Post-Thanksgiving Morning (Student)

Well, it came and went, but I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving started early and ended early. I started working on my ZBLL document at about 12:45 when I got back from class. At about 5:30 I went to dinner. It was roughly 5 in the morning when I stopped working, and I woke up at 10 to continue. For those who don't know, ZBLL is a method for solving the last layer of a 3x3x3 Rubik's cube that involves knowing 501 cases. I don't know them all (actually I don't even know half at this point), but I took it upon myself to publish speed solving versions of the algorithms a few years ago. I've tried to keep it updated as I learn new things, but it just doesn't work that way sometimes. However, I finally have another version out, and you should give it a look:

ZBLL Algorithms (version 3.00)

I figure people who want to learn this are going to be learning it over school breaks, so this gives them a nice winter holiday season to get it done. I don't actually expect anyone to learn the entire thing in that amount of time, but I at least gave them the option.

I said I would explain why white cubes are better than black ones. It's not the feel or the look, but rather the background that it presents. The beauty of a white cube is that you can use black stickers on it. This lets you take advantage of color opponent process (Wikipedia link), theoretically making it faster to recognize pieces as they move around the cube. The problem with the black plastic cubes is that black stickers appear to be nothing instead of something, and so it takes extra effort to figure out what pieces are moving around. I have a  few pictures of the cube I have set up. The blue isn't really the shade I want, as I sometimes get it confused with black in bad light, but in good light this is a great color scheme. The reason I chose not to put opponent colors opposite each other is that this requires re-learning your entire color scheme. This way, on the other hand, only replaces orange with black. I can go back and forth between my non-specialized color scheme and this one without issue (well, very slight issue) because that is the only difference.

I spent my Thanksgiving away from home this year. A dormmate lives about an hour and a half away and I crashed at their house for Thanksgiving. I got to meet a very interesting grandfather. He's a very intelligent person and is not afraid to say or ask anything. Absolutely anything. From sex to politics to religion, he covers it all. I had a great Thanksgiving even though it was away from home, and I stayed up till after midnight doing some reading I have assigned over break.

Thus I started and ended my Thanksgiving working. It is now officially finals season here, and I figure I will be doing a lot more working from now on. I did discover that I can get CD's from the library here, so that should make my days of reading and writing more interesting (I can only deal with Pandora and Spotify adds for so long). I've really gotten into jazz recently. It seems that people only know Miles Davis and John Coltrane by name. I'm a big fan of Charles Mingus (Mingus Ah Um is great), but the best album I have heard so far has been the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. I can't even describe how great it is.