Anotherblog

Puzzle Competition

Hooray! The Puzzle Competition webpage is live. This is what I’ve been working on with my work friends, in our spare time, and it’s finally gone from a bit of fun to a full blown competition, with prizes and everything.

The first four puzzles are up, but the actual puzzle week isn’t until April - still, people can register and solve the existing puzzles before everything gets too intense (16-19 April, when the other 16 puzzles will be released four at a time). I created two puzzles, and wrote the flavour text for the “Classroom” set of puzzles.

It’s very exciting - we’re pretty well prepared, I think, but you never can tell just how hard or easy the puzzles will look to outsiders! If you like puzzles, I think you’d enjoy this competition (though only Australian uni students and high-school students are eligible for prizes). Have a go, anyway!

Busy

I’ve been very busy, though not, apparently, as some of my friends! Still, there are many things coming up soon, once I’ve finished up on the SVG working group. There’s less than two weeks remaining now, then I have my life back. The group has been great - really good people, exciting work - but the early morning and late night teleconferences for a year and a half have been… enough.

So, after next week I’ll be attacking Film Forensics and my various projects with renewed vigour. Hooray!

Archery at 70m

I’ve begun shooting at 70m, the longest distance I’ve tried. This is because the bow is now capable of reaching this distance without being ridiculously inaccurate - I upped the weight to 40lb when I got the new limbs.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon’s archery was very good indeed. I’ve been slowly improving, but the scores I got in practice were so ridiculously above my average (38, 40, 39, 40, 37, 45 - expected average for my rating is 32.5) that I immediately suspected I’d misinterpreted something. But no, it was just a very good day. Remember how I was talking about getting close to being a Second Class Archer, for my rating? 45 is pretty much First Class.

Yep, very enjoyable. Absolutely trashing my arms, though.

Also! I won the Sydney Olympic Park Summer League. It’s a handicapped competition, though, so all it meant was that I’m improving faster (or rather, more *consistantly* fast, not too much in a go, which might suddenly increase my handicap) than anyone else, not that I’m the best archer. I haven’t been sandbagging (avoiding getting too good a score), but I *have* been getting very tired at the end of each round.

Oh, cute.

So, Australia is gearing up to swap out lightbulbs in favour of energy-efficient light-bulbs. I’m sure there will be some occasional issues with form factor and price-performance, and I’m equally sure will be sorted out in time. This swap over seems to be a very good thing to me; relatively easy and effective, the kind of low-hanging fruit that is actually juicy. Did I just use up my metaphor allowance? Yes, I did.

The same proposal is happening in California, with a cutely named legislation.

Archery

Got some new arrows to match the new limbs. These arrows are much lighter and less flexy than the old arrows (which were flexing quite alarmingly as they fired - sometimes I could see them wobbling all the way to the target). This counts as my birthday present for myself, I think. I shot with them on Saturday morning, and would have done really well except for the fact that I was shooting at the wrong target.

Let me explain. We were shooting at 25m, which is pretty short, at an 80cm target, which is pretty small and so cancels out the fact that it’s a short distance. It’s like shooting at a 122cm target at 50m, except that it doesn’t get affected by wind as much, so it’s slightly easier. So, 80cm target. Except that there weren’t enough 80cm targets to go around. There were, however, some 40cm targets. These are exactly the same as the 80cm targets, except that they’re missing the rings from 5 down to 1. If you never get less than 6 (eg. if you’re a Grand Master Bowman) then you use these targets, because there are three of them, vertically aligned, on the same piece of paper, and it means that you don’t have to shoot two arrows at the same target, which matters because if you get a bullseye on your first shot, the second arrow could potentially be deflected if it hits the first arrow. Result: lower score, no olympic medal.

There were quite a lot of these targets. I had a practice shoot, and none of the shots looked even close to going worse than 6 (just to remind you: 10 for a bull’s eye, the yellow ring in the middle, 9 is the second yellow ring, 8 for the first red ring, 7 for the second red ring, 6 for the first blue ring, etc.) So I did the round on that target, and naturally missed the target several times, in circumstances which would have given me 5 points on a normal 80cm target, but instead got me 0. My end score of 439 would have been more like 465, which would been quite decent.

The reason this is at all relevent is that we have a summer competition, and I’m doing reasonably well in it - I have a good chance in coming first, simply because it’s a handicapped competition, and I’ve been improving throughout, so I’ve come first and second a couple of times. My inbuilt competitiveness is yelling at me. But I don’t care. It’s still a heap of fun, and I might not have shot as well at an 80cm target.

MTG Draft

Did a draft of Timespiral/Planar Chaos yesterday lunchtime. It went pretty well, though my deck is perilously slow and bombless (not to mention, low on removal). I actually had a plan for this draft, after a couple of picks, and I followed it through fairly consistently. We’ll just have to see whether they work - I really wish I’d gotten some lower casting-cost creatures…

Flat tyre

I’ve been getting a rash of flat tyres recently. Three in one year, after none in about ten years. They’re all my fault - I hit a pothole about a month ago for my previous one, and the one last night happened as I was pulling into my driveway too wide (in an attempt to avoid scraping the bottom of the car on the road - it’s an awkward driveway) and rode up the gutter with the front left wheel as I was doing so. I got out of the car, and heard a hissing sound. Very glad I finally got around to fixing the spare tyre last week! However, unlike the previous flat, this one wasn’t easy to fix. The wheel wouldn’t come off; it was held in place by some rust between it and the axle. I tugged at it, tried levering it out with a tyre iron, thumped it with a rubber mallet, and finally applied some oil and left it for an hour, after which it gave way with some more thumping and a really big tug.

Phew. I really didn’t have a Plan B, except to pay stupid amounts of money for NRMA roadside service. At least I got it done before my birthday…

Birthday

Yep, it sure is. I’m 37, an age about which I can’t think of anything particularly numerically interesting, except that it’s a prime, which hasn’t happened since I was 31. When Mum & Dad were my age, I was 13. I find it very interesting to think about that. I have enough memories of that time to get surprised by one every now and then. Like, that they had travelled all around the world, lived in three different countries before settling in Australia, and had bought a big house in Townsville, and Dad was in the process of building his new surgery (well, he didn’t build it himself, but he had organised it with some other doctors).

It’s not that I’m really comparing - I’ve done lots of interesting things too - but I’m still in the process of moving the things that my parents did from “Facts Of Life” to “Things They Did”, seeing them as people as well as Mum & Dad.

They’re pretty awesome.

Default look & Feel

Ah, just noticed that my upgrade of anotherblog and filmforensics have resulted in the return to the default look & feel. Bother.

Busy times

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks, so I’ll just summarise. Life is excellent.

Oh, and some stuff happened. Like (for example) some scumbag spammer was using this very weblog (and filmforensics, and lexifab) to forward spam, thanks to out-of-date wordpress software. It got our domain name host very cross with us, because we were consuming huge amounts of CPU and causing the server to repeatedly crash. Fortunately, they let me upgrade to the latest wordpress, rather than trashing the whole thing, which, in their position, I’d have been sorely tempted to do. This happened in a blitz of emails and frantic activity on Saturday night. That’s the kind of wacky fun I get up to on weekends nowadays.

You’re sick of archery, right? I’m not. I’ve been going regularly, twice a week, and I’ve been rapidly improving too. I finally got used to 38lb bow weight, and because that was as far as those limbs were going to go, I upgraded the limbs to the next weight up. Now I’m drawing 40lb, and the arrow is hitting the target with a real snap. The new limbs are considerably lighter and seem to really give the arrows the hurry-up signal; I can see them bending back and forth as they fly toward the target. I need stronger arrows. I also added two more flanges to the bow, which steady it against lateral movement, and immediately got better scores; very gratifying, I’d hate to upgrade something and not have any difference! On Tuesday I managed an unofficial “All Gold” at 40m range (All Gold is all the arrows in the yellow 9-and-10 area; the best I’d previously managed was 20m), and just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, I managed it again on Saturday morning. I won that day’s competition. And since I only just upgraded the limbs, I went back on Sunday and shot until I couldn’t shoot no more. It was great. Now my arms feel like lead and I can barely stay awake.