Decline and Fall

ACPT by the numbers:
My position after puzzle 1: #1 (a 19-way tie)
My position after puzzle 2: #13
My position after puzzle 3: #13
My position after puzzle 4: #14
My position after puzzle 5: #25
My position after puzzle 6: #37
My position after puzzle 7: #64

Error on puzzle 5, silly error on puzzle 6, one of each on puzzle 7. Grrr. I have started practicing as of today.

Also: Eric Berlin (see sidebar!) has the Friday night puzzles for sale, which you want. I don't care who you are, you want them. 'Kay? As honorary captain of my team, by virtue of being the one who knew what was going on (I was teamed with two rookies, who understood crossword puzzles, but not funky crossword puzzles, and who didn't always read the directions at the top of the puzzles), I still have ours, but you can't have them.

Things I Would Not Have Expected

One of the new features of StamfordBrooklyn that slipped under the radar was the new $30 fee to watch the finals. It got added late (I don't think it was there when I registered, or maybe it got added between when I printed out the form I thought I was going to have to mail and when I ended up doing Paypal), and I quite frankly refused to believe that anyone would actually spend $30 to watch nine people doing crosswords with big silly earphones on.

According to Will via Stella, nearly 100 people have signed up.

I blog corrected.

I'm Sure There's a Reasonable Explanation For This

I just can't think of it quite yet: License plate on a Pontiac Vibe: "3SMLUV".

There was a "family portrait" of a stick-figure mother, father, and daughter on the back, if that helps.

Why Yes, I Am Pathetic

I decided to set myself a goal for today (Monday's crossword comes out at 6): to do my best at being the first one done. I started hitting refresh on the page at 5:58, and although the time sucks:Yay me.

Oh that wacky New York Times

I keep hearing about how the Times has lots of very good editors, you'd think at least one of them would have killed this story before it actually got printed. And it came out on a Thursday! I could almost understand if it came out on a Sunday -- there's no way to actually fill all those pages with meaningful information -- but surely there was something happening on Thursday?

The advantage of the crossword solving applet is that if you get to a cross you don't know -- such as cuchifrito crossing orfe -- you can systematically type letters in until the applet tells you that you are correct. Of course, if you didn't look at a previous crossing and so have exacet instead of exocet, well, you won't look at that until you've gotten all the way down to Z.

I'm in Trouble Now

My local Domino's now offers on-line ordering. (I put in order #14 yesterday.) Their "pizza tracking" (think UPS/FedEx tracking, for pizza) didn't work though.

It's an Epiphany!

Or at least, that's the default web browser that comes with GNOME these days.

Yes, my new laptop (after the last one, I spent the extra $20 or whatever to get the super-long-life-battery) is now dual-booted in WinXP and Debian 4. At first, Debian couldn't understand the graphics card or the built-in wireless jobbie. I still haven't figured out the wireless yet, but that's because I haven't tried, since I still have a wire. It took quite a bit of mess to get the graphics driver installed (apparently they haven't yet got a precompiled version for Linux 2.6, or something, so I had to compile it myself, which required having the kernel source code installed. And for whatever reason, aptitude never installed things the first time around -- I never did get the hang of it).

And better yet, I've been working on this battery since 2 o'clock or so, and it's now 5; and it says it's still at half full and good for another 2.5 hours. When you consider that my previous laptop lasted 25 minutes at full charge, well, I'm already giddy.

UPDATE Sunday afternoon: Wireless working, and I think I've got it set up to always turn on. (I know, typing one whole command each time is a heck of a pain.) The sound was easier than I expected, since they've got a tool for that now. And I've got my Windows data mounted (read-only, but that's ok; I've got the Linux side read-only under Windows too). It took 135 minutes or so to get most of my files from old laptop yesterday.

Puzzles

I did another crostic today, which is posted in the puzzles place. There's one answer that I think is a little iffy, but. I also updated my perl script for automatically generating the grids, getting rid of all the appearances of the magic number 19 (it is now the variable $boxesPerRow), and at the same time changed its value to 21 (a wider grid fitting the layout I print them with). I also (I hope!) finalized my LaTeX template for making the puzzle pages (both in terms of the font selection and the layout). There's still some copy-and-pasting going on; the perl script doesn't know anything about how much space the clues will take on the page, so the column split is done by hand. So all that's posted for anyone to look at (should anyone want to, which I can't think who that would be).

I did that partly as practice, as my arm was starting to ache after five or so puzzles in the book. It appears to have helped, as I'm feeling pretty good about a time of 10:45; especially since I'm pretty sure Stella&Bruce (I'm ashamed to admit I've forgotten which one does the fill--I think Bruce? but I don't remember) made a couple of those words up.

It Is On

I have my plane ticket to StamfordBrooklyn, and my hotel room reserved. Eventually, I will actually register for the ACPT, but they're not taking registrations yet?

Saturday-levels are still my downfall; the left side of today's NYT just wasn't working and required a couple look-this-up. Plus yesterday's ONTHELOOSE/ONTHEHOUSE (for the clue "Free" -- spoiler! Oh.) debacle didn't help, but at least I got there by myself, even if five minutes off the pace.

Fortunately, I have 490 Sunday puzzles to do still, out of the Supersized Sunday collection. (I had made a vow to myself that, except for Merl, I would never buy puzzle books that weren't spiral-bound. Of course, I can't hold my family to that for Christmas. Fortunately, my good Parker pen only needs a light touch, making it possible to do puzzle #4, for instance, which sits a good three inches off the table when you're doing it.)

A Man With One Novelty Clock Knows What Time It Is

A man with two novelty clocks is never sure. (Although so far they agree.)