That unusable monstrosity that was developed "in partnership with the OpenOffice.org community" and billed as the OpenOfficeMouse?

As it happens, the mouse was apparently officially presented at the recent OOoConference in Italy to judge the reaction from the OpenOffice community, but the relationship ended there, and the mouse's creator was never given permission to market the mouse with the OpenOffice name ... Not one to be deterred, WarMouse now seems to simply be referring to the mouse as the OOMouse

Read more at engadget.

anyone else going tonight?
were going to try catch dinner in chinatown at 6:15ish
will probably shoot to be at the center front rail of the 2nd lowest/ closes section of the floor

not quite, but gettign closer!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1226147/Morrissey-storms-stage-bottle-thrown-concert-goer-hits-eye.html
*snicker*
next time fill it with petrol, parafin and a rag alight

You've seen them. The various sites on the internet where you can use real money to purchase gold for World of Warcraft. A must if you want to get that mount that lets you move slightly faster and maybe outrun monsters! These inspired similar sites for other games. Influence-trading sites for City of Heroes. Linden dollar exchange rates for Second Life. The Black Market Meat Exchange for Kingdom of Loathing.

But no one has taken it to the next level and cornered the LARP Market.

Until now.

Are you tired of being dirt poor at games, with that necessary potion or magical flamesword just out of your economic reach? Then come to LARPcoins dot com, where you can trade in your hard-earned real-life money for in-game money that you can spend on fake things! Only, since you're doing it for a LARP, those fake things are real things! Sort of! You know, without the enchantments!

Do you have a LARP in which you are no longer playing? Do you still have the copper flashings and spray-painted poker chips cluttering up the corners of your car? Sell them to us! Trade them in for money in games that you still play, or in which you would like to play. It's just that easy!

Do you need Stels, Flanges, Bits, Crowns, Farthings, Talents, Oti, Marks, Newbux, Credits, Dingles, Wollapers, Warvick Shells, Silvers, Funches, and Smees? We have them! Ask us about our $20.00 Scoop O' Gems, that are potentially valuable in some LARP somewhere!

Fire up your web browser and orient your pointer or keyboard device to LARP coins dot coooom!

Do it! Do it noooow!

When I end up in jail tomorrow, my sane friends might wonder how I lost my head.

Right now I’m standing outside my new neighbor’s door—-not with brownies and friendship, but with a metal desk lamp. It was the closest, heaviest thing to a weapon I could find, even though it’s trailing a 3-foot cord behind it and looks pretty random here in my hands. It has a nice heft though. Maybe I can bash a skull in, or two.

Now let me set you straight. I’m not generally a violent person prone to attack the next creature that crosses my path. It’s only when that creature is particularly bothersome that I go out of my way to bother it back.

Or sometimes, I do it just because it’s fun, but let’s not get off topic. The fun is mostly reserved for harassing the plethora of geese down by the lake when they are too dumb to get out of my way.

Anyway, the door of my new neighbor’s apartment looks the same as the day before, and the month before that. A dingy old door that’s scratched up and overused. It has the number 9 nailed in, a once-shiny nine that’s now faded and scraped.

The difference in the door today is the cacophony inside. I can’t tell if they’re arguing, or doing shots and getting wasted, and I don’t care. These young guys don’t give a hoot about whether they’re bothering others. They just yell and do their thing and it’s all about them.

It’s not like I never heard the women who lived here before. Two lesbian girls. The floor creaked sometimes and they shouted at each other. Shouted about twelve decibels lower than these guys are shouting right now, though. So I’m revising my definition of shouting—those girls chattered, rather than shouting. Just loud enough to make me notice but never care.

And those girls were always having fun together—yeah they were dykes but I don’t mean they were always having sex. They just liked each other and teased each other and talked together, and you could hear that fun, feminine energy from below. It buoyed me sometimes.

I live alone, and sometimes the quiet is deafening. They lightened it. To hear them laughing—it wasn’t always what I wanted to listen to, but sometimes it made me smile too. Once in a while I could hear them fuck, and that was soft and sexy—late at night, or in the kitchen in the afternoon. I’d smile and turn my music down.

These guys have a real different energy. It’s loud and booming and masculine. All that disgusting testosterone oozing down my walls. When they laugh it’s not adorable, it’s a sickening cackle or a snicker. It sounds like they’re making fun of someone or stroking their own egos, telling stories about how cool they are. I don’t have anything against men in general, but I can’t stand that attitude. It’s fucking irritating.

It’s one thing when you’re out in a bar and there’s guys. Then you expect it. They’re drinking, it’s a public place, yadda yadda. This is my home. So shut up already, jerkwads. Get your rocks off somewhere else and stop invading my sound space.

Do you need me to repeat that? Want me to shine some light on what I just said? A few good whacks with this metal lamp might just do the trick…

Back home after a very long "day" of traveling (29 hours from leaving the hotel at 2 AM to hitting my doorstop) with a real race to the gate after a customs delay with baggage in Chicago.

The most surreal experience of this year's WPC was having other competitors pinging my blog (spotted at least 4 teams having it up at different times on their laptops) and even was asked whed I'd update as we sat in the Delphin Diva lobby. Apparently, my stories are part of their in-event experiences too and not just for the readers at home.

The hosts were good about posting score updates online where we found them first before they were printed out but this isn't always the case for all hosts (which is why I now blog all events on-site so that partial results can be found by my friends and family) and having a good online site is important for any WSC/WPC host but then so many things are and each year different ones will be missed. Even if I listed standard concerns here, I no longer hope that they will be addressed since there is not even enough agreement that Slovakia had issues to do something meaningful to codify sudoku rules and standards, not just "meet in a subcommittee" to discuss. In my opinion, the quality of a competition is often well-correlated with the amount of competitive experience of the organizers - not just puzzle-solving experience but actual competition experience. The puzzles and the puzzlers should always come first, and five hour delays because instructions were not handed out is simply not acceptable by any means to me. The solution key error and its effect on Ulrich (or whichever other solver would have gotten there first if not for him) only added onto these problems, and was another unfortunate result of not testing the format/puzzles carefully for the all-important "playoff" if you are running one. This kind of problem happened in Bulgaria as well, so its not that its a new thing and its not that it couldn't be avoided.

So, after this trip, I feel I've got lots of new puzzles ideas I want to write (can you say Tapa variations?), some "What Ifs" about competition/sudoku ideas I'd love to see here, and other energy on the construction side after seeing fun puzzles in Antalya. I am 80+% committed to writing a SudokuCup for next year's pre-WSC period (in part to cover the fact I am 80+% sure I will not be constructing for the next world tournament).

But I just do not have any energy to solve puzzles competitively at this moment. After a year with a challenging Mystery Hunt experience, the disaster that was Slovakia's world sudoku "championship" where nonsensical "rules" and unsolvable "sudoku" reigned supreme, my first discovery of the direct plagiarism of my puzzles on the French national championship just before the USPC and my first discovery of blatant cheating at the USSC that combined to destroy any sense of "innocence" puzzles might have had for me, and continued unfair and disrespectful treatment of solvers at the WPC because of the need for some kind of a "secret" playoff (foreign competitors must see WRITTEN rules and well before-hand since they do not all speak English; the documents we got certainly seemed to have been typed formally after the rounds were meant to start during the many hours of delays, and then further amended as we went on), I'm still wondering where the future of competitive puzzling will lie if I don't put on a different hat for awhile and establish standards others can't be bothered to put in place. I still await some resolution on the cheating scandal at the National Sudoku Championship and will certainly report on that here. But I'm honestly beaten down after a long year with a ton of frustration, and just need a break right now.

http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=09Nov09

Some notes from the last day of the NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland, Ohio. Also: Aristotle tries to figure out what happens when self-control fails. Do facts get lost when universal premises collide and the promise of sensual pleasure takes advantage of the confusion?

The datacenter is quiet now that most of the managers and sysadmins have left, only a director, the DC Ops manager, a few Cisco people, the backup guy and myself remain.

Still have quite a bit of work to do, a ton of hours put in the last few days, but everything moved okay. Since this was a test move, lots of problems were resolved in preparation for the big move, which will consume me entirely the weekend before thanksgiving, the week of, and the weekend after.


A bid is also being made to keep me here through the week, but since I am supposed to fly home Monday night so I can work at the bank Tuesday, I think I'll get to come home. Kinda nice to be in demand, but I am exhausted.

Albuquerque is gorgeous, and a little cold at night, simple awesome at dawn and dusk (which i've seen too many of from the windows of the datacenter).

In 1662, John Graunt compiled and published Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality.

Graunt found that the average life expectancy in London was 27 years, with 65% of people dying before age 16, the vast majority due to childhood infectious diseases ...

Via Respectful Insolence.

http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=08Nov09

Some notes and photos from the first full day of the NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland, Ohio. Also: Aristotle continues to try to understand self-control and its absence, and contrasts his view with that of Socrates. Does this have anything to do with hypocrisy?

Happy Whelpday to razor_wulff!

Short version: WPC happened.

Longer version:
Today did not get off to a good start as we battled a mosquito or two in our room at night - basically without working AC, we had the windows open at night to sleep and at 3-4 am the likely bug problem arose. So not restful sleep, and not a quick start to the day. As already stated, there were about 5 hours from the announced start of the team finals at 10 am and when they actually started; the late start also meant no break between team finals and individual finals.

I already commented before, after the disastrous WSC in Zilina, that the rules for the playoffs should not be a super privileged secret and here the organizer's first flaw - after two days of incredible puzzles and mostly sound round design aside from the unavoidable timing issues - was not just delaying the rules meeting from last night, but not having printed rules when they started. Even with an unclear top 12 or top 4 teams the night before, there were only a handful of extra people in the running and a meeting could be held with all potentials so that the actual event could get started on time. Here, even after the delay, not having a printed copy of a complicated set of rules was further problematic as it led to a lot of competitor questions and further unclear answers. So, after several more hours of waiting, we finally got a printed list of 28 puzzle types that would occur in both playoffs and a list of the timing and tiebreaking rules for the event. Still, we'd never receive info on what puzzles would appear in any round before it started - it was a mystery revealed in the packet - and this did not help me either strategize or mentally prepare for the type of challenges I should do. Having to instantly react to seeing 5 types and remembering what some of them were and knowing which ones to solve, when already not in my best state of mind, led to some poor decisions.

The team playoffs finally started at ~2:45, when the individual finals were initially intended to be finished. First, the Czech Republic faced Japan and we learned some about the desk matching format which let us figure out how we would play the next team. When Japan prevailed, to maintain their ranking over 4th, we decided to match the Japanese competitors at their desks in alphabetical order (for various reasons such as to match their strongest Hideaki Jo with Zack and the rest of us against fairer match-ups). I had my best of the playoff rounds I was in today, getting through 3 of the 5 challenges in 18 minutes before stalling and breaking the Magnets. The 5th puzzle was a challenging "puzzle" about finding the lowest unreachable positive integer (LOUPI) using a set of 4 numbers and any operations (with some other rules). It would actually appear in all the team rounds, and never go solved to my knowledge by any member of any team in any of its iterations as it takes way too long to sort through so many possible numbers and even when you think you have an answer you can't know (and didn't, for just this type, get a second entry chance).

So, with H.Jo beating Zack, and the rest of us winning our desks, the US team held its spot in 2nd for the moment at 3-1.

The Germans then had the desk control and time edge, with Ulrich as 3rd alphabetically being kingmaker with the option to pick either me or Wei-Hwa (the 3rd and 4th alphabeticaly on our team with an empty seat meaning me and Wei-Hwa's table the other choice). Their first players matched desks and then Ulrich set-up the "dream match-up" against me leaving Philipp Weiss as Wei-Hwa's opponent. I was glad to have the chance to face Ulrich in this setting, but not glad to be solving like I was brain-dead and without much sleep in 5 days. After my one good solve of a latin-square/shape Ikebana puzzle where I made back some time on Ulrich, I broke (and never finished) the Scale Sudoku several times. Even knowing the main 3-cage to 1-cage comparison to use, and how it applied to some of the cages, I missed the possibility in column 8 I needed to fill it. I really wonder if the sudoku grid size (and the puzzle grid size in general) was not helping my scanning or thinking. It should be noted, as no one but us could see the puzzles we were solving, that I found it odd every grid was now 2x the size we had seen in past days when solving and in the sudoku at least I know this affected me. I switched to the pentomino packing puzzle instead of the sudoku after 2 attempts, and despite checking all 12 shapes, had managed to tweak an X to an F and not fix an easily satisfied 1 constraint. So, a 1 minute penalty followed by a 3 second fix. As time ended, still with a hopeless scale sudoku, Ulrich had soundly demonstrated his ability at 4-2. The match-ups had actually worked out for the Germans in all cases so a clear new world champion team was here on display in Antalya.

All this action brings to mind the question of why a 2-hour long team playoff was needed to not change the rankings at all. It at least showed the team playoff style was a good means of proving team depth and strength as already awarded after day 2 where gaps between all rankings were already established.

After a quick transition to the individual rounds, Wei-Hwa competed in the first heat but failed to advance with problems in puzzle selection and solution execution being his downfall. I was in the 4th desk in the second heat, with Zoltan Horvath and Peter Hudak moving up to join our group of Hideaki Jo, Nikola Zivanovic, and Philipp Weiss. As I've mentioned before we did not know the puzzle types in an individual round until we opened the envelope and here at least the Anglers jumped out as a good choice. I was a bit rusty at getting the checkerboard constraints matched quickly but the solution was found somewhat efficiently. I then went to another latin-square like puzzle with row/column constraints called Range and despite seeing the way through, wrote a 36 instead of a 35 early on the right path to get an answer with all but 1 cell. I erased and started again and apparently made a similar error again. The third time through I finally solved it, but this certainly was my first fatal mistake since "banking" puzzles soonest would win tiebreakers if no one finished the round (and in general no one was finishing any round in the team playoffs or here). I then went to a corral-like variant (I forget its name), solved it in about 90 seconds which was nice, checked the constraints, somehow counted a 6-sized region as 7, and turned in another error. Again, my paper came back for a 1 minute penalty. 3 seconds later it was back to the judge. In a 30 minute round I could not stand to lose this time or momentum. With my Japanese Arrow solution interrupted, I think I lost the path. I got close to an answer but tweaked for 5 minutes and got farther and farther from it leaving me with just 3 done and what I think is 7th place. Again, fatigue and errors from day 2 forward compromised the skills I know I can show in a single 2.5 hour tournament at home like an OAPC or USPC.

So I left to drop off some things and was frankly tired (it being nearly dinner time now before the finals started) and eventually came back to observe great controversy (again! - can any competition conclude cleanly?). Ulrich, with a large head-start, had gotten to a good start in the round when, about midway through, he turned in a solution that was adjudicated as wrong after a minute. When this happened to me, it was easy to check and find the mistake and turn it back in. Getting a wrong paper is itself really discouraging, but you can often find the mistake. Here, Ulrich spent time and energy looking over his puzzle and could not find the mistake because there wasn't one. The answer key itself was wrong, and the judge - just checking one grid against another - did not spot the issue in the key and therefore could not prevent the complete round problem from unfolding. Ulrich raised his strong concern of incorrect grading (he similarly had to do this when encountering the error in Bulgaria's semi-final Star Battle). His distress at the mistake, and how it would affect the final if it was allowed to continue (it had been stopped) was clear. What to do was not. A long meeting was held with many captains. A decision was announced to continue with a 2 minute restart time for Ulrich (after 15 minutes of the announcement) was made. An additional error - Peter Hudak had not been given the right time for his start - was also mentioned which led to me rolling my eyes once again at playoff incompetency unfolding in an unreal way. After continued discussion of Ulrich with organizers, more huddling happened, and it was eventually decided that a new set of finals puzzles, mostly of the same types, would be used in a rerun. At dinner, Wei-Hwa and I would join some other solvers in testing these extensively and I was tasked with going through a Kropki Sudoku which needed some tweaking and fixing to get simpler which Wei-Hwa and I helped with. In the end, now as we sat at dinner tables, the finals reran and Ulrich clearly repeated as WPC champion so a fair resolution to another potential disaster happened here.

I'm still left with a lot of doubts about the ability of the WPF to organize a fair competition when so much is left on the host nation's themselves and standards are not being enforced (if they even exist, which is honestly not clear to me after recent events). Some of the simple issues I mentioned in my open letter after this years 'WSC', like the unclear rules for these playoffs that were not given to competitors in advance leading to 5 hours of delays shows me that there are serious problems with competition standards that are not being addressed by organizers. I'm honestly still really angry about the WSC fiasco and am currently not enthused to perform in any puzzle competition next year outside of the 94306 zipcode or a 1 hour drive. I also continue to persist that I should start my own online puzzle site, and possibly also start to contribute - as the OAPC team did for nine months this year - to online contests to rank top solvers and constructors in the world. The WPC community grasped onto the excellent OAPC puzzles and I'd hope they would similarly welcome anything I could offer for solvers in the coming year.

So, all in all, a WPC with phenomenal puzzles and a lot of great additions like the run up of monthly OAPCs to introduce a lot of the new Turkish types in a competitive context, but still consistent and disappointing flaws in playoff execution that leads to both increased and possibly needless stress for the finalists. If there is no doubt after the individual standings that one solver is the best, and if there are few in the audience (at least during the team playoffs), given a format that is hardly interactive and frankly way way too long, what is the point of these playoffs? After 2 days, the Germans were clearly first as was Ulrich. They both ended up winning. If only any considerations were given to order of finish at a WSC.... I do not believe the board frankly wants or can address my concerns with that event, so I don't know when I will see many of my foreign friends again, but for now goodbye and safe travels.

The other day, my roommate and former friend Polaris Kyo skipped out of our apartment in Austin rather than pay his rent, taking all his stuff with him and trashing the place before leaving, even as I am already getting off of the lease. He damaged his door and also left the dishwasher dismantled. Additionally, he took some personal items of a mutual friend that did not belong to him.

Right now my landlady and I are trying to find him to be probably joined by law enforcement due to the theft and vandalism.

I am posting this here because I know many in the Burningman community will know Polaris from Burningman, Flipside (he snuck in every year apparently rather than paying)and Art Outside. I am asking for help in tracking him down, as Orwellian as I know that must sound.

Polaris is a sociopath. He used me, many of my friends, and most who got to know him well, and if someone does'nt put a stop to this, he will use someone else and hurt them in the way he hurt me and many other people in his life who selflessly tried to help him.

If you know where he might be staying, or headed, or have any information that could help find him, please contact me.

Thanks.

Following a weird round without instructions, we are now 3.5 hours late at even starting the team finals as the instructions are late and not printed - the oral English descriptions are neither perfectly fair for all teams nor perfectly clear. We do have over two dozen puzzle types that might show up, and a slight idea what will occur during the team rounds (4 individual head to head matches will occur with 3 versus 4, winner versus 2, winner versus 1) but that will take two hours and be tiring before the individual playoffs start which will also take two hours and be tiring. I'm at least 6th individually, so I only have 2 heats to get through although a huge time advantage to overcome in the finals if I make it.

So I'm not sure what day it actually is, except I have a feeling I have 3 minutes to post, to hit Friday in the west coast. These three combined puzzles were first written as part of a birthday hunt for Wei-Hwa last summer; there is a solution "word" but it is not a further instruction so when you have it you are done. If Four Winds/Nurikabe are not instantly familiar, use Google.

(This jpg is the best image format I can do while on the road from the files I have - an updated form may be here next week.)

http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=07Nov09

Some photos from the opening day of the NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland, Ohio. Also: how do people come to behave badly even when they know better? Aristotle addresses the problem of self-control.