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I've been learning a lot lately, basically I am trying to use my ring finger (actually both) more. One nice alg to use it on is this OLL. Perform B' with your ring finger. After a little practice it becomes easy.

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Yes, that's right, sub 19! 18.97 to be exact. But still. It was an insane average, where I did a couple of times in the 17, more 18's. I'll give an update with the exact times soon.

I am very excited about this, but I'd prefer to have an all-sub-20 average soon.

This great record was set in the morning, after a very good nights sleep, that seems to be very important for my times.

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Yes, that's right (*makes backflip triple somersault*). Last Sunday I did my ever first sub 20 average solve. For the not so well informed: this means I solved a Rubiks cube 12 times in a row with an average of under 20 seconds per solve.

19.88 seconds

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I managed to save some pictures although my camera has now died a silent death. My friends Jasmine and Peter promised me some more pictures, and for some I will be in them.

Houston, we have a visual:

Pictures of Disney at WC2005

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Well, I am back at home, and let me tell you about all the good, the bad and the ugly experiences (yes Gaetan, this is a pun).

The bad

Let's start with the bad for a change. There I was, standing on the stage, ready to blow everyone away with my sub 20, and then it happened: total blackout. My thoughts got sucked into another dimension and I stared at the cube for what appeared to be ages, but was in fact just a couple of (precious) seconds.

Result: a miserable 25 seconds. The other two solves had the same disease and resulted in 30 and 40 seconds. My average was not better than 20 years ago.

The good

The good things happened afterwards. I must say I loved seeing everyone: Dan, Jasmine, Dan, Macky (didn't get past security and media though to talk to him), Brent, Ron, Ton, Peter, Lars, Lars. Joël, it was great meeting you finally.

I also loooooved the races that were going on ubiquitously, is that a word? The most fun was that one race table with Yuki, Jon and Doug Reed. They were all so much faster than me, that I was pushed to the upperlower limits of my cubing career. I did several 20's, some 19's, some 18's, 1 or two 17's and one 16. And on top of that I broke my avg and set a new 21.335, the old one was 22.

The ugly

This wasn't cube related though. The first day I thought let's drink lots of water, so I bought a bottle and put it in my bag. The opening mechanism was somewhat like my old popping cube, so it ended up being open inside my bag, thereby destroying not only all the algorithms I had collected for this trip but also my digital camera!!!

If that wasn't enough on the way back, right when I was about to check in for my flight I found out my wallet was missing. Stolen or lost, I couldn't say.

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update: it appears to have become the good, the bad, the ugly part II, Hollywood ending: Mickey Mouse found my wallet and returned it by FedEx!! Thank you Mickey!

 

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First let me tell you about ning. Ning is a new application invented by the guy who brought us Netscape. Now I know that Netscape was generally a bad boy browser, who knew nothing about standards and following rules, but still this Marc Andreessen guy cashed out pretty good...

Anyway, Ning is a playground for developers where you can create, copy and share applications in a snap. Some templates for most used 'social' apps are ready made and can be instantly transformed to something that looks like you made it yourself.

So I copied the 'bookmarks' app and created my own take on it: alglist.ning.com. Go have a look. You can do lots of nice stuff with it. You can tag your favourite algorithms or add other people's algs to your collection.

I don't know where I will go with this app. Adding functionality is not as easy as creating the app . One feature I'd like to add is the video link. Another might be the image display of the cube.

I still believe the community is shattered: look at all those nice F2L/OLL/PLL show-off pages, where actually not much new is found besides algorithms. C'mon guys, share it!!!!

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• Rubiks Cube - been to the World Championships, done that
• Windows Solitaire - I am on the World Ranking list
• Galaga - when I was younger
• Donkey Kong - same here, of course
• Virtua Fighter (I and II) - spent a summer holiday beating everyone
• Various Cookies - shame on me
• Milk - after sports
• Running - now that was healthy!
• Keepie Uppie - over 500
• Aikido - every day
• Pencak Silat - every day, school grades went downhill

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I always have so much unfinished business, not only in my programming tasks, by the way. Luckily at work, there is a manager breathing down my neck, but at home sometimes I wished I had someone to whip my back whenever I 'forget' about a pet project.

Here's a list of the programs I always wanted to write, but were afraid to finish:

• The cube-solver. I always wanted to write a program that would solve the Rubik's cube. And I haven't. Of course my ambitious goal was it to be Artificially Flavoured Intelligent, so it could solve it without the tedious job of me typing in the solution. In fact Cyrill Castella has done just such a thing. And though credit goes to him I am amazed.
• The neural network. In my crazy days I thought I could make money if my neural network program could just predict the stock exchange future. I never got the hang of neural nets and I still don't. If someone is so kind to explain them in a language my 3 year old nephew could understand I'd be glad to listen.
• Ligretto. At one point, when I was about 28, me and my girl Anne were both addicted to Ligretto. I am sure that if you try it out, you'd be addicted too. And actually, I did program the basics once (an animated game played by the computer against itself), one night when I stayed up until dawn. Of course, when dawn comes, I am usually so tired and my brain is so messed up that I usually mess up. I accidentally deleted the program. Yes you heard it right. I never got it back.
• My own home page. Now I must say, I have had a home page in the past. It's just never been the professional looking, feature packed website that I envisioned. The page you're looking at now is the closest thing.

Things I actually did finish, but which took me a very long time:

• The ultimate maze-finder. A genetic algorithm that could find it's way out of any complex maze, without being told how.
• Lingo. This is the famous 5 (or 6) letter word finding game.
• RubikTimerTalks, the talking stopwatch. I don't like looking at the screen when I am cubing, so I wrote something that actually tells me how far along I am.

Things I am "working" on

• The cube profiles for Dan
• RubikTimer.NET, a new version of RubikTimer. I hope to actually get somewhere with it.
• The cube study page, a web page where you can study algorithms

And of course I've always wanted to write a novel, and I have several unfinished once lying around....

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You found my site. Congratulations! Keep checking in for the newest posts.
Why is it called "the universe divided"? That's because my other blog is mainly for my family, it's completely in Dutch, and it's not about tech stuff at all.

If you can guess from what song the title of my blog comes, you can get a wordpress invite.

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• Dan Harris - Dan’s great cube resources
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• Jessica Fridrich - Jessica is the founder and creator of CFOP, the Fridrich method for speedsolving
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