Friday, 23 April 1999:
Another Week of Hobbies
Yes, it's been another busy week. Where should I begin?
Well, I can begin with the epilogue to my Tuesday entry, in which the guy who lives below me came upstairs and asked me to turn down my stereo, claiming he could hear it through the floor all the way in his bedroom in the back of the building. Which seemed pretty impressive to me, since I could barely hear it in my spare bedroom, where I was working on the computer. Annoying! And one more argument in favor of moving.
Wednesday, of course, was gaming night. I went over to Subrata's and we played a game of Robo Rally, which Subrata won (he often does), although I did have the pyrrhic victory of (1) setting off The Big One and thereby taking the Converter away from him, and (2) pushing him off the board on the turn in which he touched the final checkpoint. Not bad, especially since I'd been killed twice in quick succession earlier in the game.
Wednesday was also comic book night, and the following was included in the weekly haul:
- Daredevil Masterworks vol 1 (Marvel; Stan Lee, Wally Wood, et. al.): The second printing of this hardcover reprint of Daredevil #1-11; the first printing runs over $100 these days - nearly triple the cover price of this printing. I do enjoy these early Marvel comics, although many of them are pretty cheesy by today's standards. Haven't actually read this volume yet, but it's nice to see Marvel is on sound enough financial ground to start reprinting these things.
- Planetary #3 (Wildstorm; Warren Ellis, John Cassaday): The series of "paranormal archaeology" continues, this time with an issue whose source material I can't identify: A ghost cop in Hong Kong. I would guess it draws from Hong Kong action flicks, but who knows? It's not as tantalizing an issue as the first two were, but it's still enjoyable.
Also this week: The Titans #4 (yawn; a series without a direction), World's Finest #3 (enjoyable series about Batman and Superman getting to know one another), and Bone #36 (Jeff Smith's cartoony fantasy series continues; I think it will be hard for him to top the sheer hilarity of the first ten issues, however).
Thursday folks decided to get together for Bridge in the evening. I spent a couple of hours going, "Bridge... or laundry? Bridge... or laundry?" Guess what I chose?
This evening wasn't one of my finer moments, although it was educational. It's amazing that I've played a number of hours of Bridge by now and I'm running into situations which call for common bidding procedures which I haven't yet had a chance to use. Like preemptive bids, or slam bidding. John also felt I was overbidding my hand in a couple of places, and probably was; it's hard to keep it all in my head, although I'm getting a little better at reasoning out how many cards a particular bid promises.
Becky - one of the other Bridge players - gave me a booklet on some standard bidding conventions, highlighting the ones which more-or-less make up "Apple standard", the default system that the group I play with tends to use when paired with random partners. I was finding that I had too much to take in as far as bidding conventions, and I wanted to limit myself to ones that would be useful for now. I think it will be easier to wrap my mind around it all with a specific goal in mind.
After that... I think John wants me to learn the "precision" bidding system.
By the way, I did find a glossary of Bridge terms if you're interested.
Tonight I decided to take the night off (well, unless someone called... which they didn't). I watched a couple more Homicide episodes on tape (I have about 20 stored up right now), upgraded my Mac to MacOS 8.5, listened to the Giants game, and answered some e-mail (I seem to have a lot of that stored up lately, too). It's been a nice, mellow evening.
Oh, one more thing: I am hoping that very soon this site will be redirected to my new site at spies.com. When it happens, hopefully it will be transparent to you. But there's a chance that Fullfeed might not get it done before my account expires. So if that happens, please go to the new site to look for new entries. (You may need to give me a day or so to get it up-to-date.) So please make a note of my soon-to-be-new URL!
Michael Rawdon
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