Fan Service

Many of you (for some definition or "many", "of", and "you"), my dear loyal readers, have asked me repeatedly just how sharp an X-acto knife is. Since you have all made this blog so enormously popular (for some definition of "so", "enormously" and "popular"), I feel I am forced to do your bidding (for some definition of "do", "your", and "bidding"). It is for this reason that I decided to test (for some definition of "decided", "to", and "test") an X-acto knife upon my thumb. Unfortunately, I mean the common and universally understood definitions of "upon", "my" and "thumb".

On a scale of 1 (does not cut my thumb at all) to 10 (cuts the tip off my thumb), I would rate the X-acto knife's sharpness as 5 (cuts the tip of my thumb half way off). At the given depth, I'd estimate that if the cut had gone twice as far laterally, I'd be posting something philisophical asking whether it can still be called the tip if it's laying on the floor (see Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought).

Incidenatlly, when I say that coed astronomy pours it's blood, sweat, and tears into the Iron Puzzler BANG (and all the games we run), I don't mean that metaphorically. If your start clue has red stains on it, you'll know where they're from.

Well, ok, I threw out the piece of card stock I was currently working on, and the rest were protected in envelopes (unlike my carpet), so there was blood, sweat, and tears involved, but it's just the pouring that was metaphorical.

Scuba Certification

Just in time for our honeymoon, Linnsey and I just completed our 4 open water certification dives this past weekend for our scuba certification! It was freezing and there was terrible visibility, but we still had a lot of fun. Knowing that conditions in Bali would be vastly better was a pretty good incentive to get to Monterey by 6:45am each day and into that frigid water.

The highlight of the dives for me was seeing a cormorant skim the bottom at 25 feet in search of fish. Since seeing this in the BBC's Planet Earth documentary, I've thought this was the coolest thing ever (they can fly, and they can swim!), and I've wanted to see it in person. I tried to point it out to Linnsey, but she didn't look in time. Hopefully we'll get to see it again.

Doing Thyme

My first impressions of married life are that it involves a lot of sneezing and makes your living room smell like poultry seasoning. Who'd have known the spice rack Linnsey put on the gift registry would come with 15 impossible to open bags of spices that you have to try to pour into the jars?

On the plus side, we've got the airline tickets for our honeymoon in Bali! =)

Last Weekend

So what'd you do last weekend, Dale?

Oh, I dunno. I went to the beach, hung out with a few friends.

Anything else?

Oh yeah, I got married! It was awesome, and it was so great to have so many friends and family in Hawaii to celebrate with us. I'll post pictures, puzzles, and more when I've had a chance to recuperate.

The Rock

As tempting as it was, I did not get Linnsey The Rock. Instead, we went online looking for a good engagement ring. She wasn't all that into diamonds and wound up choosing a ring made with lab created alexandrite. I had never heard of alexandrite before, but when the ring came, I looked at it, and it was duller than it had appeared on the website. I hesitantly gave it to Linnsey, but when she put it on, it was a nice deep purple.

Turns out alexandrite changes color based upon the lighting. Indoors, it's purplish, but with even the fading evening sunlight, it's a bright green. This caused a fun game of move-Linnsey's-hand-all-around-the-house. "Ok, now put it by the window. Ok, now a fluorescent light. Ok, now incandescent. Ok, now in front of the computer monitor." It's like I got her some sort of classy mood ring for our engagement!

No More Secrets, No More Projects, No More Flakiness

So as you might guess, I've been rather busy working on No More Secrets. Running a game is not the sort of undertaking one should get into idly, but then again, I'm the same guy who decided to co-teach a course at Stanford with all that "free time" I had. Unfortunately, all this busyness means I've been a total flake--I don't return emails and phone calls, I stop playing WoW, I don't go rock climbing, I basically just drop off the radar.

That's why, after May 19th, I plan to abstain from taking on any side projects for a minimum of 2 months. That means no planning of any sort of puzzle hunt or game. That means no hacking on my webcomic script. No joining an open source project. No open sourcing my puzzle solving python utilities. No working on my pet programming language. No 20% project at work. No nothing but video games, movies, rock climbing, and board games.

Well, that and planning the wedding... So I guess I can't escape side projects after all. =)

I Said Yes!!! =)

Ok, so it doesn't have the same ring to it as "she said yes", but it doesn't make me any less crazy happy about it! We've been telling friends and family, and everyone is some combination of really happy for us and totally tripping out. Best comment so far is: "Well it's about time someone around here got married!" Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to *totally freaking out*. =) =)