Goals, Week Ending 2/5/06

Here are my goals for the upcoming week...

1. Read Luke 1-8. Yes, another loaded goal.


2. Outline three more chapters in the book, and come up with character descriptions for the detective and the victim.


3. Gym goal is contingent upon my doctor's appointment on Tuesday. I don't know if I'll be able to hit the gym as much as I'd like to.


4. GET THE BEDROOM COMPUTER UP TO SPEED. Find out what the fastest processor the motherboard will take, because they have some used ones at Bookman's. I also need to get the old version of Battery installed on there from the old hard drive, and then get everything up to speed.


5. In preparation for the move: put the computer desk and bookshelves on the classified ad bulletin at work

Week in Review, 1/22/06-1/28/06

Here's a review of everything that I've had going on last week...

1. Yep, I read the Bible chapters Sunday morning. Did it again this week, to. It's actually amazing that I got any reading done outside of the Dark Elf Trilogy.


2. Didn't make the gym, didn't see the fitness consultant. I had a doctor's appointment, and that messed me up because I had to be fasting and some other stuff, so I skipped the gym this week.


3. Bedroom computer crashed. Need to reinstall Windows before getting any of that "creative stuff" done.


4. Found the info on the practice space for the band, and found a manager, too.


5. For the murder mystery: I have a few more chapters outlined, but not the rest of the book as I thought I would have.

So... not a good week as far as accomplishing goals went by. I had some things sidetrack me (a non-functional printer, a series of really good books), but hopefully this week I'll get a bit back on track.

Goals, Week Ending 1/28/06

Goals for this week...

1. Read Mark 6-16. You've guessed right if you say I've already done it.


2. Gym 3 times this week, and make time to see the 'fitness consultant' who is in the gym on Wednesday afternoons. Overall goal: more productive workouts.


3. I'm shelving 50 Words of Fiction, because, face it, I wasn't giving much thought to it anyway. This week's creative exploration involves getting all those song ideas I have written down into actual music.


4. I also have some commitments to the band, namely, finding info on a practice space, and finding a place for us to have our promo picture taken. Also, start thinking on where we can get a gig.


5. For the murder mystery: Outline the remainder of the book, and have at least five chapters fleshed out.

Goal review: Week Ending 1/21/06

Another week in review...

1. I had the Bible chapters read on Sunday morning, even before posting them. It's a good routine: get up, read, then post on the blog, then get ready for church.


2. I got to the gym three times this week. I would like to do more on the exercise bike, but there are some problems with that.


3. Still no work on the 50 Words of Fiction... I'm not sure if I did anything creative (except the book) this week. SAD FACE.


4. I wasn't inspired to work on the detective character this week, but I did start outlining the book. I feel good about that. I have the format of the book, and also what the prologue and third chapter are going to be. It's good progress, and I'm pleased with it.


5. Almost got the recording studio at 100% -- the only problem is the software program I'm using for drums isn't working like the previous version... I have to get the old version off the old hard drive, and strangely enough, I'm not motivated enough to swap hard drives yet again. I do need to get that done since I have some ideas I would like to put down.

Goals, Week Ending 1/21/06

1. Read Matthew 24-Mark 5


2. Hit the gym 4 times this week... three times weights, one time cardio


3. No work yet on the 50 Words of Fiction... I have to get done with that!


4. Now that I have a setting for the murder mystery, I am going to start working on the main character (detective). I have a name already, which may or may not wind up as the name for the detective... but it is a good name and will definitely make its way into the story. Heck, even if it's not a good name by the time I write the story, it can always be the name of the victim. :)


5. This week's Creative Project is 50 Words of Fiction... oh, and I need to get the recording studio set back up, too. So, two goals for the price of one.

Goal review: Week Ending 1/14/06

I did good this week. Scripture reading was accomplished Sunday morning as usual, and I'm looking forward every week to spending the time doing that. It's been a while since I've done any sort of regular reading of the Scriptures, and this is a nice way of easing back into it.

Went to the gym on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday this week. I did the weights and the elliptical machine on Tuesday and Thursday, then did the treadmill only on Friday. I'm liking that routine, because it got me into the mindset that, yes, getting up at 4:45 AM is productive and beneficial. I'm not even that tired when I get home.

Took pictures to and from work one day to make a movie, and I didn't realize how dark it was in the morning. OK, that's not true, obviously it's pitch black at 5 AM when I'm leaving for the gym, but man.. the camera isn't very good for close-up pictures -- it takes everything almost at a wide-angle perspective. Therefore, my shots of traffic lights and street signs were just red dots and green stripes. Oh well. I did manage a movie of myself driving in the afternoon, but I don't know how to incorporate a video into Windows Movie Maker -- it just made it as a still shot of the first frame.

Not only do I have a setting for the story, I took some time and described the town that I am setting it in: its characteristics, "personality", and such. It was a good way of remembering the town where I grew up, and also a good exercise in creative writing.

Next week's goals up tomorrow.

Fatherhood

"Luke... I am your father. Now, it is time for me to share with you something that my father shared with me..."

"...Pull my finger."

1/1/06 results and 1/8/06 goals

Reviewing old goals and setting new goals...

1. I read Matthew 1-12 just fine... got that done Sunday morning before Church. This week's goal is Matthew 13-23, which I finished before updating the blog, actually. It's nice for Sunday morning to be quiet time, and already have one of my week's goals out of the way.


2. I didn't do the 50 Words of Fiction yet, having been sidetracked by two other projects, the Great Boggle Question and the List of 100 Things. I never realized how difficult it was to make a list of 100 things... maybe it was the topic I chose. I chose "100 Things I Would Like to Do Before I Die," and so far I have nine. Nine!


3. Still working on the Murder Mystery... both that and the previous project are being kept on the Wiki while they are still in their rough stages. I have a method for writing it all set, but I do not yet have a plot and characters. So, essentially, I have nothing. Hey, at least I'm honest! This week's goal is to come up with a setting for the story.


4. There wasn't much stretching or exercise throughout the week, actually. I think I did three days of stretching and two days of pushups... much short of my goals. One thing I learned from my mission was to put bad weeks behind me and start anew. So, that is what I'm doing. I have a gym bag almost all packed and ready to go, so I will be hitting the gym before my shift each morning. This week I will hit my goal.


5. This week's creative project: Take pictures on my journey to work in the morning, and make a short video presentation using MS Movie Maker.

End of the Boggle Project

It is finished. 4-hours-plus later, we have at least one 17-letter word.

I'm interested in finding out the maximum score of a board that would yield this word, now. Good thing there are programs for that one, already... I think. However, I will pronounce this project "finished", with the word "quadricentennials".

NOTES
Word list used: ENABLE Word List
Written in: Turbo Pascal 5.5 by Borland International

Number of 11-letter words found: 14721
Number of 12-letter words found: 10651
Number of 13-letter words found: 7232
Number of 14-letter words found: 4575
Number of 15-letter words found: 2721
Number of 16-letter words found: 1396
Number of 17-letter words found: 12

17-letter words possible in Classic Boggle: ACQUAINTANCESHIPS, CONSEQUENTIALNESS, COUNTERQUESTIONED, DISEQUILIBRATIONS, INCONSEQUENTIALLY, PREQUALIFICATIONS, QUADRICENTENNIALS, QUARRELSOMENESSES, QUATERCENTENARIES, QUATTUORDECILLION, SESQUICENTENARIES, SESQUICENTENNIALS

Wow.

Fin.

SUCCESS!!!

More mundane details on the near-completion of the Boggle project...



I finally pooped out around 1:30 AM, with the project still unfinished. I slept until about 7:30, then got up and got right back to work. I remembered that I could watch variables, and finally solved the issue with my dice selection routine.

It was tough, though: the test words that I had chosen, along with the order I had chosen to enter the dice into the system, were making two out of my three test words completely invalid: the program was finding the correct dice on the first pass for 'ABDOMINALLY' and 'PRECONDITIONED.'

It was up to my third word, 'ACCOMMODATING', which I knew was an invalid word (due to C and M occupying the same die), but was also unknowingly throwing my testing procedure off due to the double consonants... also out there was how I was handling the word list... very, very sloppy on my part.

Anyway, I'm currently running the process in the background, and should have an update shortly with final results, sources used, and other interesting stuff.

Boggle project update

Update on the Boggle Project of Doom...



Got home from work and eagerly started coding... downloaded TP 5.5 from Borland's website... I'm pretty sure I have a copy of BP 7.0 somewhere, but I have no idea where. Anyway, started busting out the code, and hit a few glitches along the way, but nothing that can't be overcome. The biggest one was that I had tried coding the the dice as a 16X6 array, but that turned out to be too tedious for my short attention span, so I switched over to a 16x1 array of 6-letter "words".

Figured out a way to eliminate the "duplicate letters on dice" problem, now the only problem is having to figure out how to get a die removed from the queue once it has been used. Ah, our old friend recursion. I've taken a break from flowcharting and pseudocoding to update the blog, and while roaming the Web for hints, stumbled across a site which is a variation of my project... apparently Boggle is a fun assignment among Computer Science professors! None of the projects listed seemed to go about it with the same goal in mind: finding the longest word possible. Although it appears that theses have been written about this subject, so it's weird that I would come up with it "out of the blue," but also a little intimidating as well.

My goal is to find at least one 17-letter word. I have hope -- one of the documents I scanned was running an algorithm on a 5x5 authentic Boggle board and mentioned a 14-letter word in passing. I jumped to my set and was able to reconstruct the word "PRECONDITIONED" without any of the 9 'extra' dice in the 5x5 version.

Time will tell... back to coding!

Boggle

I am playing a lot of Boggle at work these days (don't worry, only on breaks)... and it occurred to me the other day how many games one could play before repeating the dice combinations.

So... 6 to the 16th power, dividing by four to account for the sides of the grid, then again by two for the "mirror" effect, which yields the same answers...

There are 13 letter repeats on the same dice, and 54 occurrences of a letter repeating itself on more than one die.

Therefore, 352,638,738,365.

I can rest easier now. But wait, there's more! What is the longest possible word that can be made in Boggle? It's obviously 16 letters long, but is there a 16-letter word that can be made with Boggle dice? Is there more than one? Am I going to be stuck with squirrelled as my longest possible word, or is there a 17-letter word which strategically uses the Qu die?

These, my friends, are the times that try men's souls. And my rusty computer programming skills. We have here a worthy project, and some time to kill this weekend... let's see how it turns out. I'm downloading a 600k text dictionary when I get home, and let the games begin!

Cool project...

I know I'm doing the "50 Words of Fiction" thing, but this one is too good to pass up. Especially for someone as goal-oriented as myself...

http://www.52projects.com/52_projects/2006/01/whats_your_proj_1.html
(52projects.com)

What's Your Project?
Project #100

Make a list of 100 things. It can be a list about anything, but it should be personal. 100 books you'd like to read. 100 things you'd like to do before you are 40. 100 things that define who you are as a person. 100 people in your life. 100 things to do before the summer ends. 100 places you'd like to visit. 100 loose ends you'd like to wrap up. 100 questions about your family history you'd like to find the answers for. 100 ways to make your life better. When you first start out making your list, it will seem like it's going to be very easy to get to 100. About halfway through, though, you'll wonder if you are actually going to make it. As you get closer to 100, you will start to get very selective and contemplative with your choices, realizing you only have so many more spaces to fill on your list. Reaching 100 is a celebratory milestone, but of course, doing everything on your list is the time to really break out the champagne.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi
Brooklyn, NY

This week's projects

1. Matthew 1-12


2. 52 Projects has a link to a website entitled "50 Words of Fiction," I think I'm going to try that just to get myself back in the game slowly.


3. I forgot that November is Writing A Novel Month... so I am going to spend the first ten months building up to that. My first novel is going to be a murder mystery.


4. It is Sunday, so no stretching or exercise.