Anotherblog

Filmwise

Filmwise
Woohoo! Not only a perfect score, but also the first person to submit a perfect score. Check it out.

Ev and Sam

Ev and Sam
On Friday night we started tidying up the place for Ev and Sam’s arrival, but went to sleep early… and so Saturday morning was *rather busy*. I don’t really think Ev or Sam would have minded too much if it was messier, but hey, sometimes you need an excuse to get things tidy. I’d been trying to put together a best-of-all-time song collection for Ev in response to his best-of-all-time collection for me. I had spent a fair amount of time agonising over it and getting all my CDs burned onto the computer and chopping and changing.
Anyway, they arrived at lunchtime Saturday and we went to town and wandered around and then made dinner together and talked and drank and had a good time… a great build-up for Dave and Fiona’s wedding next week. And yesterday was much the same, except we played a couple of board games.

Cranium
I keep meaning to put something up on otherleg with reviews of the various board-games that I’ve played… anyway, we played “Cranium”, a game that mixes charades, trivia, pictionary, and play-dough sculpture. Ev and I lined up against Anna and Sam, who had made friends easily and quickly, and proceeded to be slaughtered. It doesn’t really help that the only sub-game type that I really enjoy is charades, and I’m lousy at it. It may be just because I lost, but I really didn’t like that one at all - the team who is setting the question get to laugh at the other team’s ridiculous efforts, and I’m no good at being laughed at. Even in harmless fun.

Zendo
Then we tried out “Zendo”, which was rather good fun. You build sculptures out of little plastic pyramids and the zen master tells you whether they have buddha-nature or not. You have to figure out the buddha-nature rule. Anyway, a lot of fun and not nearly as competitive as Cranium - I started with the rule of “Must contain at least one piece that is lying down”, then Ev did “Must have an even number of pieces” and Sam did the particularly tricky “must contain two pieces of complementary colours (and any number of other pieces)”.

Red Faction
In the spare time Ev and I played “Red Faction”, which I found cheap on Saturday - a good fun first-person perspective shoot-em-up. I found that I didn’t miss the mouse nearly as much as I was expecting - you can’t turn around particularly quickly, but since your opponent is in the same boat, it isn’t too bad. Still, I think you can actually move around a stationary object faster than you can turn, so someone can have circles run around them without ever seeing the opponent.

Bunduki

Bunduki
There’s a series of books about a tarzan ripoff named “Bunduki”. He is allegedly the Fearless Master of the Jungle. A tradition has built up in the office - it has a long and complicated history - to attempt to read the first of these books. According to the challenge, you must read every footnote when it comes up, and every appendix when it is first referenced. When you give up, you put your name in the margin and pass it on to the next victim.
This was the first Bunduki challenge.

Table Tennis

Table tennis
Today, my first ever recorded table-tennis win at work. Oh sure, I’ve won a couple of games here and there, but only against unrated players (you get a “rating” when you record your score. It uses a similar system to chess). I’ve managed to pull a couple of losses out of the jaws of victory before - from winning 19-16 in one match and 20-18 in another - and I almost managed the same in today’s win, but fortunately my opponent was able to make a mistake and save me another humiliation.
I also had a hit-around with the #1 and #9 players. They were both on one side, I was on the other, and it was all excellent fun. Lots of smashing, trash-talking, and unlikely saves. Not proper games, but real fun. There are a lot of players who treat smashing the ball as something to do only when given a real sitter. These two, however, have the proper spirit of trying to cream the ball no matter what the situation, and are good enough to get it in almost all the time. Wonderful to watch.

Bundaki
There are some links that I need to point you at to give you the proper context for this, but anyway, today I finally felt that I was part of an extremely cool company. It was the day of the Bundaki challenge. And I’ll tell you more about it when they get the photos up.
I mean, Baltimore was a pretty hard act to follow. Until all the layoffs and the pain and the suffering, it was an extremely good place to work. The social club was lively, the working atmosphere unbeatable, the friendships strong (for that matter, my previous work five years ago at the D.S.T.O. had an equally excellent group of people to work with, but the work itself wasn’t as good). So pretty much any subsequent workplace was going to suffer by comparison.
I’m coming around to favour my current work more though, recently. The bundaki challenge has sealed that: I’m happy working here.

Conversation with Andrew’s brain

A Representative and accurate conversation with Andrew’s brain
Andrew: Ohmugod! I just had a great idea. I’ll copy my Greek language learning tapes onto the computer, then transfer them onto the iPod. I can learn Greek while driving to work!

Several hours pass.

Andrew’s brain: Say, that plan regarding the iPod…

Andrew: Yahuh?

Andrew’s brain: How do you play the iPod music in the car, anyway?

Andrew: Oh, there’s this gadget that you put in the tape player. Oooooooh…

Filmwise
My continuing struggle with the weekly Filmwise Invisibles has landed me my second ever perfect score. I’d like to imagine that I’m improving at these things, but the sad fact is between each perfect scores is a long list of entries where I get one or two of the whole lot correct.

Table tennis
Continuing to get closer to winning. Last week I was leading against Donna 19-16 and managed to lose. Today I was leading 20-18 and managed to lose again. I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever win a game. I’ll probably have to give up.

60’s cookery

60’s cookery
Today’s entry features nothing but a link, one that made me laugh uncouthly in the office just a moment ago. Check it out.

Table tennis humiliation!

Table Tennis Humiliation
I wasn’t in particularly good form in table-tennis today, and got humiliated in one game 21-0 - the first time that’s ever happened to me that I can recall! Still, the guy I played against was one of the best there. He beat me in another game 21-5, and I was lucky to get that many. I played a whole bunch of other games, and lost them all, never getting above 15. Still, I enjoyed it a lot (as I don’t have any expectations of competence yet) and I’m keen to play on. Dave’s wedding is only two weeks away, and I greatly fear that my suit will be a little snug - I’ve not been doing much exercise since the ski trip, and that was also when I had my suit fitting. Oboy!

Guitar practice
I went to guitar practice yesterday, for the first time since the ski trip, and was relieved to find that I didn’t suck. I had been practicing a bit, but my tutor is a devil at picking up on bad habits, and extended periods of practice without intervention have previously resulted in very bad habits indeed. What’s particularly nice is that my tutor has decided to pick up the pace a little - I’m moving to some more challenging pieces, stuff that’ll sound really nice when I can get them to work. Yay!

Rut
Otherwise, I’m feeling like I’m in a bit of a rut. I haven’t been doing much creative in a while. I arrive back from work at about 7:30pm usually, have dinner, browse the web for a little bit, play with Anna for a while, then go to bed. It’s only taken two weeks to get like this… still, Ev and Sam arrive for a week’s stay next Saturday so that’ll hopefully pick up the pace a bit!

Further use of Greymatter

Further use of greymatter
There’s been a worrying amount of hand-coding to get this transfer from blogger to greymatter - nothing much to do with greymatter itself, more trying to put together a last blogger entry to redirect here, without actually having blogger handy, and trying to retrofit the old blogger entries into greymatter with correct datestamps, etc. I think I haven’t quite mastered the latter - they appear OK on the main page, but the archives index has them woefully incorrect.

Table tennis
Three games at lunchtime today, didn’t win any of them, but having lots of fun. I’m now officially on the rather worryingly complete list of table-tennis statistics for CISRA.

DVD frenzy
A special at Video Ezy caused a frenzy of DVD purchasing - Midnight Run, Tremors, Lawrence of Arabia, Ghandi, Vertigo, Being John Malkovich. Anna saw Tremors and Midnight Run for the first time, last night, enjoyed them hugely. I really enjoyed watching them again, but especially the characterisations in Tremors. Lovely script, the characters are uneducated but not stupid, heroic but not superhuman. And the scientist is done in such a way that you know there was a scientist involved in the script writing - sure enough, one of the two writers worked as a scientist for ten years before becoming a script-writer (with Short Circuit).

Austin 3
Back and forth like craazy with the big dumb comedys… I enjoyed Kung Pow, hated Scary Movie 2, and was back and forth within Austin Powers 3, but came out enjoying it. There’s the usual milking-a-joke-until-it-bleeds, a repeat of many of the jokes from the first two, the usual cavalacade of bodily fluids, and an unusual amount of puke-worthy sentimentality. The opening was great, though.

Previous entries

OK, I’ve added the previous entries (that hadn’t made it to otherblog, courtesy of blogger’s bug problems) so you’ll find a whole week of rambling blogger entries. Lucky old you. I’m pretty happy with this Graymatter setup now.

Further testing

Well, let’s have a look at some of these features offered by Greymatter - **bold** text (and the old way), \italics\ text, and __underline__ text. And how are we with links?