Not a Banner Week for Gaming

Tuesday night we played Bridge at Becky's place. In contrast to last time, when I kept getting dealt these 20-point hands (there are 40 conceptual points in a Bridge deck with strong distribution and declared nearly every hand, Tuesday I was consistently dealt about 5-to-11 point hands. Somehow I ended up declaring a lot of those, too, and often the results were poor. (I did get dealt one stunningly bad zero-point hand. Fortunately I didn't have to play it.) I'm not sure this was especially good practice; it got really frustrating after a while.

Someday I must find a regular Bridge partner. There's a limit to how much I'm going to drive myself to learn if I don't have someone to work out conventions with.

Wednesday was gaming night at Subrata's. We played a game of Acquire. Early on it looked like things had gone very much against me, due to a stunning miscalculation I had made, but I had a quick reversal of fortune. To my surprise, I finished second (of three) and was only narrowly behind Chad, who won. A small change earlier in the game and I might have won. Unusually, Subrata came in last (we joke about how the expected result of nearly any game is that Subrata will win).

This week Apple has its Enterprise Solutions meeting, so a number of sales and support engineers from elsewhere in the country were in town. Thursday afternoon several of them showed up outside my cube and said, "So... we hear that you guys sometimes play Quake after work." It turns out I'd seen some of these guys' names on Apple mailing lists, and they were pretty nice folks. So we played a round of Quake for about an hour and a half after work. They turned out to be quite good; we hoped to play with them again tonight, but they never showed up. Presumably something came up.

So I played a lot of games this week, but didn't win many of them. Oh, well!

Speaking of work:

We're doing a department reorg later this month, mainly to adjust offices to be in line with the new management team we've got for our product. Today my group picked offices. Have I bitched yet about how every person who's joined my group since me has been on WebObjects longer than I have? And therefore they get to choose an office before me? Aargh! Well, at least I was able to get an actual office and I'll no longer be in a cubicle. A year in a cubicle is about all I can stand, then I get antsy to be able to shut people out more regularly. (Plus I want to be able to blast the baseball games during the day, saturate the air with the sound so I can register what's happening in the game even while I do something else.)

We're at one of those in-between points in the project right now, so it's a little more difficult to stay focused. I did spend some time plowing through the stack of fixed bugs I had to verify, and I got to spend a little time playing with Mac OS X, which is starting to look pretty neat.

Today I went to lunch with Jenn, in part to retrieve my spare apartment keys from her (from when she watched my kitties way back over Christmas!). We went to Carl's Jr., which is a ubiquitous hamburger chain in the area which is generally derided by everyone I know. It's actually not bad, it's basically a McDonald's (slightly more expensive), and is a step up from Burger King. Of course, if you never eat fast food, then this will mean nothing to you. (In-and-Out Burger seems to be regarded as the best fast food chain in the area; I haven't yet tried them.)

Jenn works at a medium-sized startup in Mountain View (conceptually Sunnyvale, as it's east of Hwy 85, which as far as I'm concerned is the functional Mountain View/Sunnyvale boundary). From stopping in there, it looked less spartan than I'd expected (Jenn says this is because it's 3 years old so it's had time to grow and settle in), although it's still a cube farm.

Lunch with Jenn was good. She apparently loved the Dork Tower comics I left for her to read over Christmas, and went out and bought them all herself!

I've been working out regularly for the last few weeks, alternating a day on the weights with a day of aerobic exercise. Wednesday I went in to do the weights in the afternoon, the first time in many months I haven't gone in the morning. It actually turned out to be somewhat easier to do in the afternoon, presumably because I was more stretched out from having been up and around for seven hours, and not being so sleepy. (I am very slow to wake up in the morning. It's very annoying.) So Thursday and Friday I also went in the afternoon. Maybe I will do this more regularly.

Although, it does require more planning since afternoons tend to be busier at work than mornings are. Maybe I should aim to go around 11?

Anyway, I have been stalled in my fitness goals for months, and I'm getting frustrated with it. I'm not losing weight, I'm not getting thinner, and I've even been cutting back on the amount of food I'm eating. I'm not really interested enough to take really draconian measures (yet); it seems like the amount of exercise I'm getting should be doing more good than it is. Grr.

Tonight I relaxed by going to Borrone. It was pretty crowded inside, presumably because it's been a little chilly lately. I had to wait for a table, but finally got a good one. I finished reading Iain Banks' Excession, which is entertaining but very flawed. Not as good as Use of Weapons.