Steven Stadnicki's Journal

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Oh SNAP
About a month ago,

aprivatefox and

mufi pinged me with an offer: they were going to be involved with a puzzling event in a week or two, along with

tracerj and

krdbuni. It was a single-day event called SNAP -- Seattle and Nearby Adventures in Puzzling -- and their team had room for a fifth. Would I be interested in joining them? I waffled for a couple of days, but finally decided that it'd been far too long since I'd gotten a good chance to hang out with them and too long since I'd done much puzzling; this was a great chance to do a bit of both.

Saturday morning, I picked everyone up and we went out to grab breakfast and go over the plan for the day.

aprivatefox and

tracerj had put together notebooks/clipboards with 'cheat sheets' for all the stuff we expected to need for the day: Morse Code tables, atomic numbers, ASCII codes, etc. We didn't use all of it, but we wound up using quite a bit; the sheets were laid out amazingly well and they were a major factor in our successes with various puzzles. We talked over solving techniques (look for various common encodings, look for things that break a pattern, etc.) and talked about expectations for the day.

aprivatefox mentioned that his goal going in was to finish all the puzzles, and suggested that a good day would be finishing in the top third or so. I was a bit more optimistic; I knew he and

mufi had a good amount of experience under their belts and that we had a solid team, and figured we had a decent chance at the top 5.

As for the event itself, it would be impossible to capture the energy of the day in words; we turned on from the first puzzle they threw our way and never turned off for the whole event, with only one lull where we ratholed on a puzzle based on a bad initial guess and disregarding advice that turned out to be smarter than we were. With so many brains running so intensely you'd expect flare-ups, but the only moment of friction we had came during the aforementioned ratholing; other than that, we were a surprisingly well-oiled machine: nobody got in anyone else's way, we collaborated fantastically, and everyone brought something to the table -- we all made critical contributions at multiple points throughout the day. You can find the puzzles here if you're curious; my favorite by far was #4, a sort of reverse crossword puzzle where answers were given and clues had to be figured out, then reassembled into other clues. When we bogged down (on #2), I figured we were out of the running at least for first; we spent a long time on it, and it felt like a bunch of other teams finished first. But we made decent time on the next puzzle, and great time on the one after that, and very good time on the next one, and by the time we hit #6 -- which was essentially marked as the last puzzle -- I started to feel like we were back in the top 5 again. When we turned in our answer, they told us that we were the third team to complete, and we spent some time being vaguely boggled. Then it turned out that one of the other teams had taken a hint. Then it turned out the other team had missed one of the bonus questions. And suddenly they were announcing the results, and we went from 'vaguely boggled' to stunned; somehow we wound up the winners. I'm sure we were all daydreaming about it (I know I certainly spent large swaths of the day doing that!), but I'm equally sure that none of us was actually expecting to win, especially not our first time out as a team. It was an incredible rush, and one that I'm still riding the high of, at some level...

...you see, one of the prizes for winning one of these events is that you run the next SNAP. We're already starting to toss ideas around in our heads: I've composed a puzzle or two and I have a couple more in the pipeline of my brain, and I know everyone else is doing likewise. Running the thing is going to be a lot more chaotic for the team than even playing in it was -- but it's shaping up to be at least as much of a rush, too.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Lots of it. Mu ha ha.

Powell's vs. My Wallet
The short version: Powell's wins again.

As part of

ladyperegrine's amazing trip out this way, we trekked down to Portland this afternoon. Though really, that's not wholly accurate; while we did slip up to a Moonstruck Cafe for hot cocoa, pretty much the entire time in Portland was spent in one building: Powell's Books. I described it in Twitter as 'introducing a junkie to your favorite dealer', and that's not too far off the mark. But of course, I'm pretty badly addicted myself; I wound up walking out with a pretty hefty stack in the process. In hopes that the added motivation will help me get around to most of it sooner rather than later (a problem I tend to have with new books all too often), I'm going to try to write up some measure of thoughts on these -- essentially, mini-reviews -- as I get deep enough into them to say something useful about them. In the meantime, here's an introduction to the cast of characters:
( Yeah, this is gonna be long. )

Current Mood: literary

Lazy Sunday...
...though no, I did not wake up in the late afternoon. It was just all around low-key; nothing vitally important got done, but there was nothing vitally important to get done, so (mostly) lazing about was a fine way to spend the day.

The highlight of the day, by far, was the two meals: breakfast this morning was pancakes, adapted from a recipe I found via a local Seattle chef's blog, TastingMenu. The original called for ricotta (and they work very well that way), but I've been making them with sour cream instead (and quite a bit less sugar) and the results are fantastic: moist and fluffy, the perfect sop for plenty of dark maple syrup. Dinner, after a fair bit of scrambling around looking for the accoutrements, was steamed clams in a sake-dashi broth, and they were actually better.

quarrel has for good reason prohibited me from referring to them as 'clam-tastic', but I can honestly say that I can't remember the last time I had steamed clams this good. The broth was absolutely perfect for them (a bit too salty and dashi-ish when sopped up with the potato bread I got to go with, but being that strong meant you could actually taste it on the clams), and something in the treatment I gave them -- maybe the double-soak, maybe the brisk scrubbing, maybe just getting lucky with the quality of the clams themselves -- made them the cleanest I've had; there was absolutely no grit anywhere in the bowl, which I'm not sure I've ever gotten with any clams I've had before. A great meal, something I'm going to have to remember for the future, and a perfect cap to a fine day.

Current Mood: content

Too cool not to pass on...
...thanks to

liralen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BxymuiAxQ. I just know I'm going to be saying 'a-rack-a-nids' all day, now...

Although I confess, I love the commentary on it: 'The world is awesome... so watch it from your living room.' Yeah, but still. :-)

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Boom-di-a-da, boom-di-a-da...

"Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme..."
So, I finally picked up Rumor and Sigh recently. For those of you who were trying to convince me how amazing an artist Richard Thompson is: I'm sorry it took me this long to come around. For those of you who didn't: tsk, why didn't you let me know sooner? And for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about: here, have a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning.

(And more content to come soon, I swear! I've certainly got enough stuff to post about, if I can find the words to say any of it...)

Current Mood: musical
Current Music: See above, of course...

Random game plugging
Via the always-interesting Indie Games weblog I found a new game from the guy who did Passage: Gravitation. It's a bit confusing in spots, particularly without instructions -- and definitely frustrating. But it's utterly fascinating in its own right, and even if it's not necessarily to people's tastes I think it's well worth having a look at.

Current Mood: fascinated

Happy birthday!
Everyone be sure to wish

quarrel a wonderful tenth birthday! We're going out for pizza and arcade games tonight, as befits the occasion. :-)

Current Mood: celebratory

Mandatory Fun Day -- opinions wanted!
So my company is having a Mandatory Fun Day tomorrow, but wonders of wonders, it actually is fun; we're going out to Snoqualmie Pass to hit the ski area there for the afternoon. This opens up some opportunities; I've been snowboarding more the last couple of years, and I'm starting to get just good enough at it to be dangerous (more or less on the blue/green border); I'm finally starting to move at a speed where the falls actually *hurt* when you spill. But it's a lot of fun, even so, and satisfying as long as I stick to the more lapine slopes. On the other hand, I haven't busted the cross-country skis out of my closet in a year or two, in large part because Jeff doesn't care for it as much as I do, but I've been a huge fan pretty much since my family moved to upstate NY back in the early '80s, and it's a wonderful way to just get out, admire nature at a somewhat slower pace, and think... pretty much like hiking on snow. So, since I'm torn, I cast out to the masses...
Poll #1138674 What should Steve do tomorrow?
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What should Steve do tomorrow?

View Answers

Break away from the pack and go cross-country skiing
7 (29.2%)

Take the chance of beating himself up and have some fun boarding with the rest of the group
13 (54.2%)

Hide out in the lodge all day with the gamer dweebs
4 (16.7%)

Stick around the office. After all, there's bound to be work to catch up on, right?
0 (0.0%)

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: "Stardancer," Klaus Schulze

Chicken Soup for the Stomach
A few weeks back, I found myself in the mood for chicken noodle soup, and particularly nostalgic for an old friend's family's soup that I remembered from back in high school. I'm pretty sure theirs was nothing like this, but a bit of digging about the web for drop noodles gave me enough information to figure something out for myself; and after three or four iterations I've finally got all the pieces puzzled out to offer:

Steve's Amazingly Tasty Dog-Simple Chicken Drop-Noodle Soup
( Recipe behind the cut, of course. )

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is -- there are a couple of different pieces to get together, but every one is easy (toss stuff in a pan and let it cook), and none of them is fussy at all about particular details of timing or proportion. If your veggies get done early, let 'em sit for a few minutes; it won't do 'em any harm. The only thing you actually have to measure is your eggs and flour, and that's basically trivial. And it's really, really good. The perfect way to cap off a blustery, wonderful weekend.

Current Mood: sated

So if I was Alice, who was the Dodo?
I have to admit, the opportunity to actively participate in democracy (or some semblance thereof) was too much to pass up; this afternoon I trekked out to the local community college to caucus. I've heard from friends and news reports that most of the sites were packed; ours apparently wasn't as busy as many, but we still filled up the cafeteria they had us packed into and most of the precinct tables were completely surrounded with people. There were a number of people there who'd caucused before, but the great majority of the crowd -- I'd say a good 70% or so -- was new to the process. Our chair did a pretty good job of organizing things, but a somewhat worse job of explaining the process: several people in our group had the mistaken impression that you had to declare support for a particular candidate on the first tally, not realizing that 'Undecided' was a valid choice, and she never gave a clear description at all of the extended process (i.e., the upwards chain from the precincts to the district level, to the county level, and onward from there).

Once we broke into our individual precinct caucuses, my instinctive Geek Social Fallacy organizational skills (unfortunately) kicked in full-force. I wasn't precinct chair -- but I wound up as secretary and tally clerk; I got everyone organized, confirmed that everyone had filled out the preference sheets and that everyone who had filled out a preference was there (we had one woman who'd been in the wrong district and didn't strike out her preference when she moved, so that had to be struck), then tallied the votes and figured out how to chop our four delegates among the candidates (not that it was especially hard -- with the vote standing 16 to 5, it was an almost perfect 3 to 1 for Obama). And yes... I actually did wind up a delegate. *sheepish grin* Fortunately the conventions happen over weekends, so it won't interfere with work obligations at all. Honestly, it was a bit of an ego boost; it's hard to say how much energy I'll be able to put into it going forward (as it always is with this sort of thing), but it was incredibly flattering to have multiple people come up to me once things started breaking up and complimenting me on how well I'd kept things going. I'm looking forward immensely to the county-level convention in April... and maybe even to doing this again in eight years.

Current Mood: accomplished

Whee -- we're live!
Madness? This is, ummm, Vegas!
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/849/849337p1.html

Expect my personal thoughts on the project later...

Going live!
While I can't yet talk about the project I'm working on at work, I can say that it's going to start getting talked about very, very soon. In fact, sneak previews are starting on IGN today (going up, I believe, at about 2PM Pacific time) and they'll be running one a day all week. We'll be 'the hot new game from Surreal/Midway' or something like that. :-) Check it out!

Current Mood: hopeful

The best worst luck
So, I'm on my way down to FC. As part of the pre-trip prep, I grabbed some cash out of my bank account yesterday and some more this morning. And then this morning, I apparently left my ATM card in the machine.

:-/

This is, of course, about the worst timing for such a thing to happen, and one of the things you'd' really rather not have happen before a con. But you know something? Someone found my card and turned it in to the bank, and there weren't any additional charges on it. And I got the cash I was after for the trip -- that was the purpose of hitting the machine, after all. And I have an actual credit card (which I didn't this time last year!) and a stack of checks just in case that turns out not to be enough somehow. Really, it's an annoyance, but it's far from the calamity it could so easily have been. And I'm infinitely thankful for that, much more than I'm upset at its happening.

Current Mood: thankful

An unusual occurrence
I was playing Settlers of Catan with some friends last night, in a four-player game (physical, not XBLA, for the curious among you), and ran into an unusual situation: I was a decent ways ahead at 9 points, with nobody else threatening to win the game for several turns -- and I got into a position where I literally could not win the game. I had three settlements in a chain up the middle of the board (and out to a 3-for-1 port), all of which had been upgraded to cities, and I had largest army sewn up; but I was hemmed in on all sides so closely that there wasn't a spot for me to build another settlement, there wasn't enough space for me to take away longest road, and despite going into a frenzy of buying dev cards (including three in the last meaningful turn I took), I only scored one victory point out of them -- and then we ran out of development cards (it was an unusually-resourced game, where dev cards were fairly cheap and roads were unusually expensive thanks to a brick near-monopoly and uncooperative dice). I hit 9, but there wasn't a single way for me to rack up the one extra point I needed. It took two or three full circuits before someone else finally built a couple more settlements and revealed their victory points for the win. Has this ever happened to anyone else playing Settlers? As Jeff pointed out at the time, 'at least you know you're getting a LiveJournal post out of it!'...

Current Mood: bemused

How not to start the new year...
I got back from my parents' place Sunday afternoon; unfortunately Jeff had to work yesterday (at least a partial day), so the original game plan was for us to head out snowboarding for the New Year and take advantage of the absolutely amazing conditions. Unfortunately, my body decided to make other plans. Sunday it was a mild scratch in the throat; yesterday it was a more distinctive tickle at the back of my throat, along with a mild sniffling and an achiness, but I was already pretty sure. I knocked myself out with Nyquil last night, but it was too late; by this morning it'd blossomed into a full-bore cold, and any plans for the day were sidelined in favor of lounging around in my bathrobe all day in hopes of kicking it quickly before it impacted work. It actually seems to have worked, for the most part; I'm not feeling 100% right now, but I'm immensely better than I was earlier today, and work tomorrow should be a relatively smooth thing. Unfortunately, it wound up burning a mental break day I could've desperately used -- though I suppose the enforced glaze of a fog around my brain does qualify as a mental break of sorts. Still, definitely not the way I wanted to start off the year... and I fervently hope it doesn't set a precedent. :/

Current Mood: grouchy

Yes.

"A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face."

— Jorge Luis Borges, from the epilogue to The Maker

Current Mood: pensive

Oy, this takes me back...
Such a serious 13-year-old. For the curious, this is from 3-2-1 Contact episode 98, "Water And People". Really, it speaks for itself. :-)

Current Mood: bemused

Merry Christmas

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: "Fairytale of New York," The Pogues

Joy...
...more food: my grandmother's pierogi. My uncle's cold (and probably not homemade) kielbasa, and his shrimp platter, and his crackers and cheese. My mom's cookies (yes, again. They deserve mention twice). All the little things that pile onto themselves over the years and envelop the holiday in a snug blanket of tradition.