You can guess what he's famous for...

I’ve been told that I am a lazy mofo and should post, so I am… (posting that is.) To see relative laziness, it may pay to compare wordcount between accuser and accusee, which tells quite a different story, considering the two blogs were created within a day of each other! At first I thought not a lot had happened since my last post, but looking back, that is not actually the case. Here is a selection:

I decided to let the juggling challenge die it’s natural death… Incidentally, I did 26 juggles this morning which would have seen me well into next week. Juggling is actually a lot easier if you aren’t trying to count.

Dutch draughts is going somewhat worse now. Baz won the first game and I won the next nine, and he is currently on a winning streak of 6… I did catch him perusing draughts problems on the web when I came in one morning, so I think he might be putting a little bit more effort into learning the map… (Gaming reference)

I played some of the prince of persia – warrior within demo last night which wasn’t all that, but I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll reserve my judgement, but I’m not really overly impressed and will quite possibly cancel the pre-order I placed just over two months ago. (It comes out in a month’s time.) This is also partially due to the large number of games that I already have and haven’t finished.

On Tuesday we farewelled Ayley, which involved eating a Scottish dinner, including haggis and “taties and neeps” (mashed potatoes and turnips) and fine malt Whisky. Eoin did a fantastic job of addressing the haggis before we ate it as well (Scottish tradition). Jeremy and Me (well, mainly Jeremy) had put together a bit of a presentation of video clips and photos of Ayley during her time here, which we showed as well, including the guaranteed technical difficulties. Windows media player really does suck. Then I somehow managed to recover Peter’s 11 page assignment which his computer had crashed and eaten… Possibly the first time I have ever got something useful out of a windows tmp file. I was quite impressed that it actually worked.

I think I’ll leave it at that… I could include more links if I really tried to 🙂 but I don’t really want to link to Microsoft… They have kind of cancelled themselves out. On the one hand, the aforementioned technical difficulties and on the other, actually managing to recover the data lost when Windows crashed… Apparently this was due to a problem with HP’s printer driver and not Microsoft’s fault?

Recently at work me and Baz have taken to playing Dutch draughts at work (also known as international draughts.) See his blog for scores. 🙂 It is a much more interesting game than what most of you know as draughts or checkers. I will try to explain the differences as well as linking some actual rules.

The first difference is that it is played on a 10×10 board with 4 rows of pieces instead of 3 (20 pieces instead of 12). Any piece can take backwards, not just the king. Taking is compulsory and if you have multiple options, you must take in the way that will allow you to capture the most pieces. (A king counts as one piece). The biggest difference though is the kings. They can move as far as they like along a diagonal in any direction instead of just one space. If they are jumping they can start any distance before the piece they are taking and end any distance after it. However, they must still follow the maximum take rule, so if they can land somewhere where they can take more pieces, they have to land there. This can lead to some serious carnage, once you get a king and makes them much more important. You win when your opponent can’t move (no pieces or completely blocked in).

I think that’s about it, see the above rules site for the rest of the rules, although I think I’ve covered most of them.

I’m still managing to go home every day! Today my target is 14, which I have already achieved. I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it…

Last night marked the end of small groups for another year of navs. A bit of a sad occasion, but a good time to reflect on how the year has gone and looking ahead to the future. A lot has happened this year, which I won’t go into here because I don’t really have that much time to write this post, but I might go into it in more detail in a future post.

I had quite a long talk to my family the phone on Monday night too, which was really good, with my brother setting an all-time new record for him on the phone, of about 70 minutes, which is extremely impressive. Incidentally, if there are any girls aged aproximately 19 from the Hamilton area reading this… (Not very likely but it could happen) I won’t say anymore, but feel free to post a comment.

I also got Quake 3 on Monday, which is a fairly old game now, (which made it really cheap) but still a lot of fun. I installed it linux too, and it installed and ran without a hitch, which I thought was pretty cool. I’ve never really played the game before either, because when it came out my computer was too slow to run it, causing the people I was trying to shoot to appear to teleport around the screen instead of smoothly running.

So, a combination of quake 3 and the long phone conversation meant that I “decided” not to go to the gym on Tuesday morning. I will try again tomorrow… Now that daylight savings is here, getting up at 6:20 is starting to become more of a struggle again.

I went back to Captain Ben’s today after church and because I wasn’t feeling adventurous, I pointed to the same thing as last time. Strangely, I got a different meal… I think this one was bacon and egg on rice. Still very tasty, but I’m back to square 1 on the learning the list front.

I clocked the original Myst today – well, at least I think I did… It doesn’t seem to actually end. It just lets you keep exploring. I also played quite a lot of single player MOHAA earlier in the day, which was actually quite a sobering experience. One of the missions was the allied asault on Normandy. I was landing on Omaha beach and the suicidal nature of the whole thing was quite a thought provoking thing on the stupidness of war. Every single time all the people in front of me on the landing craft got mowed down by machine guns, as I did 9 times out of 10. Luckily it wasn’t real, or I’d be dead at least 30 times over.

I also installed Myst 4 just before I went to bed. I think it is possibly the biggest game I have ever installed, weighing in at a whopping 8GB on two DVD’s. It is very pretty though, although Cyan and Ubisoft failed to provide “invert mouse” as an option, which is somewhat annoying for my upside down brain.

We went to Captain Ben’s – the local fish and chip shop for tea, (about 8:30) and I decided to try something different for a change. Every time I go there I see this sign written completely in Chinese advertising the Chinese dishes that are available and every time I tell myself that the next time I will actually pick one of them. So, today I actually did it… Here is the dialogue with the girl behind the counter…

GBTC: Hello, what would you like (or something similar)
Me: I’ll have one of those please (pointing at Chinese writing on the menu)
GBTC: You can’t be serious.
Me: Yes
GBTC: Do you even know what it is?
Me: No
GBTC: I suggest you choose something better.
Me: No, this is what I want
GBTC: It’s kind of a chicken and tofu thing on rice – Is that really what you want?
Me: Yep, sounds good.
GBTC: That will be $6.50
(Money changed hands)

Some time later…
GBTC: Ummm… The pointy thing (announcing that it was ready)
Me: Thanks
GBTC: Would you like chopsticks or a fork?
Me: Chopsticks please.
GBTC: (Somewhat mockingly) Have fun trying to use them.

And that was pretty much that… Incidentally, it was very tasty and I wouldn’t hesitate to order it again. (I know which one on the menu it is too.) 🙂

Thank you omega drivers, you just saved my life, well, my hair anyway, from being torn out. Note the time… I arrived at the LAN at 11am and now I can finally start playing games.