Today's Advent of Code problem was a variant on the Josephus problem. I recalled that there was a formula to figure out the sole survivor but I decide to run a simulation rather than looking it up. I also decided to write it up in C++, well, really C with cout instead of printf. Part 1 was the traditional problem. Part 2 was a variant where at each iteration, you remove the elf opposite the elf being processed (see the problem description for details).

I got an email from my good friend and mentor this weekend. Danny Jaye, after 45 years, is finally retiring for real. Danny, the Maestro, or Doc, as we sometimes called him spent most of his career at Stuyvesant. First as a math teacher, then math chair. Danny also spent time as the director of the Bergen Academies and his last few years as the Chief Academic Officer at Solomon Schecter in Bergen.

Today was the last day of classes at Hunter thus ending my first semester of teaching at Hunter College. I very much enjoyed the semester and my class and look forward to working with the same group when the spring term starts in a few weeks. At the same time, even though I'm a quarter century veteran teacher, in many ways this was like my rookie season all over again.

I'm spending the weekend up in Michigan. Visiting my brother and is family. We're here to see the UMGASS production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer. Batya also came up from Cornell to join us so the two families are all togehter for the first time in about 10 years. This hasn't left much time for Advent of Code but I did manage to finish yesterday's challenge this morning.

Today we're looking at Advent of Code 2016 number 2. To change things up, I thought I'd do a video where I live code a solution. The solution I present is pretty straightforward - use a 2D array (or technically, an array of strings) to represent the keypad, parse the input, and follow the input instructions to build the code. One of the things I really like about Advent of Code is that every problem has two parts and depending on how you solved part 1, you may or may not have extra work to do for part 2.

I recently posted about Advent of Code - a series of programming problems relseased one a day. While they vary in terms of level of difficulty, a number of them make nice problems for introductory to mid level programming classes. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on a few of them starting with the first problem from this years competition. Take a minute to read it over.

Once again, it's time for Advent of Code - a series of small programming problems released once a day. I wrote a bit about it last year and you can still find last years problems here. It's only day three but so far, all of the problems look really nice for students in APCS-A or any similar intro course. I'm thinking of looking at a couple of the problems this week with my class at Hunter.

Not much in today's actual post. The video is a continuation of the last one on org-capture. The video goes over how I set things up to pop up a new frame to do a capture even if emacs isn't on screen (as long as it's running) by hitting F1. I would have preferred to bind to C-c c - the same as within emacs but I havn't figured out how to do that in Ubuntu or Mint Linux yet.

The other day, a friend posited a question on Facebook (paraphrased): If called upon, would you take a job in an administration who's policies you strongly disagreed with? Would you go work for an administration that you reviled in order to get a seat at the table? To try to affect change from the inside or would you consider yourself a sellout or worse, publicly promote positions you disagree with.

Org mode has an amazing feature - org-capture. I only started using it recently but it's really awesome. What took me so long? Probably that the manual seemed a little intimidating. It really isn't hard, though. Combined with what I'll go over in the next video and post (and a future one for Google calendar sync) it's what I use for: recording blog ideas managing bookmarks taking short Notes managing my calendar.