Risk

So I have played Risk about 10 times in the past two years. I've won 9 out of 10 of those games.

This past weekend was one of those winning games. A group of us got together and played on Friday night. There were seven people, so we teamed up having three groups of two and one person on their own. I was on a team with a friend who had never played Risk with other people, but had played it on an ipod touch plenty of times. We rocked.

My general strategy is to start in Africa. Some people like to go for Australia because it is easy to take, but I feel like it makes you too secluded. The only exit point is in Asia, and that is worthless for the first half of the game. Starting in Africa gives you the ability to take over South America.

Here is the coup de grâce of this strategy: Once you have control of Africa and South America you are able to stop anyone else from getting bonuses in their continent. From South America you can hit North America. From Africa you can hit Europe and Asia, removing all of their rights to continent bonuses. If done correctly you are removing 17 potential reinforcements to your enemies. That's power that you can't get from any other position on the board.

One other interesting thing I've noticed is that the one time that I did lose I sat where I wasn't facing the normal top down view of a map of the world. Every other game I've played I've sat specifically so that I could look at the world like a map. It just makes more sense in my plans and schemes for world domination.

Supercomputer

Yesterday my CS 330 professor took our class on a little field trip to see BYU's Supercomputer, Marylou. To be completely correct we only saw one part of Marylou. It is divided up between several different locations on BYU campus but is all the same computer.

It was so awesome. I've never seen anything like it before in my life. The floor was a grate where cooled air was blowing through. There were rows computer parts with wires plugging in everywhere and lights flashing on and off. There was an exhaust area where all the heat generated by hundreds of processors running at the same time was being removed. I immediately fell in love.

Who knew that such a beautiful thing existed in this world? I think I have found my calling in life.

One Missed Call

I just watched the movie One Missed Call at a friend's apartment. It was a scary movie about a girl who died while trying to make a call on her cell phone for help, so her ghost got caught in the cell phone. She then proceeded to call people who would consequently die.

It wasn't that great of a movie. The whole idea that the girl's spirit was in the phone and was killing people was kind of dumb. The first girl that died in the movie died because her cat was meowing at something in the water. When she went to look at whatever it was a gross hand shot out of the water and pulled her in, drowning her. The hand then grabbed the cat and pulled it into the water as well. I laughed at that part and felt comfortable knowing this was going to be a ridiculous movie rather than a super scary movie. As it turned out, I was right. (The youtube video linked there starts right after the girl is completely under the water.)

Afterwards we played Dr. Mario where I once again got my trash kicked. That was a fun way to re-enter reality after watching a semi-scary movie and getting into that mindset.

Reinterpretation

My present job is to find the bugs other people have written in programs and fix them. Today I searched through many lines of C code to find what was causing the program to crash. Every day that the bug isn't found is another day that would-be freshmen cannot apply to BYU (seeing as how the program being debugged is BYU's admissions web pages). It's not exactly the season for students to be applying to BYU though. That comes around October.

Yesterday I programmed all day in the language called Scheme for a project in CS 330. I was up until about 1:40 in the morning (late night) after having been programming since around 10:00 that previous morning. I got it all passed off though.

I discovered that I really like most of the music by Muse. I'd heard a few songs that I liked from them before. I started to listening to some more of their music and really liked it.

I also liked randomly going to a playground and playing tetherball and playing on the swings with friends late at night tonight. That was fun.

Late

I haven't gone to sleep earlier than midnight in about six weeks I think. I would like to go to sleep earlier so I could wake up earlier, but that is a difficult thing to do.

What would it be like to have a job where I worked all night and slept during the day? I could get home and be asleep by around 10:00 in the morning rather than going to sleep somewhere near 10:00 at night. I'd wake up at 6:00 - 7:00 that night to start my day. I think I would really like it. It's totally not feasible for college students (although that doesn't stop some people from doing it), but maybe once I graduated college I could do it.

The only job I in Computer Science that I've heard of being an overnight kind of job is penetration testing. Basically a penetration tester's job is to see if there is any way they can hack into a system or website to obtain or modify sensitive data. Some people do it at night and then send reports to the company for them to read the following day. Pretty neat stuff.

Starcraft 2 Beta

So I pre-ordered Starcraft 2 and therefore got invited to play the Beta. I've been pretty excited about it. It felt kind of like being one of the kids chosen to go into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. I used to read the posts players would make on the beta forums, and now I have my own chance to play and make posts on the forums.

So far I have proved that I am a terrible Starcraft 2 player. I wasn't the greatest Starcraft player to begin with, but this is just amazing how much better other players are than I am. There is a league system where you have to play five placement matches to determine your skill. They separate it up into 1v1 and 2v2 leagues. For the 1v1 league I won only one of the five placement matches. That put me in the lowest league there is. I was happy with that though since it meant I could play against players who were also not that great.

Unfortunately for the 2v2 placement matches I happened to have a rather strong player on my team. They helped me win most of the matches, resulting in being placed in a higher league. This now means that I am always the weakest player in any game I play in the 2v2 league. I don't like being forced to play against harder players like this. I wish I could demote myself to the lowest level league somehow.

It is a fun game though. I hope to play it with friends, since that is always more fun than just playing it with random gamers on the internet.

Dodge Ball

Yesterday we had our first dodge ball game this Spring. It started out with only four people there, so we played four square. When more people arrived we played dodge ball itself. It was so fun! I love playing this sport. BYU's dodge ball club is great at encouraging everyone to play. Essentially what I mean by that is every time someone opens the door thinking they will play basketball we all shout "Dodge ball!" or "Come play dodge ball!" at them. It doesn't usually work. It's so fun though.

I invited a few friends to come with me. I got return invites of "I can't go, but you should come to this brownie party" or else "I can't go, but you should come to this cinco de mayo party" in response. My response to this was more like YOU should come to dodge ball!

Because who wouldn't want to have dodge balls thrown at them at high speeds?

May the Fourth

Yesterday some clever people here put on a fun May the Fourth star wars party. I really enjoyed going to it, talking to people, watching star wars, eating chips and m&m's... just having fun really. I hadn't ever heard of / realized that May 4th is star wars day. I certainly agree with and endorse it though.

I'm only taking one class this semester: CS 330 -- Concepts of Programming Languages. It is a good class to take. I'm feeling like it encourages me to work harder to understand these ideas and practices in computer science. We're currently learning Lex and Yacc which are tools allowing us to write, among many other things, our own programming applications. That is so cool.

There are werewolves among us....

Okay, so this definitely has nothing to do with New Moon. Just in case you were wondering.

I moved to a new apartment complex for the Spring / Summer. It's really awesome. There are a lot of great people and it is a great social atmosphere. I feel like this new place has good potential.

Tonight after Ward Prayer I went to some friends' apartment for game night. There were like 15 people there! We played "After the manner of the Adverb" and "Psychiatrist" and "Werewolves." Those were some way fun games.

I'm glad to be here. I'm certainly not saying that my last ward was not social, but it just feels easier to meet new friends now. Maybe it is just because it is Spring term and I'm only taking one class (CS 330 -- Concepts of Programming Languages), so I feel like I have more time to do things like staying up until midnight playing social games.

I wrote a program in Python that calculates factorial numbers. It was my first non-"Hello, World!" program in this language. I'm excited to be learning it. That is, I'm just trying to learn it from online references. We'll see how it goes.