I've been doing some thinking and some reprioritizing of my time, and I've decided that I would like to get back into serious Scrabble study. I really haven't studied at all since Phoenix in February. And I can tell, because my brain has felt pretty foggy during most club sessions. The other day I played FAP# (hm, that must be why I thought it was good), and I challenged LOGE. I was "pretty sure" of both. I can easily find and play weirdos like KEIRETSU, but I can also carefully consider and play phonies like FOILERS*. This is not good.

My main problem is that I don't have much free time. Those of you who have sent me email, hoping for a response someday, have probably already figured this out. Another problem is that my current cardbox backlog is something like 3,000 questions per day for the next month and a half. Most of those are a relative waste of time because I'm not going to miss them even though I haven't seen them in two years. Not useful.

I need a study regimen that will let me get by with oh, say, an hour per day or less. Something that doesn't require me to answer thousands of easy questions every day. Something that will help me avoid playing phony 3s and challenging valid 4s would also be nice. So I came up with the following.

I created six separate anagram quiz files (regular quizzes, not cardbox), one for each word length from 3 to 8. The 3- through 6-letter quizzes are in random order, and the 7s and 8s are in probability order. 6s would probably be better in playability order or something, but I'm not worried about that for now. All I want is something that will, eventually, help me learn all the words of each length.

Each day, I do 50 questions from each quiz, with a 10-second timer. For 3s, 4s, and 5s, this is review just to keep the words fresh. For 6s, I'm mostly learning new ones. For 7s and 8s so far, this is review since the words are in probability order, but eventually I'll get to words I don't know yet. Anyway, this is a total of 300 questions each day, which takes less than an hour. Perfect! I cycle through the 3s every two weeks or so, never again to play FAP# or its ilk. The 5s cycle every four months or so, quickly enough to keep them current. It will take me a year and a half to get through the 8s, but that's fine with me. There's no hurry.

However, I also need some way of reviewing troublesome words, which is why I add all my missed words to the cardbox, and the last quiz I do each day is a cardbox quiz. I completely erased my cardbox data about two weeks ago (well, I backed it up just in case). After a few weeks of following this program, adding only missed words to the cardbox, my backlog has ended up being about 60-90 questions per day. I expect that to increase, but not nearly like the cardbox explosion I had previously. Also, once I move a word up to cardbox 5ish, I'll kick it out of the cardbox system entirely. I'll eventually see it again during the regular cycle, and if it still needs more review at that time (i.e. I miss it again), back in the cardbox it will go.

So far, after 10 days of the program, I'm happy with how it's going. It's not a burden to do 300 questions each day, and the cardbox review is helping for the difficult questions. We'll see if I can manage it in the long run, but this pace seems pretty sustainable. And it's still fun; I wouldn't do it if it weren't.

This might be my last post about my quest for financial freedom. Or rather, it might be my last progress update. Maybe not, who knows. I still love to talk about the quest, but it's gotten past the point where I'm hitting milestones all the time. My wife and I have gotten ourselves on the right track, and now it's just a matter of staying on it.

I do have one last milestone to report, though. As of yesterday, April 15, 2009, almost exactly two years after we started the Dave Ramsey plan, my wife and I have completed Baby Step 3, a three-month emergency fund. For two years, we have hunkered down and focused with great intensity on paying off about $44,000 of debt and pulling together three months of all living expenses, and this week we finally accomplished that goal.

At this point, we can get back into investing for retirement, saving for the kids' college educations, saving for other large purchases, and paying off the mortgage. It's been killing me to be out of the market for two years, but it turns out to have been a pretty good time to be out. And now looks like a pretty good time to jump back in. I also need to brush up my list of purchases we've been putting off, and see which ones we still want. I know my wife probably won't believe it's real until we actually, truly have an new dishwasher physically in our kitchen.

We'll probably also continue to beef up our emergency fund to be closer to six months of expenses, to guard against whatever the future may hold. One nice thing about an emergency fund? It can turn major disasters into minor inconveniences. About a month ago, our water heater broke and it was going to cost something like $1000 to replace it. Instead of panicking about the expense, I remembered that I've always wanted to get a tankless water heater, and this was the perfect opportunity to install one. With cash in the bank, we were able to write a check for a couple thousand dollars. Crisis averted, and wish fulfilled. That was an awesome moment. That was a taste of financial freedom.

If you're interested in seeing the entire journey from the beginning to now, you can look at the "money" tag on this blog, or read individual entries as listed below. If you need a little hope that getting out of debt can be done, I hope you are encouraged by my success. Two years ago, I could hardly imagine having no debt and an emergency fund in the bank. Now that I'm here, I could never imagine going back.

April 27, 2007 - Our Total Money Makeover

The first step.

May 13, 2007 - [ ] 20-24 [x] 25-29 [ ] 30-34

Stuck to a budget for one paycheck.

May 31, 2007 - Month 1: budget success!

Stuck to a budget for one month.

August 21, 2007 - Four months closer to debt-free!

Stuck to the plan for four months, 15% debt paid.

September 27, 2007 - Screw Chase

Chase lights a fire of fury in our hearts.

October 19, 2007 - The (unfortunately) continuing Chase saga

Chase continues to convince me why I should never, ever deal with credit card scum again.

December 14, 2007 - Ready for a break

25% debt paid.

January 7, 2008 - Scrabble schedule for 2008

My Scrabble tournament attendance suffers.

February 27, 2008 - Stay on target...

"Convenience" checks go from the save pile to the shredder.

May 1, 2008 - Credit Card Freedom!

All credit card debt paid off, 50% debt paid.

June 27, 2008 - One step closer to debt freedom

Car paid off.

October 16, 2008 - We're debt freeeee!!

100% debt paid, except the mortgage!

Here's a quickie. I'm visiting family in Michigan, and last night we played a couple of 4-player Scrabble games. The fact that we're playing in Michigan made it all the more appropriate that I found the following play:

(EDIT: there's a hidden blank in the picture - my rack is ?AEKORU)



( Answer behind the cut... )

The OS X build of Zyzzyva 2.0.5 is the first one I've built since I upgraded to Leopard. Unfortunately, since Zyzzyva still uses Qt 4.3.2[*], the build will not run on Tiger. The simplest solution would be to rebuild Zyzzyva on a Tiger machine, which would create a build that is capable of running on both Tiger and Leopard. Does anyone have a Tiger machine, who would be able to do this for me? If so, please respond here and I can give you instructions. I'm looking for anyone who can build on either an Intel or PowerPC machine - I need help with both. Thanks in advance for any help!

[*] The gory details for anyone who is interested... Apparently Qt 4.3.3 and newer is capable of creating builds on Leopard that will also run on Tiger. However, when Zyzzyva is built with Qt 4.3.3 and newer, the display of large word lists is almost an order of magnitude slower, which I find unacceptable. This is the only reason I've stuck with Qt 4.3.2, which is over a year and a half old, and two full minor revisions out of date. I'm working on finding and fixing the performance problem, but that will take a lot longer than just rebuilding Zyzzyva 2.0.5 on a Tiger machine with Qt 4.3.2.

I've released a new version of Zyzzyva, 2.0.5. Zyzzyva is a program for studying words, practicing anagramming, and adjudicating challenges. It runs on Windows XP, Vista, NT, 2000, 98, and Me; Linux; and Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. You can get the latest version here:

http://zyzzyva.net/

This is a minor update with one main new feature. The Word Judge now prompts the challenger for the number of words to be challenged before displaying the input screen, and will not adjudicate the challenge until the correct number of words are entered. This feature is intended to eliminate accidental adjudications triggered by hitting the Tab key prematurely. This should particularly help players in North America, where the penalty for premature adjudication is severe!

Here is the full list of changes in this version:
* Word Judge now prompts for number of challenged words
* Allow input, sorting, etc. for some characters other than A-Z.
* Fix reading of DAWG files so they are loadable on 64-bit machines.
* Fix some word definitions

Please give me feedback about how you think Zyzzyva could be improved! If you would like more information about Zyzzyva, please join the Zyzzyva Users list here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zyzzyva-users/

I hope you enjoy using Zyzzyva, and most of all, have fun with it!

Here's a stupid little bash script I just wrote to update my Twitter status from the command line. If you use Linux or OS X and spend a lot of time in a terminal window, you may find this useful. Just source it from your .bash_profile and then run it from the command line as the "tw" command. It requires curl and perl, and expects your username to be in $HOME/.twitter_login in "username:password" format.

If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, here I am.

#!/bin/bash

tw()
{
    # Ensure a Twitter status message
    STATUS=$*
    if [ "$STATUS" == "" ] ; then
        echo 'What are you doing?'
        return 0
    fi

    # Ensure a Twitter login file (format: "username:password")
    TWITTER_LOGIN_FILE=$HOME/.twitter_login
    if [ ! -e $TWITTER_LOGIN_FILE ] ; then
        echo 'Error: Cannot find $HOME/.twitter_login'
        return 0
    fi

    LOGIN=$(head -n 1 $TWITTER_LOGIN_FILE)
    WC=$(echo -n "$STATUS" | wc -c | perl -pe 's/\s+//g')

    # Ensure 140 chars or less
    if [ "$WC" -gt "140" ] ; then
        echo "Status is too long: $WC  (cannot exceed 140 chars)"
        return 0
    fi

    # URL-encode status and send it
    ENC_STATUS=$(echo -n "$STATUS" | perl -pe 's/(.)/sprintf "%%%02x", ord($1) /ge')
    curl -u "$LOGIN" -d status="$ENC_STATUS" -o /dev/null --stderr /dev/null http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
    echo "Updated status ($WC): $STATUS"
}

I was never really tempted by Amazon's Kindle, but now that Kindle 2 is available for preorder, I have to confess I'm salivating a little. Probably also because I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and it would be nice not to have to lug all my books around in case I feel like reading one of them. Here's a link to the Kindle 2 order page on Amazon. In case you feel like buying it, I get a kickback if you buy it through this link (yeah, I'm a whore):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00154JDAI?tag=saganist-20

This meme has been going around Facebook, and I finally succumbed. Here are 25 statements about me. Enjoy.

1. The 25th statement is false.

2. Sometimes I stand conspicuously in the Sexuality section at Barnes & Noble, in order to feel awkward and embarrassed. I occasionally like feeling voluntarily uncomfortable.

3. Every night I look up at the sky, and I name all the celestial bodies I can see. Sometimes I close my eyes and point to where I think things should be, and then open my eyes to see how well I did. I usually do pretty well.

4. If I ever hear "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys while in the car, I have to crank up the volume and sing at the top of my lungs.

5. I wanted to name our youngest son Archimedes, and call him Archie for short. My wife didn't go for it.

6. I have been baptized four times.

7. I once walked about 12 miles across the Japanese countryside in the middle of the night, alone. I made my way by following the stars.

8. I spent a summer developing web pages in a cabin in the middle of nowhere outside Red Cliff, Colorado. The cabin did not have electricity or running water. It was the best summer I've ever had.

9. I play tournament Scrabble, and am currently ranked as one of the top 250 players in North America.

10. I suspect that nearly every major decision I've made in my life has been because of a girl.

11. I love to laugh, and I love to make other people laugh. Most days, almost every word that comes out of my mouth is intended to be funny, even if only to myself.

12. I am a last-second sipper. Whenever I am leaving a restaurant, I have to take at least a few last-second sips of my drink before leaving. You never know where your next Diet Coke is going to come from.

13. In the last two years, my wife and I paid off about $44,000 in debt and have started building up an emergency fund. All we had to do was pay some attention to what we were doing with our money. We are now debt-free except for our house, and will never go back.

14. I call myself a Saganist because I think Carl Sagan expressed the most sensible and inspiring view of the universe, and our place in it, that I have ever heard. It's a shame I never read any of his work until relatively recently.

15. I own about 25 CDs from the Time-Life "Sounds of the Eighties" series. They just kept sending me CDs, and I just kept sending them money. And it was totally worth it.

16. Throughout my whole life, I've often suspected that I keep myself busy to avoid feeling empty.

17. I share too many intimate personal feelings in public forums.

18. On the McDonald's menus in Japan, the price for a "smile" is "free". So I ordered two of them. 「スマイルをふたつお願いします。」 The girl behind the counter was extremely confused. I think a lot of people thought I was a stupid gaijin.

19. Before I proposed to my wife, I asked her what her favorite dessert was. She said it was strawberry shortcake. But I didn't know how to make that, so I made her brownies instead. And I also bought her a blender. I am so romantic.

20. Back in 1996, I wrote a Java applet that ended up being published in a book called Teach Yourself Sunsoft Java Workshop in 21 Days. It was a somewhat crappy Minesweeper knock-off called "LimeSweeper". I haven't written anything in Java since then. I heard a rumor that Java has changed a little bit.

21. In 7th grade, I told my drafting teacher than when I grew up, I would eat pizza for every meal. He said I would get sick of it. In summer 2000, I proved him wrong when I ate Papa John's pepperoni every night for three months, and never got tired of it. I did gain a few pounds, though. Pizza is still my favorite food.

22. I subscribe to 32 podcasts and 220 blogs. That's way too many.

23. When I was a kid, I used to play video games all the time, but could never afford to buy any. Now that I have the money to buy video games, I don't have any time to play them. I often listen to video game music while working, so I can almost feel like I'm playing. Almost.

24. I hope the world will be better for my having been here. My ultimate goal in life is for those who knew me to say, "I'm glad I knew that guy. He made my life better." Most importantly, I hope my family thinks of me as a good dad and husband, and they know how much I love them.

25. The 1st statement is true.

Hi all, my accommodation plans for Phoenix have fallen through, so I'm looking for a place to stay for the Phoenix tournament. I'm playing in the early bird, so I'll be showing up Thursday night (Feb 12) and staying for four nights (Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun). If you have any space available, or know anyone who does, please let me know. If you already have a roommate but would like to split the bill three ways instead of two, I'm totally happy to bring a sleeping bag and sleep on the floor. I don't snore (as far as I know), don't smoke, and am generally a very easy person to room with. Please let me know! You can either post here or email me at "mthelen" at gmail (dot com).

UPDATE: I've found a place to stay, so if you've read this far, forget everything you just read.

I spent all of New Year's Day playing an informal 10-game double round robin with some guys from the club. We called it the Super Dog Challenge, and I won it with a record of 8-2 +700-something. The final game was one of the funnest games ever (easy to say when you win by almost 200). Even though we were playing a round robin with no KOTH, the final game also just happened to be against the guy in second place, who could have won the tournament if he beat me by 90 points. If you play the game all the way to the end, I promise the ending is worth it.

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=2805

I've just released Zyzzyva 2.0.3. More details behind the cut.

( Read more... )

Wicked is coming to Salt Lake City in April and May, and my wife really wanted to go. This morning, tickets went on sale at the Capitol Theatre box office at 7:00 am, and I showed up at 6:30. Which was apparently way too late. There were literally thousands of people ahead of me in line, and the line wrapped all the way around the block (around all four sides, and Salt Lake City blocks are huge).

When I first got there, I wondered to myself what I would do if someone tried to cut in line near me. I determined that although I'm a nice guy, I would stand up and be not nice. I knew it would be tough, because face-to-face confrontation always is, but I steeled myself from the beginning. And would you believe it? At about 9:00, a lady tried to cut in line right next to me! I'll call her Big Red, because she had red hair, a pink jacket, and a bright red purse. Big Red looked to be about 55 years old, and she claimed her feet were hurting, so she couldn't walk to the end of the line (at this point we were still all the way around the block from the ticket window). She asked the lady in front of me if she would mind if she just tucked in with us. I said, "I mind." Big Red ignored me and hung around. I didn't say anything, because I wanted to give her ample time to rest her feet and get along on her way.

The next time the line started moving, Big Red subtly injected herself behind me in the line, clearly intending to cut. I said loudly, "It's not fair to anyone behind you if you cut in line here, so I think you'd better go to the end of the line." She complained again about her feet, and I said, "We're all going to have to walk around the block to get to the window anyway." Then the lady in front of me piped up, saying that Big Red was not with us. The people behind me had naturally assumed we knew her, since she had joined the line after talking with us. Finally Big Red said, "Ugh, fine!" and started walking back to the end of the line. I didn't even have to sic the crowd on her, but I was gearing up to do it. Or, if she decided to hang around, I was ready to tell the ticket agents that she had cut in line and not to sell her any tickets.

I stuck it out for about 6.5 hours in the sub-freezing temperatures, and made it within about 20 feet of the door by the time they announced that tickets for all shows had sold out, at about 1:00 pm. Suck. Oh well, I got to listen to 6 hours of podcasts that I desperately needed to catch up on anyway, and I have a new appreciation for homeless people who have to sleep out in the cold. Behind the cut is a mini photo journal of the experience.

( Read more... )

Initial Rating: 1590
Final Rating: 1656

1. Phoenix Early Bird, 4-4 -86 (div 2)
2. Phoenix Main Event, 13-7 +498 (div 2)
3. Texas Sowpods Challenge, 9-5 +345

And that's it! I've had a lot of things going on in the past year, but Scrabble hasn't really been one of them. I was extremely grateful to be able to attend the Texas Sowpods Challenge though, and to luck my way into a 3rd place finish. I discovered that playing the Collins list is a lot of fun, and I hope that sooner rather than later, we can adopt it as our own.

This coming year, I am definitely planning to do Phoenix again in February, and tentatively planning on the National Championship. Other than that, I may do the DO, and maybe another relatively close tournament like Albuquerque or something. The budget is still tight, but I'm feeling a lot better about my potential for going to more tournaments from here on out. Still not as many tournaments as you lucky coastal bastards, but hopefully more than two anyway.

And for that reason, I'm actually studying again. I've had too much word uncertainty at the club lately, especially on 5s, and I've played a ton of phony bingos I thought were good. So I'm currently running through the 4s and 5s to refresh my memory, and then I think I may want to try the Insane Kenji Method for a while.

I did it! My novel (still sans title) now officially stands at 50,094 words, though OpenOffice thinks it's about 100 more than that for some reason. Although I've hit the target of 50,000 words, the novel is not even close to done. In fact, I think it's just starting to get good.

I'm still not sure whether I'll make the whole thing available or not, once the first draft is finished. I probably will, because I could use feedback. I know it's relatively horrible, and that's okay, because the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to get something written, an unpolished slab of marble from which something beautiful has a chance to be liberated. It is definitely more like a slab than a masterpiece.

Until then, here's another excerpt, behind the cut. I hope you like it.

( Read more... )

I'm currently at 48,209 words, and need to write only 1,791 more words before Sunday at midnight to win NaNoWriMo 2008! If all goes well, I expect to hit 50,000 words tonight, a day early. Here's a silly little two-sentence excerpt that was not intended to be funny. But when I read it tonight as I was trying to remember where I left off this afternoon, I laughed out loud.

"January, that's a cool name," said Jason. "I like it."

"Thanks," said January coolly. "I like it too."

Over the course of this month, I had fallen quite far behind pace on my NaNoWrimo novel, and as recently as a few days ago I was seriously entertaining thoughts of packing it in. I was over 10,000 words off the pace, and I didn't know how I was ever going to catch up.

Then I remembered the one-day catchup strategy that I read here, and my hope was renewed. Basically, the strategy is to write 500 words every hour, on the hour, for 15 hours, giving you a total of 7,500 words for the day. On Friday night, my wife and I had gone on a "writing date", during which I got about 3,500 words written. That got me within striking distance, so that if I could implement the catchup strategy for just one day, Saturday, I would be completely caught up and on pace to reach 50,000 words by November 30. I had to try it.

When I'm writing at a good pace, I can pump out a little over 1,000 words per hour, and as I implemented the 500-word sprint strategy today, I found that it took me about 20-25 minutes each time. That left plenty of time for goofing off, folding laundry, watching Michigan get crushed by Ohio State (sob), and watching Utah crush BYU (yay). And it worked! If I had stuck to the original pace of 1,666 words per day, my goal for today would have been 36,666 words. Just about ten minutes ago, I saved my document with a word count of 36,670. Yes! I'm going to win this thing.

Here's a graph of my performance for the month. It's a little weird to read, but basically whenever you see red, that means I didn't make my goal for that day. You'll notice there's a lot of red. Whenever you see a gray and green bar, that means I exceeded my goal for that day. Friday and Saturday are the two consecutive giant green bars.



Everyone is asking me, "What's your novel about?" My standard answer is, "It's about N words," where N is my word count at the moment. I think it's kind of about religion, which I didn't really want it to be, but it's also about a lot of other things. Boring things, mostly. And Hope College. I love me some Hope College. Not at the moment, of course, since everyone there is puking their guts out.

My general feeling is that this novel pretty much sucks. But I've grown attached to the characters in it, and at any rate I'm going to enjoy torturing them in the last 15,000 words. Behind the cut is an excerpt. Be warned, this is not for the faint of heart. If you are not accustomed to reading severely amateurish and heavy-handed prose, turn away now. Remember that the following excerpt came straight out of my fingertips, and probably has not been edited in any way since then. You proceed at your own risk. But I hope you enjoy it, even if it only makes you thankful you're not putting yourself through this.

( Read more... )

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming novel. By the way, I can't type the words "my upcoming novel" without laughing. This is something I wrote this afternoon at lunch, and I kind of liked it, so I thought I should share. The usual disclaimers apply, this is a first draft, yadda yadda.

January sat on her bed, thinking about what an awful day it had been. She had stayed up until 3:00am the night before, writing a paper about the Napoleonic Wars. That had caused her to sleep through the alarm, so she completely missed her world literature class, which meant she missed the weekly quiz. That afternoon, she had gotten a D on her first French exam, and her roommate Sarah had screamed at her because January had accidentally erased half of an important phone number on their shared whiteboard. And just as she thought she had escaped the chaos by driving back home to Grand Rapids, January had struck and killed her best friend's dog.

“This is the worst day of my life,” January said as she fell over onto her pillow. Her room was just as she had left it a month earlier when she went away to college. The same pile of stuffed animals sat in the corner. The same collection of inspirational books lined the bookshelf. The same poster of Clay Aiken hung on the far wall, giving her the same sly look he always had. Except now, it occurred to January, Clay Aiken was gay. She turned over and buried her face in the pillow. “This really is the worst day of my life,” she said.

I may be the last person to actually see this, but I have to share because I just thought it was awesome. Both clips.


http://www.hulu.com/watch/41829/saturday-night-live-mccain-qvc-open


http://www.hulu.com/watch/42020/saturday-night-live-update-sen-mccain

November is National Novel Writing Month, and each year thousands of aspiring writers try to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. A few of my friends have participated in years past, and I've been interested but never had enough free time. Well, I still don't have tons of free time, but this year I've decided to do it anyway. I will make time.

The main point of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words. Fortunately, they don't have to be any good. They just have to be on the page. With half an hour remaining before the official start of the contest (at midnight local time), I still have no idea what I'm going to write about. And that's okay. I've been tossing some ideas around in my head for the past few days, but I'm also very interested to see what comes out extemporaneously. From what I've heard, the story often takes a life of its own, and I'm excited to see what happens.

If you'd like to follow my progress, here's my personal NaNoWriMo author page. If you're intrigued and would like to know more about NaNoWriMo itself, here's the very entertaining FAQ. Is anyone else planning to do this? If so, let me know, and we can prod each other to stay on target.

I plan to post updates here occasionally, but I don't know how detailed they will be. I probably won't post excerpts unless I think they're absolutely fantastic, and I don't expect that to happen. I might post excerpts if I think they're total crap, which seems more likely. Wish me luck.