Last week turned out to be pretty busy! I had a pop quiz at work on Monday night, we were out at Anne-Marie’s for pancakes on Tuesday night, we had Moore Course on Wednesday night, and then I was leading home group on Thursday night. So by the time Friday came round we were just about ready for a break!
And we were able to watch “Into the Wild Green Yonder”, the latest and final instalment in the Futurama DVD quadrilogy. I really enjoyed it – I think it was a fitting end for the movies. Although the ending did conflict with the last episode of the series (“The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings”), I think it’s comparable to there being contradictory versions of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And, of course, if they do go on to do a sixth series they might explain it somehow.
On Saturday, I took the car into the garage to have an estimate done for repairs. Hopefully the insurers will get back to me soon and tell me that I can go ahead with having it repaired! In the evening, James and Tash (some friends from Fordham) came round for dinner. It was a really nice evening! After dinner we played a game called “Mexican Train” which was very good fun – kind of like dominos. More on that later.
On Sunday morning we went to church (to both services!), and then came back home for lunch. In the evening we went to a prayer meeting at Fordham for the new Sunday @ 6 service (which is beginning at the end of April), followed by a “Visual Bible Journeys” presentation. Basically it was an overview of Saul, David and Solomon illustrated by photos and maps. Very interesting, actually! There are two more coming up in March, they’d be well worth coming to if that’s something you’d be interested in. Seeing (for example) a photograph of the valley where David defeated Goliath does help to make the Old Testament more real. And being able to see roughly what Jerusalem looked like is very useful too – often you can read something about the temple but not really visualise what it would have looked like.
Anyway, after that we came back home and collapsed watched “Lark Rise to Candleford”.
I mentioned a while back about “Mexican Train”. Well, it’s basically a dominos game – see here for the rules. You basically have to lay out your ‘train’ with dominos, matching the numbers end-to-end. As we were playing, I kept thinking what the best way of arranging your dominos would be in order to make the longest train.
I thought this would be a good problem for a computer to solve… so I just knocked up a quick python script which will generate the longest chain given a set of dominos. (If you just run the script, it will generate a random set of dominos and a random start number and give the longest possible path). It’s a fairly useless script, but then again maybe it will come in handy next time I play the game 😉
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