Happy Monday

[plonq]

I've grown a bit tired of the limited music selection we have in the office, so I decided to try and tune in some streaming audio.  I have the software that I need, but our firewall blocks everything over port 1024.  No problem, right?  Lots of corporate firewalls tend to do that.

Well, it is a problem, because virtually every streaming audio source out there routes its traffic through port 8000, or 8001, or 8080, or 4063... or some other random port well above 1024.  Why?  Some of these sources bill themselves as "music while you work", but then they broadcast over a port that locks out pretty much anyone who is trapped behind a restrictive company firewall.  Argh.

Speaking of argh...

I like the Mensa calendar that atara gave me for Christmas, but every once in awhile it makes me question whether it's truly from Mensa. I guess even geniuses have their bad-cerebrum days.  Here is the entry for Sunday:

The children were guessing the number of jelly beans in the Easter display.  Becky guessed 63, Bruce guessed 66, Tony guessed 65 and Larry guessed 62.  One guess was right.  One was off by 1, one was off by 3 and one was off by 2.

How many jelly beans were in the display?

Let's put them in ascending order to make it easier.

Larry = 62
Becky = 63
Tony = 65
Bruce = 66

Ah ha!  Do you see the problem here?  Needless to say that my answer and their answer did not agree.

Their answer: 65

Because, you know, 63 wouldn't work just as well.

My answer: This is nothing that couldn't be handled with a wood-chipper and four shallow graves.  I mean, at that point who cares how many jelly beans there were?

Comments

[nrasser.livejournal.com]

Naww. Tony wins, because he probably runs faster than Becky and he'd win the race condition. :)

[plonq.livejournal.com]

It's a sad world when the winner is determined by race...

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

Awwww a discrimination joke!!!

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

If they had said the right answer was 63, that would have been reverse discrimination, because Becky is the only girl. ;-P

Meanwhile, Tony is the only one with a 4-letter name.

They didn't hint anything about the gender of the winner, or reveal on say, the Mar. 18th puzzle that Becky is always wrong or incredibly unlucky or anything? ;-)

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

As far as your port problem, on home machine put a port-forwarding program, opened to a low port on your firewall, that redirects to the higher port service.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I toyed around with this solution at one point, but I never could never get it working. Having a dynamic IP address at home didn't help, though I found a work-around for that at least.

My co-worker showed up with a portable MP3 player laden with forgettable B-sides. So far we've had Bon Jovi and Rod Stewart. It can't get any worse, right?

Oh... yay. And now it's a (deservedly) obscure Bryan Adams song. Bleah.

Bleah.

[pierrekrahn.livejournal.com]

I noticed the problem right away when you sorted by ascending guess.

I think they're using "Mensa" in a very loose manner.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Mensa is the femenine of Menso, which (sort of) means dumb in Spanish =P