At the beginning of July, my wife and I bought ourselves a new HDTV as our birthday present, to replace our aged 15″ CRT.  I set it up, and let it auto-search for channels.

Amazingly, it picked up the whole line of cable’s Expanded Basic tier of service.  We’re only paying for the “Limited Basic” tier, which is basically just local channels plus a few shopping networks and the Discovery Channel.  Our CRT still only gets the limited tier channels.

I haven’t said anything about it, because I didn’t want Comcast to realize they’d screwed something up, but I just read an article explaining the situation.  I encourage you to read the article, as my summary here will be short:

The Expanded Basic channels have been unenc

I like Project Euler.  If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a website with a few hundred math/programming puzzles to solve, and it keeps track of which ones you’ve solved, who else has solved them, etc etc.

Yesterday, I was working on solving one of the problems.  The way you know you’ve solved it is by entering the answer into the website, and they tell you if it’s right.

I wrote some code, ran it, and got an answer.  They said it was wrong.  So I double-checked my code, ran it again, and got the same answer.  Wrong.  I re-wrote the code from scratch, and got the same answer.  Wrong.

Finally, I got fed up and googled the answer.  Someone’s blog listed what they claimed was the answer – but it was wrong.

So I copied the algorithm used by that blogger, and ran it.  It produced my original answer.  Not the answer they posted on their blog – the same answer I had all along.

I submitted it again, trying not to scream in frustration.  This time, it was accepted.

I don’t know why the site didn’t accept my answer the first couple times.  I don’t know why that blogger posted the wrong answer but the correct algorithm.  I guess Project Euler just wanted to waste some of my time?

(If anyone’s interested, you can see my Project Euler profile here.)