Category: just life

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in china just life traveling

bali

lately, p. and i have been talking a lot about bali, more exactly, about spending a week or so there, in the sunny beaches.

anything to take our thoughts away from this cold weather. i don’t know who told us shanghai would be cold and dry in the winter but so far, it hasn’t been true. there’s cold allright, but there’s also a sort of silly rain falling every now and then, just to keep the levels of humidity high enough. our stomach might have already adapted itself to the food but our body is still struggling to understand this permanently wet new weather, with little aches here and there…

anyway, i digress. what i wanted to say was that today i got this card, sent to me from a taiwanese girl living in malaysia who spent her new year in bali:

bali card

so bali again, gently sneaking into our lifes. sounds like a good omen. :)

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just life links and ideas photography

short reminder

“whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. boldness has genious, power and magic to it. begin it now.”

goethe

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in china just life links and ideas postcards postcrossing

our own little ikea hack

a few months ago, at ikea, we noticed this pot lid holder. we don’t have a lot of pots and less pot lids even, but we purchased it anyway. guess what we use it for… postcards, of course!!

postcards stand 3

it’s isn’t exactly an ikea “hack”, but it fits our needs well. also, the higher racks are smaller and the lower ones are larger, which comes in quite handy for those big sized ones.

we don’t like the idea of “storing” postcards away, once received. they make us happy, so we want to look at them! :)

more pictures, on flickr (click for larger):

postcards stand 2     postcards stand 1

Categories
foooood just life links and ideas

the grass is always greener…

last thursday i ate my first francesinha in a smoke-free café. and let me tell you, it tasted really good. my sincere thanks to all the portuguese smokers out there who are playing by the (new) rules – i appreciate it. :)

ad by tbwa for the world tobacco free day.

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geek just life

mr. cook, we have a problem.

when i failed to join the air force and had to choose another career, i picked informatics, journalism and astronomy, all in the same application form – that’s how clueless i was towards my future. in the end, informatics won, and 7 years later, here i am, still clueless but with an engineering degree! :)
every now and then, on the most improbable situations, the informatics/mathematics part comes in handy, like for instance (and ironically) when i have to fly.

here’s the formal definition of a common problem, known as packing. the next time your mom tells you to stop procrastinating on your packing duties, you can properly explain her how hard that is – and hopefully delay the task a little longer!

  • you have n kinds of items, 1 through n. each item j has a value (sentimental or of importance) pj and a weight wj. the maximum weight one can carry in the suitcase is c, and according to british airways, c=23 kgs.
  • the number of each kind of item in the suitcase, xj, is restricted to zero or one (for simplicity purposes).
  • mathematically the problem can be formulated as:
    maximize \sum_{j=1}^n p_j x_j.
    subject to \sum_{j=1}^n w_j x_j \le c, \quad \quad x_j = 0\;\mbox{or}\;1, \quad j=1,\dots,n.

this is called a 0-1-knapsack problem, which is known to be a np-complete problem. np stands for non-deterministic polynomial time… and that translates into “very hard & time-consuming problem”.

another np-complete problem is called bin packing, which consists of neatly placing different volumes in as less bins as possible. no time-efficient solution has been discovered for these problems.

so there you go. combine the two and you have packing! :D

(and now, back to the suitcases…)

ps – images from wikipedia, more on the subject here.
ps2 – who was stephen cook?