Interesting Stuff

As promised, here is a hand we played this evening at bridge club, as copied down by Andrew’s computer. Andrew was North, Kai was East, I was South, and Carrie was West. Kai opens with 1D, and I double (a classic example of a Takeout Double). Carrie passes and Andrew bids 1S. Undeterred, Kai bids 2H, which I double (this time it’s a Penalty Double). Carrie passes, and after a pause, Andrew passes as well. Kai gets scared and runs to 2NT, which I am happy to double (penalty again), and then Kai continues to 3D. At this point, I lose my confidence, and pass. Andrew, however, does a Penalty Double of his own before everyone passes. In the end, we took 1 spade trick, 2 diamonds, 1 club, and 3 hearts (one of which is a ruff), and another trick somewhere (I don’t remember if it was another heart ruff or another spade, but there was something else in there) for a total score of 800. Had we bid more and doubled less, we probably could not have made game, let alone grabbed 800 points. It was a lot of fun to bid – I’ve never made 3 doubles in a row before.

On Tuesday, Andrew and I went to the ACBL sectionals tournament. We were in the stratified pairs competition, so we were only competing against other players with less than 20 masterpoints (I have 0 and Andrew has 5). We did pretty well – we took 5th place out of 7 partnerships overall, and took 2nd out of 3 in our stratification. I’d like to go back soon. We’ll see.

Mac bought the car he’s been looking at for a bit – it’s an offwhite Toyota pickup that seats 2 and a half. 4 cylinder engine with a lot of pick-up. I got to ride in it a bit because we did errands and bought stuff tonight. Food, power strips, and some mesh to make screens for the windows. It’s summer, so the bugs are out in force. Being a college student, I’m up late and keep my lights on after dark. Let me tell you, when the windows are open, the bugs come in droves! I figure that with mesh, velcro, and a liberal application of duct tape, I should be able to make screens for the windows and keep the place mostly bug-free. Robert is coming on Friday for Rachel’s birthday, so I hope I can do this by then. I doubt it, but it’s nice to have goals. As Douglas Adams once said, “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.”

Oh! I now have 2 monitors hooked up to my computer! I got the 2nd monitor from Travis at the start of summer, and had been looking into getting a graphics card. Then, yesterday, Mac mentioned that the CS Staff had been cleaning out the machine room, and were going to throw out a bunch of 2nd-rate graphics cards, and I should go get one first. I only wanted a crappy one anyway, so I got it. The one I picked out happened to not work, but a second card did, and life is good. At 1024×768 it can only support 16bit color, but I don’t really care; I’m not using the 2nd monitor for raytracing or games.

On the academic side of things, Clair finally got DIRCOL up and working yesterday, so I can start building a model in that. Now I just need to talk to Prof. DePillis a little about the finer points of the system. Raugh thinks I will have a paper to publish by the end of the summer, but I’m not so sure. Time will tell. and it would be pretty neat. Tomorrow’s a Stouffer talk, so I won’t get too much done in the morning. Still, I’ll be getting paid to eat food and listen to a prof talk about what they’re doing this summer, which is always interesting.

So… yeah. All in all, life is pretty nice right now. Having said that, I’m going to sleep.