"I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat"
Oct. 9, 2005
Last week was the ACM annual PuzzleCrack competition. Depite my better judgement, I somehow started solving the puzzles. I probably should have been working on the puzzles of my research instead, but there is something eminently satisfying at solving puzzles that can be solved in a short amount of time. The upshot is that I did pretty well. My team and I won 3 days worth of prizes, including 2nd prize in the final day, which netted us a $200 Amazon.com gift certificate. The Google-supplied prizes were pretty lame compared to previous years, so it was nice of ACM to throw in the gift cards. Overall, I think the puzzles were a lot of fun this year, even if the prizes were a little lame.
My parents recently decided to sell their Once Upon a Child store. They have owned the store for 10 years and have been successful with it, but they feel that it is time to move on. My mom is tired of running it herself, but at the same time she doesn't trust a manager to do a good job. So now instead they are going to experiment with something else. I'm not exactly sure what, but hopefully it will be successful.
Kim and I also went to look at some dogs at the Humane Society. There were a couple that we decided to adopt, but when we went up to fill out an application, we discovered they had already been taken. Of course we were disappointed and irritated. Next time I will ask them which ones are available before even taking them out. We'd like a dog less than 2 years old that would be good with kids and other animals, and no bigger than medium sized.