Sunday, November 30, 2008

Wordabble -- 100,000 points

This morning, I passed a landmark that has been looming for a while and that is have found 100,000 points in the Fusion Bay's iPhone/iPod Touch game Wordabble. Earlier in the month, I achieved another milestone and that was to have played my first 100 games. As I think about these two milestones, I wonder what other milestones I can achieve by playing wordabble. I'll close this entry by thanking Jason and Adam for developing wordabble. 100,000 points later and 100 games later I still get my daily mental gymnastics through Wordabble. Thanks guys!

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Geocaching, the military, and bow hunting

Yesterday, I was out geocaching and with the expectation that it would be cool and quiet afternoon. This was not too be. As I was driving up to the trailhead I passed two groups of army recruits decked in cammo, face paint and carrying an assortment of rifles, sniper scopes, and machine guns. They looked like a serious and dangerous bunch. At the last moment, I noticed that most of the guns were plugged. They were hoping to ambush another platoon concealed much deeper along the trail. Lucky for me the first geocache was in the opposite direction and an easy find. I continued along the trail and noticed a guy in cammo sitting midway up a tree keeping very calm and quiet. Later I would find out that the woods were occupied by deer hunters with bows. The third cache find was what I call a "gotcha." The cache was suspended 15 feet in the air and hanging from the nub of a branch. Standing on a three foot stump and using a 10 foot long branch I was able to knock the cache down. As I was lifting the cache back into place along came a couple of deer hunters wanting to know what I was doing. I showed them the cache and my GPS and explained what geocaching was all about. Before they headed back along the trail I asked them what to do when in the woods during deer season; do you move silently or make some noise. They suggested to make more noise that you would expect of a deer prancing through the forest.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

100th Wordabble game

Today I played my 100th game of Wordabble. Each day has been a lot of challenging and rewarding fun. I can say with certainty that my vocabulary has increased as I continue to learn more and more obscure words. When Jason and Adam introduced the finger-dragging with auto-entry option I found I could play the game faster. Another feature that has become more valuable over time is being able see what words I have missed at the stroke of midnight as I use it as a way to increase my vocabulary. I would like to take a moment to talk about a couple of the more entertaining days. In one of them I was able to make use of most of the urology terms I had learned a couple of years ago. In the other game, I was using my knowledge of the various components of the heart and lungs. I can say that I have enjoyed each days whether it had 200+ words or less than 100 words. In the high value games it was frustrating to find 50% of the words. When there were fewer than 100 words I would scratch my head and wonder if that four letter jumble of letters was indeed a word. In most cases it would be a new obscure word that I would park away for future reference. I'll close off this entry by thanking Jason and Adam for my first 100 days of fun playing wordabble.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Bras to Masks

I'm at home for a long weekend which gives me a chance to catch up on reading. This morning I was reading one of my father's technical magazines. It talked about a recent patent for a bra that could be quickly converted in a face mask in the event of civil emergency.