Month: April 2014

No, I don’t have a cape, can’t fly … can’t even leap tall buildings. Yet somehow I regularly have people ask me if I’m Superman.

Actually, I do have a list of things I do that most people wouldn’t even try that I refer to as my “Superman routine”. None of it all that hard – well, mostly – if you know what you’re doing. And I’m not a weight-lifter by any means, but I am stronger than you’d think from looking at me. Especially considering my age, but no one can tell that by looking at me either.

The latest example is typical. We have some plastic tables at work for clearance merchandise. Technically tables anyway – not something you’d eat off of or play cards on. The legs are just pieces of 3″ PVC tubing. But as the tables can have a lot of weight on them, sometimes the legs can get stuck pretty tight.

Back on Tuesday, Colleen brought half a dozen of these tables into the storage area – three were semicircles about 6 feet on the long side, the others were straight rectangles maybe 2.5 feet wide and 8 feet long. Being familiar with these tables generally, I figured she’d need a hand with the legs … so I put away my stuff I was working on and went over to help her. She said they were stuck pretty good, so I said something like “Well, let’s see” and then pulled one out. That’s when she accused me of being Superman – so I showed her how to do it.

Actually, it’s all pretty straightforward. Stand with your feet about a foot apart with the leg between them. Bend slightly at the knees and grip the leg with both hands. If it’s stuck real tight then rock it back and forth a little to break it loose, then pull straight up (by straightening your knees). She tried – worked like a charm. I think she ended up taking as many out as I did – and there weren’t any she tried to get out and had to ask me to help – but when we were done she still thought I must be really strong. (Come on girl – you just did half of them yourself, so what does that make you? Of course I didn’t say that …)

Okay, my co-worker Rochelle might not be able to do it – she is a real petite girl and just not as strong as Colleen or I. But it’s not so much strength as knowledge. Your legs are a lot stronger than your arms or back – using your knees to pull or lift works a lot better. Of course it helps immensely here that these tables are something you can actually stand on as well (you’re not going to break them).

Now I just need to convince people that I don’t have “x-ray vision”. Of course I don’t, but I’ll see the edge or corner of something behind or under something else and it does make people wonder …

I have an old (well, relatively) Nintendo DSⁱ which I generally use to waste time. I’m not trying to beat a particular game – just do something on my free time to relieve boredom. (Honestly, I typically use my tablet the same way.) My favorite DS game is “Clubhouse Games”, a collection of fairly simple games like card games, checkers, etc.

I used to play their version of Hearts quite a bit. When playing against the computer, you have a choice of 3 levels of difficulty … but the rankings can be misleading. It is easier to beat on the “Hard” setting than on the “Normal” setting, due to a flaw in the strategy.

If you’re not familiar with Hearts, the object is either to take as few points as possible or to take everything of value. There are a total of 26 points per hand … if one player collects all 26 points he “shoots the moon” (though we called it “making control” when I was a kid) and all his opponents get 26 points. If no one “shoots the moon” then each player gets the number of points he took added to his score. So … you’d prefer to take zero points, as long as no one else gets all of them, or else to get all of them yourself.

And that’s where the flaw lies. The “hard” setting is very good at not taking points, but rather poor about making sure someone doesn’t take them all. Playing on the “Hard” setting, I “shoot the moon” so often that I always win. I had to switch back to the “Normal” setting just to have any challenge at all!

I recently decided to try out their game “Sevens”. This is based on the classical “Seven Up” card game, but with a couple of changes: all the 7s are played as soon as dealing has been completed, and you can pass any time you want – but if you pass more than 3 times, you forfeit the game. (Since I didn’t actually read the rules it took me a few rounds to find out they were passing when they could have played – but they do, and thus I’ve adopted the same technique when it benefits me.)

Once again, there are a few glaring errors in their “Hard” strategy. Or their “Easy” one, but you expect that. The biggest error is that they play their lower cards first. If you have one card left – a King – and one of the computer players has the Queen of that suit and the King of a different suit, they will play the Queen first allowing you to win. Very basic strategy error, I think any 8 year old would have learned to play the King first.

Okay, I get that if you’re writing a collection of games like that the strategies of the computer players won’t be all that good. There are dedicated Hearts games that can be quite challenging – but this isn’t a dedicated Hearts game. But I don’t expect them to be quite that bad! (Actually, the Sevens game is something of a challenge … since they do play low cards first, if you have any high cards you have to play in a way to force them to play their high cards. What would be the best strategy against human players will fail against the computer about 1/2 of the time because one of the computer players won’t have any Kings and you will. But that’s “dumb luck” and not a real strategy.)