Month: September 2010

Cube races

We’ve got a new way to race rubik’s cube solving. The old way was just to have everyone start solving at the same time and keep track of the order people finished in. That’s not near an even race with six or seven people, so the order of finishing was mostly set before it started. Now we’re doing relay solving, where we split into two teams and the teams race each other, solving in sequence.

Friday at the end of the day was my first chance to join in the fun. I suspect the teams would have been more balanced (or at least easier to balance) with Jeremy there instead of me like it’s been the previous times they raced like that, but the first round was pretty close. The most entertaining part was when Ryan showed up in the lab with the cube transport, meaning he had a lunchbox with everyone’s cube in it so nobody would have to walk through the halls just carrying a rubik’s cube. I always take my backpack to work and carry my cube (and lunch) in that.

I don’t feel like my rubik’s cube times have been improving lately because my timed runs (of which there haven’t been all that many) haven’t come close to my best time or even consistently faster than my 3 of 5 average. On the other hand, my average seems to be approaching my 3 of 5 average very slowly, so eventually I’ll probably get lucky and beat it if I do enough solves.

My efficiency is improving on my slow solves at least, and I’ve had several solves where I made less than 60 moves. If I could just learn to spot things faster I might be able to use move optimizations for speed.

Well-used toy

I had trouble getting a good picture of it, but Talore has thoroughly mangled the toy that’s on the end of the elastic cord. She’s also bitten through the cord another two times, putting the knot count at 4. I had trouble getting a good picture of the toy. This was the best I managed and it didn’t turn out as well as I’d like.

It looks like the fur on the back of the toy was mostly just glued on. There’s one edge that’s still holding on, and a sewed seam in the middle that’s starting to come apart, but the toy is dangerously close to losing it’s tail (and half it’s fur). The plastic body is also so dented and punctured that it doesn’t rattle very well anymore.

I generally try to keep my clean clothes cat-hair free, by which I mean I close them in my closet and don’t let Talore in there. Today after I put a load of clothes in the washing machine I turned around to see Talore stretched out in the empty clothes basket. For how short a time she was in it she managed to deposit a good bit of cat hair, and all of it is clinging to the plastic rather well. It’s surprising that she even went near it in the first place, considering when I first got Talore I trapped her in the upside down clothes basket a couple times and she didn’t appreciate that at all.

Speaking of not appreciated, I attempted to give Talore a bath (or really just get her entirely wet and towel her off) in my kitchen sink today. She’s got a stripe down the middle of her back that occasionally gets a bit matted, and I’m pretty sure the reason for that is that she usually bathes on top of the bookshelf in my bedroom but the shelf isn’t wide enough for her to twist far enough to reach that spot on her back while being perched comfortably. It turns out my sink isn’t nearly deep enough since she absolutely refused to be forced to lay down. I was able to hold Talore mostly in the sink without her getting panicky, but she wouldn’t relax at all. I couldn’t even dunk her tail because when I tried she’d try to sidestep her back legs out of the sink and I’d have to use both hands to hold her (I really didn’t want a wet cat fleeing across my bed to the bookshelf). I could have almost completely submerged her if I flipped her over on her back, but doing that normally causes her to struggle and I figured trying it in water would result in claws coming out. In the end it worked out well enough – she was wet enough that I managed to briefly swipe a damp towel over her back before she bolted (to next to the dining room table) and went to lick all the water off. From the noises she made I think wrapping her up in the towel bothered her as much as the sink mostly full of water. No pictures because I didn’t want any electronics near a wet cat.

If I try that again it’ll have to be a shower, but ever since she poked her head around the shower curtain and got a face full of water she’s avoided the bathroom in the mornings. Actually, Talore tolerated the water far better than most descriptions/videos online of bathing a cat indicate can be expected. She complained a bit at the start, but was quiet so long as I was talking to her and petting her head with my dry hand (as I held her in place by keeping my hand in front of her face). Reading about what preparations I should have made (which would have mostly been unnecessary) I should bathe her in the bathtub with somewhat deeper water than I had in the sink. At least I had the water temperature right (somewhat warm). Watching vocal cats given baths got Talore to come looking for the tormented cat, which doesn’t usually happen when I watch videos of cats, even loud ones.

I had to go shopping today, and since it was getting late I got a bacon cheese burger from Wendy’s on the way home. Talore was rather interested in the smell of it, but I wouldn’t let her have any while I was eating it. Once I’d nearly finished it off I let her swipe the long strip of bacon that had fallen out. She took it out of my sight, but she managed to eat about half of it and came back around the corner licking the sauce off her face around her mouth.

The Way of Kings

Despite it being a holiday weekend I feel like I got less done than I do on normal weekends. On the other hand, the book I read this weekend was over a thousand pages long (1001 not counting the appendix), which is a bit more than I usually read in a day and a half.

Brandon Sanderson‘s new book (The Way of Kings) came out last Tuesday, but considering the length of the book I figured I was better off waiting till I could spend all day reading so I wouldn’t stay up all night before a work day. As it turned out I didn’t need to worry about that for probably the first half of the book since it wasn’t hard to put down (it was good, but paced slow enough I wasn’t rushing through it), but by the end there wasn’t a chance of me taking a break. By Saturday night I was far enough into the book that I kept putting off going to bed for one more chapter till 2:30 in the morning and was late to church, so waiting till the weekend wasn’t the perfect strategy for managing that. I very much enjoyed the book, but I haven’t yet read a Brandon Sanderson book that I didn’t enjoy.

Brandon Sanderson has written a couple standalone fantasy novels (Elantris and Warbreaker), the Mistborn trilogy, and a young adult series (Alcatraz) that I haven’t read. He was also chosen to finish writing the Wheel of Time story from Robert Jordan’s notes and has finished the first two of the last three books (only one is already published).

I’ll try to keep this spoiler free. If you want to know the plot you should read the book.

Way of Kings is the first book in the Stormlight Archive, which Amazon claims will be 10 books but I thought was planned to be fewer than that. Considering how epic fantasy stories tend to go, the planned number of books is probably just a lower bound anyways, and we won’t know how many books the series is until the last one is being written. On the other hand, my understanding is that each book is going to focus on different main characters, so depending on how rigidly that’s planned out it might be kept to the planned number of books (though books could be published in multiple volumes or other characters could get viewpoints I guess).

I felt that the book stood on its own fairly well in terms of ending in a decent stopping point. In terms standing on it’s own by explaining everything it was perfect, but it’s the first book in the series so everything you’re expected to know can be gotten from this book. I don’t consider the ending to be a major cliff hanger, but it definitely left me wanting to read more of the story.

It’s the most bold start to a series that I can think of in terms of giving a broad view of the world, and it followed three plot lines (the way I counted them, with interludes ignored and flashbacks counted as the plot thread of the character they were about) which also is quite a start. Compared to what the Wheel of Time has become that’s not so much, but The Eye of the World at least started with limited plot threads and just followed characters that started together and were going to the same place. Of the three plot threads in WoK, two largely happened in the same area, but the third was mostly independent.

The book was split into parts with a few one-off viewpoints between most parts. Those interludes did a lot for the world-building by showing glimpses of other parts of the world, but most of them had little to do with the plots of the book (at least not as far as we see the main threads in this book). Several of the interludes were rather humorous though: in what other world can a character call the grass retarded and be able to justify the claim?

There were only two sets of “magical” abilities revealed to any degree, and while both were important in places neither was a focus for most of the book. Magical items, on the other hand, were fairly common and heavily used by some characters. Most of Sanderson’s magic systems are very well and rigidly explained (which is part of what I like about them), but for the first book in a series leaving most in mystery is expected. That wasn’t entirely the case with WoK, but I thought the balance of what was explained worked pretty well. I will be rereading parts of the book in an attempt to pick up more of the systems now that I’ve finished it, since I always miss some details the first time through, especially when I’m pushing to the end.