “SSDD” phenomenon. We are throwing ideas around for a new direction for the help desk’s website, starring an “article-centric” approach. In the last week we have had an article submission contest to see what employees would be adept to such a task. With any luck, we can get enough momentum behind this to keep it going, and really make a significant change. I have been looking at other Universities on the web, and have found our “beef” to be lacking.

We concluded our “Thursday Trainings” with week, with what I thought to be a fantastic finish. The entire focus of these trainings has been to teach the concepts behind computer systems, instead of mastering point-here, click-that. To prove what I was showing them extended outside the walled garden we know as Windows XP Professional SP2, I completely infected a Windows Vista machine with, of course, IE7. It wasn’t hard at all to do – it only took about 20 minutes to make the machine almost unusable. I then ran through the same approach for cleaning that I have recommended with Windows XP, with complete success. I want to thank John and Dan for helping me record these sessions for future use.

Other things are in the works, and I should have better updates in the near future. This week was proof that you can have closure at work, even doing a job that seems to be routine.

In non-work-related news, I had a blast at the FragFest 7 event at Clayton State today. I honestly can’t remember when I have had as much fun at a LAN as I have with the guys that are there. Usually, problems come from bad networking equipment, having to bring your own monitors, furniture, power outages, and general idiocy. At FragFest, it is a clean machine. I come in, and everyone is already playing – yay!

As for the magic bit in the title – I found an interesting mathematical phenomenon that can be worked through a card trick. Arrange 21 cards in 3 columns, and 7 rows, dealing out the cards in the pattern of column 1, column 2, column 3, column 1, column 2, column 3, etc until all 21 are dealt. Have someone pick a card (keeping it to themselves) and say which column it is in. Collapse the columns back into a pile, being careful not to change the order. Place the stack of the identified column in the middle of the other two stacks, and repeat this process two more times. The chosen card will always be 11. Try this trick with 3 columns, 6 rows, the number will always be 10. Try with 5, the number is 8, with 4 the number is 7. It is definitely a pattern, when looking at the “magic number”. 3 columns, 3 guesses, and the magic number will always count up, skipping 3’s. (ex 4,5,7,8,10,11,13,14,16,17, etc). Interesting…

I have also changed my WordPress theme from its default, so I should hear no more complaining 🙂