Category: Twisty Puzzles

The weekend

Instead of her usual waking me up at 6 something by meowing insistently in the other room, Talore woke me up at 7 this morning by sitting with her head 6 inches in front of mine purring loudly at me, then as soon as I went to pet her she retreated out of reach.

I finally uncovered my chairs yesterday (I had boxes and stuff on them to keep Talore from picking at the fabric of the cushions).  She still picks at them occasionally, but if I look at her and say “No” she stops.  Talore doesn’t seem to mind that they lean back now (when I first got her she wouldn’t even stand on them) since she both walks all over them and has gone to sleep on one.  She either walks up the chair next to it or just jumps to get to the cat bed I have next to the balcony window where it’s high enough to see over the railing.

Half of the clothes pin I have the feathery toy tied to is missing.  I had it clipped on the fan above Talore yesterday, but she eventually just ignored it and went to sleep.  At that point I figured I might as well take it off the fan so it wouldn’t keep swishing by, but I forgot I had the fan on lowest instead of medium and pulled the cord twice.  At full speed the thread caught on the pull chain, wound up, and popped the clothes pin off the fan blade.  The clothespin twisted coming off and one side came out from under the spring that held it together and the side with the spring flew off, hit the wall, and fell behind something.  I wasn’t paying attention to what direction the sound came from and I haven’t found it yet.

Talore now is quite willing to tolerate going in the cat carrier in return for a cat treat.  For probably a week I would put her in it, then feed her a cat treat (after she got out to start with, then while she was in it when she was used to it enough to not be in panic/escape mode).  At first I figured it was at least giving me practice at getting her in when she didn’t want to go, but she did start getting used to it somewhat.  This last week I’ve been sitting her in front of it, then putting a treat in the carrier and waiting there till she went in to get it.  I have to hold her in front of it so she doesn’t wander away (she’ll sneak back and take it while I’m not looking if I let her leave), but she has now entered the carrier several times without me having to force her in.  Next step is to get her to go in, then feed her the cat treat, though I don’t know if she’ll go for that.

I spent a couple hours working on my rubik’s cubes yesterday.  My average time on the 5x5x5 is 14:36 minutes with four solves.  I should have kept track of the time for each step of solving it, and I know I’m getting faster at the first ones (the ones unique to the 5 cube, or at least to big cubes).  Still, it takes so long to scramble and solve it’s hard to work on it much.  For the 3 cube I went to update my time when I got to work on Friday and was just in time to see Tom updating his times.  His (newly updated) single best was one second faster than mine, and his 3 of 5 was three or four seconds faster.  Calvin still has us both beat, but we’re catching up since he hasn’t been improving his times.  That was part of what prompted over an hour spent on the 3 cube yesterday, but I think I’ve finally got a solid second place single solve time with a 29.13s solve.  It didn’t seem spectacularly lucky when I was doing it till the last step so if I hadn’t been using a timer that keeps a log I’d have thought I accidentally touched it and restarted it during the solve, but considering I had gotten a few solves that nearly matched my previous record that weren’t lucky solves I shouldn’t have been too surprised.  Unfortunately I was getting great times (sub 45s) about once every 5 solves with mostly mediocre times (of 50-55) around them so I only dropped my 3 of 5 by half a second.  It seems like fast solves are now more dependent on me spotting the last steps quickly and not messing up the new algorithms I know than they are on getting a good start.

Also: “something negative about Emee”  I was assured that if I posted that Emee would hear about it.  I’m sure that’s not what Dad meant, but I couldn’t resist.

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.

Visitors

A few people from my Sunday school group at church visited today.  I still have some of the (less appetizing) candy they brought last time, but the chocolate in this batch isn’t contaminated (with nuts or caramel).  When they knocked on the door Talore ran to see what the noise was.  I can’t figure out why that noise caused her to run to it, while noises like the AC coming on caused her to jump and look for someplace to hide when I first got her.  When they came in Talore wasn’t so sure she wanted to have anything to do with them, though she did get close enough to be petted.  I also got her to chase the laser pointer dot while they were here, but she was overly jumpy till they left and spent some time hiding in my bedroom and behind a chair.

I’m going to have to start running the Roomba daily again.  Apparently every other day isn’t often enough to not have cat hair completely obscure all the moving parts when it runs.  It’s amazing how much hair cats shed while never appearing to be missing any.  Hopefully Talore will keep a bit more of it in the winter.

When Talore is moving around on my desk and gets in the way (or starts creeping up on my plate of food) I tend to slide her back to the spot she has cleared off on the end.  It generally works well enough because her feet don’t get much traction on the desk surface, but I have to keep her claws trimmed since she leaves long scratches when they aren’t.  She finally stopped laying down/sitting between my keyboard and monitors, though now she occasionally just lays down on my keyboard.  At least she doesn’t generally do that while I’m in the middle of something.

All that remains of the feathery toy (till I find glue that sticks) is a plastic nub on the end of a thread.  Talore was quite willing to chase and attack it at first, but yesterday she got in front of it when I tossed it and got bonked on the nose pretty hard apparently.  Before it had hit the ground (from the chair she was in) she had made it over the back of the chair and was well on her way to my bedroom looking back to see if it was chasing.  Since then she’ll hit it if it’s on the ground, but the moment it leaves the ground she’s out of the way.

While I was looking for the large bottle of elmer’s glue I was left in college (leftover from a certain Halloween costume) I found my old rubik’s cube.  I’m sure I cleaned and lubricated it before I gave up on it, but it’s in pretty bad shape for speedcubing.  It’s nice and loose, but turning it feels like the plastic is grating against each other, despite the fact that it appears to be at least partially worn smooth when I take it apart.  I guess I got a new one for more than just the fact that the old one had peeling stickers.

According to the site I learned to cube from (http://lar5.com/cube) I should be solving the first two layers (f2l) in around 30 moves when I’m doing well at lookahead (spotting pieces and planning optimal moves).  I’m failing quite badly with my 45-60 moves, depending on how lucky I get at the start.  I haven’t decided if I want to spend time trying to optimize that (which should greatly improve my times once I can be efficient quickly) or memorizing moves for the more common cases for the last steps.  Considering how easily I memorized a couple algorithms I may keep doing that to a point, it just won’t help my speed much.