Day: August 13, 2010

The feathery toy and the ceiling fan

I ended up just tying the thread directly to the headless feathery toy. That way it doesn’t have enough weight to throw around effectively (which is a good thing, since it means there’s not enough weight for it to bother Talore if I throw it at her), but it’s still interesting enough to chase.

Also with it that light, I can hang it from the ceiling fan (clothes pinned to the outside edge) and not only is it too light to damage anything it hits, but it mostly hangs toward the center of the fan since it has so much drag for its weight. If Talore actually catches it well enough it comes unclipped (that’s happened once) and the clothespin flies off somewhere, but she almost never manages to grab it.

Solved

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I figured out a way to do the step that I was stuck on for the 5x5x5 rubik’s cube last Saturday.  Tonight I finally got around to timing a solve.  It took me 18:43.31, no inspection time, but I completely botched the end of a step and spent a couple minutes recovering.  I don’t think I’ll be practicing that one as much as the three, though I may go look up a faster method for solving big cubes, and I will be doing a few more timed runs at some point to see if I can improve on that time.

I also managed a 3x3x3 time of 37.69 seconds today. Combination of a very lucky start (maybe 4 turns to finish the first step), and a skipped later step. Later on I improved my 3 of 5 average by a few seconds (without even using the 37s solve), but I don’t know if either is fast enough to reclaim 2nd place on the board at work.

My 2x2x2 cube has finally been dug out of the pile of stuff it was in and reassembled. I ordered replacement stickers for it since it’s been blank for over a year now (the clearish plastic stickers it came with were terrible, red and orange looked the same to me).  I might get a new 2x2x2 cube too if I can’t get the one I have (Rubik’s Ice Cube) to turn a bit better. My impression is that the plastic is too stiff and has no flex, but it could just be that the lack of springs means everything is held together too tightly for it to rotate as freely as I’d like.