Capricious Me

Today was puzzleday. The day was so awesome. The puzzle creators and people planning the event were all dressed up in costumes. Among the attendees, several Star Trek crew, a grunt (from Halo), Master Chief, a flower/vines creature (mother earth?), Darth Maul, a Jedi knight, Neo (from The Matrix), a cardassian… Oh, the costumes did not disappoint.

When we were at the closing ceremonies, the author of the puzzle or a representative would explain how to solve each puzzle. One of the authors was… KEVIN LITWACK. From my high school! I remembered then that Lily had told me that he was at Microsoft and I’d confirmed that there was a Kevin Litwack working there. I didn’t know him very well, but Lily and he were on debate team together.

Pain Train Synchronetics (5 pts plz!), my team, came in third today (we were the 3rd team to complete the metapuzzle) but we had the highest overall score and solved every puzzle but one (which is at least 2 more than any other team, including the teams that solved metapuzzles before us) so I was really pleased. As a prize, we each got a little star trophy with a hologram of a shooting star that says, “Third Place – Lieutenant” and a Mars Mission Lego set and a handshake from Master Chief. (The theme was space related.) The 1st and 2nd place teams got pretty much the same prizes.

Puzzlehunts are fun. I wish they would bring college puzzle challenge to UCD, but I doubt that we’ll be so lucky.

So Mike, who is awesome beyond words, got us tickets to see Maroon 5 in September. (Counting Crows will also be there, as will Augustana, who I just started listening to on Pandora and it’s pretty good.)

*happiness*

And then… there’s THIS. Diablo III! The gameplay video looked so awesome. There was a bit with Deckard Cain when he starts to say, “Stay a while and listen,” and get interrupted midway. Heheheh. And he sighs, “No one ever listens.” Which is probably true. Anyway, the new class, Witch Doctor, looks like a lot of fun. Swarms of locusts? Gruesome pets? Firebombs? Mind altering spells? It’s going to be a long wait till 2010.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is an AWESOME, AWESOME game full of puzzles and brain teasers. I can’t wait for the sequel!!! now that I’ve thoroughly beaten the game, I can only wait for the weekly puzzles. Penny Arcade did a great take on the game that I love in Professor Layton and the Perpetual Torment.

And whoever implemented Puzzle Quest’s path traversal either enjoys plotting convoluted paths, or judging by the inconsistencies in the path selections, really sucks at graph theory. Um, hello? There’s a subset of algorithms for the SHORTEST PATH problem for a REASON. It’s not like they’re finding the shortest path for randomly changing graph configurations. Every town/node is fixed. They could have hard coded it!!!

Last night was An’s birthday. We went to Mikuni‘s to celebrate. Their BBQ white tuna with the red or white sauce is the most awesome deliciousness… EVER.

After food, we came back to the apartment to continue the birthday fun with some Cranium Turbo. My team was lagging so much in the first half and then all of a sudden we caught up and overtook the other two teams. We won. People left, but we tried Scene It anyway (2 girls vs. 3 guys) and we won again. (in case of confusion, I was on the girls’ team.) The guys really REALLY wanted to win, I suppose, so they started playing again against us and were winning initially, but then we caught up and beat them thoroughly.

Tonight was trivia night at the Silo… our team, The Traveling Salesmen (you won’t truly appreciate that name unless you’ve studied a bit of algorithms), won. Woo!

The Internet is an awesome thing. Thanks to the xbox 360 and the speed of cable Internet, I’ve been able to play Halo 3 with the Boston people. This time it’s not quite as pathetic as when we started playing and Max mercilessly slaughtered everyone (except Mimi). It’s pretty awesome on my end, because I don’t have to share the screen with anyone. (AHAHAHHAHAHAHA)

They taunted me last night by telling me about the asian cakes they were eating. Booo! Boo! I demand cake as well! Perhaps I’ll take a small trip to Kim’s Mart for some of that green tea pastry thingy or head over to Ciocolat to see if they’ve got any hazelnut cakes…

is pretty awesome. Ryan’s Guitar Hero 3 should arrive soon so we have an extra guitar to complete the band. :-P

In a way, I vicariously indulge my desire to travel the world through conferences.

This time, my destination is the ever-so exotic city of Oakland for the annual IEEE Security Symposium. I suppose there is comfort in the familiar… and it says something about the quality of the conference if one holds it in Oakland year after year and everyone still shows up.

I started playing Counterstrike, mostly with Mike. It sucks starting out because I have no reflexes and he enjoys shooting me. Still, it’s pretty fun. We were playing with bots yesterday, as the terrorists (because being counter terrorist means you have to shoot people AND defuse a bomb, where as being a terrorist winning is much easier since you just have to shoot all the counter terrorists). So bots being bots, they weren’t all intelligent… and once I managed to get my paws on a shield it was pretty funny. The counter terrorist bots would just shoot, and since I had one of their shields they couldn’t really hurt me at all… so I’d wait till they had to reload and then shoot them. Or, Mike would follow me and I’d be in front with the shield. I dunno, for some reason I found that extremely amusing…