Salzburg

It's been a while since I posted. I don't have much to say, so here's a photo I took of Salzburg, Austria. Click to enlarge.

The Definition of Irony

I got this little gem in my facebook news feed the other day:

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Irony
1. The use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning.
2. An outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

Robo Rally in Quasi-3D

Robo Rally is a board game in which players race robots through a factory, avoiding pits, using board elements to their advantage and sometimes even destroying other players along the way. It's one of my favorite games, but I've always thought the physical boards that come with the game lacked something- they were just flat, lifeless cardboard things and it was easy to miss a wall. As I was browsing BoardGameGeek, I came across an image by user myronf:

This board looked awesome! Pits are actually intimidating and walls are easy to spot. I had to make my own version (and of course improve where I could.) So I began my quest. I purchased:

-Sturdy black foam core - 30"x42" (This would give me four 15"x15" boards and some extra to make walls with)
-A sharp craft knife with some extra blades
-An Itoya O'Glue liquid glue stick

myronf  was nice enough to send me the scans he made for his board and I used them with some minor modifications to create my boards. Unlike myronf, I created the whole board to be printed out from the computer instead of cutting out and gluing on individual squares. Once I had the scans ready to go, it took about 30 minutes to make a board in Adobe Illustrator. I also created the yellow/black pattern to use for the borders of pits and walls.

I printed out the boards in two halves on 100# matte 11x17 cardstock, glued them to the foam, and cut out the first board, Cross. The yellow/black was printed on glossy 1"x2.63" Xerox labels and I cut each piece out using a template and my craft knife. The walls are still not done (I have a few extra chunks of foam core as temporary walls) but the boards are looking good so far.

Left: Island, Right: Cross

Closeup of the center pit in Cross.

More picture are available in my Picasa Web Album.

Happy Birthday to Me

Yesterday was my birthday and I was lucky to enough to get the day off work. Some friends and I got together and decided to make the manliest meal would come up with... we chose to make the Bacon Explosion™ (Yeah, it's actually trademarked.)

Below are the pictures and the process of our awesome and terrible creation:

Step 1
Take a pound of thick cut bacon. Weave it into a mat.

Step 2
Coat that sucker in BBQ rub and BBQ sauce.

 

Step 3

Throw a couple pounds of Italian sausage on there and slather with BBQ sauce again. With the length of our bacon, we should have gone with 1.5 pounds of sausage.

Step 4

Fry another pound of bacon. Cut into bits, and cover the sausage. Slather with sauce again.

Finale

Roll it up and slather it again. At this point it should resemble a small animal. Bake it for about 2.5 hours at 250 degrees. If you have a barbecue, use that instead.

Eat it

Cut it up and make burgers or something.

 

DDR Experiment Week 2

Sorry for the lack of updates for all of you who are following my progress (haha, who am I kidding?) I started the workout routine last week and quickly found that the push ups routine was a bit too much. I did a lighter version of the routine and didn't take measurements every day. I'll start the same routine this week and hopefully the workout from last week will have given me the slight edge I need.

Data will be forthcoming shortly.

The DDR Experiment

Those of you who know me well probably know that when it comes to getting exercise, I don't. I don't think exercise is hard; it's just boring. Well, it finally seems my lack of exercise has caught up to me and I've decided to start an experimental exercise routine. I'm not particularly overweight or anything, although I could stand lose a few pounds or at least convert them from fat to muscle. No, the problem simply is I feel like a turd. The main reason I want to exercise is because exercise is important for your brain to function at its highest level. To me, having chiseled abs is secondary to having a functioning brain. If you are interested in reading about the effects of exercise on the brain, might I suggest Brain Rules by John Medina?

I love experiments. So my exercise routine will be half to get fit and half to see how effective a fun routine can be. That's why I decided to take something I already like to do and turn it into exercise: Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). If you don't know what DDR is, it's that game you see sweaty Asian kids playing at the local roller skating rink. I used to play this game all the time, but lately I only fire it up once a month or so. Finding the effectiveness of DDR for weight loss will be one of the primary goals of this experiment.

A good exercise routine has more than one exercise in it. I like to keep things simple, so I'm going to add two more very straightforward routines from online: One Hundred Push Ups and Two Hundred Sit Ups. This will be a good opportunity to see if these workout plans really work. I did 23 push ups in my initial test, so I'll be starting on Week 3 for One Hundred Pushups. I'm not great at crunches and only did 31 without resting, so I'll start on Week 3, but in column 1.

I wanted the results of the individual workout plants to be quantifiable, so each week I will post the stats on what has improved. I will do daily weigh-ins and weekly max. push/sit up tests, as well as keep data on my max. number at the end of each workout.

My goal for the exercise is to reach at least 100 max. push ups, 200 max. sit ups, and to weigh 135 lbs.
My goal for the research is to see if it is possible to go from 23 to 100 push ups and 31 to 200 sit ups in 4 weeks, and to see how fast you can lose weight by playing DDR for 3 hours per week.

THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE:

	Mon	Tue	Wed	Fri
DDR	45 min.	45 min.	45 min.	30 min.
Push Ups	12/17/13/13/17+		14/19/14/14/19+	16/21/15/15/21+
Sit Ups	15/18/11/11/14+		15/18/12/12/18+	17/20/14/14/20+

As of January 24
Weight: 138.0 lbs
Max Push ups: 23
Max Crunches: 31
Resting Heart Rate: Around 76-80 (based on 2 measurements)

Settlers of Catan: Epic Edition

Yesterday I played the longest/epic-est/worst/strangest/funnest game of Catan I've had in a long time. We used a 3rd edition of Seafarers, and the 4th edition of Catan and Cities & Knights. We also played with 6 players without having the 6 player expansion for Seafarers. Needless to say, it was horrific to set up.

If you aren't familiar with Seafarers and Cities & Knights, some of the following may be confusing. Sorry, you'll just have to play them to understand what I'm talking about.

We didn't change any rules (as far as I know) except for creating our own custom board setup and going to 20 points instead of the standard 13 in Cities & Knights. We used 58 hex tiles, opting for a 1:1 ratio of land to water. We decided to also throw a gold tile in just to see what would happen. We used the 3rd edition water tiles, so the ports were automatically randomly distributed with the water. We laid out the board with the following row lengths: 7/8/9/10/9/8/7. We swapped two or three land tiles to make sure the board wasn't just one large island snaking around the board. After this we randomly distributed the numbers on the condition that there could be no 6s or 8s next to each other. Below is the result - click to enlarge:

 Land Hexes:
      6 Sheep
      6 Wheat
      6 Wood
      5 Ore
      5 Brick
      1 Gold





After looking at the setup we decided that players could not start on the "gold island" and we began placement. I went with a port strategy, seeing the sheep-heavy area to the left and guessing (correctly) that nobody would take the seemingly unattractive sheep port on the bottom-middle.

Thus began the most insane game of Catan I have ever played. I'll spare you the play-by-play, so to make it short (spoiler alert) I'll just say I won. It took 2 hours and 45 minutes, and there were still two players with only 3 points at the end. There were some great moments. The first was when the two players who got to the gold realized that the robber was pretty much going to sit there the whole game. Another was when I used a Spy card to steal a Spy card and then that card to steal the same player's last card. We weren't sure if stolen cards could be used on the same turn, but we let it happen anyway.

If you're looking for a way to make your Catan session a little more epic, look no further. You might want to play to 16 though.

Matthew and Cam making some shady deals.

The sheep farm that carried me to the win.