John O'Laughlin's Journal

11:06am: canam
I hope it's still on. It's getting late enough that I thought about nagging somebody about it, but I suppose there's no need.

Pearson seems to crowd up pretty bad with hosers in the summertime, and as such BOS-YYZ-BOS looks like well over $800 for two people. So I don't know.. we might rent a car and drive the whole way, we might fly to Buffalo and car/bus/train the rest. I read some forums where other people had asked about BUF/YTO land transportation, and the not quite unanimous consensus was that crossing the border in a Greyhound is not much fun. Anybody have any ideas?

9:47am: favorite plays
yay me:
(P)ERI(S)TOME vs Peter Schwartzman, 2006
(TRACKS)UIT vs cuzzakenji, 2006 NSC
ExIG(EN)TLY vs Darrell Day, 2006 NSC
SATIN(WOO)DS vs carolravi, 2007 DO
SP(OROGENIC) vs wisemonkey, 2007
SYNKAR(Y)A vs listeme, 2007 Baltimore
SLUIcEW(AY) vs wisemonkey, 2008

some great plays from my opponents:
(PILFER)ABLE by Mark Kenas, 2002
FrO(G)FISH by Mark Kenas, 2003 (He fished off two on his opening rack keeping something like FFIS? and drew this as a 2x2! The exchange simmed best and was a great play not many people would think to make.)
CRAMO(IS)IE by Mark Kenas, 2003
(UN)NEEDFUL by cuzzakenji, 2006 NSC
SUPER(GO)OD by Ron Hoekstra, 2007 ArdenCup

1:05am: I made a thingy
It's not actually anagramming anything yet, but that should be the easy part. Hope I'll be able to try it on my real iPhone soon, or ever. My coworkers and I were trying to think of iPhone games today at lunch, and the best idea was a Boggle game that would let you shake up the cubes by shaking the phone.

2:21am: Dallas
we were delayed at manchester and our mdw-dfw codeshare decided not to wait for us. southwest helped out as well as they could and at 1am central we made it to Oklahoma city (after another stop in st louis). We had a tough call on whether to wait in Okc to fly standby in the morning, but we opted to rent a car, so rod is driving me, monkey, alyssa, and Jason in a nice big SUV and we're probably only three hours away now. Woot#!

11:26am: happy birthday wisemonkey!

1:38pm: oops
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/30/iphone-doesnt-work-with-most-3rd-party-headphones/

Found this out the hard way just now. Really, really lame.

Otherwise iPhone has been great. The new Location button in the maps is awesome. Using just cell phone triangulation it manages mainly to frame a reasonably sized map that hopefully includes you, but if you're in range of wifi with location data on Skyhook, it'll get you within a few yards. The browser has some annoying limitations, but in landscape mode text is extremely readable.

11:24pm: cambridge cup
Yesterday wisemonkey and I hosted a tournament to find the best Scrabble player in Cambridge. I think everybody had fun and we got to eat at Pepper Sky's for lunch, so I'd call it a success.

lordiceman 5-3 +503
cheezchick 5-3 +494
Aaron 5-3 +50
olaugh 4-4 -21
jasonkb 4-4 -104
magratheazaphod 4-4 -365
wisemonkey 3-5 -299
benphial 2-6 -255

Thanks to everyone for coming and congratulations to Rod and Alyssa!

12:04pm: albany bingos
TANGLER NOWNeSS RADIATES
CALORIES WHEATEN SAFFrON
HEADSAIL BEARSKIN MOULINs
WASTREL
MEATIER aDORING
RADIATOR (later got to turn it into IRRADIATORS 2x2, but it was unfortunately a massive blunder)
DIASTEM INFARES READJUsT
PHONEYED cOWIEST
GENITURE
AMoRINI
OVERDONe REDWING
SEROsAE PARKING ENORMOUS
ENROOTS LORICAE GUMMIEsT
OARsmAN TEENERS
HUGENESS LItANIES
LATTINS
ARRIERES* (not # as I had thought when I played it. no S on ARRIERE#)
CULTRATE TWIGgEN
IMAGINE GRAZIERS
CIbARIUM*
vEXILLAR UNDERATE
INHERIT (MI)NISTRAL* GRAPHITE
tEACAKES NONRATED ENLISTER
SPRAiNS

3:04pm: wsc bingos
You all deserve a more interesting story than my bingos, but I've always preferred to give tourney reports in person and anyway I'm still too exhausted.

DOGMATIC NIELLIST
GESTAPOS TANGOING
DRAGNETS AXINITES# (CH)EATINGS#
NAVETTE SETLINES CUSHTIER*
ROADING#
GALORES CHOMPER TESTIER ETHENES SUAVELY
FAITHED ALIDADES GIRNIEST#
NOTITIA# UNRESTED
WADSETS INCUSES
TRINDLE FAINTING PROVABLY MOTIONED DIALOGER CREASES
HENDING# PLECTRON HEMLINES ANESTRI
HAIRLINE APOSTLE PEDALOS
FORTUNE NOCTUARY# HARDSET
DERATION# CENTRAL
FURNACES
AERATORS ANTICULT BONDSMEN
ERINITE# SALINAS
TOOTSIE SEXTUOR#
SANICLE GENERALE# ARENOUS BESHAMED
VIDUAGES# TRINDLE
REKNITS
oR(D)INA(N)TS# TERCIOS# SOLERET
NESTING

7:57pm: india
I'm having the most fun I've ever had at a WSC! The food has been great, but tonight I'm just too tired to go out and I'm going to try to sleep earlier so I can have a good last day. I'll be really hungry for puri bhaji# in the morning. Jason won his last game by 383 and had a 2x2 ZORBINgS#!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorbing

9:35am: cape
I had a really unlikely and incredible sequence of games yesterday morning at the Cape Cod tournament.

446-445 vs magratheazaphod
404-403 vs key_lime_guy
398-397 vs Aaron

Sherrie didn't quite get the details about the game with Aaron right. It was a 3-point win for Aaron that changed to a 1-point win for me after we found a mistake in the score for one of his plays. crosstables got me in the last game to take first place, but he hasn't put the results on cross-tables.com yet. Such a modest guy!

Ratings won't mean too much to me until 2009 WSC stuff is on my mind, but I'm happy to have tied my personal record of finishing five consecutive tournaments with a rating above 1900. Mumbai won't put a stop to that, but Albany New Year's sure might.

Last day of work before the WSC has been kind of scary so far. My coworkers are all very excited and happy for me, but I'm already worried about the amount of work that will be left for me with a short deadline when I get back. It'll probably be a lot of long nights at the end of the month, but maybe the timing for it is pretty good. I came home from the last Worlds feeling like I could take on anything, so another shot in the arm would be just fine.

I've never had so many Scrabble players tell me I have a chance to win the WSC. The last two times a lot of folks were probably surprised I even qualified :). But there's about a million holes in what I know, so tomorrow through Thursday, if I'm not sleeping or eating, I'll be studying. Hope to do you guys proud!

JKB and I leave BOS-LHR-BOM at 8:15am!

12:53pm: pant pant fan fan
Somebody brought some really spicy pasta to work, with peppers and a hot sauce containing this thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naga_Jolokia
The dude printed out the Wikipedia article and put it next to the food.

It was tasty and didn't hurt (I didn't eat much), but it sure has a long halflife. Half an hour later and it still burns.

5:38pm: small but appley# tournament
Woohoo about getting picked and all, but check this out:

I'm 12-25 (Christmas!) against Division 1, and 34.5-20.5 against the waiting list. A draw more lopsided than that would be about exactly 100:1.

3:28pm: visaed
I probably shouldn't have put off applying any longer than I did, but everything worked out fine, and even jasonkb (his app was about four days behind mine) should be all set by sometime next week. There is still the matter of the tens of thousands of words I meant to learn but didn't, and I hope to get that all sorted out on the long airplane ride. I wrote a little program to octothorp David Sutton's stories for the new words. Haven't looked at them enough to know how tolerable they are, but David's immensely talented, and I suppose this kind of thing is up my alley if anyone's.

Sunday I bought a new laptop (got mine on sale for $700) which is running Gutsy Gibbon (first time after 12ish years using Linux I've ever single booted it, except for my work PC). It's been mostly fantastic, and I'd like to say that everything worked right away without a hitch, but wireless has been a little screwy so far, and I haven't gotten Bluetooth to work at all. If I had enough sense to give up on messing with it until after the WSC, lack of connectivity would actually be quite a blessing for my chances in Mumbai. Battery life, which has historically been awful on Linux laptops, is looking great. It's not a particular strength of the cheapie VAIOS, but with unnecessary services off and brightness low, should be around 3.5+ hours.

This weekend and next two = DC, Cape Cod, WSC!!

9:03pm: pakorn didn't qualify for mumbai
:(

But Charnwit got the fifth Thai spot, and I look forward to meeting him.

7:10pm: bonus game
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=341#0

I don't know how I managed to miss ADJOIN, but luckily the rest of the game was okay. I don't think I'd change any of my other plays except that I'd do MVULE# instead of HOLM. Wonder if I'd have found SAPROBIC if Adam gave me an R... I'd only gotten as far as hoping for an A. Adam's bingo on his second turn is excellent. Quackle doesn't show the 5 point challenges, but they ended up a wash. He challenged WAGGA# (new) and I challenged VIOLER# (only remembered OLIVER#).

9:27am: grumph#
I deleted the wsc predictions post. It was a bad idea. Jason was understandably upset about my list, and I definitely screwed up. He's the best TWL player on the US team, and I think I was annoyed for a while that he'd waited so long to start studying Collins, but he's studied plenty now, and what # I know that he doesn't won't be very significant in a month. We'll both do fine. A case could easily be made for Nathan and Geoff too, but I didn't think it was worth revising the list. Pretty much any continuation of that thread was likely to make me unhappy.

Before the other WSCs too, I went through phases where I didn't like my chances much. Switching between the dictionaries is always hard, and the set of non-TWL words has gotten much larger and more disgusting. Disgusted or not, I expect to know the shit by the time I need to, and the excitement of being there ought to shake whatever negativity I might still have.

Games with Adam yesterday were pretty good. I can't remember all of the results of the 2 vs 1 games, but they were well played by both sides, and I split two games him while Jason rocked his US/UK match.

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=339#0

Jason and Adam played almost perfectly in this one. The only thing I see that they missed was TIFF/TROPED#. Some of my plays at the end were slightly wanky#, but not too bad. ZEIN, EME, and HOSEN should have been WOWEE# or ZEE, WOWEE# or SEME, and EUOI#. EUOI# right off instead of WOWEE# in the endgame is better, but I thought keeping one of each vowel might give me protection against some magical J setup (one didn't actually exist).

4:34pm: why does the "i got $5000" song from wayne's world get so few google hits?
Wow. It was really great to see (almost) everybody, kind of like a half-NSC, and luckily it was one of the halves where I didn't suck!

bricap asked me how many SOWPODS words I played, and the only one I could think of was GOETIC#. I thought probably the others were just dogcrap*, as millcake16 used to say.

Not quite in chronological order, because I was without clipboard the first two days:

JAnGLER REPEATS SYNKARYA DILATES
JIgGERS MOISTURE
RELISTED
PERMEANT
GROANERS OxIDATE
SHOGUNAL (olaugh + NS) ZeBRINE
PASTROMI OVENBIRD bRINIES
ANTINOME DESALTED ALcOVED
TARTUFES TANNERS
none against Matt
POORLIER# REGENTS
MARINERS TONIEsT
GUARAnI ARILLoID COALFACE#!
APOLUNE GRANDEST cLITORIS COATEES

Zyzzyva says coalface# is exposed coal in a mine, and not "some racist shit" like Marlon said, but really I have no idea what I was trying to do or why.

Can't wait to see a bunch of you again in NYC, and congrats to cheezchick, scrabblek8, goldfishbw, and mrsscheisskopf!

2:21pm: sowpods
Why does anyone care about the NSA's endorsement and having the games rated? I just want to play Scrabble with my friends and maybe win some cash, and I'd rather not play Sowpods against people who don't like it. Total conversion to Sowpods was mostly dead before I started playing in 2001, and the real killer was when Edley lost interest. Boohoo. Let's just do our own thing a few times a year and I'll keep playing plenty enough TWL to qualify for WSCs, especially since that's where the prize money is.

I'm totally done talking about it on CGP. Does anyone truly believe anything is going to change in any official way? Would you bet money on it? Does spending time arguing maximize your expected fun? At some point I'd like to make some trips overseas for non-WSC tournaments. I'd like for us to have big tournaments here that people from other countries can play in. That all sounds like a lot more fun, and we don't have to ask for anyone's permission.

9:38pm: what's the only play here that guarantees a win?


I was up 3 points before this play with DEIINNPT unseen. I lost. The best play is a TWL word but might require a two letter # hook.

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=261#19

11:19am: quackle with colourings#
Jason added octothorps in the move history and color coding of non-TWL words. His version of it was pink letters on the gray tiles, but I changed it to be white on pinkish tiles. Firetruck red is my normal choice for a # color, but on the Quackle board that wouldn't look very good because it's the same color as triple words. This will just be an option in the next version of Quackle, since most of our CSW-playing users don't care about whether things are in TWL. I've enjoyed playing this way a lot. Minimizing confusion was what Jason wanted it for, but I like it because it draws attention to the red British words, which say, "Oi mate, I'm a word then. Do play me if you have the chance." Otherwise in some of my lazier Generate Choices-heavy games I might not even notice them. And it looks cool.

7:00pm: olaugh v jasonkb csw speed
Jason and I played eight 5:00 games over the board last night and scored them by typing them into Quackle. Some of the racks (esp. exchanges) are wrong, and we might even have some plays out of order, but it worked pretty well and we'll probably do it this way all the time.

Some of the games were played pretty well, some not. Just started reviewing # and we're both kind of rusty for speed. But it was fun and I bet by November we'll be playing better than this at 2:30.

One of the games didn't get saved, but if anybody's curious, here's the other seven:

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=247#0
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=248#0
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=249#0
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=250#0
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=251#0
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=252#0
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=253#0

Tonight I'm going to add #ness and playability to Quackle's dictionary so that soon Quackle will mark non-TWL words with octothorps (and psst... include a new version of Letterbox). MMm that's good bloatware!

11:37am: dream
I'm at a tournament in Dallas, but for some reason I'm only playing the five-game early bird and then flying back to Boston. The playing room is outdoors, and there's a horrible blizzard. Everyone complains about the weather, but the complaints are much too restrained to be realistic, and no one suggests that we play inside. I've started 4-0, but I'm very cold since I'm wearing shorts, so I go back inside to find a blanket or something. Mr. T and Keith Smith are sitting at a table in the lobby, and I can't resist sitting down to talk with them. The conversation goes on for hours, I forfeit my last game (no one came in to get me) and miss my flight home. There's a chance that I've won the tournament anyway, but I see Joey hours later and he says, "oh, Neville won, he went 5-0." I don't know anyone named Neville, but I check CGP on my phone and see that it's Nazi-appeasing PM Neville Chamberlain.

I have a cold. Now, not in the dream.

8:31pm: 3 minute csw on isc?
anybody? hardly any non-NA people do speed. can't get anybody above about 1500 to play with me

5:32pm: iron and wine
9/29 8:00 show at the 9:30 club in DC. Games starting at 10am Saturday suddenly not seeming so great. I don't know if there's an opening act. Is this doable?

There's also 9/27 Boston.

+MP3!
http://www.digitalwell.washington.edu/dw/1/51/f9/f963d37c-01ce-46b4-84e1-66d548024894.mp3

update
I spoke to wisemonkey and I see more difficulty with this idea because the tournament is way the hell out in the suburbs and not in more or less Baltimore as I had assumed. So instead I should be real worried about even making it for the 8pm Friday games because my flight doesn't get in until 6pm. I was broke and lonely in the midwest but at least we didn't have goddamn Friday night starts for tournaments! We can do 14 games, just make it eight and six!

Anybody want to go with me to the Boston show?