Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in garzahd's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
10:27 am	Update My mother has had knee replacement surgery this past weekend. I am not really familiar with the anatomical details - nor do I care to learn - but I can see that it hurts like hell and I'm trying to do my part to be a calming presence and a helping hand around the house. She can still move around with a walker, and is required to do so as part of her ongoing physical therapy, but most of her planned activities for the next 8 weeks involve a lot of book-reading. I've started weekly bridge games again, partnered with the father of my childhood babysitter. We've been going to church together for awhile, or at least whenever I've been living in the upstate NY area. Sort of a curious arrangement, and he is a new-ish player, but we're having a good time. First two games were a 36% and 55%, the latter giving 56 cents of black. Call it progress or luck or whatever, but I might actually make Life Master before they hike up the requirements for doing so. My game of choice has lately been Aion. I was favorably impressed during their beta week during the beginning of September, so I am now playing an Elyos sorcerer on the Triniel server. The game seems to have combined the PvE of WoW 5-mans, the PvP of Warhammer Online sieges, and the graphics of asian MMOs to make a very interesting game. The more I play it, the more I think it will be high time to put WoW to rest after Arthas dies. In WoW news, we're sort of at a stupid juncture where hard modes are too hard and easy modes are too easy, so morale is a little low. In general, it seems that the hard-mode design philosophy of WoW is rather flawed. In the old system, only a small percentage of the player base got to do the end-game content because it was too hard. In the new system, there's easy-mode for the masses, and hard-mode for the people that want to go the extra mile. The problem is, the danger of missing out on said content was one of the biggest motivating factors for going that extra mile to see the cool final boss. These days, when you have the choice between easy and hard, and in our case graduating from easy to hard, too many cards are on the table and the thrill of anticipation is gone. We know exactly what's coming next, and it's not all that compelling. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 15th, 2009
6:19 pm	Newspaper article My 6-week summer class wrapped up yesterday. Today the Albany newspaper had a pretty large story they wrote after talking to the kids and watching our closing ceremony. The story was on the front page of the second section of the paper. Next week I'm headed out to Cooperstown, NY, to be a summer camp counselor for a week. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
5:58 pm	Job I have a job for the summer. The job is teaching kids age 14-15, who are in some sort of poverty situation, how to take apart a computer, put it back together, and run a few common programs. (Word and Powerpoint are the main targets; others include HTML, Excel, and maybe playing around with a Java compiler.) If they pass the course, they get to take home the computer they've spent the summer tinkering with. Day 1 was today, and it went reasonably well. Took off a computer case, did some show and tell, but the kids were mostly in smile-and-nod mode. Tomorrow's activity is going to be "trade a hard drive with your neighbor and see who can get the computer working again first". The software side of things has been rather complicated by the tech department of the school at which the class is being held. Over the weekend, they took the liberty of installing their standard HD image on our lab. Which would have been all well and good if (1) they actually gave us login credentials after the fact; or (2) they chose an operating system didn't suck as much as Vista. Especially given that these computers were donated for a reason: they're 1 ghz machines with 512 megs of RAM that have absolutely no business touching Vista with a ten foot pole. In other news, some WoW bureaucracy gave me an excuse to start raiding again, roughly six weeks after I first asked the guild to have me start raiding again. Roughly three days later, first kill of Yogg25. Huzzah. Then summer vacation hits, a few people leave, and suddenly we can't fill the raid anymore. *facepalm*. I suppose it might be argued that this is "fourth of july vacation", which means we might catch up to normal pace faster than expected. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
6:22 pm	Otakon? My sister Kendra just returned from college in Toronto, and will be hanging out here till classes start back up. We are discussing maybe going to Otakon this summer, July 17-19 in Baltimore. Any f-list people that might be interested in joining us? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 12th, 2009
6:39 pm	Update One of the pleasant side effects of moving in with family is that life in general is far less sheltered. For instance, I actually get to read the newspaper for a change. In WoW, I do not consider myself a gossip/drama connoisseur, but for some reason this local news story has me enthralled. Basically, Monday afternoon, after the NY State Senate decided to pack it in for the evening, the Republicans (who are the minority in our senate by a 30-32 margin) decided to stay afterwards and hold a couple extra votes, including who should be majority leader and president of the state Senate (that's two different people). Two Democrat senators decide to switch sides for this, one of whom got to be Senate president as part of the bargain. Hilarity ensues. The other 30 Democrat senators go WTF and try to get the after-hours votes thrown out in court. And various other childish QQ such as "fuck you guys, we still have the key to the senate chamber and we're not opening it for you losers" "who says we have to pass laws in the regular senate chamber?" Pass the Doritoes. And one cute bridge column that I enjoyed, though not a terribly deep or sophisticated one: xx Kxxxx Jx AJxx KQJT9xx AJ QT9x void Righty opens 1H and you decide to blast 4S. You only have three obvious losers, but LHO leads his (presumably singleton) 2 of hearts. How do you play to avoid a defensive ruff? And lately, I've been reading about the upcoming sequel to King's Bounty. It's not coming out in English until the winter, but it's out in Russian already. Knowing a little bit about modding the original game, but roughly nothing about Russian, I'm attempting to mod the sequel into being at least vaguely understandable in English. (I realize the dialogue wasn't really one of the bigger selling points of the original game, but understanding the combat engine, and new tweaks thereto, is also kind of important.) This process basically amounts to taking the ~2 megs of dialogue in the game, chopping it into chunks of about 30k each so that Google Translator doesn't cough on it, then reparsing it back into the original data files. The parsing was kind of fun, but copy-pasting 65 times out of Google is sort of annoying. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
1:34 am	Frustrated I moved out of Pittsburgh. With RADAR having ended long ago, there weren't really enough reasons to stay in town. Currently moved in with family in upstate NY. That's the good news. The bad news is: - Rejected after 2nd phone interview with Amazon. (This one was for dev, prior one was test.) Whereas the first interview hit mostly on Java inheritance topics - wrt which I am very much on shaky ground, and made my rejection understandable - this second interview hit on a nice balance of topics. The only part I really botched in the second interview was a sort of theoretical one: "talk me through how you might design an object-oriented structure for a restaurant tracking reservations for their tables." I got off on a couple poor tangents. The rest seemed great though, including the programming problem "sort this CSV by the second column, in (n log n) time, with an algorithm that would survive a dataset of about 100 million lines". (i.e. assume you can't load everything into memory at once). This turned out to be more fun than I had expected. But that's been sufficiently demotivating that I feel I should either (1) aspire to a crappier job in order to get my coding groove back; or (2) skew in a totally different direction like teaching high school or something. Weird feeling. - Our WoW guild melted down, so I jumped ship to another raiding guild.... which then proceeded to ALSO melt down. There's really only one option left, and they're chock full from all the refugees floating around, so I suppose I'm done with WoW for awhile. - Annoying twist in my PBEM Diplomacy game, where I am feeling fresh out of allies. (Link is here, I'm England.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 17th, 2009
12:12 am	Carnival CMU Carnival is this weekend. If some manner of Stuff is going on, I'd probably be interested in showing up. Tomorrow I'll load some board games into my car and eat lunch above the O, on the offchance someone I know is also doing so. Failing that, I'll watch LJ and AIM for other developments. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
6:21 pm	Puzzlehunt again So, puzzlehunt. The "expected" workload of about 40 team puzzles was inflated to about 65 due to the hosting teams. Two teams set out to create their own events, but both burned out after about 75% of the work they expected to do. So they merged efforts and made this puzzlehunt, which is becoming known as PH123, the combination of (what was supposed to be) 12 and 13. For me, the high point of the event was the new "Daily Double" puzzles. These are timed events designed for the entire team to attack in their conference room, as opposed to the ordinary puzzles that are best handled by 2-4 people at a time. My favorite of these was themed to movies, and I copied it to our WoW forums. Feel free to take a look, but don't look past the first post if you don't want to be spoiled. At the end of the day, we placed 2nd, and did not solve the final meta (we were 1 step away). This implies that the hunt was a lot harder than par, perhaps as far as to alienate the teams that didn't do well. Postmortem discussions are still going on, trying to solve the neverending problem of maximizing the fun of 1100+ people. Our team is considering stepping up to host an upcoming hunt, as the highest scoring team that hasn't already hosted. This may be a recurring source of excitement over the next few months, but I probably won't be able to post much of it to LJ for fear of spoilers. dr4b wrote a summary of the event that covers far more than I ever expected to post. Including pictures. I decided to try out another new game, Atlantica Online, that touts itself as a strategy turn-based MMO. It's an interesting twist on the norm. It plays like Disciples or a Final Fantasy game, except you are limited in the amount of time you use to queue up commands. You control a squad of up to 9 characters, arranged in a 3x3 box, allowing for AOE effects to target a row or column. In multiplayer scenarios, up to 3 people on a side plop down their units and move simultaneously. (so 27 vs 27 is the largest possible battle). I haven't gotten too far into it, but the newbie progression is quite enjoyable so far. The obvious quests of killing woodland creatures are peppered with quests teaching UI elements, like "put an item on the auction house" or "send a whisper to someone". The UI feature that I most enjoy so far is the fact that all vendor-bought items are baked into the auction house. The vendor just acts as another player on the list of sellers, except they happen to have an infinite supply. An oddity is that rather than a fantasy realm, the game actually takes place on a rather condensed map of the real world. Sapporo, Japan was my newbie town, and dungeons include places like the Cretan Labyrinth, Angkor Wat, and - for reasons I haven't quite learned - Detroit. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
9:40 pm	You know you're tired when.... ... you take a break from puzzle work at 6am, enter an unfamiliar restroom, suddenly realizing that that trip three hours ago was accidentally to the girl's room. Anyhow. PH12 was intense. We placed 2nd of 84 teams, a new record for our team, but did not manage to finish the meta. There were a LOT of puzzles to do. More details and stories later. Need to head to bed before I fall unconscious. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 27th, 2009
11:20 am	Something about a long strange trip After spending most of yesterday hopping between various methods of public transportation, with an airplane or two thrown in, I've made my way to Seattle for the next incarnation of the Microsoft Puzzlehunt. The theme of the next game is the TV show Jeopardy, so I've been spending a lot of time browsing the glossary at the J-Archive. Due to some poor last-minute planning on my part, rather than staying with agh for the weekend, I'm instead staying with jeffford and jonobie, who are awesome people that I wish I'd been better acquainted with before I moved out of Redmond. The logic in arriving here Thursday night was that I might have been well-placed for an onsite job interview today, while I was in the area. Unfortunately, Amazon sent me an email earlier this week saying that my phone interview was not sufficiently impressive. Although I thought I was doing reasonably ok, the majority of the technical questions were on the topic of "how would you represent an arbitrary four-function mathematical equation using inheritance". I've had relatively few opportunities to use inheritance for a functional purpose, and although I threw together some code that compiled and worked, as requested, 1 hour after the interview, they still didn't like it. ( Catching up: Gaming ) ( Vermillion ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
11:10 am	Twas the season Christmas went well. Presents included the boardgames Ticket To Ride Europe, and Settlers of Catan, the latter being somewhat long overdue, even though I didn't think to put it on my list. The old mantra of "tis better to give than to receive" hits slightly closer to home each year; I must be getting older. A jigsaw puzzle that I picked up as an impulse purchase - and I am really not an impulse shopper - ended up being the "first toy to play with" for my mom, which was quite a pleasant surprise. Kendra found two nifty youtube videos that manage to be both insightful and funny: I'll see you in hell, Pachelbel Penn and Teller vs. Bottled Water (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
11:07 am	What I got for my birthday was... A power outage. I'm up in the Albany NY area for the Christmas season, just in time for last week's nasty ice storm that covered pretty much everything with 1/8 of an inch of ice. Top-heavy trees either fell over or dangled their branches enough to axe quite a lot of power lines around the region. Over a million people lost power. Ours was out for 60 hours, which was a little bit worse than average, but less than half of the worst-case-scenarios. The news people kept saying that it was the worst storm in 21 years. Most of the times I just ignore such comments, but in this case it's weird because I _remember_ that storm. It was in October 1987, and had an ice storm hit before the leaves had fallen off the trees, so no one had power for a full week. Most of the related memories are of school closing and playing in the snow, rather than the memories of the current storm, which revolve around warming up by a fire and thinking my book was not very good. Seattle had a memorable ice storm too, just after New Years 2004. The ice thickness was significantly higher, but the ambient tree count was significantly lower, so the roads were the only real dangerous thing, and power outages were brief. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
3:14 pm	I voted. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
11:16 pm	KGB puzzhunt: Geller Hotel KGB ran a puzzle hunt today, and we won! The theme was that you are a guest at a convention for psychics. The archnemesis drugs your drinking water to inhibit your psychic abilities, and kidnaps the keynote speaker, and it's up to the intrepid guests to uncover the mystery/conspiracy/etc. 18 teams of 4, with a little over a dozen puzzles in 6 hours. They made this hunt "Safari"-style, so nearly every puzzle was either a doing a runaround, or doing something at the end of a runaround. They asked everyone to stay in character when doing puzzles with a staff member, which I expected to be annoying, but was actually fun. None of the puzzles had a gimmick that took more than 10 minutes to uncover, yet they did well to not make things too easy either. A couple puzzles had parallelism issues; since nearly all of the puzzles were "go there and do this", generally only 1-2 teams could be "doing this" concurrently and the rest had to stand in line. Most of the puzzles - the important ones, at least - resolved to a superpower that you had acquired (or re-acquired?). These were used to infiltrate the vault for the final meta: psychic suggestion to distract the guard, telekinesis to open the door, invisibility to fool the security camera, etc. There were a couple amusing stories at the postmortem of people who tried to use abilities at the wrong time. Cell phones were mandatory; all three of my teammates owned one, so I was off the hook again. I really should get one someday. Text messages were issued throughout the hunt - most of them were simply plot coupons, but others announced important things like the times of pizza and the postmortem. The meta was set up so that it could only be executed once, so other people didn't really get to enjoy all the work that went into it. Two teams made into the vault (the second place team had only two people!) and once we uncovered the documents confirming the conspiracy, we were whisked from Baker to Wean for a final puzzle, where we unlocked a box containing the missing keynote speaker. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, all the _other_ teams got a cellphone text message ordering them to run out to the CFA lawn (they would later learn that this was so that the evil corporation could execute them, which apparently translated as playing freeze-tag.) This made for quite a shock when we ran back from Wean to CFA to see all 70 other players out on the lawn running around. Our fearless keynote speaker saved the day and we went to the postmortem. KGB really don't take themselves seriously very often, except for CTFWS, but they did tonight, and I was very impressed. Next weekend there is another puzzle event going on, but sadly two of the four from today are already committed to a separate team. Not sure if random matching will triumph. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 24th, 2008
11:59 am	Bridge Dream I had a very peculiar dream about bridge last night. I was partnered with my dad, who is probably the least likely member of my family to start being enthusiastic about bridge. But we were playing anyway. Third seat, I pick up: - AQxxx AJx Axxxx and begin to perk up when partner opens 1C. After responding 1H, partner comes back with 5C. Oof. What the heck does partner have? A few kings and a singleton, probably. I figured that there's no good way to explore, so I blasted 7C. Partner looks as if he's going to be sick. As the opening lead comes, I console him with "Don't worry, I have a few more tricks than you think I do." Did it make? I don't know. That's when I woke up. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
9:26 pm	Gaming ( Warhammer Online ) ( DotA ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 19th, 2008
11:54 am	Cruise Last week (Sep 7-14), I spent the week in Eastern Canada on a cruise with the family. Our itinerary was: Depart and return to Boston St. John, New Brunswick Halifax, Nova Scotia Sydney, Nova Scotia Bar Harbor, Maine ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
3:32 pm	Regional This weekend is the Pittsburgh Regional. Yesterday, mpa and I finished our third and fourth of six planned sessions. We had a solid afternoon, just under 60%, and enough serendipitous gifts in the evening to bring us to 2nd in A for 11.81 gold. Quite the lump sum. Here's a bidding problem we had: x KQJx KTxx Axx Kxxxxxx AQJx x Ax North deals at all white, opens 1C, and south jumps to 3C. What's a good auction to reach slam? Our auction went: 1C X 3C 3D p 5D ppp +420 was worth 2 matchpoints on an 8 top. I had the big hand and thought my 5 losers was too many to insist on slam, but in retrospect it really can't hurt to go fishing with 4C or something. At that point, West only really cares how many aces I have. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
5:54 pm	Months behind Last week, the time had come for me to buy a new hard drive. And, holy crap, Moore's Law is in full swing: I got 3/4 of a terabyte for sixteen cents a gig. I guess I haven't been paying attention to prices lately. And what better way to celebrate than by putting a ton of stuff on it. Namely Heroes season 1, which is really really good. I haven't binged this amount on videos in a really long time, and it's made for a good couple days. (Halfway through the season so far, no spoilers yet please.) Also been playing a lot of beat-em-up musou games lately. I am not really sure why they appeal to me so much; in retrospect they're pretty much the height of brainless gameplay. At the office, the end-of-year push is setting in, so I have a good deal more hours worked than average. Plans are still not set for post-Radar activities; if anyone has a job they think I'd enjoy doing next year, let me know :-) And a couple days ago, Warhammer Online announced Sep 18 as their release date. Kudos for beating Blizzard to the punch - now I just hope the game is actually fun. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
4:23 pm	Bridge Return trip from upstate NY went smoothly. The trip ended up with more time hanging out with family at my parents' place, rather than at our Adirondack cottage, but it was a good vacation nonetheless, and I managed to get my annual waterskiing trip done. What better way to return to the usual routine than to head to the Monday afternoon bridge game, where I had the rare pleasure of making a new enemy. Second seat favorable, I picked up: xx 9x KT9xxx Txx and decide to try opening 2 diamonds. LHO: (points to bid, looks at partner) What's that? Partner: It's weak. LHO: What's your preempt range? Partner points to our card where "4-10" is clearly marked. LHO: 4-10? Is that even legal? (I am 80% sure it's fine, but have neither the means nor the gumption to prove it, so I sit quietly as he asks a passing director.) Director: I think it needs to be 5-11. Partner: (without missing a beat) Okay, then it's 5-11. LHO, emboldened by his AQx of diamonds, then overcalls 2N, which RHO pushes to 3. As it turns out, had I passed, partner was all set to preempt in hearts and quietly go down three, but wisely chooses to shut up after the actual auction. On lead against 3NT, he pounds out declarer's heart stopper and has the entry to get back in and set him two, for a top. LHO: So, how many points did you actually have? Me: (poorly attempting to hold back a laugh) Three. LHO: DIRECTOR! Director comes back, reaffirms that 4-10 is right out, and that although I am allowed "shade bids by 1 point" if I deem it necessary, and I am allowed to psych, this board used up that psych, and I will be penalized if I psych again this session. I try to point out that 4 minus 1 is usually 3, but that doesn't get me anywhere, so I quietly groan, but figure that the odds of the same situation are pretty low. On the very next board, first seat all white, I pick up: Tx J Ax ATxxxxxx I decide that this six-loser hand looks like it has too many defensive tricks for a preempt, so I open 1 club. LHO speedily turns to partner and asks what strength I need to open. Partner: Well, it should probably follow the rule of 20... LHO: But how many points? Partner: With a balanced hand, probably 12. With distribution, he could open with less. LHO: Would he open with 8 points? Partner: No. The auction continues: 1C P 1S P 2C X P 2H 3C P P P making four for an average plus. LHO: So, how many points this time? Me: Nine. LHO: 9?! DIRECTOR! Director: What's the problem this time? LHO: He opened with a 9-count. I'm not disputing the result, I just think that this pair should alert their opening bids if they want to do this. Director: (condescending tone) You guys really need to get back to basics, stop using fancy conventions, and just stick with Standard American like everybody else in the room. Look around you. These people don't know how to defend against crazy methods. I try to have a vaguely diplomatic discussion about how good I thought my hand was, but it doesn't really get me anywhere, but doesn't get us any penalties either. So I'm thinking of switching to EHAA next time we end up having to play against these opponents.... (10 Comments |Comment on this)