I’m sick. I’m coughing, my nose is runny, my throat is sore, and I’m sneezing over everyone who comes near me (effectively scaring them away… like a defensive missile system shooting away rockets). Don’t worry guys, I will survive. The funny thing is, people usually get more sick during this time of the year.

Is it the cold? Nope. Studies have shown that you are not more likely to get sick if you forget to wear a coat during a cold winter day. So what could be the reason? I decided to investigate with the help of my trusty friend, Google Trends!

People tend to get more sick during the winter seasons, so it makes sense that they Google their symptoms.  The most common one is probably a cough, so lets see what that shows.

As you can see, the cough symptom is periodic, peaking in December/January and reaching a low in the summer time. Thus it seems to be correlated with the season.  So what’s different between winter and summer? The biggest difference, is that people stay inside more during the winter, and they stay outside more during the summer. But how do we confirm this? Lets look at the trends of a few activities that are strictly outdoors only versus indoors only activities. How about playing board games and gardening? Board games, you usually play at home, whereas gardening is only done outside.

The differences are very clear. Board games get a peak during the winter season and gardening peaks in the summer.  However, the board game peak could be due to new Christmas presents, and people eager to try them out. How about card games instead?  People have access to a deck of cards all year long. And during the Christmas season, with so many parties, people are more likely to play game together.

So the trend continues: Board games and card games peak during the winter season, whereas gardening drops. Now lets compare all this data with coughs.

And as you can see, it matches quite well. Peaks of gardening followed by drops in cough (so people spending more time outside) and increase of “togetherness” time followed by increase of coughs. So as you can see, its really people spending more time together that’s causing more people to get sick. There’s so many examples of this, that its crazy!

People looking for the bus schedules (thus it means more people/students are going to start taking the bus) increases sharply right when coughs start to increase.

Its almost scary how closely billiards matches the cough.

This one is really interesting. As people search for more directions (meaning they are traveling more), the less coughs they have. As people search less for directions (staying home more), the coughs increase.

So here’s the bottom-line. If you want to stay healthy: Do not stay home, avoid crowds, and under no circumstances should you kiss your girlfriend while she is sick, no matter how lovely she may look at the moment. I made that mistake and I have paid dearly.

Today at work, I was looking for a cache of an old site, Google gave me some surprising suggestions:

Erin Andrews? I wondered who that was. After hours of long and hard, intensive research, I found out. After I rested, I reflected upon this experience, it hit me like a ton of bricks: did Google manage to teach me something? I decided that since I’m no longer in school, there has to be a way for me to learn new things, so why not let Google Auto-complete teach me?!  Follow me into a this journey of discovery and see what new trinkets of wisdom we can uncover from Google!

155,600,000 results say people is good for me, so its settled: pizza is awesome!

Oh no! Apple is an evil evil company, in fact, they are the devil! No wonder they are the new Microsoft!

Lets see what Google has to say about girlfriends.

Girlfriends are annoying? Overrated? Like Bras? This one is just confusing. Maybe Google will tell me something better about boyfriends.

Hrm, I’m beginning to not like this. Boyfriends are not recyclable, nor are they like purses, nor are we mean!

Now I have become more confused. Megan fox is a hot man? So weird. This makes me wonder about what Google thinks about certain races.

Wow, lots of bad things about Chinese people. I wonder if Vietnamese people fare any better.

I see. Lets move onto non-people-related things. Something useful, like finance!

I get some obvious results, like “Finance is not fashion”, which surprisingly got 156,000,000 results. Do that many people confuse finance and fashion? I most admit though, I am curious to see how finance is a conspiracy against the laity.

I wonder what Google has to teach me about Beer.

Wow. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. That is beautiful. Wow, just wow. I’m flabbergasted! I never expected such beautiful truths to come out of you, Google. To many people, you are just a search engine, just an algorithm running on some turing-complete machine, endlessly searching for answers. But to me, Google is a friend, an ally, my mentor. Who else could teach me such beautiful truths? I no longer need a reason to drink. Thank you Google!

During one of my nightly sessions of rampant web surfing, I accidentally typed in the wrong address! To my horror, I was not given the standard 404 page, but rather something from Bell!

For my non-techy readers, let me explain what is happening. Every website on the internet has an “ip address” that tells your computer where that site lives, that looks like a bunch of numbers, (ie. 128.0.0.1). You don’t have to memorize those numbers, because everytime you type in an address, like http://www.google.com, the computer does a “dns lookup”. Its pretty much like a dictionary, that has a list of every single site, and the ip address that it has.

So what happens if that site isn’t on the list? The dns lookup fails, and sends back a “404″ error to your browser, which then displays the 404 page that you all know and love:

Bell doesn’t do this. What they do, is hijacks the 404, and sends a redirection instead, to their crappy search page. Why? I’m guessing its because they get revenue for doing so. So who are they partnered with? To find out, just dig a little bit into their html, and you see:

Infospace! So what is infospace? They’re just a search engine that combines results from google, yahoo, bing, twitter, ask, etc… into one convenient location. So am I happy about that? Not exactly. I don’t like being told what search engine to use. I like using google. I WANT to use google. I like their results.

If you click on “about this page” there’s actually a convenient page that lets you opt out!

What does that actually do? Absolutely nothing. Bell still hijacks your 404s! Sure, you get the “address not found” page you are used to, but not really, because they’ve redirected you to their page anyways! It really hurt me then and there, being lied to like that. They’re still even loading infospace’s stuff into my browser!

Argh! So how do we fix this? I tried complaining to bell, but that didn’t go too well:

Me: Hi, I’m calling to complain about your 404 redirects.

Tech Support: What’s that?

Me: You know, when you type in an address that doesn’t exist, the dns server sends back a 404 message to your browser. You guys are hijacking this and sending us to your “search” portal page.

Tech Support: DNS? Err…Let me talk to my manager about that.

Me: Okay…

(Five minutes later) Tech Support: We are not really sure what you’re are talking about…

Me: …

I guess DNS server wasn’t on their scripts. So how to resolve this error? One way, would be to actually define your own DNS server. A nice guide exists at OpenDNS if you want to check it out. What it does, is sets up your router to not ask Bell’s DNS server for the ip address, but rather openDNS’s DNS server. So when you get those pesky 404’s, you get a real one, not the one generated by Bell, in a poor attempt to squeeze a few extra dollars out of their customers.

Unfortunately, Rogers is guilty of that too, so changing ISPs won’t work… that is..unless… you switch to teksavvy

A group of ten evil henchmen enter a bank. The evil leader rises up his gun, shoots a round of shots and yells, “Everyone on the ground! This is a robbery!” Frightened, the bank tellers and clients fall to the ground, quivering in fear, not knowing if they will make it out alive.

One by one, the evil henchmen enter the vault and extract their bounty. Hope appears to be lost, when suddenly, out of the blue, the hero flamboyantly falls through the glass ceiling, proclaiming to the world, “Never fear! Your hero is here!”

The evil leader, not wanting to lose his hard-earned treasure, orders the henchmen, “Get him boys!” The henchmen swarm around the hero, ready to beat him to a pulp. They attack him one by one, buts its no use. The evil leader squirms in anguish as the hero tosses the evil henchmen off to the side.

They’re now unconcious. The evil leader, in an act of desperation shoots the leader with his evil ray of doom. “Silly evil leader”, exclaims the hero, as the evil rays of doom bounch harmlessly off his rock-hard chest of goodness and saves the day.

So, what went wrong for the evil leader? The evil henchmen of course! Seriously. They’re being taught the WRONG things at the evil henchment academy!

Seriously,  it happens all the time, in kung-fu movies, super hero movies, power ranger movies, etc…  What is this problem? The henchmen are using a PRIORITY ATTACK QUEUE!

What is a priority attack queue? Basically, the henchmen all want to attack the hero. They wanna attack him badly, but they can’t decide who will go first. So, they assign themselves a priority. Sometimes its the strongest first, sometimes its the weakest first. Whatever. It doesn’t matter, because they always end up fighting the hero one-on-on.

Let us assume that we have a set of ten henchmen, each one will have an x amount of attack they can administer to the hero. The problem is, the hero will usually have a power level greater then or equal to the strongest henchmen. So with that assumption, the hero will be able to easily dispense any of them.

So what algorithm should the evil henchnen be taught at the Evil Henchmen Academy? Please. Its so obvious. They should be implementing an EVIL DIVIDE AND CONQUER algorithm!

The idea behind an evil divide and conquer algorithm, or any sort of algorithm like this, is to divide the problem into little parts, and solve those parts seperatly. After those little parts are solved, they are combined together into the final solution.

So if a henchmen were to encounter a hero, they would divide the hero into the following pieces:

1. Right leg
2. Left leg
3. Right arm
4. Left arm
5. Throat
6. Head
7. Chest
8. Testicles (Its an evil algorithm! Don’t attack surprised!)
9. Buttocks
10. Mouth

So if each henchmen were to focus on solely one of these parts, the hero’s attention would be too divided to even begin to fend off the attack. The henchmen would then beat each of these parts into a bloody pulp, then when the parts are combined into one final solution, you get a hero who is now a huge bloody pulp.

I swear. I should turn to a life of evil. Unfortunately, my evil laugh still needs a bit more work to strike fear into the hearts of my opponents. Until next time, same Anton-ian blog, same Anton-ian domain!

For my male readers who read this blog, this should be a familiar sight to you. You’re out in public, and you gotta go really badly. You have no time for the toilet stalls, so you make a beeline for the urinals. You’re a man. You’ve been equipped with a penis, which makes urinals a fairly easy thing to use.

Normally, the rest is easy. Not for me. According to my dear friend wikipedia, the average male height in Canada, is a grand 5′8! Me? I’m a mere 5′5 man. I’m ABOVE average in Vietnam (5′3), which explains why I tower over my family. But the minute I leave the safe confines of the world, I’m a midget.

So what does this have to do with urinals? Well, since the average male height in Canada is 5′8, I believe they place wall-mounted urinals to adhere to those of this height. If you check out this thread on reddit, they are debating what urinal people prefer: Knee-high or Waist-high.

My answer? Neither. Knee-high comes up to my stomach, waist-high means I have to be on my tippy-toes to even begin to urinate decently.  So that’s one reason why I hate urinals.

But you know what? I’m okay with knee-high ones. With waist-high urinals, a problem occurs. Let me show you a picture to illustrate the point:

As you see, I do not pass the minimal clearance. But notice that protrusion that sticks out? Usually “average” men’s heights allow them to rise above that protrusion, and thus move their bodies closer into the urinal; effectively hiding their junk.  I cannot. Do you see my perdicament?!

I am VERY VULNERABLE to peeping eyes! Now, you must be thinking right now. “But Anton, don’t you remember the number one rule? Keep your eyes on the road!” Yes, I know, but let us use some math to show you something.

The average degree of sight, for the eye, is 60 degrees towards the nose, and 100 degrees towards the ear:

So from the edge of the eye, someone may see something. As you can see, from the corner of your eye, something can be seen. Assuming the average man stands 15 cm from the urinal, and I stand 30 cm from the urinal, then what distance do I have to be, for my “junk” to be seen from the corner of someone’s eye? Let me show you with a graph!

To calculate this, we use similar triangles, with angles of 10, 90, and 80. So to calculate the visibility distance (distance away from the urinal), we use the distance from the next urinal (beside you) as the dependent variable. Thus I get the formula:

Opposite = Adjacent x Tan (10)
Visibility Distance = DistanceFromNextUrinal x Tan(10)

Which means if the distance between urinals were only at least 47 cm apart, then someone standing within 30 cm of the urinal would be exposed!

Gladly, most urinals clear this distance, or it would be a tight squeeze. New urinaters, on the other hand, that’s a whole other story! Maybe I’ll just stick to stalls.