Take That, Good Sense!

I had an idea for this post, while out walking amongst the grass and the trees earlier, but now the idea is gone, blown away by stressful interludes and adventures in the land of computational programming. Oh, what would life be like without programming, if not a heaven beyond all imagining? How lovely it might be! Ah, if only it could all be writing stories and nonsensical gibberish for the notional readers of this blog, the august and barely competent Quirky Muffin...

As a challenge to one's ingenuity and skill in dextrous wordplay, this Muffin is just as invaluable as it has ever been, even as topics dwindle rapidly in number and the fabled six hundredth post approaches, bearing with it much mythic significance and the customary sigils of a job barely done. Six hundred? That's nothing! The real milestone is one thousand! Could this possibly go to a thousand posts? Really? At some point, it could well degenerate into nothing but story entries and ramblings about the desperate world of unemployment as relieved only by the occasional private student.

Ooh, did I mention private students? I learnt something while preparing for giving a tuition this week, and it was the lattice multiplication technique. This is an absolutely brilliant calculator-less multiplication method, and one that beats out long multiplication for integers. It should also work for decimals, with some fiddling, but I've yet to try it. An explanation will go up on the tuition blog, which currently gets far less attention than it ought. As an advert, it's very much the equivalent of proclaiming that the author pops in every month or so, looks confused, and then leaves again with a feather duster and a boomerang he found behind the filing cabinet.

A thousand posts? Could that happen? It's a fascinating idea. Presumably it would become easier if a job appeared miraculously, an unintentional gift from a bizarre confluence of events. Oh, it will happen anyway, no matter the cost or difficulty, as this is the Quirky Muffin! Here we do things no sane person would attempt! Roll on one thousand, in at most two years time! Whoop! Whoop!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled lifestyles.

O.