• I had enough time to play in the /dev/null/nethack tournament at the start of the month, but I haven't played this week. I did manage to play a few serious games, one of them just getting past the castle before YASD, and I completed the Grue challenge, the ZAPM challenge, and this year's new challenge within the first two games. I never seem to encounter the level for the Pacman challenge, and the KoL challenge is broken this year. The wish to activate the ZAPM challenge came from a water demon that popped out of a fountain while I was trying to uncurse stuff. At some point I should post a recap here and all my badges for accomplishments over the last 4 tournaments.
• My prizes for yet another year of alsoran status in the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship arrived yesterday. It was two ThinkFun puzzles, the Rec-Tangle puzzle (which I solved in about a minute) and the 36 Cube (which I didn't start playing with yet).

• Oh yeah, rain. People have been having a stupid number of accidents during evening rush on 128, so I have been getting home up to an hour later than usual. This has been taking time away from other things I'd like to be doing. Together with the general heavy load at work, it makes me feel like I need a vacation. It's a good thing I have one...
• The NPL convention is just around the corner, of course, and I have had my arrangements made for a while. There is clear weather in the forecast, with some chance of a passing thunderstorm to interrupt an otherwise rain-free con. And I continue to work on Enigma puzzles and try to build up a string of completes.
• I haven't had a lot of time to work on Math Magic but I did manage to put my name next to one miscellaneous achievement, as well as two "none"s where I showed particular results weren't possible.
• On Ed Pegg's site I saw the link to Al Zimmermann's Son of Darts contest sometime last month. I have some programs running for this but I am not devoting a lot of my time to it right now. There is a whole year to work on it. I am running some fairly lengthy searches to try to get some good results for all the cases; I expect to have 86 points and change when these are done and my initial results for all the cases are posted, which still leaves me needing a breakthrough in better search techniques to have any prizewinning potential.
• The external monitor I use with my laptop died recently, and seeing how it was a 5 year old 17" LCD, I followed the old tradition of upgrading to a much better monitor (in this case, bigger) for about what I paid for the last one (a 23" widescreen, which adds both in area and pixel count approximately 50% more length and a little more height). Of course, at the con, I will have to make do with the laptop screen alone, but con is mostly not about using computers.
• I went to Salem Willows and got in a good session of pinball today, scoring replays on Nascar, No Good Gofers, Attack from Mars, and several on Funhouse, eventually setting a #2 high score on it at 27 million. There were tons of people in the park enjoying the first nice summery weekend we've had all year, and not the largest crowd I have ever seen in the arcade but still a good number of people in there. They have a nice setup with about 16 pinball machines this year, close to the most I have ever seen in there, though for the most part they are the same ones they have had there in years past. There were a few broken ones; their tech is probably out enjoying the nice weather!
• Oh yeah, and though I was rather slow about it, I finished the recent meta-puzzle in P&A Magazine. I didn't find the hidden contest yet; maybe during con travel I can look for it.

• W**k is a heavy load lately, but let's not burden the blog too much with it. Suffice it to say that I am not putting in more hours but I'm being called upon to do a heck of a lot during the hours I am there.
• Mystery Hunt is chugging along. Some of my puzzles will be in next year's Hunt. Probably more than in the 2008 Hunt, but we are a smaller team than Palindrome was, so this is to be expected. Of course I can't say more now.
• There is a whole bunch of interesting stuff at MathMagic this month. I have some contributions on one problem and one I need to properly write up on another.
• The US Puzzle Championship is next Saturday. There is still time to register. I do not expect much of a difference in the results from last year, but I will participate as I have done the last 10 years or so.
• It seems all my friends are throwing parties for one reason or other this month, and I am attending some of them. And the NPL con is in Baltimore in just a few weeks.
• ( Kingdom of Loathing stuff )

I don't see any of the familiar American names here, so apparently the others either didn't compete or didn't bother to submit scores, except for the one person who registered as "No Name" and placed 6th internationally.

Turkzeka #2 came out just before I left for Eric's, and I am befuddled by it.

• My team, plugh, finished up the CISRA puzzles last night, solving the last one 2 days after the next-to-last one to finish 4th in the non-prize-eligible division.
• Turkzeka started today. The first puzzle is still available at full value if you'd like to join.
• Logic Masters, the German puzzle championship, is next Saturday.
• The Washington Post hunt is Sunday, May 17th. I'm not planning to attend.
• And for next month, the USPC is June 20th.

• I submitted a Ralf for the Enigma that gave Crax a good laugh. Look for it next month.
• I got my laptop fully working again (see last post). The inverter turned out to not be the problem, but actually the backlight itself, which was a much more daunting job to replace, mainly in the part where I have to solder the backlight wires onto what are just tiny posts on the end of the backlight. This required several tries. I had tied the fragile bulb to a plastic part of the frame that it rests against anyway once it is installed to help hold it in place, and ended up also temporarily tying the wire there once I had it looped around the post, while I worked on the soldering.
• I've been working with my teammates on theme development for next year's Mystery Hunt. I can't say much about it, of course, but stuff is happening.
• I skipped the ACPT again, as it doesn't serve the purpose for me that it did when I started going.
• I went to Matt Stone's party Saturday, and learned 3 new games: Dominion, Aquadukt, and Chicago Express, but didn't win any of them.( About the games )
• We had a very small local NPL get-together Sunday for non-ACPT-goers. I taught La Do La Li/Ti and Sue++ the classic game of Anagrams, and we played some other games and laughed at the Scrabble Junior Cheez-Its. Brief review of the Cheez-Its: Pretty much like regular Cheez-Its, but the same technique that is used for pressing the edges is used to make letter shapes in the interior of each cracker. This makes them denser and less puffy than regular Cheez-Its, and I think it makes them taste and crunch more like Cheese Nips. A number of the crackers were broken off on one side, along the edge of the letter. The Scrabble Junior component is a miniature gameboard printed on the back of the box, offering suggested words and some pre-printed letters, along with a set of rules for playing a Scrabble-like game. We chose not to play the game, but I pulled handfuls of 5-7 crackers from the box and tried to spell my best word from them before eating them, usually failing to use all the letters due to an overabundance of vowels.

• Color laser printer
• Laptop with external mouse
• MP3 player
• Digital Camera
• Flatbed scanner (that ended up not getting used since there was another one available)
• 3 power strips, and all the cables to connect and power the above equipment
• Erector set
• Pre-constructed spaceship made of R-C car, erector parts, and playing cards, and the R-C controller, 2 dice for it to shoot, and batteries
• Box of plastic nametag holders
• Set of colored pencils
• Scissors (This was a late addition and a fortunate one; nobody else brought scissors)
• Scotch tape
• One of those clipboards that opens up for you to store papers and stuff inside, with 3 twist-erase pencils, a large eraser, and a pen
• A pad of paper and a pad of graph paper
• A little food and 2 12-packs of Coke
• Folding cart to help haul the stuff in