Too cool! Turns out that there is a local chapter of the National Scrabble Association, right here in Auburn!
There was a meeting tonight, although it was just myself and lady who runs the chapter. It’s snowing like crazy, but since it was over at the Auburn PD, it was easy to get to.
I’m going to join the NSA tomorrow, because there is a tournament in April down in Boston, that I’m going to try to attend. The Scrabble for Literacy is being held at the Hilton in April, and I’m also hoping to get some people from work involved – I’d like to see us have 2 or 3 teams play this year.
I’m just stoked that there is organized play in the area. The NSA has also added 5 new two letter words to the play list, with 2 in particular that will change the face of the game.
QI and QIS n. the vital force that in Chinese is thought is inherent in all things. – and
ZA and ZAS n. a pizza
These two words alone will make thousands of play possibilities in game. The only 2 letters that DO NOT have a 2-letter play in them are C and V. I can’t wait until I can play some more games. They meet on the 2nd and 4th Sunday of every month, so I’ll have to only play D&D every other week. But that’s OK, I’m going to have a blast playing Scrabble for a while.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Computer... computer.. computer
This is too cool!
I did a MAJOR upgrade to my computer – Bought a 256MB video card, 1GB of ram, and also a S-Video to Composite converter.
I can finally watch movies on my TV! Looks fantastic too.
And my games run great! I love my computer now (
I did a MAJOR upgrade to my computer – Bought a 256MB video card, 1GB of ram, and also a S-Video to Composite converter.
I can finally watch movies on my TV! Looks fantastic too.
And my games run great! I love my computer now (
Monday, February 06, 2006
The mission - should you be able to log on and do anything...
Talk about an ACTUAL impossible mission.
Mission Impossible 3’s HUNT started at 8:00pm EST. It’s now 9:35, and it’s STILL not up and running.
The site – hunt.missionimpossible.com is not up – and Chat is wonky at best.
Did the admin’s not do a stress test on the game before launch? There were only 120 people in the chat room, and I can’t possibly believe that 120 people crashed a server – considering over 30,000 people signed up for the game.
I find this comparable to the stress test I did for Star Wars Galaxies during their closed beta – The admin’s would tell us in the chat room to all try to log in at once and see how long it took the servers to crash – just so they could figure out the bugs BEFORE the game went live. The only problem is – they are supposed to be live NOW. This should have been taken care of at least a month or 2 ago – either in house or as a closed beta.
But when you (as a company) promise to have a site up and running – especially when there are actual prizes on the line – I find it inexcusable to have this many problems on day one of a game. 1 Hour and 45 minutes into the game, and no one has even see what the screen looks like yet (as far as I know).
I do hope that the admin’s figure out what’s wrong and then fix it, because I like stuff like this, and it would be a shame to see an opportunity like this to go to down the tubes.
Mission Impossible 3’s HUNT started at 8:00pm EST. It’s now 9:35, and it’s STILL not up and running.
The site – hunt.missionimpossible.com is not up – and Chat is wonky at best.
Did the admin’s not do a stress test on the game before launch? There were only 120 people in the chat room, and I can’t possibly believe that 120 people crashed a server – considering over 30,000 people signed up for the game.
I find this comparable to the stress test I did for Star Wars Galaxies during their closed beta – The admin’s would tell us in the chat room to all try to log in at once and see how long it took the servers to crash – just so they could figure out the bugs BEFORE the game went live. The only problem is – they are supposed to be live NOW. This should have been taken care of at least a month or 2 ago – either in house or as a closed beta.
But when you (as a company) promise to have a site up and running – especially when there are actual prizes on the line – I find it inexcusable to have this many problems on day one of a game. 1 Hour and 45 minutes into the game, and no one has even see what the screen looks like yet (as far as I know).
I do hope that the admin’s figure out what’s wrong and then fix it, because I like stuff like this, and it would be a shame to see an opportunity like this to go to down the tubes.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
WOW. Not World of Warcraft
Found a TON of cool links for stuff.
I’m into cryptography. Letter frequencies, word patterns, cryptograms, Scrabble (which I believe is the ultimate combination of math and English), sudoku (number logic puzzles), WWII era cipher machines – you name it, and I’m pretty much into it.
I had a roundabout way of getting to www.elonka.com. I was doing searches for “The Beast” which was a online murder mystery the ran as an advertisement for “AI Artificial Intelligence”. That in turn led me to the new Mission Impossible 3 game that starts up on Monday. And from there I decided to go to the Da Vinci Code movie website. And from there I find out that Dan Brown (the author of “The Da Vinci Code”) put a reference the Kryptos cipher (located at the CIA) into the illustration on the dust cover of the hardcover books. So I finally get to elonka.com, and I hit a virtual jackpot of cryptographic goodness.
Here are some fun links:
What nerdier than Nintendo? How About Acapella Nintendo
http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/138298/
Cool Optical Illusion
http://blogs.msdn.com/ianm/archive/2005/08/19/453737.aspx
RuneQuest
http://members.aol.com/scirealm/RuneQuest.html
Coolest Rube Goldberg Commercial… ever…
http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/581/
I’m into cryptography. Letter frequencies, word patterns, cryptograms, Scrabble (which I believe is the ultimate combination of math and English), sudoku (number logic puzzles), WWII era cipher machines – you name it, and I’m pretty much into it.
I had a roundabout way of getting to www.elonka.com. I was doing searches for “The Beast” which was a online murder mystery the ran as an advertisement for “AI Artificial Intelligence”. That in turn led me to the new Mission Impossible 3 game that starts up on Monday. And from there I decided to go to the Da Vinci Code movie website. And from there I find out that Dan Brown (the author of “The Da Vinci Code”) put a reference the Kryptos cipher (located at the CIA) into the illustration on the dust cover of the hardcover books. So I finally get to elonka.com, and I hit a virtual jackpot of cryptographic goodness.
Here are some fun links:
What nerdier than Nintendo? How About Acapella Nintendo
http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/138298/
Cool Optical Illusion
http://blogs.msdn.com/ianm/archive/2005/08/19/453737.aspx
RuneQuest
http://members.aol.com/scirealm/RuneQuest.html
Coolest Rube Goldberg Commercial… ever…
http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/581/
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