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BT emailed me today to let me know that they are bringing ADSL to Whitehead. The expected activation date is 2003-01-07, but I’m hoping we’ll have it by Christmas.

So, it’s time to intensify my quest for an ISP. I know what I want, so I tried the ADSLGuide advanced search.

Leonardo Fibonacci was an amazing mathematician. His greatest achievement was introducing the western world to decimal number system. I’m not sure if I should be grateful for this. There is no doubt that decimal is better than the Roman numeral system it replaced, but the choice of 10 as the base is not optimal except for counting on your fingers. Fibonacci himself seemed to prefer base 60, but I don’t think that would be a good default either. Hackers would prefer 8 or 16. For everyday use, 12 would be much better than 10.

Fibonacci, though, is not famous for decimal numbers: he just popularised them; they had been used in India and Arabia long before he found them. He is famous for a eponymous sequence of numbers.

The Fibonacci sequence starts with 0 and 1. Subsequent values are obtained by adding the previous two values, so the first 10 values are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34. Patterns from the Fibonacci sequence occur in nature, and the related /golden section/ is interesting too.

I was watching to Karen, Marc, and Tony play poker this afternoon. Tony mentioned a Fibonacci straight, probably in an effort to fleece Marc out of his money. I think it’s a great idea, and we should include it in all poker games. To do that, we need to know what it is and where it lives on the poker ladder.

A Fibonacci straight is a hand of 5 cards forming a subsequence of the Fibonacci sequence. So, in poker there would be three such straights: A, A, 2, 3, 5; A, 2, 3, 5, 8; 2, 3, 5, 8, K. The latter two can occur in /flush/ form too.

I haven’t had a chance to calculate all the odds yet, but a Fibonacci straight is higher than a normal straight.

It must be something in the air, or maybe it is the heat.

Until my laptop disk died a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen a major disk failure.

SWM had a similar problem a few days ago. And this morning, after an unexpected power shutdown at a datacentre in the middle of the night, I observed a catastrophic disk failure on a webserver.

I hope it doesn’t continue.

Whitehead reached its ADSL trigger level yesterday, with 250 registrations. We now have to wait for BT to do have a look and enable the exchange. BT can take a long time to do this, so I was pleased when I read that BT in Northen Ireland are faster, so I should be wired before Christmas.

So, I’ve started selecting my broadband ISP by playing with the service provider comparison service at http://www.adslguide.org.uk/.

Karen took me to John Carmichael’s falconry school for a half-day introductory course. It was wonderful!

The day started with John (jr) setting about 15 birds out on little perches, and complaining about the owls. They keep lots of owls because they are very popular (thanks to Harry Potter), but they don’t really like them. Owls, it seems, don’t have great eyesight and aren’t at all wise, so they don’t make great birds of prey. Maybe in an effort to justify his complaints, John (jr) started the flying with owls. The first owl was beautiful, but didn’t seem to want to get off the ground. When it did, it wasn’t interested in food. The next owl was much better, although it wasn’t able to land accurately on my glove. The third owl was the best (of the owls): it flew easily, landed well, and was careful when taking the food.

The Harris Hawk was the best part of the day. We had to carry it away from the other birds before we started. Then John let it go, but it didn’t go very far: Harris Hawks follow their owner. We continued to walk down the road, and the hawk kept us in sight. When I held up some food, it would land on my arm, grab the food, and then fly off to a nearby tree or post. It was amazing.

Karen found a picture of me on O’Reilly, so I’m returning the favour.

It’s not often I want to thank Microsoft, so wanting to do it twice within a month feels a bit strange. But, I’ll do it anyway.

Today and yesterday Microsoft provided lunch for OSCon. Fortunately /I spent the last few years building up immunity to iocaine powder/.