Pressed Rat and Warthog

Blech, I'm not enjoying marking this weekend. The prof for the first year calculus course "accidentally" made an assignment harder than it should have been. He asked we two markers which wanted to do it, with the promise that future assignments would be shorter. I volunteered, because I didn't have any discrete assignments to mark this weekend, and I figured I'd rather get the work over with sooner than later. Well, it took me about 4.5 hours to mark the first page of the four pages of solutions, so things were looking grim. I've burned through the second page quite a bit quicker, though, and it looks like the whole assignment will take around 16 or 17 hours to finish (still a heck of a lot longer than it should be taking).

I'm not taking a third course this term, but Adam is getting me started on my research project this term rather than in the summer. So far, I'm supposed to be reading some articles to find some inspiration, but I've been slacking off a little bit. I have, however, found a few sites with some reading material on combinatorial game theory. Interesting stuff, but I wouldn't say I'm "passionate" about it. I'd better find something I enjoy for my research project.

Adam bought the second power plant deck for Power Grid the other day. We went to the local game store on Wednesday and asked the owner (Drew) if he could order it for us, and he had it in the store by Friday afternoon! That's a pretty quick turnaround; I'm impressed. It wasn't too expensive either. I saw that they had Ra in stock again, but they've knocked the price up by another three dollars.

Power Grid is Adam's favourite game, and he pretty much goads to play it whenever possible. It's a great game, but I'm getting a little sick of playing the same game so many times in a short time (see: Settlers of Catan, Liar's Dice, Saboteur). I'm *still* waiting to get a sizable new audience to my games nights. It seems that just about every week, I have 7 people. If I could get 8 or 9, I could break into two games easily (since I have a fair number of games good for 4 or 5), but people seem less willing to break into a group of 4 and a group of 3. Well, I guess I should be thankful that I'm getting that many to begin with; 7 is better than 6. Now if I could only convince people from my classes to show up (they all say that they will, but never come!).

I had a hankering the other day to start playing Final Fantasy 12. Argh! I hate when that happens! I still don't have nearly enough time to start playing a meaty game like that! And then of course, when I actually have some free time to play games, I probably won't be in the mood for playing anything. Oh well, c'est la vie!

Well, time for some sleep. There's some A&W breakfast waiting for me tomorrow morning!

Listening to... Opeth - Serenity Painted Death
Link of the moment... Some fresh Super Smash Brothers Brawl gameplay videos

But first, an apology

Before I forget, I'd like to issue a formal apology to Andrew for berating his lack of rules knowledge when it came to Cities and Knights of Catan. It turns out I've been playing a number of rules incorrectly in Power Grid. Though there's not much behind the actions the players take in the game, the housekeeping can be a lot to keep track of. There are a lot of details in that game that are easy to overlook.

I was supposed to have my first class today, but the Ryan building was closed today due to a burst water main. The class was only going to be a ten minute "here's the outline, read these chapters for next week" thing, so the prof just sent the two of us an email (yeah, another huge class of two). Thus, my first real class will be the Graduate seminar tomorrow morning. I'll have to make sure to coerce some of my classmates into showing up to this week's game night. I ran into Chris and his girlfriend at a new year's eve shag, and they both mentioned that they were looking forward to playing some games, so I expect them to show up at least a few times.

Adam has made the bold statement that Power Grid is his favourite game, and that can be evidenced by the 10+ plays it's had in the last few weeks. I think I've only racked up two wins so far, and I always seem to make some pretty bad plays every time I play.

I started a new game of Disgaea. I've completely set aside any magic casting characters since they're a pain to level up, and opting for a beat-em-up team. One thing I've noticed about that game is that it's very easy to spend way more time playing it than you originally may have intended. I've racked up about 15 hours of playtime since I started it three days ago (hey, I'm trying to milk as much out of my free time as I can while I still have some!).

The other day, I made the mistake of drawing a comparison between X-Men Legends and Guild Wars. In doing so, I re-lit my spark for Guild Wars, and further fueled my hope that I can get Adam into it (since he seems to enjoy playing XML). The original game is only $30, with no monthly fees. For that price, you get some pretty good bang for your buck.

I had an urge the other day to buy a new computer. There was a computer on the Future Shop website that included a QUAD-core processor, 3GB of RAM, a 400GB hard drive, and a 19" widescreen monitor for a grand sum of $800. By the time I noticed, they were sold out. I'd still be a little wary buying a computer from a box store. I'd rather know that I have higher quality components than having to deal with the hassle of trying to replace crappy components that are jam packed into the case. Case-in-point, Adam's power supply died on his old Dell, and the spare power supply I had sitting around wouldn't fit into his computer since the old supply was sized specifically for a bracket in the case. Sure, you get a great computer for $800, but after a few years, you'll likely have to spend another $500 (as well as a ton of aggravation) to keep it up and running. I think I'll stick with my plan of getting a new computer when I'm done my masters degree (when I'll likely be moving away to get a job in, you know, a *real* city).

Listening to... Metric - Dead Disco
Link of the moment... David Blaine parody (heads up, foul language)

Did you think I was dead?

Hey, look at that. I *didn't* forget how to put up a post in my blog. It's been so long I figured I'd have lost the knowledge. I'm quite surprised myself that I would be on a 2 month hiatus from posting. I guess I don't really have much of an excuse, either, though most of my November was spent on schoolwork. Most of my December has been spent on sloth. Ever since I handed in my takehome exam for algebra, I've just been doing as little as possible.

Hm, now which events from the last two months should I discuss? I went on my trip to Waterloo a few weeks ago, and that was fun. I stayed with Andrew the first few days, and Hugh for the last leg of the trip. We had a four hour game of Cities and Knights of Catan that was rife with inaccurate rules since Andrew had never read the rules in any great detail.

I had that party that I mentioned in the last post, and it went off without a hitch. Lots of people showed up, everyone had a great time, and it didn't take much effort to clean up the next day. I'll be sure to do it again sometime next term.

Hey, here's some big news: I've started drinking! Not as a hobby, or anything, but I don't refuse to drink anymore. I realized a while ago that I didn't really have a good reason to *not* drink, but I felt like I needed an occasion to start. I didn't want my first drink to be anticlimactic. I decided that Phil being in town was a good enough reason to celebrate. Since then, though, I've decided I don't really like the taste of alcohol, and the last few times I've had drinks it's made me pretty queasy, so at least now I have an excuse if someone offers me a libation. Plus on top of that, I'm still a cheapskate, so I'm not willing to buy my own booze often. At the moment, Adam keeps making new and disgusting drinks with what I have sitting in my bar. The only thing that I've enjoyed so far is the Amaretto Sour.

Phil is back in town again (yes, he's visited *twice* since the last time I made a post), and he and Adam are more or less living out of my house. We've been playing lots of Power Grid and Nexus Ops, some Guitar Hero, and we started playing X-Men Legends (very fun multiplayer game). I've been staying up til 5 or 6 the last few nights; I haven't seen much sunlight lately. At least I'll be well seasoned for New Year's Eve.

I didn't get anything extremely noteworthy for Christmas besides a Bohnanza expansion (from Sheena and Dan), and Super Paper Mario and Metroid Prime 3 for Wii. I was sort of hoping to get Super Mario Galaxy, but it'll still be waiting for me once I play the two games I got.

I attended a games afternoon the other day at the game store with Doug, a guy I met via BGG. I invited all of my friends to come, but none came. I'm willing to bet that Sheena and Dan would have, if they were in town. Regardless, I had fun. We played Incan Gold, Citadels, Bang (twice), and Munchkin. I'm not really a huge fan of any of those games, but I wasn't about to bitch and whine about it since it wasn't really my event. I sent an email inviting all of them to come to my games nights. I'm anticipating a pretty nice turnout to my games nights, but of course I've said that in the past only to have the usual 5 or 6 show up. If all goes well, Doug and his friends will come, and up to 6 people from my classes will start coming out as well. Hopefully Dan's two brothers will start coming as well. If I could get enough for two tables on a regular basis, that would probably be ideal.

Well, that's as much as I'm willing to write about at the moment, so I'll end it around here. I make no promises about when another post will show up, but hopefully I can get back into the habit of making a public journal of events in my life that next to no one cares about.

Listening to... Foo Fighters - Come Back
Link of the moment... Please do yourself a favour and watch all of these game reviews. HILARIOUS!

"The goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning."

MAKE IT STOP! Goodness gracious, I've been overloaded with work for quite a bit longer than I'd prefer. See, I do an average of five hours per week of TA duties in two different courses, but last weekend (that is to say, about a week and a half ago), I got stuck with nearly 20 hours of marking to do (though this *in theory* means that I'll have less work to do in these courses later in the term). As a result, I had to get an extension on an assignment, and everything got thrown off kilter (it doesn't help that I had only a week to prepare my second lecture for my seminar course). Since then, I've been logging exactly how many hours I put into marking so that I don't work any more than I'm supposed to.

I got together with Chris (a fourth year undergrad in two of my courses) to work on an assignment that is due tomorrow morning (the one we got an extension on), and we made little to no progress in the two hours we worked on it. On top of that, I have the regularly scheduled assignment due on Wednesday that I have only barely started working on. Oh, right, and then I've got that lecture to give on Thursday afternoon that's not done yet.

Mind you, I have had my fair share of distractions this weekend. I had Thanksgiving dinner, of course, and after that I played my second game of Power Grid with Dan, Sheena, and Trevor again. Sheena pulled off a fairly decisive win this time, and I was left once again not really knowing what I did to lose. Also, Sheena had some people over to her place for some Singstar (as two new song collections have come out recently). I got a hold of Holly, and she came with me. She knew the words to lots of the songs, which I suppose is a side effect of working at the radio station.

I've got some plans to have a party at my house at the beginning of next month. My plan is to drag another TV downstairs, and have multiple games going on: Singstar in one room, Guitar Hero in another (GH3 is released at the end of October), and Wii Sports somewhere in between. If I can find another TV and convince Grant to let me borrow his Gamecube, then I can even have some GC games going on as well (SSBM, Mario Party, etc). Someone pointed out that it would be like those "fun days" in elementary school where you get the day off to play different games set up at different stations. I'm quite looking forward to it, so hopefully there won't be too many conflicts with the date I choose.

Listening to... Muse - Knights of Cydonia
Link of the moment... Feel free to peruse the lecture notes I've prepared for my lectures.

Woohoo! 14 hour sleep!

So, the other day I decided that going to bed at 4 AM probably wasn't going to work well with my school schedule, so I resolved to do something about it. Of course, you can't just shift your sleep schedule back 4 hours on a whim, so my plan was to pull an all-nighter and then go to bed early the next night. I wound up staying up for an entire 32ish hours without any sleep (well actually, I sort of passed out around hour 30 for ten or fifteen minutes). I went to bed that night at 9:30, and slept 14 hours straight (I probably could have kept going if my dad didn't wake me up). Unfortunately, I don't think it fixed my sleep schedule all that much, but it was a fun little experience.

I placed an order for my board games the other day. I'm still waiting for one to get in stock, but it will probably ship within the next week or so. When choosing games to buy, I tried to get a game that would fill every need I have. I got Power Grid for a heavy game, Citadels for 4-7 people, For Sale as a quick filler game, Coloretto for another filler, Shadows Over Camelot for a good thematic game, and San Juan for a fairly deep 2-3 player game.

I think it's interesting that ever since I've put serious thought into placing an order for games online, my list of "must haves" has changed quite a bit. The first game I really wanted to buy was Alhambra, and I've since changed my mind to buying San Juan as a substitute. I was also very intent on buying Category 5, but it didn't make the cut either.

I've transformed the back room into a games room now (well, it has other purposes, but what I mean is that my tables are permanently set up in there). The lighting is a bit better in there, and there's a bit more elbow room, but there are a few nitpicky drawbacks. The fridge and microwave are now no longer within sight, and I have to shuffle chairs around quite a bit to seat everyone. We'll see how I like the setup in a few weeks.

John's in town this weekend for a wedding and most of next week as well. I can only assume I'll see him tomorrow. It'll be fun to hang out with him again.

Listening to...
Link of the moment...