Anotherblog

Back from Tokyo

Wow, that was a really quick trip. It was good to catch up with Winston (and a pity to have missed the ever hard-working Ted) and I got a lot of good work done, but really, that was the kind of work trip where there was barely any time to look around. I am ever admiring of the efficiency of the Tokyo metro; the food was pleasant, I didn’t get sick. I’ll chalk that one up as a success, and lobby a bit harder to get a day off… and to take Von with me. Like on the trip to Ireland on Tuesday!

Trips, thumps.

Got a trip to Japan for work on Sunday, and then off to Ireland for CB’s wedding a week after that. It’s been long enough since the SVG working group that I’m actually looking forward to overseas travel again, hooray.

Meanwhile, our lunchtime group (or a couple thereof) tried out a drumming circle. It was fun, and not even too embarassing.

Rubik’s Cube: 2′10″

New best time is 2 minutes and ten seconds. I haven’t timed myself in a while (my last best time was about 5 minutes), but I’d guess my average time would now be about 3 minutes. Mr McLeish averages about 1′30″.

It’s not boring yet.

Wii Fit, Fire Emblem

I got a Wii Fit two weeks ago. The board is quite a bit better at doing balance related tasks than improving fitness, but that’s fine by me. I’m enjoying the yoga exercises in particular. The game gives feedback on your centre of gravity, and using that as a focus is quite calming for me.

One thing that bugs me, though, is that it relies on BMI. The game can weigh you and calculate your BMI given your height. The trouble is, for my weight of 84kg and height of 183cm, it claims that I’m overweight. And then makes my “Mii” (the Wii has avatar figures for players) rather pudgy.

Now, I could just suck it up and admit that I’m overweight, but on balance I’m quite happy with my weight and have no intention of changing it. I don’t feel overweight. From what I understand, BMI doesn’t take into account body type. But it’s a bit irritating: the Wii Fit keeps trying to make me commit to losing weight down to an ideal 73kg(!), which I suspect would be rather scrawny. I’d like to tell it to get stuffed, but there isn’t that option. My quick hack fix is to adjust my height to about 200cm, but I can’t even find the option to do that. And it feels like cheating.

Von and I have also been playing Fire Emblem, an unapologetically old-school turn-based strategy game. It’s a real time sucker. I suspect it’ll suck up a lot of the time that really ought to be going into wedding planning…

Car fixed

Yep, the car’s all better (thanks to a shudderingly expensive new clutch assembly), except for the fact that it now sporadically displays the “Check Engine” light. This has happened before, also just after a service, and is “fixed” in the same way that you would fix Windows: turn it off and on again. For this reason, I suspect it’s the warning light that’s faulty, not the engine, but I’m still taking it back to the shop. Some day when I have time.

Car troubles

I’ve been enjoying the delights of Sydney public transport the last couple of days, thanks to my car’s spontaneous decision to visit the mechanic. It was a relatively lucky way for it to happen: I was stopped at the second set of lights on the way to work on Tuesday morning. The light turned green, and when I changed from first to second gears, the clutch suddenly went flat to the floor and refused to do anything more. I knew - or rather, I thought I knew - what had happened immediately. I pulled over to the side of the road, and called my mechanic, who was fortunately quite close by. He was happy to come over and deal with it, especially since at that point I thought I’d snapped the accelerator cable, which almost never happens to a car.

I thought I’d snapped the accelerator cable simply because of the immediate loss of power (which was, of course, because I was in neutral and couldn’t easily get out of neutral). My delusion persisted until Peter (the mechanic) opened the hood, and asked me to press the accelerator, at which point I pressed the clutch, and started to get that sinking feeling of “Oh poop, time to look like an idiot”.

Anyway, Peter arranged for the car to get towed, kindly dropped me off at the station, and I took a train and bus (a slightly wrong bus, as it happened - it really was one of those mornings) to work and arrived an hour late. The car was well overdue for a service anyway, and as Peter pointed out, if I’d had it serviced at the right time they might have caught the problem. Stupid procrastination.

Chaser’s Age of Terror Variety Hour

Jade’s surprise Friday event turned out to be a performance of the Chaser’s Age of Terror Variety Hour. We both went to excessive effort to ensure I would be maximally surprised, such that I didn’t know what I was seeing until the performance actually started. And I’m very pleased I did: the extra surprise was very enjoyable. We had front-and-centre seats, as in, the very front row, because Jade booked very early.

And, naturally, I got called up on stage. I was called out as a theatre critic (and requested to complete the line for one of their opening songs, where the rhyme was obviously for “shit”, but at which I said “quite good, actually”, and still haven’t forgiven myself for not answering “sheer crap”), got taken up on stage to dance with them, and then they all ran off stage and left me to do a solo bit. I took out a coin and was about to do a coin trick (which would certainly have failed miserably) but they rushed back on too quickly. It was really thoroughly enjoyable. I didn’t even get stage fright.

The rest of the show was good too.

Sick

I caught a cold on Sunday morning, only a couple of days after the flu shots. Off work on Monday and Tuesday. Very, very bored.

Puzzle competition finished

The puzzle competition is over, and all the puzzles and solutions have been published, hurrah. My fifth and final puzzle was the metapuzzle, cunningly hidden in plain sight.

Overall, we got a lot of nice feedback on the puzzle competition, and were very pleased with the look and difficulty level of the puzzles. Two of the puzzles even had animations as part of their solutions, which looked fantastic. Mr McLeish is rather good at POV-Ray.

One area, however, has been a headache for us again and again: hints. For each of three days after the puzzle is released, we release a series of hints, each hopefully getting more and more people towards solving the puzzle. Unfortunately, though, a typical problem is that when a puzzle has multiple stages, a team will get stuck at a later stage, and the first hint will be useless to them. They then feel cheated. We’ve certainly felt that in other puzzle competitions, but after much discussion (reversing the order of the hints, for example) we kept coming up with the same conclusion: it’s more important to help those who are stuck early than those who are stuck late. The latter are pretty good already; they need the help less.

Recently, the aforementioned Mr McLeish came up with a better solution (which sounds very obvious now that I’ve explained the problem a little more clearly). The hints should not give away each stage of the puzzle in turn; instead they should start as cryptic hints for solving the entirity of the puzzle, and later hints should get more explicit. This seems like a really nifty way of doing it. We had thought of trying to embed hints in the answer server (so that if you try an answer that is wrong but on the right track, you get additional hints) but this is a lot better.