Posts with mood listless (3)
NCAA Football 09
Mood: listless
Music: old LOST podcasts
Posted on 2008-08-28 10:01:00
Tags: video games football
Words: 454
Last week destroyerj and I bought copies of NCAA Football 09 to play an online dynasty together. I haven't played video game football since college to my recollection, so it sounded like fun!
5 weeks into the season, it is indeed fun. The controls have gotten a lot more complicated since then but I'm starting to get the hang of it - trying to pick up one or two new moves every game.
Dynasty mode is pretty sweet too. The idea is that you're the coach of a team (I took U of Houston, destroyerj took Rice) and you play games while also recruiting for next season. If you do well you can go to bowl games/get invited to better conferences/etc. If you do poorly you can be fired!
The first few weeks we played on "Varsity" difficulty, but after I beat #13 Illinois and destroyerj beat #10 Texas we bumped it to "All-American". Last night I sat down to play a practice game against Rice to try out the new difficulty. It was definitely a step up - Rice was beating me 28-7ish before I gave up and went to play my real game against ECU (East Carolina University, apparently). Luckily I guess I had adapted to the harder difficulty while practicing so I thumped them 31-7ish.
So that's going well. The fun part is, oddly enough, recruiting! You have to pick a bunch of high-schoolers to set your sights on (that are at least a little interested in your school), and then start cajoling them to like you more. Your school has certain attributes (academic quality, conference quality, proximity to home, early playing time, etc.) and each recruit values these things more or less, so you can call them and try to figure out what's important to them (and sometimes you can sway them to think something is more important). After they like you a certain amount you can set up a campus visit, and you use the knowledge of what they like and what you're good at to pick activities for them to do.
My recruiting this season seems to be going quite well - I needed two MLB's and two G's which is a bit rough but I seem to have the inside track on a number of good ones. The recruits are rated from 1-5 stars and I have a good shot at some 4 stars, which is pretty good for my first year at a mediocre school. I have learned not to schedule visits during a bye week; thought I read somewhere that it didn't make a difference but it sure seems to.
Anyway, it's a good game and worth picking up, especially if you plan on playing an Online Dynasty!
ratatouille!
Mood: listless
Posted on 2007-07-02 11:11:00
Tags: movies microresolution haskell computer
Words: 195
For our anniversary, we ate at Famous Dave's BBQ and saw Ratatouille. Famous Dave's - not bad, but the meat was kind of fatty. And no, their brisket wasn't "as good as anything you'll find in the Lone Star State", as their menu audaciously claimed. Ratatouille - excellent, excellent, excellent (same director as The Incredibles!). Very sweet comedy. Made me hungry. kottke's review convinced me to see it.
After a little bit of pain, I got my new hard drive set up, SATA and all, and all the data copied over. It's even faster than the old one! I'm experiencing some weird freezes (usually if I wait 10-15 seconds it will come back) in WoW, but I think it may be a video driver problem; I just upgraded them so I'll try downgrading tonight or tomorrow.
Microresolution: I will spend at least one hour of concentrated time before the end of Saturday on the Haskell version of the hat puzzle. (writing the genetic algorithm) I've been trying to do this for a while but I always find myself distracted by other things. I don't know why it's so important to me to do this, but it is.
travel notes
Mood: listless
Posted on 2007-05-29 11:03:00
Words: 397
So we spent Memorial Day weekend with djedi's family in Houston. It was fun, despite the rain and usual hecticness that typical associates large family gatherings. (there were 10 adults and 2 kids) I took a few pictures that I'll post sometime this week. Our flight back was delayed due to rain (as were at least 80% of the flights leaving IAH), but only by half an hour, and we slept late this morning so I'm feeling fairly decent.
Travel notes:
- There are lots of little "road signs" in an airport along the runway, etc. One such set of signs is a distance marker that lets you know how far away you are from the end of the runway - when you're taking off you can see the signs count down to 0. (the flights I've been on usually become airborne around 3) They're just numbers, though, and I wondered what the units were. So, on the flight out, I noticed that the highest number was 9, and it took us around 35 seconds to reach the end of the runway. (we were in the air by then!) So, assuming constant acceleration and that our final speed was 300 mph (a ballpark number), I did the calculations and determined that we were accelerating at 13 ft/sec^2, and that gave a distance of .5*a*t^2, which is around 8000 ft. So, I figured the signs were spaced 1000 ft apart, so the whole runway was 9000 ft long. (I later saw in the magazine that the cruising speed of the 737 we were on is 520 mph, which puts us even closer to 9000 ft traveled) Yay for math! And I just found this diagram of the airport which indicates we were probably on the 9501x150 runway going northwest to southeast.
- At the baggage claim at IAH (which was pretty darn busy) we saw a Lyndon LaRouche supporter. It seemed like an odd location...who wants to talk politics when you're waiting for your bag/ride?
- On the ride home, I saw an HIV/AIDS prevention billboard that said to text your zip code to KNOWIT, which I did, and I got back my nearest HIV/AIDS testing location. Neat!
- Did you know the Petersen graph can be constructed by labeling each vertex with a 2 element subset of a 5 element set, and then connecting the vertices whose sets are disjoint? I didn't.
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