Anotherblog

Keeping busy with delicious Brain Crack

I’ve been avoiding my troubles and woes (such as they are) by spending my spare time on the archery thingy. It’s beginning to look decent now, and I’m definitely feeling the joy of coding: small, easy increments, each with definitive positive results.

I was thinking of watching “Snakes on a Plane” tonight and immediately doing a FF, but I’m feeling a bit too lazy to go out, and I really ought to watch one of the videos I rented specifically in order to FF them (National Treasure, I’m looking at *you*).
A thousand projects and none of them getting done. Every tiny moment of success is magnified and seems magnificent; to be stared at and admired from all angles; to show to everyone I know. I’m always embarassed after contriving to show something to people - embarassed by the smallness of the achievement, sometimes; by the obviousness of my contrivances, always; and by my own long-standing and somewhat cowardly quest for approval. Ze Frank has a magnificent web show episode in which he rails against “Brain Crack”. I’ve been in the thrall of it for years. Brain Crack, that is, not Ze Frank’s show (which I highly recommend, by the way).

So, I’m resolving to put out even more half-arsed things, just to get them out of my head.

Archery statistics

I’ve done a first pass at graphing my progress in archery. You need an SVG-enabled browser (firefox 1.5, Opera 9.0, or IE with the Adobe SVG viewer installed) to see it, and it isn’t much yet. But it’s getting there.

Thrilling for me is the expansion of possibilities that this simple bit of coding represents. I now have SVG that accesses a database to get the results, and I have more code elsewhere to write a form to the database in the first place. I can now enter the data via a web form, and the graph is immediately updated. I can use this tech for all sorts of web-based things - high-score tables for my SVG juggling game, a MTG draft viewer, web-based games… it opens up some design space I’ve been wanting for years.

The graph, too, will get a bit more sophisticated as time goes by.

Archery competition

I’ve been having trouble with archery lately: I broke my self-imposed twice-a-week rule and went on both Saturday and Sunday. And today, at 4:00pm (I’m back at work now.)

The reason for this additional excitement (I’m normally very keen to go twice a week, but not especially prone to going more times) is my discovery of the awards and classifications that are available. I’m usually quite competitive, but until now in archery I’ve only really been competing against myself, in a half-hearted kind of way. Medals and awards and competitions are far too addictive for me to resist.

It’s given me an insight into how far I have to go. There are five classifications - don’t laugh - Grand Master Bowman, Master Bowman, First Class Archer, Second Class Archer, and Third Class Archer. Roughly speaking, I’d have to score an average of 46 at 30m to get Third Class Archer (so I’m pretty sure I’m already there); 43 at 50m to get Second Class (not quite there yet); and 43 at 70m to get First Class. It’s considerably more complicated than that, of course, but those scores seem to be a reasonable metric to start with.
So, today, I did a round at 30m, and got an average of 49 (not particularly good, but it was very windy). As soon as I start entering competitions and getting these things officially recorded, I’ll be a Third Class Archer. Second-classdom is tantalisingly close.

Sick

So, I was feeling hot and a bit light-headed this morning, and when I got up, realised I was a wee bit sick in ways with which I will not regale you. In any case, I slept in some more, and pottered around the house, and I was feeling a lot better after lunchtime so I decided to go to work. The sun was shining, and I was playing some very pleasant latin-jazz-metal-acoustic-guitar (Rodrigo y Gabriela), and the traffic was light. The clouds got darker and darker as I got closer to work, and it started to rain, hard. I started getting a huge headache, and stopped in at the Rhodes shopping centre to get some panadols. As I parked, I got a phone call from Anna’s brother George. As I put the phone away, I realised my wallet was missing. Crud. It occurred to me that I must have taken it out of my pocket to get at the mobile phone, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in the car. I looked on the back seat and under and beside the seats, and eventually concluded that I must have left it at home. Crud. No panadol for me.

Then I couldn’t find my parking ticket. The one that I had just grabbed, seconds before getting the phone call. I looked all over again, now convinced that I had put the ticket in my wallet and put them both somewhere special. Not on the roof of the car, or in the door pockets. Not in my pocket. Not on my seat. Not caught in my clothes. At this point, I began to wander whether this was a nightmare. I couldn’t leave the car park without the ticket: I didn’t have my wallet, and so couldn’t pay the fine. So I just had to keep looking. I looked for about ten minutes, going through the whole car.

Finally, I found the ticket. It was stuck to the bottom of a piece of rubbish (the Kosciusko National Park pass, lying on the floor) that I’d picked up several times while doing the search, but hadn’t noticed that the bottom bit wasn’t part of it. I had left my wallet (as it turns out) at home.

I decided I wasn’t really in a fit state to go to work, and went home again, and slept, and had horrible repetitive dreams. I feel better now (again) but my tinnitus is really loud at the moment and only the heavy metal music playing next door prevents it from being unbearable. Thanks, heavy metal music at 1:30am!

Weekend: games, archery, music

Big weekend: no time for any of my projects in the end.

Starting with Friday night, we (me, Andrew C, Andrew K, David MM, David Mc, and David K with a side-tournament of Andrews vs. Davids) had a Coldsnap draft. Pack 1, first pick: Adarkar Valkyrie. And white was underdrafted, so I got lots of good picks, and ended up going undefeated with a W/B deck that had a good early game, could stall in the mid-game, and then finish off with the valkyrie. This was the first time we tried labelling all the sleeves, and it looks like it’ll work well. We put labels “A1″ to “C15″ on 45 sleeves for each player, and put our draft picks into each sleeve. This way, we can completely reconstruct the draft later (once we transcribe all the cards) and see what people’s choices where, and what they picked. Cool. But we’ll have to write something to do so. I’m thinking SVG.

On Saturday, more games with David C., Kyla, Iain, Llyn, Damian, Evan, and Tim (I think). It was good: we started with Coloretto, and went on to TransEuropa, Stichen (my first time playing: seemed like good fun), Waz! and finally Roborally. David and Evan played a side game of Dungeon Twister and Hive (which looked good: I must try and grab it) while the rest of us did a freeish-form roleplaying game of Squee, playing various B-movie characters trying to escape the fiendish mechanisms of Dr. Satahn’s House Of Wax. I was crusty Old Man O’Reilly (Yah, Reilly) the School Janitor, and we had a bunch of doomed teens, the Librarian Jane Russell, the Bad Boy Harley, the Nerd, and the Doubting Priest. It was good fun, and worked really, really well: Kyla used atmospheric music to great effect, and we invested energy into our characters (rather than cutting the scenario down, as it was already quite deliberately B-grade ’50s horror) and we solved the mystery and defeated Dr Satahn with mere seconds before our certain doom, making it one of the closest and most satisfying victories of any games I’ve played in, well, years. Not that I’ve played much in years.

Then, on Sunday, archery. I’ve been going twice a week, getting an hour in some afternoons on my way home from work, and it’s as satisfying as ever. It occurs to me that I started archery around the same time as I started work on the standards group, and that it may be a way of releasing frustrations. I oddly hadn’t thought of this possibility until now, but it does make sense, even if it’s a bit abstract (I get great satisfaction from hitting the bullseye, but doing so is an action of perfect discipline, not aggression.) Anyway, I’ve started shooting at the 40m target now, and on Sunday I was averaging about 47 (as opposed to my 30m average of 51) which was rather pleasing. Now that I’m a member of the club, I shoot in a different area, and I don’t have as much interaction with other archers. But that’s OK. It also means that I get more shooting done in a shorter time, as I usually don’t have to coordinate with other archers.

And finally, played music with Jon & Kate. We had some band troubles over the playing of one song, but still managed to get through “I can see clearly now” with relative contentedness, and had a game go at a bunch of others, including Money and Free Man In Paris.

Snowboarding

Well, that’s that.  A week of snowboarding, and no serious injuries or mishaps, so obviously none of us were trying hard enough.

It was, of course, good. I drove over to Canberra on Friday night, had dinner at Dave & Fiona’s place with The Gang, moseyed around on Saturday in a relaxed fashion (though I helped Ev record a song) and then we took off for the snow on Sunday morning.

When we arrived in Jindabyne, we were hit by what would turn out to be a trend: the Station Resort people had lied to us, by omission, failing to point out that our gear hire and lift pass for the Sunday afternoon would be free.  We had been expecting to pay extra - we had our credit cards out and everything - so it was a mighty inconvenience to have to put the credit cards away and grumblingly put our wallets back in our pockets.  Later, we discovered that rather than the three night’s dinner we were expecting, our deal included *five* night’s dinner.  Once again, the inconvenience of having to change our plans almost completely ruined our holiday.  We met up with our room-mate, Shaun (who knows Ev and Sara-Jane, and joined our group of me, Ev, Sara-Jane and James V. fairly late-on) and exchanged bitter complaints about the free extras they had given us.  Shaun himself massively inconvenienced us earlier by joining our group, bringing the per-head price down by over $60, and forcing us to spend money on other things instead.  Bastard.
So, off we went for a lovely afternoon’s wobbling about on the beginner’s slopes.  By the end of the day, the clouds were descending and it was pretty clear we were getting some snow.  Monday was very snowish (after choking down the tasty free dinner on Sunday night) and we discovered - scumbags! - that lessons were extremely cheap over at Blue Cow.  We ended up spending much of the week over at the Blue Cow area, as the runs were quite lovely and it wasn’t too crowded.  I even got a solo lesson one afternoon because nobody else showed up.

Anyway, there’s really not too much to say.  We bought much beer and drank it in the evenings, and sat around watching TV or playing cards, utterly stuffed from a hard day on the slopes.  We ate far too much, and burned it off almost immediately.  The snow was fine - better than NZ last year, and Monday and Thursday brought extra snow and the thrilling sight of real, proper, fat snowflakes.

That’s that.  Now I’m back at work and mentally still out there, on the slopes somewhere, zipping down a blue run in the soft, soft snow…