Things Seen in Kroger Two Days After Thanksgiving

Baby!! Red!! Plantains!! Organic!! Bananas!! (I didn't need any babies or plantains, but I wonder how good their red is.)

Boxes of stuffing, normally $1.79, selling at 88¢ a box. (I bought two.)

Pumpkin cake donuts on the remainder table. (I didn't buy any of those.)

I Love a Good Mystery

I came home one day last week to find a notice taped up over the mailboxes addressed to residents of building # ### noting that the amount of animal feces "in front of and on the sides of the building" was getting out of control and threatening a $50 fee to any pet owners deemed to be in noncompliance etc. (I have decided that "on the sides of" really means "beside", but you never really know.)

After seeing this, I was not surprised to see a note for me rolled up next to my doorknob (our management's second-favorite way to leave us a message, after taping it to the door). I got in and unrolled it and sure enough it was the same thing, but with an addition: a handwritten telephone number 800-942-2045. What could the phone number be? The SPCA? A vet? Maid service?

Well, rather than call, I Googled the phone number. It belongs to UBS Financial Services of Stamford, CT.

The possibilities are endless.

It Was Bound to Happen

I got a 419 e-mail the other day, from (supposedly) an American sergeant who, with his buddies, had found $63m of Saddam's money in Tikrit and wanted to get it out of the country. I don't know whether the scammers are slow, or I just hadn't got one of those until now. I've also noticed an uptick in 419 e-mails from Ouagadougou, and I am always surprised that it is correctly spelled. (They don't always get "Burkina Faso", but you can't have everything.)

I still haven't finished Making Money, since I started it on a Friday afternoon after finally getting out of the office, so I managed to finish three chapters. But I can say that, since Thud! came out, HarperCollins has hired a copy editor who is able to distinguish "1" from "I" from "l". Very exciting.

European Online Open, Day 1

Well.

Round 1 went ok; I won three hands, but someone else won 5, so she won the round.

Round 2 I think I played ok, but I could not pick tiles for anything. Illustrative example: I had 159C 27B 38D (or something very similar) and six individual honors. Knitted (fourteen tiles out of 147, 258, 369 of different suits and the honors) seems indicated; no matter how the suits break down, I've got nine tiles, all I've got to do is match what I draw. In 20 or so picks before someone won the game, I managed to pick the one remaining honor and 3C. That's it. When you consider that 15 of the 27 ranks (six of the C, although that only became 1 once I had picked the 3C, 4 B, 4 D, and one honor) were good, that's pretty pathetic. I finally managed to win the last hand with a minute on the clock to pull ahead of the third-place player by five points.

Round 3 I wasn't getting any hands either, but I wasn't planning/taking advantage as well as I should, as I was behind early and frustrated from the previous round and trying for BIG hands. I did win the last hand here too, but I was still in last place by a good 55 points. Big goose-egg. And, even though all my teammates took second place at their tables in round 3, we (as a team) went from fourth (one spot out of the money) to eighth (just above .500). It looks like I have Things To Prove tomorrow for the last three rounds.

Why Don't We Make One Page For All the Puzzle Things?

Let's! (I may note updates here on the main page, but everything will always be linked from the puzzle page.)

A Crostic

Available here. Why did I do it all in raw Postscript (for the grid) and a lot of LaTeX picture commands (also for the grid)? Because I can. And also, now that I've done it once, I can automate for the future (should the future hold more of these).

UPDATE (8/11): Updated and fixed version here! The automated tools appear to work fine; I just have to come up with a typesetting style I like. (Four-column is standard, because it's the only way to go; it's dealing with the long clues/answers in a reasonably sane way that is eluding me so far -- and I can't seem to get \raggedright to work for whatever reason.)

Things I Wish My Allied Health Students Wouldn't Tell Me

That a one-quart bottle of water that sells for $1.92 has a unit price of 52¢ per quart.

Analogy of the Day

Comma splices are the bad marriages of English grammar: two different sentences, yearning to be free and independent, but shackled together in an incomplete bond based on a bad decision.

Why No One Has Even Considered Inviting Me To Their MIT Puzzle Hunt Team

I am currently working through Eric Berlin's excellent Game Show Hell puzzle hunt for, ooh, a hundred minutes now. Current progress:
Jeopardy!: Know what I'm doing, stuck at three columns complete
Cross Wits: I was sure I knew what was going on, and I think I still do, but I'm not confident. I have the crossword complete, I think, but no answer yet
Concentration: I think I know what I'm doing, but missing a puzzle and the answer
Family Feud: Not a clue
Wheel of Fortune: I'm pretty sure this is straightforward and hard as, well, hell (one phrase so far)
Let's Make a Deal: I know this is not straightforward, but I don't know what's going on
The Price is Right: Yay! The answer I have might make sense, once I have the rest
Bonus Round: I can do a wordsearch. The others I know what to do, if they're straightforward puzzles, but I'm not making any progress and surely the endgame is never straightforward?

So there you have it. I will keep plugging away and will never beg for mercy! Answers, however, I may have to beg for.

UPDATE (another hundred minutes later or so): Finished Jeopardy!, finished Cross Wits. Two more lines in Wheel of Fortune. I still don't know where I'm going.

UPDATE UPDATE (mostly Wednesday): Family Feud finished. Up to five lines in Wheel of Fortune, and I think I have the puzzle answer anyway. LMAD finished (not as non-straightforward as I was thinking). Four of the five Bonus Round answers. So I have a lot of words, which have some ... interesting ... properties, but I'm still not sure where to go with them.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: With John identifying one of the pictures for me, and sitting here throwing ideas at each other, we now have all the words. Now to find the answer....

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Okay, I had one answer wrong, fixing that made it all be OK. (Downloaded Tuesday at 6:30pm, finished Friday at 12:30 pm ... 66 hours ago.)

Proof of Concept

I tried to host an on-line game in Four Winds Mahjong tonight. One player got in fine, one player could see that the game existed and get updates, but couldn't join, and one player couldn't see anything at all. We'll call it a .500 batting average, but at least we know that it works in theory. (And I have the saved game to prove it!)

I thought I'd put up what I did on my end to make everything work; presumably everything I've done here is both necessary and sufficient to successfully play online. And of course, this comes with no warranties, either expressed or implied; I refuse to be responsible if following these directions causes your computer to launch some long-forgotten nuclear warheads.

1. HOME NETWORK. To host a game, you need to provide an IP address to the other players; presumably you can easily find out what "real" IP address you are on. However, for most of us, that IP address does not belong to the computer you're playing on; it belongs instead to your router. When packets from other players (or from the host, if you are the other players) arrive, your router needs to know to which computer to send them (especially since, unlike HTTP packets, they're not usually sent in response to anything you did). For that reason, you should configure your router so that it sends these things to your local computer. The easiest way to get your local IP address specific to the computer on which you are playing is to run "ipconfig" from a command prompt; your local IP address will almost always start "192.168." Then open your router configuration page (if you've just run ipconfig, your router address will be listed as the local gateway)--you're going to need to know your router login and password! You're looking for something called "port forwarding" or "port range forwarding" or something similar--in my router config page it's under "Applications & Gaming". If your router knows about the CVMMON service, that might be all that is needed; otherwise, you should forward ports 2300 to 2400, 6070 to 6080, and maybe 47624 to that local IP address. (I got those ranges from the help files inside Four Winds.)

Of course, if you only have one machine and no router, then you don't care about all that. And if all that seems intimidating, and you don't have anyone else in the house to yell, you can yank the wire out of your router and plug it into your computer temporarily. I had originally thought that only the host had to bother with this, but since the one player who did get in isn't on a home network and the two players who were on a home network had troubles, I'm guessing everyone has to.

2. FIREWALLS. Firewalls vary greatly, but generally you'll need to make your firewall program aware of the application ("4Winds2") and the port ranges (above) and allow access. Setting up the port forwarding above bypassed the firewall built into my router, which you would expect. As for your computer's firewall, if you just run the application and try to connect, the firewall will usually pop up a message and ask you to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. You should be sure to allow both inbound and outbound connections. Just to be sure, I went into my firewall program (McAfee) and specifically opened the ports under the system services setting (it asks for the program name, and inbound and outbound ports). There should be something similar in other firewalls. I do not recommend just turning off the firewall; this way keeps some control over which programs come knocking on which ports. If your firewall is cheap (or overly complicated), you may not have much of a choice, though. If you do turn it off, be sure to turn it right back on after you're finished. Also, I turned off automatic updating of my anti-virus and firewall (not the programs themselves, just the updates) because I've found those really kill my connection when they kick in and that's not polite when you're the host.

As an optional alternative, you could find the IP addresses of your other players and add them to your whitelist of trusted IPs that connect with your computer as they please. Again, afterwards you should probably remove them (with DHCP you can't guarantee those IP addresses are always going to be associated with the nice people you play mahjongg with).

3. FIND THREE GULLIBLE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY THINK YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. And that's really it, as far as the technical details go. That's all I did, anyway, and it worked (more or less). If all this works for you, then great! If it doesn't, I don't know, because this is what worked for me. But it shouldn't be too much more complicated than that. In theory.