Harry's Blog

Winks

While I was in the Boy Scouts, my troop would oftentimes play a game on campouts called "winks". It was a simple game (all it required was a pencil and paper), but it was a great way to pass the time. Originally it started with just a cop, a dealer, and a bunch of citizens. However, as time passed and we got sillier ideas, different roles appeared. The version I'm posting is more or less what I came up with last time I made this at a campout (in early 2009-ish).

How to play

1. Print the cards on 4x6 index cards or draw/make your own.
2. Give one card to each player. If there aren't enough people, just leave some cards out. The Cop and Dealer are pretty much required, though.
3. Everyone keeps their role to themselves and sits in a circle such that everyone can see each other's face.
4. When everyone agrees, the game starts.
5. The dealer's job is to wink at people. If a person is winked at, they are out of the game (unless otherwise specified). The dealer wins if everyone possible has been dealt to.
6. The cop's job is to catch the dealer. At any point in the game, he may accuse someone of being a dealer. If his accusation is correct, then the cop wins.
7. If the cop or dealer are taken out of the game, then the game ends.
8. In addition, almost all other players have some sort of special role. Their description is listed on the card.

Scoring

The scoring system is pretty much made-up and arbitrary, and should only be used as "guidelines", so to speak. Though if you want to keep score, go ahead. Let me know if my scoring system is by any means accurate.

The cards

At the moment, there are ten roles. I have a couple ideas for a few others, which I may post if this proves popular enough and/or I feel like putting my sucky Photoshop skills to work.

(Note: All links open in a new tab.)
Dealer
Cop
Cube
Hippie
Assassin
Bomb
Reporter
Talk Show Host
Doctor
Frat Boy

Anyway, hope this game proves at least interesting! Let me know what you think if you play it.

Fortnightly Update

It has been two weeks since I started my website project, which means that I've done about 15 hours of work total. I'm actually fairly pleased with what I've accomplished so far — I've created several new blog features, as well, as an account system that actually lets you save puzzle progess, not to mention making certain parts of the site more organised and easier to update. Over the past few days, I have been working on a tournament results database for high school Quizbowl, which unfortunately doesn't quite exist at the moment. I'd say I'm about 70% of the way to a functional (but not pretty) state, though I know full well there's a good chance something will go horribly wrong.

I'm actually fairly pleased that I'm doing this project. On several nights, I normally would have just played something like Team Fortress 2. However, knowing I had a commitment to working on the website, I actually did something productive with my nights. So far it hasn't actually eaten into time I would have otherwise spent doing something useful, which was my big worry going into this. Only once have I actually not done my assignment for the day, when I hadn't realised that I would be away from my computer for the entire evening and night. So apparently I need to actually plan my day ahead of time for once.

And of course, I do have quite a bit of incentive to keep this up. If I fail, I have decided to donate $500 to charity, minus $2 per day that I complete (so as of now it's down to a measly $472). I figure that it's a fairly tangible penalty that while significant, isn't crippling. Plus, there's an incentive to finish today's work as well as do the entire thing (I get to save two bucks!), and I have a definitive finish date of April 27th. No idea what would happen after that, but that's still a long way away.

Anyway, here's hoping things will continue to progress smoothly!

Five Years

Today is essentially the five-year anniversary of this website! Huzzah! Well, I guess it's been more than five years, but I've basically been counting from when I made my first post, which was made back on August 29th, 2006. Back then it was just a smaller Puzzle, plus vague promises of a game that I had kept working on and off. Heck, the site didn't even have any CSS! Since then, the site has made many changes and improvements and new features. Admittedly I haven't always been maintaining this thing; just look at the wealth of news posts over the past three or so years. But still, it's certainly been a fun project of mine, and it's still neat seeing people get hopelessly stuck on my puzzle. And hey, with my new goal, hopefully there will be a lot more fun stuff for people to see!

The other day, I was putting all the news posts into a MySQL database, and it was fascinating seeing this site evolve over time. There were all the games of Diplomacy (man, that was fun), the Rants, the attempt at the Unending Story (I am actually tempted to bring that back, though with a couple modifications), as well as a lot of other silly stuff. Not bad, considering this started as a silly freshman-year diversion.

On to the next five years!

P.S. For the interested, I recently dug up an old version of the main page here. My, how times have changed.

My Plan

Okay, so it seems that my idea is rather popular, so I am going to go along with it. Starting on Monday, I will commit at least one hour of work on this site for six days a week. If I do not meet that requirement for whatever reason, then that amount of work, plus one half-hour, will be added to the next day. So if I skip a day, I'd have to do two-and-a-half hours the next day, and if I skipped that, it would become four hours, etc. If I end up skipping more than three days in a row (cases where I can't realistically do anything don't count), then I will consider to have failed. Not quite sure what the penalty for failure would be, though I have an idea.

As for what I am going to be doing, I have a few ideas, both for improving the site itself, as well as adding some new content. Some of it I kinda know what I'm going to do, I could use with some input. For example, I kinda want people to be able to track replies on the blog (and maybe even have X comment in reply to Y comment), though I'm probably going to want to wait until I'm sure I'll make some use of this darn thing. There's also some backend stuff that I need to fix, as a bunch of this site was coded when I was a freshman in high school, and it shows.

I also have started basic work on a couple more projects that I personally find interesting and that might have some marginal use. One of them involves Quizbowl, and the other deals with League of Legends, so I have a feeling that most visitors won't exactly care about them. But I ought to state that I have some sort of plan!

This leads me into yet another thing I'm considering, which is possibly modifying the navigation. I suspect that 99.9% of people who visit the Puzzle probably don't care too much about my Diplomacy antics, and each section does tend to stand out on its own. So my question to you guys is: Is it a good idea to redesign the header to eliminate the links, except for a link back to the home page? I can see advantages and disadvantages to both, so some more opinions would be nice.

Finally, there's some stuff that I want to do, but don't really have much of an idea as how to go about it. For example, the Links page. Is it still worth it to keep it up and update it? Or would you guys see it as an unnecessary part of the site? Also, I would love to add new levels to the Puzzle, and I do have a couple neat level ideas, but it seems kinda silly for me to just keep tacking them on to the end, since no one can ever get that far! I'd like to somehow make it such that people who are around levels 15-20 can access it, but can still be done by people who are past that. So yeah, suggestions would be wonderful.

Anyway, this is what I have in mind at the moment, but it could very easily change. As always, if anyone has any awesome ideas, that will be great! But for now, keep an eye out for more exciting stuff!

A new challenge (hopefully)

(If you want to skip to the important bit, go here.)

For those of you that knew me back in my sophomore year of high school, I did a really good job of keeping this website up-to-date and adding new and interesting things. Unfortunately, over the years, I have let this site slip by the wayside. The last time I made any actual updates to anything was about a year and a half ago. I actually had to clean out some spam comments in the blog that had been sitting there for months because I hadn't bothered to check. (Spambots, you're wasting your time!) I have started on a couple programming projects, but none of them have received the light of day. So basically, hdwhite.org is in the exact same state as it was back in 2008 or so, and it kinda sucks.

Frankly, I love having my own website. And it seems that other people like it too. When my puzzle was mentioned in the MIT student newspaper a few months ago, my site got over 500,000 pageviews the following day, peaking at over 30,000 hits per hour. So I really don't like abandoning this site, which is what I have been doing for quite a while now. Plus, it gives me a nice creative outlet. (Harry? Creative? Wait, what?)

On one recent sleepless night in good ol' Albuquerque, I was reading about Starcraft stuff (Harry White: coming to a Bronze League near you!) and I stumbled on the blog of someone whose goal is to play Starcraft for two hours a day, six days a week (Linky, if you're wondering.) Upon reading it, I had an idea: What if I did something similar? I would make it my goal to work on my website every day for some preset amount of time per day. Hopefully, as a result, this site might actually become useful for the first time in forever. In addition, I'd get to keep a nice hobby, which is probably something I need at the moment.

With something like this website, I am all but required to keep adding stuff to it on a fairly regular basis, or else interest dies out (well, the puzzle is a different matter). On occasion, I have had thoughts about resurrecting this old site, but part of the reason that had kept me back was the requirement of having to frequently focus on it. This time, instead of seeing this website and the maintenance thereof as a chore, I hope to view it as a goal to accomplish. After all, I have done it before, so why can't I do it again?

So here's my plan. I will work on my website for at least one hour a day, six days a week, through some predetermined date. No doing two hours one day and none the next, since that would just be cheating. "Working on the website" would include anything that I make with the intention of being seen by the public, be it either more puzzle levels, more blog posts, new content, etc. Random meaningless coding doesn't count. Obviously I'll have to make exceptions for days in which I won't have reasonable computer or Internet access, but that's life for you. If for some reason I don't succeed, then I will do something suitably punishing, as a deterrent against slacking off. I'm not frankly sure what that would be yet (suggestions are welcome!), but hopefully I won't have to deal with it.

So the question I have for you guys is: Should I go through with this plan? Will there be enough of a return on my investment? Or am I just being really silly late at night? Please let me know your opinions on all this, or if you have any ideas. Ideally I'd like all this to work out awesomely, but there's also a good chance this is just me needing some more sleep. If feedback seems to be positive for all this, then I'll probably make a post in a couple days with some (hopeful) plans of mine and a couple questions about the site in general.

Week in Review: March 5

Welcome to the first Week in Review. The point of this is to throw in all the various things that I've found interesting but can't justify making a full blog post out of them. The content will vary depending on what I happened to find over the past week, but I have a feeling that eventually the format will settle down somewhat. Anyway, here goes:

Program of the week

IOGraph — It's a simple Java program that runs in the background that tracks your mouse movements and saves them into an image that you can save and share with everyone. Unfortunately my usage of a trackpad doesn't make for exciting results, so instead I'm just going to link to an image made by the creator of the program.

Video (series) of the week

It's a visualisation of the notes of a piano, with each octave taking up a full rotation around the spiral. There are vidoes for similar pieces in the "Related Links" thing (hopefully), but I felt the Hungarian Rhapsody was the best one to show.

On this day

On this day in 1770, escalating tensions between American colonists and British troops stationed in Boston caused what is now known as the Boston Massacre, which resulted in five deaths. In the ensuing trial, it was decided that the soldiers (represented by future President John Adams) were threatened by the colonists. Six of the soldiers were acquitted, while the other two were found guilty of manslaughter.

Oddball news article of the week

Australian government claims their site was hacked. How was it done? By typing in the web address.

Some closing thoughts

The Olympics would have been a lot more fun if they installed a flux capacitor on all the bobsleds.
The urge to blog is a dirac delta function. It is zero everywhere except at one point where it's infinite, but at the end all you end up with is one post.
I am surprised that no one has thought of using a university quad for a Tower Defense LARP.
No matter how had you try, you cannot stare down black ice.

Enjoy your weekend!

Welcome to the New Blog, Take 2

As you have noticed, I have started making blog posts again. Last time I tried, well, it ended kinda badly. Actually, to say it ended implied that it even started, which would be kinda generous. And yet, apparently I've decided to try again. However, this time I am more prepared this time. For one, I've made sure to build up a backlog of posts, so I know I'll at least be able to get through a nominal amount of time before I stop posting again. Ideally, I'll be able to post three times a week, as well as a "week in review" of stuff that basically don't deserve their own post. Of course, that's if I can continue coming up with material at that pace, which may or may not happen. We'll see.

Also, you can help too! If you have an idea, or a link, or anything else I might find fascinating, let me know! There's a handy comment box down below, or you could shoot me an e-mail using the link at the bottom of the page! Anyway, tune in tomorrow for the first Week in Review.

Bottled Water

I don't exactly consider myself an avid environmentalist. I don't contribute to Greenpeace, I don't go out of my way to buy organic, and I probably throw away more than I have to. However, one thing that irks me to no end is the prevalent use of bottled water. I mean, there are times when it's useful (for example, if you're in an area where water isn't readily available), but there is no need to drink bottled water at home when there is equally good tap water right at the sink. People might complain that it isn't healthy, but municipal water is in fact regulated, and when something goes wrong (which rarely happens), it's a big deal! Now, as we all have heard numerous times, a picture is worth a thousand words [citation needed]. Thankfully, someone has already created an infographic (which is worth a lot more than 1000 words, right?), which allows me to be a lazy bum and link to some other dude's work instead (click for the actual thing).

Why I Use Windows

The other day, I was typing up my physics lab in Microsoft Word. The Linux geek sitting next to me noticed this, and proceeded to bug me about not using Latex. In this case, the fact that I had to submit it in just over an hour and a half was enough to keep me on my merry way, but the thought did pop up: Why do I use stuff like Microsoft Word instead of other, probably more powerful options?

I should probably note that I am in no way, shape, or form against open-source software and its ilk. In fact, on two occasions, I have run Ubuntu Linux on my computer. The trouble is, both those times resulted in me having to reformat my hard drive due to a stupid mistake of some sort. You see, open-source software tends to want to give more power to the user. The caveat, however, is that it results in more opportunities for the user to mess up, and it almost always results in a much steeper learning curve.

It's easy to see why there's the greater chance of accidentally blowing up your hard drive. As for the higher degree of difficulty, consider the following equation, written in both LaTeX and Microsoft Word 2007:

LaTeX: \[z \left( 1 \ +\ \sqrt{\omega_{i+1} + \zeta -\frac{x+1}{\Theta +1} y + 1} \ \right)\ \ \ =\ \ \ 1\]

MSWord: z(1 + v(\omega_(i+1)+ \zeta-(x+1)/((\Theta+1) ) y+1) = 1

In addition, Word automatically processes the equation as you go along, while LaTeX requires you to compile the file before viewing it, which is rather laborious if you don't know what you're doing. This does not mean LaTeX doesn't have its advantages, though. Word files can only be opened by other computers with Word 2007, while LaTeX generates PDFs that can be viewed by anyone. Furthermore, LaTeX is much more powerful, as you can include stuff like variables and loops.

In my daily usage, I don't really need a whole lot. There's rarely a case where Word doesn't have what I'm looking for, and I usually don't have to worry about compatibility, since I typically just print the files and turn them in. However, if there is a situation where neither of these is true, I would see no problem with using LaTeX for the time being.

Of course, the one thing I did not mention was cost. In my case, I happened to get Microsoft Office as part of a bundle that I had to purchase for the university anyway, so I didn't actually pay anything. On the other hand, had I had to pay for it, I would certainly not buy it. I used OpenOffice before, and in the four years that I used it, I had very few problems.

I should also note that I am not outright endorsing either one. I am just saying that each method has situations where they would be more useful, and that there is oftentimes no true right answer as to which one is better.

Now Apple, well that's a different story. Maybe I'll come back to that later.

Welcome to the New Blog

Well, as you can probably tell, the Rants have become a blog. Yay for being a conformist. Anyway, I'm hoping that this format change will give me more of an opportunity to post more stuff, as now I'm not really restricting myself to ranting about stuff any more (not that I was really doing a whole lot of that in the first place). In addition, there is now a comments section, so now if you want to send me a death threat, you can do so right here! There's also an RSS feed and better navigation, so it's finally possible to keep up with this without having to remember to check back every couple of months.

While I'm at it, there are a couple of ground rules for comments. First off, please remember that anyone can read what you write, and I reserve every right to edit/delete your comment. So no profanity, no personal threats, no advertising, no spam, and no acting like a complete and utter idiot. If you want that, go somewhere else. Other than that, have fun! I implemented comments for a reason.

Finally, you may have noticed that most of the original Rants were brought over, while some were not. The reason why I didn't transfer over all of them was because either they were outdated or because I'm planning on revisiting them later. And yes, I will fix the dates at some point so they'll actually correspond to when I wrote them, instead of having a bunch of posts saying 9/20/09.

Anyway, here's the blog, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it.