Why are people so "hardworking"?

We use Bitbucket at work for code reviews. In a review, there is a main “overview” page, and a separate page for the “diff”, which shows the list of files that have been modified and the difference between the old and new versions of the files.

Every time I review code, I tend to open the overview page and the diff page in separate browser tabs. This allows me to switch easily back to the overview page to find information that I may need while reviewing the code change (the diff). This way, if I have scrolled some way down the page, either in the code or in the overview (which can be quite long sometimes), I won’t have to scroll down again to find the part that I was reading previously.

The strange thing is, I don’t seem to see other people doing this. We often have an overview meeting for code authors to explain their change to the reviewers. During these meetings, the author who shares their screen tends to just switch to the diff in the same browser tab. And sometimes, when a question arises and they need to show us something in the overview page, they click “overview” again (without opening it in a new tab), and we wait for the whole page to load again… And then when we’re done looking at that, they go back to the code change (again, in the same browser tab) and we wait for the page to load, and then we’re at the top of the page again.

In some discussions, we might need to check back the overview page multiple times…and each time, we do the reloading of the page and the re-scrolling down the page. Recently I have started asking them, “Why don’t you just open it in a new tab?”, but I don’t think they understand the purpose…usually they just go blank, and then I give up because this explanation is kinda long… *sigh*

Long word down

Last week was a very difficult Sunday Knotwords, and I spent almost half an hour solving it.

This week's was easier, but it was hard to start...I went over several parts of the puzzle before I found a word that I could start with. But overall, it wasn't as difficult, and it took me about ten minutes.

At the point where I had to fill in either "wed" or "dew", I knew that there was a high possibility for an alternate solution...I chose to use "dew", and yes, it was the alternate solution.

And would you look at that long word down the middle...I felt like it was the longest I had seen in Knotwords. But it turns out that I posted another long word before, and this is shorter by one letter.

Doraemon with hair

Yesterday we played a game where the first player in each team is given a sentence that forms a story, and has to draw it out. The next member looks at the drawing and writes down the story from it, then the next member will have to draw the story again, and so on.

In one of the rounds, I was supposed to draw. I started drawing a Doraemon. The person behind me exclaimed, “Why are you drawing Doraemon?!” After that, I added strands of hair poking out from Doraemon’s head, to which the person exclaimed, “Doraemon where got hair one!”

But the thing is, the sentence given to me started with “Doraemon with hair”.

I didn’t think of taking photos of the papers at the time, so unfortunately I can’t show you the drawing (or the paper with the words given to me).

By the way, when deciding who was going to draw and who was going to write, I did tell them that I was awful at drawing. (But we switched around anyway.) But it looks like I managed to represent a Doraemon and hair well enough! :P

P.S.: The actual story did have Doraemon in it, but it didn’t have hair… :P

Flavours of white rabbit candy

Months ago, I wrote about finding various flavours of white rabbit candy in a baking ingredients shop.

Some time ago, when buying something from the shop (which looked to be dying out, by the way; there were a number of empty shelves and freezers), I decided to actually buy some of each flavour.

There are some duplicated flavours here...and I think I snapped the photo after eating one or two sweets.

They had this paper/poster near the candy, but I remember that not every flavour was available. From the available ones, I tried to get one sweet each, but for some, more than one sweet fell out when I pushed the lever of the container.

The sweets were sold by weight...I did a rough calculation when I got home, and one sweet cost about 50 sen.

I bought them back in August...and now I have finally tried all the different flavours I bought. Here's a short review:

• Mango - not nice (not sure why)
  
• Coconut - quite nice, similar to original
• Wasabi - light wasabi taste. I wouldn’t have recognized the flavour if I didn't know beforehand. Maybe like sweet wasabi?
• Corn - strong corn taste, just like any other milky corn sweet
• Yoghurt - milky, quite ok
• Banana - similar to the corn flavour, there is a strong banana taste, not out of place in a sweet
• Durian - creamy durian, not bad

In the end, it seems that the creamy flavours are still the best. But none of them beats the original...

Double purpose?

Remember the introduction of my Pikachu cursor at work?

We have a new colleague who has a Psyduck picture in his WhatsApp profile. (I noticed immediately, but some other colleagues didn't notice until I opened the picture up to show them.)

The other day, this new colleague came over to discuss some work with me. I opened some code and highlighted some variables for easy reading. At the end of the discussion, he snapped a photo of the screen with the highlighted code. My Pikachu cursor was hovering somewhere on that code…I wonder whether a side purpose of the photo was to capture the Pikachu cursor. :P

New words

I didn't manage to post last weekend's Knotwords earlier.

On Saturday, I found an alternate solution by accident. Simply because I thought of the word "sad" first, and then tried to fit my solution around it. Luckily it worked, huh...

As it turned out, the original solution used "ads", which actually gave easier words down ("aha" and "sink"). I don't even know what "dink" means, in my solution above. :P

And here is Sunday's puzzle...also several words I don't know, but this time they were meant to be in the solution!

 

Less is more

When in school, I tended to pass in less sheets of exam paper than my classmates, yet manage to score higher. (*brag brag* :P )

Now seeing some of my colleagues / juniors come up with convoluted solutions for something that can be done in much fewer lines, I finally realize what my classmates must have been writing down on so many sheets of paper... 

Back then, of course I did not see their answer sheet... But I did wonder what they were writing :P