This Little Idea of Mine

Rather above-average week, actually.

So Wednesday night was a rather late one... so that carried over ino Thursday when I accidentally slept through two tutorials. Don't worry Dad, it was nothing I couldn't catch up on... so with that out of the way we move to Friday.

By now readers may or may not know about the fact that Fridays for me are like a three day weekend in some sense... since I don't have any lectures it's a good day to catch up on work and assignments.
Unfortunately, my mind was anywhere but in a working mood, however it wasn't completely unproductive (in a sense).

Has anyone thought about giving every human born an internationally-recognisable identification number? No? Ok fine. So I was paying around one night trying to figure out a suitable system (which I've been considering for about a month now), and by jove I think I might have one!

So here's the setup: By examing the person's ID number you could effectively deduce the person's date of birth, country of birth, and first two letters of their surname.
Confused? Here's an example.

NZ-973043-GU is my code, which simply says that I was born in New Zealand on 14/08/92 between the hours of 6 and 9 in the morning, and my surname starts with GU. It'd come in useful for passports and ID cards, eh? Plus it comes with over 18 Trillion Combinations, to be used over the next 150-something years.

Well... I did a bit of research onlineand it turns out I'm not the only person to try and figure this out. A guy by the name of Dr. Aggarwal Abhinav in North Carolina filed a patent that does essentially the same thing... except the birth date is more explicit, doesn't contain the country code, uses first name instead of the last one, and has the potential of over four times as many combinations to be used over the next 8000 years.*

So I'm beaten on that front. It's a shame, actually. I thought I actually may have had a shot at inventing something that no-one had thought of yet. Well, in any case, my idea is still here, and perhaps I'll pursue it further during the time when I don't have assignments to do.

And we are now into daylight saving! No, not literally protecting an endangered species called 'daylight', rather the time when everyone synchronises putting their clocks forward one hour, just because they want to enjoy the sun a bit more during the awake hours.
Honestly, I don't blame them... Summer's approaching soon anyway; but seriously? September? It's not even warm enough for t-shirts on a daily basis yet!

So because of this I ended up having another 4-hour night, although I managed to get up at 8:30 so that's a feat in itself.
I have figured out a few things to do with grocery shopping: Firstly, getting there in the morning gives you the impression the shelves are much more stocked, plus there's less inter-aisle traffic so my usual 45 minute commute around the aisles only took me 10 minutes.
Secondly, ever since I watched that music video by Michael Bublé I have always felt inclined to break out into song while walking down numerous aisles. The show-stopping number has never actually been attempted yet, I'm waiting for a lot more audience involvement.
Thirdly, Pizza Bagels. Pizza. Bagels. Just because.

Also today I had that "RA Selection Day" thing I mentioned last time... it pretty much boiled down to meeting everyone that had made it so far (around 60-70 students), splitting into groups (of around 10), and doing some of those team-building exercises that Year 9s at college peer support 'love' so much.
But hey, it was fine... so now we wait until some mysterious date in Mid-October to see if we are one of the 30 or so that got selected.

The Weekend Watch
I was feeling rather nostalgic this week, and after finding a few classic videos of Sesame Street, it amazed me how much the whole premise has changed, now that they're into their 41st Season.