Anotherblog

No archery, but I’ll write about it anyway

I didn’t do any archery on the weekend. It has, in fact, been over a week since I did archery - the weather hasn’t been particularly clement, I’ve been sick, and Saturday mornings have been eaten up by other activities. I miss it. My rating rose from 53 to 59 the last time I shot, due to a magnificent holding-it-together last set. If I was unsportsmanlike, I could have dragged out good-but-not-too-good scores for a while, gradually increasing my rating while winning each week’s handicap competition. So it’s lucky I’m not.

iControl

Ah, yes - every Mac accessory must begin with i; it’s The Law. The iControl, which I bought on the weekend, is a breakout box for Garage Band (which, because it is a tool for Rock ‘n Roll, must break The Aforementioned Law and Stick It To The Man.) Anyhoo, it’ll come very much in useful when it comes time to doing any sort of music creation eg. for the lunchtime podcasts, or any kind of hypothetical future Spit session.

I had a bit of a play with it on the weekend. Seems decent!

Sick

I’ve been on-again off-again sick for the last three weeks or so - mostly stress-related - in a way that wasn’t quite enough to take days of work. It felt like a cold was ready to arrive, but holding off for something. Then, last weekend, it seemed to go away altogether, hooray. Until Tuesday afternoon, that is, when it quite clearly manifested as a sore throat with a promise of a more regularly scheduled runny-nose package. While it was cruddy, at least it was more clearly actually *going* somewhere.

Hah! Tricked me. No, it’s just a sore throat, hanging around for a couple of days. I think it might have skipped the runny nose and cloggy nose phase and gone straight down to the lungs. At least, I hope that’s what it’s doing. Still no days off work.

This had better be over by the time I go on holidays, that’s all I can say.

Podcasts

I’ve been helping DMM out with podcasts recently, and just before he left for overseas last week, we did our most technically ambitious one yet. Fun to create, and the technology is getting easier to manage too. I’m highly tempted by the M-Audio iControl interface to make it even easier. It’s cool technology, and is my current object of techno-lust.

There are a whole heap of podcasts we’ve done together. I’m pretty proud of podcasts #2 and #7, and #5 came from an idea I had when the Lord of the Rings films were first announced. It’s particularly good working with DMM - he comes up with good ideas, and then actually implements them, instead of turning them into brain crack. Meanwhile, my brain crack ideas continue building up at a perilous rate…

Pre-release tournament

Did I mention that I went to the MTG pre-release of “Future Sight”? It appears I didn’t mention it. However, I did go along, last Saturday morning, instead of going to archery. I’ve not gone to archery for over a week now, due to the slight lurgy that I appear to still have.

Anyway, I built what I thought was a reasonable red/green deck, which turned out to not work quite so well when the opponent had Ackroma, Angel of Vengence and approximately eight bits of black removal. Oh well, I was only playing in the casual side anyway, so I grabbed my three “prize” boosters (in the Competitive side, you get prizes for doing well; in casual, everyone gets three boosters; there are also fewer competitive arseholes in the casual side for this reason) and went shopping in the afternoon instead. That was a nice day.

Puzzle feedback

I got some very nice feedback for my puzzle Hall Of Fame from some of the puzzle teams - it made a couple of “top five puzzles of the competition” lists. Happy! Now we’re busy planning new and grand puzzles for next year’s comp.

Much that can’t be talked about, and some that can

Boy, the passive voice sure is good. It should be used more often. It is surprisingly difficult to maintain in casual conversation, but that’s probably for the best.

Yes, life has been busy. Many interesting and exciting events have happened recently, across a broad mixture of good and bad. Life has been more intense lately. Progress, broadly speaking, is being made, though the period of “can’t really talk about that” may well extend for a long while yet.

Leaving aside sweeping generalities, interesting recent events include such events as the semi-finals and finals of an indoor soccer team last Monday and this Monday, in which the team (consisting of workmates) performed perfectly scripted comebacks and won both of them in extremely exciting and tense games. It was huge fun being there cheering for them, alongside other friends and workmates. Dinner beforehand at the Belgian Beer Cafe was very pleasant, although not as good as the Bavarian Beer Cafe.

Also, the puzzle week for work has now finished. Perhaps some mention of this should have been made earlier on this weblog, but it’s still possible to have a go at the puzzles, albeit with the sure knowledge that the hints and worked solutions are also available. Such temptation to shortcut the stupid puzzles is hard to resist sometimes.

OK, that’s enough passive voice for now. Time to go back to normal, starting with this sentence… aw, shit, it’s unstoppable.

We won!

Our team won the Melbourne Puzzle Hunt on Sunday, after a hard week’s puzzling. Very gratifying, very difficult. I only contributed answers or vital steps to a couple of the puzzles, but as it turned out they were some of the nastier puzzles (not solved by many people) so I was still very pleased to have contributed. A fair bit of the effort in any given puzzle is wasted on wrong hunches, but it’s still important to follow those hunches in case they’re correct.

Hooray!