Anotherblog

Puzzle

My final puzzle, Date with Destiny, is now up.
It’s hard.

…Sold.

The house is sold. Phew!

House selling, puzzle

And we enter the final week before the auction. “How’s the market?” you might ask. “The market is interesting”, I would respond in this hypothetical scenario. “There are many people who are interested, but most might be described as ‘bargain hunters’.”
And the tension rises.
On another note, the CiSRA puzzle competition week has started, and another one of my puzzles (currently unsolved) is up:
Coherency

Awkward Fumbles

Oh yeah… we worked on an “Awkward Fumbles” comic at lunchtime. It’s yet another Mezzacotta project, a continuation of Ryan North’s Whispered Apologies, wherein people submit art and we write the scripts.
Anyway, the DMM just put our lunchtime one up. I was pretty pleased with what we managed.

Puzzle week

Lots of last-minute work on getting puzzles ready (formatting changes, hints, worked solutions, etc.) for puzzle week. There are many beautiful and elegant puzzles this year but, as usual, I’m a little concerned that they’ll be too easy. Intellectually, I know they won’t be. It’s usually more important to make a the steps of a puzzle easy and logical than to deliberately obfuscate. Each puzzle generally has a core idea behind it. The discovery of that idea is the essential joy of solving the puzzle. The best puzzles often use the same idea in several different ways during the course of solving the puzzle. The idea will usually be a bit obscure anyway, so there’s no need to make it more obscure.
It’s interesting, but most of the work of a puzzle is to reduce the difficulty of it, to introduce hints and help guide the solver and reduce their frustration, so that when they do solve it, it’s so obvious that they’re embarassed not to have solved it immediately.
In my opinion, we are simulating the very core of scientific discovery. Puzzle solvers are scientists or engineers, trying to extract the elegant truth from the messy facts. When I solve a puzzle (I should note that I’m pretty bad at solving, by the way) it’s a thrill akin to working out how special relativity works for the first time, or understanding why the sky is black at night, or discovering a plot point in my novel or screenplay that seemed to be already there, waiting to be discovered, not invented.
Mmm. Sense of wonder. It’s the best.

Wedding

Friend Vanessa (I may have mentioned her as she shared a flat with Veronica for a year, if only by obliquely mentioning “The Vanessicas”) got married at Port Macquarie on Saturday, to a lovely chap Matthew (who has a beautiful Harry Connick Jr type singing voice, much to our surprise during the reception).
All very pleasant and successfully done, and the weather, while threatening grim rain (“It’s good luck! It’s good luck!”) kept turning to sunny when it mattered.
We met a whole bunch of interesting people, including future Rolling Stone editor Courtney and voluble actor Christopher, to whom I enthused mightily about my kidnapping drama script. I’ve really gotta get back into that thing. Every time I talk about it I get keen again. Gotta get that brain crack out of the system… some time after the Cars short film is done. Which in turn will have to wait until we’ve finalised everything for the Puzzle Competition.
Anyway, big drive to Port Macquarie and back, and now we’re pooped. Really happy I’m living close to work now.

Grandma

There is a set of characteristics that I associate with the Shellshear clan: independent, sensible, wryly humorous, open, and kind.
We had a clan matriarch who completely embodied these characteristics, while missing out on some of the minor ones (disorganised and inclined to procrastination, mainly), and I never realised it until she died on Sunday. Grandma faced her lung cancer with infinite pragmatism. She was active and completely independent until a month or two ago. After the shock of discovering she had cancer, she was pleased that it was spreading quickly. There was enough time for everyone to say their goodbyes, not so much that the pain would linger horribly. Dad flew from England to be with her for a week, and Aunt Elizabeth flew up for the following week. Uncle Michael and Uncle Davin and Aunt Alison – especially Aunt Alison – were there with her to the end.

Moved house

Phew! We had a very busy weekend moving house (ably assisted by old friend Marco on Sunday) and eating out at expensive restaurants. For Von’s birthday we went to Rockpool Bar and Grill (not quite as good as the Melbourne one, but still very nice) and had a family dinner at the Sheraton on the Park buffet. Very nice dessert selection.
It’s just as well I’m now walking to work (it’s a 15 minute walk), as my belly protests at the weekend’s efforts.

One sucky thing about the new home is it has lousy mobile reception. I also tried getting unwired internet, but the reception, while present, is pretty poor too. I was hoping to avoid getting a landline at all and just using Skype to call my family in England/Ireland, but I don’t think that’s viable now.
The house is now mostly empty. The removalists we hired weren’t particularly good – they grumbled a lot – so when they said they couldn’t fit it all in one load, we made sure they took all the heavy and awkward stuff. We’ll finish off the house ourselves later, but for the moment, we’re done.
There have now been two open houses – third one is today – and quite a few groups have gone through. We might not get as much as we’d hoped for the house, but at least there are buyers. Oh well, swings and roundabouts etc.

House for sale!

It’s on a couple of websites now. Happy!

Puzzle Competition

The CiSRA Puzzle Competition is open for registration. I’ve contributed three puzzles this year, and I’m quite pleased with them all (about as pleased as I was with my puzzles from last year, anyway). The first of the them, Snip, is now open for business, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

Meanwhile, the Irregulars are busy trying to solve the puzzles for this year’s Melbourne Uni Maths Society (MUMS) Puzzle Hunt. It’s hard. Harder than last year, and *that* was really hard. I haven’t contributed a single thought that directly helped lead to a solution, so I’ve given up for the moment. It was making me feel a bit useless. I think I’m better at creating puzzles than solving them.