2004s
- The ‘Give a penny, take a penny’ tray is completely out-of-bounds for the change game. You may not deposit a penny, or any other coin, into it or use a coin from it in your transaction. Ever!
- You cannot tip your way to a win. Simply taking the change you have and putting it in a tip jar disqualifies a win.
- The value of the coin is irrelevent for the change game, you only care about the number of coins. Having three quarters is as close to winning as three pennies.
- You win when you have no coins left!
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Did you know that Yellowstone Park is on top of a huge volcano that is likely to blow in the next few thousand years and take out a lot of the United States?
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Did you know that sometimes planes drop a 1,000 feet out of the blue? It’s rare, but it’s happened.
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Did you know that the same person that introduced CFCs also introduced leaded gas? He did more damage to the environment than perhaps any other single person.
- 2 1/2 quarts of water
- 10 sticks of cinnamon
- 10 all spice berries
- 1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
- 2 1/2 cups sugar
- 1 1/2 gallons of apple cider
- 2 quarts of orange juice
- 1 cup of lemon juice
- Bring water, sugar and spices to boil for 10 mins.
- Let water mixture cool for 1 hour.
- Add apple cider, orange juice and lemon juice.
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Digital cameras all have clocks. Had to change two of these. Let’s see, there is enough computer in here to do amazing stuff with imaging but no ability to automatically change the clock?
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Remote controls!? You bet. Two Philips Pronto’s with their own clocks. They can learn IR codes and do all sorts of gymnastics that make them worthwhile. Dealing with DST is not one of them.
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One Polar wristwatch. It can tell me what my heart rate is and theoretically my VO2 Max but no clue about handling DST.
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Microwave and ovens both have clocks, two more. I’m not going to blame them a lot since the electronics are so basic. But it sure would be easy to fix.
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The phones have their own clock. Kudos to them for taking the time of the master unit so I don’t have to change it on every phone. But it has date and time, it’s trivial to adjust for DST as well!
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I count at least 10 good ole’ clocks that I had to change. Can’t blame them, it’s just a AA battery with a clock mechanism.
Change Game
Introduction
When my wife and I decided to get married and start living together she found one of my habits to be a little annoying. It’s a habit that most guys have regarding change. Most guys probably have a jar, shoebox, or some other type of container that is filled with spare change. At the end of the day, you simply empty your pockets of change and put it in there. I had, over the years filled various containers full of change and every few years would lug it to the bank to be counted.
She didn’t think much of the boxes of change sitting around, so she tried to convince me to make a game out of using my change. Instead of thinking of all that spare change as a nuisance, it was a challenge to figure out how to use it in the right combinations. The goal of the game? To complete a cash transaction and have no change left in your pocket.
My slightly obsessive nature took this game and just ran with it of course! If you wish to play along, continue reading.
Recommended Equipment
The change game requires no equipment at all, but even intermediate players will find that their game play is improved with a simple coin purse. Here is an example of a leather coin purse that is ideal for the change game. Buy one here!
Coin purses can also be found in plastic, however they do not wear as well as the genuine leather type. This coin purse will allow you to keep your change organized, and by simply squeezing it’s sides the change game enthusiast can determine their change situation.
Rules
There are only a few rules to the change game.
Basic Strategy
When playing the change game you need to keep an eye on your current status. Strategically, certain combinations of coins are more likely to yield a win or be used quickly. Also, remember that small coins can be moved quickly.
For example, while 5 pennies are a lot of coins, you can use them very quickly as a nickel substitute.
 
A great tip while playing the change game is to combine nickels and dimes in place of quarters.
Advanced Strategy
To the uninitiated the change game can be a simple game of luck. It seems straightforward that you will have a set amount of change, hopefully less than $0.99, and the transaction will require change between $0.01 and $0.99. You have a 1 in 99 chance of winning. However, this assumes that the change required for transactions is evenly distributed.
To test wether this is indeed the case we analyzed 2,886 transactions over a 7 year period. These 2,886 transactions excluded restuarant bills (since they are typically rounded with a tip) and recurring payments or utility bills that would bias a specific cent value. We also excluded all transactions over $1,000 since it would be unlikely that cash would be used in such a transaction. The average transaction was $61.15 and the median was $35.29, with 1,850 of the samples being below $50, a very reasonable amount for a cash transaction. We then plotted the distribution of the change required for these transactions.
The distribution is not even. Nine values appear over 40 times in this analysis: $0.02, 0.04, 0.50, 0.80, 0.90, 0.94, 0.95, 0.98 and 0.99. While these 9 numbers only represent 9.1% of the possible winners, they are 15.8% of the transactions. In fact, if you just focus on the values above $0.90, those four values which only represent 4.0% of the possible outcomes are 7.8% of the actuals.
It is also clear that certain ranges or values should be avoided. There are nine more values that appear fewer than 20 times: $0.12, 0.27, 0.31, 0.33, 0.41, 0.58, 0.62, 0.66 and 0.74. While these should represent 9.1% of the winners, they actually are only 5.3%. Clearly combinations that should be avoided.
In general you can observe in the pattern that the range above $0.50 has a slightly higher likelihood of winning than the range below it.
Winning
You win the change game when you have depleted all of your coins. The coin purse on the left is an example of an ‘in play’ player and the coin purse on the right is after winning (the safety pin is not relevant to the change game).
Xbox Mod Night
Circuit boards, chinese takeout and ultrageek action. What can be more fun!? Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. 🙂
Operation was successful on the first try. Now it’s time to play with the software side of things. Big thanks to Chris and Chad! That nice soldering work is all Chris, can’t take any of the credit for that.
Stiff
I just finished reading what has to be one of the stranger books I’ve read. Stiff is in a way like an owners guide for future cadaver owners. That is to say, all of us. Mary Roach goes into impressive, if not at times unsettling, detail about the processes by which cadavers contribute to education, safety and numerous other ventures. It is initially off-putting but after a few chapters is very interesting.
I found the references to pre-1900 practices of regarding cadavers to be alarming and the advancements of recent years interesting. Perhaps most interesting was the next to last chapter regarding ecological burial. Most interesting I think was understanding how radically different various cultures work with cadavers and in general human remains.
Interesting read, glad to have read it, don’t think I’ll read it a second time.
MarketWatch Acquired by Dow Jones
News hot off the wire! MarketWatch is being purchased by Dow Jones. Still very early. It’s great news on many fronts with lots of open questions still to be figured out.
Jay Farrar at Cedar Cultural Center
I realized as I was watching Jay Farrar play on Thursday night that I’ve been watching him play music and sing songs for 14 years now. I’ve liked other bands for well over a decade. Bands like R.E.M. for example. But I there is no connection with a huge band like that like there is with the small band that you see every time they come into town. Tammy has a parallel to this in Tina and the B-Sides.
Farrar was billed at First Avenue, but was rescheduled to the Cedar Cultural Center after First Avenue shutdown. The concert would have been much different at First Ave. More energy I’m sure. But on the plus side you can’t smoke at the Cedar which is really nice and it is a much more intimate venue.
Farrar played a good set, almost entirely from his solo catalog. He played three Son Volt songs and no Uncle Tupelo songs. I liked this, even though I really love those old songs, there is something a little sad about someone playing songs a decade old to an audience yearning for the ‘glory days’. The fresh material was welcome and very good.
Farrar is a reluctant performer. He always has been. Very different than his Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy now fronting Wilco. Tweedy seems to love the stage and attention. Farrar draws away from it. He’s gotten better since the early days of Uncle Tupelo where he would never say any thing and just looked at his shoes while he sang, but he’s still not one to banter with the crowd. It makes his solo live performances somewhat awkward, but the music is that good and that real.
Fiasco!
This morning we had a mini-fiasco right here at home! Tammy was taking pictures with the Canon Digital Elph. If you are not familiar, this is a tiny camera that you can put in your pocket. Great little camera. She was sitting on the floor taking pictures of Gypsie. I got my big camera and took a picture of her and Gypsie. Tammy decided it would be funny to put the wrist strap for the Elph around Gypsie’s neck and I could take a picture. This is where the fiasco starts.
Gypsie moved her head and got freaked out at the noise of the camera. She immediately went into hyper-frenzy mode and made a bucking bronco at the rodeo seem tame. She ran through the chairs of the dining room table. Across the living room floor. Jumping up and down as she could to free herself. Meanwhile this not-terribly-cheap piece of electronics is draging on the floor, banging into chairs and smacking against anything else nearby.
Gypsie then ran into our bedroom where she somehow got the camera tangled into the pull on our blinds and she actually ripped the blinds off the window! Who would have thought this cat had such mighty strength! She ran under the bed and at somepoint everything got all tangled up and she broke free of this weight on her neck.
Amazingly enough, the camera has some dents but it works fine still. The blinds require some crazy glue. Tammy was laughing like a maniac at all this. It was quite funny but I was freaked about the gear. After a deep breath, everything is fine. I really wish we had video of it though – was really funny.
Check In
So far, so good in the quest to return to normalcy on the bathroom scale. Mostly the sugar headaches are gone. Body is getting used to eating 4 meals a day and going to bed hungry. I feel good, even a little excited. Not logging food is nice, but I question the effectiveness. I know this is just my obsessive nature kicking in, so it’ll be cool. Friday set my starting point at 271.2 lbs and 29.7% body fat. I need to get back to my “100 Pound” mark so that means 232, the math is simple – I’ve got 40 lbs to lose. Whew!
To give some perspective here is a view of the last four-and-a-half years. Yes, that really is 340 in the upper left hand corner. I certainly am good at moving the line in either direction. Time to move it on down. 🙂
Time for the weekend. This week I really just focused on eating well. Didn’t do anything other than my weekly workout with my trainer for exercise. Next week I need to get the exercise rolling.
Day 1
It seems that I always decide to start focusing on eating better and dropping weight on Mondays. More on that later.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve had a really hard time keeping my weight under control. For those that have known me for a long time you know that I used to be a “big guy” tipping the scales well over 300 lbs. I set a goal in 2000 that I was going to lose 100 lbs. It sounded a little crazy at the time, even to me, but I knew that if I set that goal clearly and publicly I would stick to it. And I did. It took about 10 months of very focused and dedicated effort and I got there.
I stayed in a range of 20 lbs for quite a while. Then things got disrupted. In a one month period I went back to work, got engaged and bought a house with my then fiance. Over the last two years particularly my weight has trended back up. It would go up for a while, then go down, then back up. As you can expect, it would always go up a little bit more than it ever went down.
Now I find myself at a point were I need to reassert more discipline and focus. I know what I need to do, I just need to do it. It’s Monday. It’s not a great time going into the holidays but there never is a good time. There is always an excuse why you need to push this stuff off. November 8th sounds just as good as any.
This is where you all come in. I know myself and when I lost my weight before a big part of my success was telling others I was going to lose 100 lbs and then not failing on that. So, it’s time I returned back to my “100 lb” weight which means less than 232 lbs. I need to drop around 40 lbs, we’ll see for sure on Friday. This is going to happen. And I’m going to share it with all of you. Wether you like it or not. 🙂
I expect two weeks that are pretty hard. Sugar withdrawal. Get used to exercising hard and regularly again, etc. Then it’s just staying the course. In the past I’ve always logged my food religiously when I’ve lost weight. I’m going to work hard not to do that. It’s a crutch for me and I really don’t need it. I think logging is tremendously powerful but at some point you know the data well enough and it’s not needed.
That’s enough for now. I’ll check in again on Friday and get the numbers started.
The Incredibles
On Friday night we went to see The Incredibles on opening night. We erred on the side of caution and went to the later show to avoid the overflow of kids that were sure to go to the earlier one. However, on the flipside Tammy found it impossible to stay awake. Somehow we have really turned into early risers.
Pixar did a great job on this one. I remembered back to Toy Story and it’s amazing how far animation technology has come. The nice thing is that you no longer even think about the fact that this is all computer generated (unless you want to), it’s completely transparent which I think is proof that this stuff has matured.
The story was fun and funny. It was surprisingly longer than I expected. I guess I’m used to these animated things being 80-90 minutes and at 105 this was notably longer (or maybe it was the later hour!). Anyway, fun flick for all, recommend it.
Ira Glass at the Pabst Theater
On Saturday we found ourselves doing something that we both recalled we hadn’t done probably in a decade. We were hopping into the car to drive hundreds of miles just to see a performance. Now, a decade ago I may have been found doing a road trip like this for a punk rock concert, today we found ourselves driving 360 miles to see Ira Glass of This American Life.
We headed out on I-94 and went straight from home to Milwaukee. As we were driving I noted again that either Wisconsin has tremendously more road kill or they do not do a good job of cleaning up the roads. We saw more than twenty deer in various states of decay on the side of the road. Driving I-94 West instead of East for a dozen hours as I’ve done many times you will see a deer on the side of the road dead, but it’s rare. For some reason Wisconsin peppers the side of the road to a disturbing amount.
We arrived in Milwaukee and checked into the Wyndham hotel downtown. The hotel was perfect as it was in the same building as the Pabst Theater. We had dinner with a friend of Tammy’s family, Jennifer McDaniel. Tammy was friends with Jennifer when she was like 9 months old. We had dinner at the Water Street Brewery and then walked back to the theater for the evening with Ira Glass.
We saw Ira Glass perform about a year-and-a-half ago in Minneapolis and were amazed by how great it was. The show is about how they make This American Life. We both love the show – we listened to five episodes of it on our drive. The show that we saw was the same structure as the one that we saw last time, however it was still great. The content inside the structure was updated. I can’t encourage you enough to go see one of his performances.
By the way, the Pabst Theater we found out while there is the 4th oldest operating theater in the country. It was a very nice place with the exception of pretty tight seating as is common in old theaters.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I just finished reading the new Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’ve read a number of Bryson’s books and they are all without exception great. I would recommend Bryson’s books to essentially anyone I know. I eagerly got this new book a while back. First, Bryson’s books are typically very funny. I didn’t find this one nearly as funny, but it wasn’t because he failed, I just don’t think he tried to make this as funny. However, it was very interesting nonetheless.
This is a good book for people who, like myself, find science really interesting but not so interesting that you want to read text books. Bryson does just as the title suggests and covers everything from the magma cooling and the formation of Earth all the way to leaded gasoline, cellular biology and the history of mankind! It’s a great book to fill a Cliff Claven like reportoire of interesting facts. Bryson correctly focuses on the things that the average person would find interesting and doesn’t delve into deep science. He highlights the politics of science and those rare individuals that spend their entire life focusing on a single species of moss.
Amongst the things that you can impress friends with:
First Avenue R.I.P.
I found out today that First Avenue has closed its doors. Anyone that spent there twenties in the Minneapolis area in the 90s spent many very fun evenings at First Avenue. It will always be remembered, and hopefully it comes back!
Wassail Tea
Ingredients
Directions
I store it back in the gallon jugs I buy the apple cider in. The more times you reheat it, the better it seems to taste.
Friday Night Lights
Friday Night Lights is the movie that you get when you mix Hoosiers with Any Given Sunday. The movie has the great but completely unrealistic action shots that make Any Given Sunday so much fun. This is high school though, not pro or even college, which really reminded me of Hoosiers. It even had the alcoholic Dad that embarasses and abuses his son subplot where he comes clean in the battle to “win State”.
I did like it though. It was an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours and even had me pumping my fist a couple of times at the choreographed action on the screen.
The Man with 22 Clocks Hates DST
I really don’t care for daylight savings time. There are a couple of things I appreciate. The balance of getting more light earlier and later is a give and take. Mostly I really dislike how it disrupts my sleep pattern. It always seems to take a full week for me to get used to it. It’s like mini-jet lag without moving anywhere.
My method for dealing with it is very specific. I like to make sure I change every clock before I go to sleep, and then I wake up somewhat unaware that anything changed. I forgot to do that last night so I had to run around first thing this morning before I became cognizant of the time. As I was changing the 15th clock it dawned on me that we have household clock proliferation.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Only devices to deal with this on their own are the computers and our TiVo. There has to be a better way.
Circus Juventas Boo Ball
Tammy and I volunteered at the Circus Juventas Boo Ball last night. I think it’s a fairly common thing that volunteering for small to medium sized events is generally a somewhat chaotic and unorganized event. We were initially given the task of “walk around and just help out with things” which was quickly turning into “you just get into the event for free” which I felt a little bad about. After all, didn’t seem like volunteering to me. In the end though we were asked to help direct people as they came to the event to get them into the right line – will call, cash or credit card. In short, we had a job that would have been done better by some moderately decent inanimate signage.
Some observations from our evening of volunteering…
The Boo Ball is a 21+ event and working the door we did get to check out all the costumes as people came in. The men didn’t really have any rhyme or reason to their costumes. There was a really good mummy and some notable scary looking costumes, but no prevailing theme. However, for the women the theme was clearly, shall we say, revealing? It seems that Halloween events must really be an excuse to look as trampy as you can without worrying what your girlfriends might say. I’m not complaining of course, this is just an observation.
Additionally, you would expect that queuing people into the right line would be a fairly simple task. And in fact, early comers to the event were fairly observant. However, you could tell the few drinks at the bar before hand as people arrived later significantly degraded their ability to comprehend anything quickly. A couple of times I thought I was explaining particle physics to someone looking for an answer to “Do you have tickets already?”.
The event was pretty cool. I’d recommend going to the Boo Ball as a participant in the future. If you are curious how the heck we ended up volunteering at Circus Juventas it is because Tammy and her sister are taking their adult circus classes. She loves it. I keep telling her to write something about it here, but she is shy. 🙂
Got The Xbox
After vowing to never buy another video game system ever again after dumping more money than I care to even think about into the Dreamcast a few years ago and before that into the cutting edge 3DO I finally broke down and bought an Xbox.
Why did I buy an Xbox then?
Mod Chips. The Xbox has proven to be one of the most modifiable consoles out there. For not a lot of money I can get a mod chip that snaps onto the board and replace the hard drive with a whopper 200G drive and instantly I’ve got a really fun, media center type PC.
You can FTP files to it, it can play music, photos, videos off of your network. You can copy entire movies to it, even entire Xbox games. How cool!
I just got the unit last night and am getting myself a mod chip now so I can rig it up with everything that I want. Out of the box it’s not all that exciting. Homebrew apps on your Xbox – very fun!
Electronic Voting Software
I’m sitting here watching 60 Minutes tonight and they are doing a piece on electronic voting. If there is one place where I would say that open source would make a lot of sense, how about this? The software that these systems run sounds horrible and has almost no security mechanisms included in it.
This problem can be solved, these companies just seem to be pathetic.
I Heart Huckabees
Tammy and I enthusiastically went to see I Heart Huckabees last night at the Uptown. We had seen a preview a while ago and it was completely confusing but hooked us in a big way. I won’t try to explain this movie. You can imagine that a movie that is focused around existential detectives may be a little odd. It is. And the cast is great. Highly recommended.
The movie isn’t in general release yet, it will be released this Friday. A hidden bonus of seeing it in limited release were some free Huckabees t-shirts. 🙂
Grand Superior Getaway
This past weekend we spent our weekend up on the North Shore just north of Two Harbors, MN at the Grand Superior Lodge. Tammy and I drove up on Friday with a dinner stop at Bellisio’s in Canal Park in Duluth. Tammy’s family joined us and we turned this weekend into the first Olson family vacation.
We had breakfast at the Rustic Inn Cafe just across from the lodge on Saturday and then made our way to Tettegouche State Park to check out the falls. The weather was very cold, just barely above freezing. The hiking was scrapped because of the weather being so cold. We celebrated two brother-in-law birthdays that evening with dinner back in Duluth at Angie’s Cantina.
Sunday morning we went to Gooseberry Falls. A trip to the North Shore isn’t complete without seeing Gooseberry and the weather was much better this day. We hiked out to the shore of Lake Superior and admired the water for a while. Everybody else took off to head back home that afternoon and Tammy and I spent another day at the lodge on our own just reading and watching a movie.
We had a great breakfast at Betty’s Pies, another North Shore staple, and then headed back to the cities. It was a nice time, if a little cold. I put some pictures up from the weekend as well.