Crazy Idea: Fragile Influence

I was looking through my old folders and found this - one of the cards that I made up that's in the 10 card cycle - of which Learning Options is part of.

When I made this more than 2 years ago, I thought it was something that by common sense would've been suggested or printed at some point. We either haven't reached that point - or someone is holding out. :D

I've had a look back at my imaginary burst mechanic, and I realised that for the most part I didn't cost it aggressively enough - although I realise that Wizards has recently done something that makes it possible to now cost it correctly (by my standards, not theirs). I might revisit some of those ideas and give them a tweak - since I think Burst is an awesome mechanic. :D

A New Addiction: Cubing

Last Friday - I decided to finally buy a Rubik's cube. Amazingly, I've never owned one of these standard cubes in my life. The closest I've gotten to one is a Pyraminx - which I have never gotten down to learning how to solve. So I went to the shop - and found the Rubik's branded cube to cost AUD27. That's a lot of money for a toy I know I'm gonna break at some point. So I decided to splurge on a cheaper alternative that cost AUD10 - and claimed to be the world's smoothest cube:

It is indeed smooth - probably smoother than a Rubik's out of the box (judging from forums and Youtube) - and after about a day of playing, it was good enough to start practising finger tricks on.

I'm of course not particularly fast, currently averaging about 2.5 minutes per solve - compared to the 10 minutes when I started, I'd say that's a massive improvement. I'm using a very basic method with minimal algorithms (about 10 or 11, I think) - I've however expanded that repertoire to roughly 20 at this point - and I expect to have it to double to about 40 by the end of the year. (Hopefully, I can get below 1 minute before the end of the year. :D)

(As for  how slow I am - it takes me 9 seconds to do the M2 U M2 U2 M2 U M2 H-perm.)

Short rant: Didn't feel like putting this in the sidebar so I'm gonna say it here - I've decided photos are a good compromise since I don't have time to write long rants and articles - I know I've still got that part 3 to write.

And I just know that I'm gonna not post anything next week again. -__- And switch to something else. I guess this is why I called the blog Random Ideas. :P

Blog Upgrade!

I've done some shuffling here and there to the category hierarchy, updated to WordPress 2.6.3 - and most importantly: NEW THEME! Do report any bugs you find. Update: Modified new theme to remove tag related material - I intend to use tags eventually, just not yet.

Photo: My Watch

(Just to continue my post earlier - I took a photo of my watch.)

Yes, I'm aware my watch is old, the colour is peeling, the strap isn't the original strap, and it's dirty. But hey - it's my watch, and it's been with me a long time.

Waking Up On Time

Despite this, my timezone is still GMT+8. (For those who don't know, Melbourne is now GMT + 10 plus another hour for DST - that means I'm 3 hours off.)

T_T