![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaWhile the world has been busy going to hell in a hand basket, Izzie has been busy with trivia and distractions such as reading, listening to gloom and doom on the radio or playing Sudoku or Mastermind. I discovered these latter two are great for trying to remain the present moment unless that time includes listening to Radio National. Then they are no good at all and gardening is a much more compatible activity as I have found that it is possible to concentrate on listening to the words or doing the puzzle but not both at the same time. Rather like listening to talkback radio while reading the paper. Such attempts at multi tasking merely lead to frustration and the realisation that in attempting to do both at the same time, I have ended up with the benefits of neither.
That is probably where doodling or the current colouring in craze come in handy. They don’t require the same parts of the brain used for processing spoken or written words.
That didn’t stop me adding yet another similar distraction to the list. Since the serpent sister is no longer available to play and the Scrabble club at the university turned out to be a total shambles, I resorted to looking for game apps online.
One seemed good until realising that the CPU had a very strange dictionary which it refused to share and to even things up it followed the really stupid rule of giving a bonus of 50 points for getting rid of all your letters even when at the end of the game the total was something like one or two rather than the usual seven. It was so easy to win that it was just pointless and boring. There was just no challenge at all.
Another greenish looking app had the added advantage of an accessible dictionary, the all important list of 2 letter words and a useful little feature that shows you the best scoring move you could have made with the tiles in your rack which are of course the Scrabble equivalent of the cards in your hand.
It also had the option of letting you play against a random opponent rather than some inscrutable machine.
The big minus was that it is not available on my ancient Android tablet but only on the piddly cheapskate smart phone which I bought in April last year.
But that still did not stop the addiction which I kept under control by making up an arbitrary rule of starting new games only on Tuesdays. Some folks will take ages to play their turn so having several games going at once means there’s usually not too long to wait for a turn.
I had always been a pretty clueless Scrabble player who did not care for the big scoring letters and thought that longer is always better. It was my sister who showed me the tricks of parallel parking and getting amazing mileage out of the dreaded J, X, Q and Z.
The Scrabble app lets you try out various words on the board and lets you know the score. You can keep pulling them back to try new ones even when it isn’t your turn. Of course you have to do all that sort of thing in your head when playing the real game as the last thing you want is for anyone else to know what you’ve got much less what you are plotting and planning.
But there’s no fun in winning when there’s a giant gap in scores between the two players. When it is neck and neck almost the whole time is when it gets really interesting and addictive.
They’ve added a twist to discourage folks from just starting a bunch of games and then getting distracted. You get a couple of “Get out of the game” penalty free cards but then after that you can get nudged for taking more then 24 hours to play your turn and if your opponent is feeling really mean or just likes to tie up loose ends, they can then foreclose and claim winner status.
So I was getting a bit peeved on Wednesday night when the Scrabble app kept freezing and crashing all the time. Too much of this and the perfect score of 12 wins in 12 games would get ruined.
The phone was getting bloated and likely needed a good chunk of new storage space and that should put an end to the hissy fits. In fact I had bought a micro SD card three weeks previously for that very purpose but had kept procrastinating on installing it. The mere thought of having to pry the back off the infernal thing brought back memories of the 3 hours of frustration spent trying to set it up almost a year ago. It would be a guaranteed Dementor magnet.
Putting in the card didn’t seem to make a blind bit of difference except that the thing was not just freezing but also randomly turning off. The only way to get it back on was to take off the back, remove the battery and put it back in again and watch the time and date transform from 1st January 1970 something to the present day.
But all this hacking the back off had some unintended consequences. I had managed to damage the charger socket and had to hold and jiggle the infernal thing to keep it charging. So I just didn’t bother.
Meanwhile I had a game running with two thirds of the tiles gone and it was fairly close with a 20 − 30 point lead in my favour.
Was I going to lose due to being missing in action? It was finally time to get out that Q onto the pretty dark blue piece of real estate just waiting for it. As is common in the game, the other player also likes to piggyback off such high scoring letters by making it part of one of their own words.
The phone was down to 15% juice with little chance of recharging when I then used that word to launch an X onto triple word territory.
All this player had to do was wait 12 hours and the game was theirs which of course they had no way of knowing.
At about 8% I put out the Z and only got twice face value for it. My sister would certainly not approve of such a waste. She expects at least 300% returns on the big scoring tiles.
It was a surprise then to see the game just disappear while the phone still had some juice. It had moved from current to completed status even though there must have been 15 tiles still left in the bag. The other player had put up the white flag. Like how often does one get nuked with the Q, the X and Z in just 3 turns?
I won the battle but lost the war. Instead of devoting effort to that particular game, the inner serpent had whispered several times to unmount the new memory card while there was still charge left on the battery. For I had moved the Scrabble app to the card to free up space on the phone and in the hope of being able to bring it over to a new one.
But now all those games along with the scores and the boards and everything on the card have vanished into a big black hole and I will have to download the app again and start from scratch at the bottom of the letter ladder.
It was fun while it lasted. More fun than trying to decide whether it would be better to get a new phone now and put in the current sim card or wait till there’s a sale and lose the 3 weeks of free calls, 6GB of unused data and 90 minutes of phone calls to Amsterdam still left on the present recharge.
Looking for a new phone is worse than looking for a needle in a hay stack. The recently deceased model was a half price special and was perfectly fine for my needs except the nightmare of ever having to pry the plastic from the back.
I’m setting an upper limit of $99 and now I got to find as much bang as possible for as few bucks.
I did bring the phone back along with the receipt to the store where I bought it on Thursday but they played the usual pass the buck “You have to go to the manufacturer” nonsense. But now that I have done the damage to the power inlet there’s not a hope in hell that they would replace the phone even though it had started acting dodgy before such terminal damage was inflicted. It’s just as well it cost only $29 to start with. You pay that much for just one month’s supply of data and calls.
Rather reminiscent of the observation that it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one stoked with fire wood.
That is probably where doodling or the current colouring in craze come in handy. They don’t require the same parts of the brain used for processing spoken or written words.
That didn’t stop me adding yet another similar distraction to the list. Since the serpent sister is no longer available to play and the Scrabble club at the university turned out to be a total shambles, I resorted to looking for game apps online.
One seemed good until realising that the CPU had a very strange dictionary which it refused to share and to even things up it followed the really stupid rule of giving a bonus of 50 points for getting rid of all your letters even when at the end of the game the total was something like one or two rather than the usual seven. It was so easy to win that it was just pointless and boring. There was just no challenge at all.
Another greenish looking app had the added advantage of an accessible dictionary, the all important list of 2 letter words and a useful little feature that shows you the best scoring move you could have made with the tiles in your rack which are of course the Scrabble equivalent of the cards in your hand.
It also had the option of letting you play against a random opponent rather than some inscrutable machine.
The big minus was that it is not available on my ancient Android tablet but only on the piddly cheapskate smart phone which I bought in April last year.
But that still did not stop the addiction which I kept under control by making up an arbitrary rule of starting new games only on Tuesdays. Some folks will take ages to play their turn so having several games going at once means there’s usually not too long to wait for a turn.
I had always been a pretty clueless Scrabble player who did not care for the big scoring letters and thought that longer is always better. It was my sister who showed me the tricks of parallel parking and getting amazing mileage out of the dreaded J, X, Q and Z.
The Scrabble app lets you try out various words on the board and lets you know the score. You can keep pulling them back to try new ones even when it isn’t your turn. Of course you have to do all that sort of thing in your head when playing the real game as the last thing you want is for anyone else to know what you’ve got much less what you are plotting and planning.
But there’s no fun in winning when there’s a giant gap in scores between the two players. When it is neck and neck almost the whole time is when it gets really interesting and addictive.
They’ve added a twist to discourage folks from just starting a bunch of games and then getting distracted. You get a couple of “Get out of the game” penalty free cards but then after that you can get nudged for taking more then 24 hours to play your turn and if your opponent is feeling really mean or just likes to tie up loose ends, they can then foreclose and claim winner status.
So I was getting a bit peeved on Wednesday night when the Scrabble app kept freezing and crashing all the time. Too much of this and the perfect score of 12 wins in 12 games would get ruined.
The phone was getting bloated and likely needed a good chunk of new storage space and that should put an end to the hissy fits. In fact I had bought a micro SD card three weeks previously for that very purpose but had kept procrastinating on installing it. The mere thought of having to pry the back off the infernal thing brought back memories of the 3 hours of frustration spent trying to set it up almost a year ago. It would be a guaranteed Dementor magnet.
Putting in the card didn’t seem to make a blind bit of difference except that the thing was not just freezing but also randomly turning off. The only way to get it back on was to take off the back, remove the battery and put it back in again and watch the time and date transform from 1st January 1970 something to the present day.
But all this hacking the back off had some unintended consequences. I had managed to damage the charger socket and had to hold and jiggle the infernal thing to keep it charging. So I just didn’t bother.
Meanwhile I had a game running with two thirds of the tiles gone and it was fairly close with a 20 − 30 point lead in my favour.
Was I going to lose due to being missing in action? It was finally time to get out that Q onto the pretty dark blue piece of real estate just waiting for it. As is common in the game, the other player also likes to piggyback off such high scoring letters by making it part of one of their own words.
The phone was down to 15% juice with little chance of recharging when I then used that word to launch an X onto triple word territory.
All this player had to do was wait 12 hours and the game was theirs which of course they had no way of knowing.
At about 8% I put out the Z and only got twice face value for it. My sister would certainly not approve of such a waste. She expects at least 300% returns on the big scoring tiles.
It was a surprise then to see the game just disappear while the phone still had some juice. It had moved from current to completed status even though there must have been 15 tiles still left in the bag. The other player had put up the white flag. Like how often does one get nuked with the Q, the X and Z in just 3 turns?
I won the battle but lost the war. Instead of devoting effort to that particular game, the inner serpent had whispered several times to unmount the new memory card while there was still charge left on the battery. For I had moved the Scrabble app to the card to free up space on the phone and in the hope of being able to bring it over to a new one.
But now all those games along with the scores and the boards and everything on the card have vanished into a big black hole and I will have to download the app again and start from scratch at the bottom of the letter ladder.
It was fun while it lasted. More fun than trying to decide whether it would be better to get a new phone now and put in the current sim card or wait till there’s a sale and lose the 3 weeks of free calls, 6GB of unused data and 90 minutes of phone calls to Amsterdam still left on the present recharge.
Looking for a new phone is worse than looking for a needle in a hay stack. The recently deceased model was a half price special and was perfectly fine for my needs except the nightmare of ever having to pry the plastic from the back.
I’m setting an upper limit of $99 and now I got to find as much bang as possible for as few bucks.
I did bring the phone back along with the receipt to the store where I bought it on Thursday but they played the usual pass the buck “You have to go to the manufacturer” nonsense. But now that I have done the damage to the power inlet there’s not a hope in hell that they would replace the phone even though it had started acting dodgy before such terminal damage was inflicted. It’s just as well it cost only $29 to start with. You pay that much for just one month’s supply of data and calls.
Rather reminiscent of the observation that it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one stoked with fire wood.
