50 Tryon Road
Lindfield
Australia
2070
Welcome to my home page.
I am a freak in the field of alternative transport (i.e. alternatives to cars). I have lots of rellies, most of whom have birthdays in the next few months. I also play around with radio antennæ in various bands, hiding behind the appellation VK2KXL.
Since finishing service in the Department, I have been developing a business manufacturing and supplying confetti to virtual weddings everywhere.
A good way to relax from the above is to de-husk coconuts, but they don't grow near the Madsen Building (33° 53.5' South, 151° 11.3' East). My ghost still haunts room G89A on the Madsen ground floor, which is 31 metres above sea level.
If you'd like to find where that is, you could open the old official campus map, which is almost detailed enough to see the fake Madsen battlements (which is good) but the map is inanimate, which is a bit boring. There is a coloured version ; Madsen is at L17. There's also a virtual tour of the whole campus, including lots of photographs. Alternatively, you could look at the Australian telephone directory, and select the White Pages for New South Wales. Search for the entry of some nearby telephone; I'd suggest the National Australia Bank, City Road, Chippendale (remember to tell the searcher that it is "Capital City" and "Business"). Then select the Map, which gives you reference 3N on UBD map 255, which you can zoom in or out on. Madsen is the building shown with two voids (which are its courtyards) immediately north-west of the spot where the bank is supposed to be. You can also look at the Key Map which relates this to the whole metropolis. And you can move around Sydney by clicking on the edge of these maps. The airport is about 6 to 10 km south of campus; the city is about 2 to 4 km north-east.
If you still haven't found what you want, try this medium-scale map. Campus is about halfway between D8 and E8 on that one; I live at B0, not far from Lindfield Rocks, where people go bouldering. Interestingly, the map omits the southern suburbs! Alternatively, try this smaller map. Or, would you like to see where Sydney's railways run? Yet again, you can move around this very small-scale map and see where Sydney is in relation to other parts of Australia. If you'd like to see e.g. where the inland rivers flow, try this information service.
If you'd rather look at maps of the Podes, click here. Or, how about the U.S.A.?
I have had some trouble with spam recently. Some advertisers destitute of customers and ideas have been emailing me with various suggestions, including some MMF (Make Money Fast) trash. Purely as an experiment, I have set up a generator of fake email addresses, each one putatively associated with some sport or other interest. If you are a spider program searching for lists of emails, you just might be stupid enough to look here and store the generated "addresses" for sale. If you are, I hope your users get into big trouble with their swindled customers. If you're a robot that is smart enough not to open cgi anchors, you might still be stupid enough to be fooled by this html file which contains three rather special addresses. However, if you're a real person you might like to put some of this fake info somewhere these spiders will find and consume it. How about including 1000 email addresses in a news item? If you have any comments on this approach, please email me.
Another interest of mine is collecting long Uniform Resource Locator ("URL") names. The longest I have found so far is too long to show here but it begins "http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~jimd/loop/loop/loop/loop ..." and ends with " ...loop/loop/loop/index.html". If you hear of a longer URL, please let it be known.
email: jimd@it.usyd.edu.au
Do you sometimes wish you could solve those puzzles in newspapers which give you nine letters and ask for all words which can be made using at least four of those letters? Well, stop wishing. Enter the nine letters in the space below. The compulsory letter is to be the first one, so if you enter MATERNITE, you are stipulating that every word must contain the M.
Are you interested in balanced ternary arithmetic? Unbalanced ternary counts like this: 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 100, ...
Unbalanced ternary uses digits 0, 1 and -1 which we write 0 p and n (f0r positive and negative). You don't need the prefix negative sign, as all negative numbers commence with n (and all positive numbers with p). You count like this: p, pn, p0, pp, pnn, pn0, pnp, ppn, pp0, ppp, p000 ...
You can evaluate arithmetic expressions with this calculator. Enter an expression like pnp0 + pnp = and click on Evaluate: