Obsession with Risk

The game of Risk is an interesting one. If I were ever to again play traditional Risk against my couterpart, Becca, I would most certainly loose very quickly. She has that game down, in the way someone has something down, and that thing will never rise again. She knows all the routes and dead-ends like the back of her hand. No matter if it's one-on-one or a larger game I inevitable lose on the classic board. Now, Lord of the Rings risk is a different matter. By all rights Becca is still a better player than I, but she doesn't know Middle Earth in the way that I do. My strategy is to hope that she makes sufficient mistakes that I can gain the advantage and hopefully crush her. It's never happened before, especially not in a one-on-one game. And it still has not happened. I think we are in hour 9 of this game, which we started some time saturday. The board is evenly divided between us, north and south. I have a few territories advantage, and our number of battalions is pretty equal too. At this point I usually make the mistake of leading bold and daring raids deep into enemy territory. I cut large swaths out of her lands, and then pretty much leave my borders undefended and long strings of single battalion territories that she can use to hop right into my lands. I'm slowly learning to be patient and defend my resources where I have them. My wife is a stubborn opponent, but the scales are starting to shift in my favor. We shall see what the next several hours of game time bring. Surely one of us will be tasting the bitter medecine of defeat. Then we shall put away the board, patch up our wounds, and swear to never speak of Risk again. Then about 4 months later we get the itch to match swords in plastic miniature table-top battle, and the whole thing begins anew.

The other Torrent

After stumbling across this article from digg, I decided it was time to do something about the pitiful water flow in my shower. The government shouldn't be interfering in how much water I use to clean myself! Anyways, it was an opportunity to get out some of those new tools I got for christmas from the inlaws. I quickly disconnected and disassembled the showerhead in our bathroom and removed the little plastic flow constrictor which limits water flow to around 2 Gallons Per Minute. I didn't do any tests to check the new flow rate of the shower head, but I was confident this was an improvement.

I fell asleep with dreams about blisteringly strong jets of water to wash away my morning stupor. Becca, who wakes up before me every morning to go to work, informed me that the shower was significantly more powerfull than before. But that our bath tub drain wasn't up to the challenge of removing all that water. I wasn't daunted though, it was probably just slight clogged or something.

What I didn't anticipate though is that when I got into the shower that morning it would be as frigid as fresh melt off an Alaskan glacier. Apperantly at the higher flow rate Becca used up all the hot water in one shower! I guess I may have to undo my shower head hack.

The Newness of it all

Site upgraded to wordpress 2.0. The upgrade was painless, the only real reason I upgraded was because of the new import functions in this version. I can finally import all those posts that I kept sitting around in a Moveable Type export format, it only took 2 years for me to get around to importing these. So, if you look in the sidebar you will see archives of sillyness stretching back into the the nigh unimaginable past July of 2001, the date of the inception of this blog. I've probably never stuck with anything of my own volition this long in my life. The only problem is that March 2002 - January 2003 is missing. Nearly a year of blog posts is gone, including the end of my senior year in high-school and the first semester of my freshman year in college. It's a pity I couldn't find those somewhere. Ah well, we cant have everything.

Unrelated to any of that above, I thought I would mention that I have been reading CS Lewis lately, his space trilogy is very interesting, I'm currently starting the 3rd installment, That Hideous Strength. It's very good, and I think CS Lewis throws more incomprehensible words at a reader than any other author. I hadn't noticed it as much in the other volumes, but this one is nuts. It might be the odd mixture of British colloloquisms and french academic vocabulary that was probably much clearer to his contemporarys. It's nearly impenetrable to me in some places.

Pikes and their Service

Holy crap, how did this happen? Here's the top 5 people on the service hours list over at the UNK Pikes website.

McArdle, Clint	5002
Peters, Cody	573
Keim, Rodney	352
Theiler, Travis	223
Weiss, Chris	120

I don't even know how Clint got that many service hours, someone is going to have to tell me what happened there. But my past 2 roomates fall in at number 2 and 3 in the list, way to go. Travis "Tickled Pink" Theiler is in a solid number 4 and my good friend Chris Weiss, the only one of those guys who regularly visits this site (as far as I know) has found himself at number 5. What's up with that anyways Chris? Couldn't you do a little more that 120 hours of community service? I know your heart is big enough, I mean look at Clint, he spent the better part of a year 208 days, 24 hours a day doing community service! So, seriously 120 hours is really weak compared to that. I mean sure, if Chuck Norris or Charlton Heston were on there they would each have done 10,000 hours of service in one day. Charlton Heston because of his ability to travel at Relativistic Speeds to accomplish 2000 years of community service in only one normal year. And Chuck Norris because, well, he's Chuck.I don't even know where I am going with this anymore. But way to go everyone back in Kearney, I'm very impressed by everything you have done.

technorati tags: service, pi kappa alpha, fraternity, community