Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Today was the first day of fall break. I went to Marketplace Mall and Wegman’s with a couple of friends to buy food for the two weeks of cafeteria devoid campus life that are to follow. They really should keep places we eat open during break, but apparently the few students who don’t leave at thanksgiving aren’t worth it.  My results aren’t too good this quarter, I got my first C yet in Engineering Statistics. Hopefully it will be the last one too. At least I managed two A’s as well.

I was also able to install Windows XP on my laptop due to a BIOS update by Asus. I must say, my laptop is performing far better and hasn’t run into any problems at all yet. It boots faster, plays better and doesn’t freeze at all. Of course, I had to reinstall all the essential software I lost during a format, but it wasn’t all that bad compared to the benefits.

Don’t really have any plans for break, probably going to play Fallout 3 a lot and drink a lot of tea – I missed the tea I get at home so I bought some at Wegman’s, and I must say that Darjeeling tea is Darjeeling tea, no matter where you buy it. This is, of course, very fortunate. I also bought a lot of cereal and a lot of milk. Organic milk is way whiter than non-organic, which is sort of disturbing, because something must be wrong with those injected growth hormones if it makes milk yellow.

Anyway, I’m almost done with this cup of tea and have to go do my laundry now. This is going to be fun.

What better way to revive my blog than with a revitalizing post about something exciting? With this in mind I have deleted all my previous posts (oops…) and cleared out some space for a new beginning. Yes, that’s right – another new beginning. So without further ado, I’ll begin writing about team Duplicitious’s antics at this year’s College Puzzle Challenge.

As per the e-mail we all got, Alex (Dean), Geoff and I got there at 11 am, to be greeted by an empty room. We might have been convinced that we were in the wrong place if it wasn’t for the arrival of some other participants shortly thereafter. Ryan arrived at about 11:30, which was also when people from Microsoft showed up to set things up. There was lots of food and a presentation that lasted beyond 12 o’ clock – which meant most other universities had a headstart on us.

Long story short, we mashed our brains over dozens of puzzles and only managed to solve enough to clock in at #5 at RIT. Out of 13. Yes, we didn’t do that well for ourselves, but it was our first time and it was lots of fun. Besides, can’t beat free food, t-shirts and hats. The only advice I can give to other puzzlers who might take part next year is – the hints are dumb most of the time, and e-mail for hints as much as possible, because that might actually be helpful.

Potter’s party is today, I didn’t go since I have to do some work for class and am pretty tired from yesterday’s 12 hour tirade. Needless to say, we’ll do better next year.

Also, I formatted my laptop and so lost all the psd files and such I used to create this template, so now I am extremely limited in what I can change here. Unless of course I happen to find some long forgotten storage device containing the files in question. Unlikely.