Shouzer

We ended up winning PuzzleCrack 2006. I’ve got to admit that I thought we had a pretty good shot, but it was still pretty damn cool. We ended up with an Xbox 360, 5 controllers, and 5 games. That’s not too shabby at all. And now that we have won, we got listed on Wikipedia, which was also pretty nice.

Probably the biggest news here, though, is not the fact that a group of 6 people from Southern Illinois won, but that they also took it over. Yup, next year around this time we’ll actually be running PuzzleCrack. I have to admit that I’m pretty psyched for it. I’ve actually already started thinking of some various types of puzzles we could possibly use, and I know everybody has been doing the same. It should be fun.

Let’s just say we dominated. First place. Finished in under 3 hours. Trampling second place finisher by 2 hours. Jared can fill you in, I just wanted to spread the word. WORD.

Well folks, PuzzleCrack 2006 began on Monday and The Big Enchilada was back in full force.  We tied for first on Monday through a snafu (I’m still not entirely convinced we didn’t win), we got second Tuesday, and we won today outright.  So far it’s shaping up to be a pretty good competition for the meta puzzle on Friday.

Through this part of the competition we’ve won a wireless mouse and two wireless 360 controllers from Microsoft.  If we win Friday, the prize would be a 360 Pro, 3 wireless controllers, and 5 games.  It would be pretty sweet, to say the least.

I suppose that I’ve had a subconcious desire for cake recently…or something. To be quite honest, it was a secret hidden even from me. I had absolutely no idea, until the other day when I was listing aloud a few things we needed form the store.

“Milk, eggs, OJ.”
Hm, so far so good.
“Bread, cereal, cheese.”
Well, this all seems rather reasonable.
“CAKE.”
Eh.. wtf?

I can’t claim to know where it came from, but cake leapt out of my mouth. Al maintains that I belted it with authority, and I’m apt to believe him.

The way I see it, there is only one possibility, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming. I was temporarily possessed by a cake-loving demon. You see, the explanation is simple really. I’ve been watching the show Supernatural recently. As such, I’ve gained a keen knowledge of the paranormal and the occult.

What appears to the average person, that is to say you, as a strange slip of the tongue, is to the trained eye a possession. However, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve decided that I should take up hunting the supernatural as a profession. It was, no doubt, fate that brought the demon to me.

For the doubters among you, look up the names of the actors in the show. You’d be a fool to believe it coincidence that one of the actor’s names is Jared. Oh yeah, I just blew your mind.

Speaking of TV shows that have me in them, do you remember the show The Pretender? The main character had the same first and last name as me. I suppose I should sue or something. I’ve been watching a good deal of Boston Legal lately, and I’m sure I could win. My psychic, supernatural-fighting powers would make it a lock.

I’m not sure what I’d spend the money on. Maybe a cake.

So we were out playing football yesterday, and my hand got all cut up. It’s pretty shitty, really. The same thing happened last year to Kyle. Basically, you get enough people in one place and they start acting like fucking morons. In this particular case, that means breaking glass bottles on open fields. So, when my hand touches the ground I get cut up. Here’s the result:

You can see on the first one that the longest cut goes about halfway across my wrist, so they’re pretty long cuts.  It pisses me off that other people’s stupidity comes around to hurt me.

We had the draft for our fantasy football league last Sunday.  It was pretty fun, as it has been the last few years.  The thing that sucks about doing it so far before the season is that now I’m really anxious for the year to start.  Football is by far my favorite sport, so football season is great for me.  I’m also looking forward to college basketball, but nothing can compare with the Broncos.

Anyway, I’m looking to improve on the abysmal season I had last year.  Two years ago I finished with the best record in the league and last year I tied for the worst.  That sucked, and it made it a lot less fun.  Hopefully I can get it turned around.

I had to post this comic when I saw it. Aside from the Oblivion stuff, I think it’s straight out of a couple conversations Al and I have had. Haha, I always wanna go to IHOP.

Well, I obviously haven’t been posting too much lately. It’s in large part due to the fact that the semester is coming to a close, and I’ve been pretty busy lately. It seems that a large portion of my professors don’t plan out their courseloads very well, and we end up getting swamped with work right at the end. For me, it’ll all be over at 10pm on Thursday, when my last final ends. Then I’ll have a good month to decompress before it starts all over again.

In much better news, the Broncos again have a two game lead in the AFC West. It came as a result of them winning their game and the Chiefs and Chargers both losing theirs. Haha, it was pretty sweet. So they’ll definitely be in the playoffs, but now it’s just a matter of whether or not they’ll be playing in the first round and things like that.

I haven’t really been commenting lately either, so I wanted to use this space to say congrats to Scott for his job, his toy, and his becoming project manager for ChallengeX. It sounds like things are going pretty well. Also, that excerpt from the Rose Thorn was pretty funny. Good job, Scottie.

the answers were finally posted for puzzlecrack, and we figured that even if we HAD realized earlier the part we were missing, we still most likely wouldn’t have used the right method to decrypt it. we had actual confirmation that we were leading or in the top 5 the entire day friday, which makes the defeat pretty sour. not to mention, if we had gotten ourselves into gear on mon-thu last week, we would have undoubtedly finished in the top 3.

what a team effort, though, by “the big enchilada”! everyone knowing their roles and stepping up to the plate when they were called upon. cliches aside, it was the most fun i’ve had at school this year, and i can’t wait til next year. i believe mr. bert johnson will be recieving a few emails requesting more frequent competitions.

in other news, the jaguars beat the undefeated bengals. who dey? dey da loozas.

Al and I went up to Terre Haute to visit Scott his weekend. It was pretty cool. We got to check out Scott’s crib. They had this nifty setup in the living room with a semi-deck lifting up a couple of recliners behind the couch. So you had the couch facing the tv, and then a couple recliners lifted up behind that couch facing the same way. It worked out pretty well.

In other firsts for me, Scott gave me a ride in the MR2. It was pretty nice, I enjoyed it. I rather liked how easy it was to put the top down. I also had some Thai food for the first time. It was pretty good.

One of the funniest things of the weekend, was checking out the habits of the local Haueteans (sp?). They were pretty hardcore into ricing out their cars. I got a good laugh from it. Now that I think of it, I wish that I would have taken a few pictures, because I’d personally never seen that many riced out cars in a specific area. Haha, what a waste of money.