CRAZ8

Our team – the Dirty Smackmasters – convened for the 10th Microsoft Puzzlehunt (Puzzlehunt A). This year was an Atlantis theme, and we did a little better than last time – we’ll probably be in the low 30’s our of 75 when the results come out. We solved all but 14 puzzles, and we had about 3 or 4 that we were really close on.

This year, we made great progress at the start, and someone has a screenshot of the standings page to show us in 2nd! I like it when the first puzzles allow you to make progress. One year, we solved nothing in the first 4 hours. This is a good way to make you feel stupid.

One tip to anyone making puzzles – don’t use pizza! This year, one of the puzzles involved the layout of olives on a delivered pizza. Our olives had all moved by the time we received it, so we had no chance to solve this until we got a photo of the expected layout. We wasted so much time on this, and then didn’t have enough time to solve it once we got the correct layout.

Once again, we had too much bad food, but we did have a good time. For the first time, I didn’t sleep at all, and then crashed at 7 on Sunday evening for 12 hours!

Update: Is seems we did finish 29th!

Microsoft Puzzlehunt has a Wikipedia entry (hopefully not edited by someone involved to avoid the Wikipedia editor’s wrath)

Here’s my comments from Puzzlehunt 9

I’ve been giving Ben grief most of the week because his Mac laptop was in the shop (and is now on its 3rd motherboard).

2pm Friday, my laptop hard disk just stops working! Not readable in any way.

Karma!

Some things lost, but the main hassle is installing everything from scratch.

Following up on my post about memory usage with OpenVZ, I’ve moved my blog from Typo to Wordpress. This saves me about 150MB of memory on my VPS host, which translates directly to $10/month.

With the low level of traffic I receive, 150MB is a little overkill. Rails isn’t the best framework for very low traffic sites.

I’ve moved my blog to a different provider. It should still look the same. If you see something missing, please let me know!

The reports from people who have visited our house (it’s for sale) is that we have 8-10 big trees down, and luckily, only minor damage to some gutters.

Since we’re living in Kirkland now, and have almost no gas in our cars (good planning!) we haven’t made it out there yet.

The tree guy is 2 weeks out to come and cut ‘em up and take ‘em away.

big is defined as > 100 feet tall.

The power came back on about 3 in the morning. The South end of downtown lost power just before 10pm on Thursday evening. The north end lost it sometime later. The only thing in downtown Kirkland that kept power the entire time was the Christmas tree (the photo is taken from our deck)

With power, internet access is returned too. We haven’t ventured out today to see how far the power extends, but we do have family coming over to take hot showers and do laundry, so they’ll know the extent of the local blackouts.

My company has put out a flash video thing where you can make Santa dance in various styles.

Check it out

Our home in Redmond, WA is for sale. I’ve put together a page with some info and photos here.

Log home for sale

This is a follow up to my previous post about the Comcast DVR

Lisa called Comcast to see what could be done about the crashing. It turns out that the Comcast customer service people can send an update to the device, but you must call in to get this. The device doesn’t update itself at a convenient time.

Now we have the software update. the thing hasn’t crashed in weeks. It is more unresponsive to user input, but the annoying crashing every hour or two is gone.

It would seem that having to call in to get updates is a process that can’t possibly be cost-effective for Comcast.

Oh well, back to the TV…

I have a new discount code for $92 off Dreamhost plans paid annually. The code gives smaller (but still significant) discounts for monthly plans.

Use CRAZ92 when signing up at dreamhost