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It's an Exciting World

The life and times of David Geisert

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Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

This was amazing.  I got to hear a full explanation of something that I’ve been hearing about for years on Skeptic’s Guide from the host himself.  Steven Novella is the man.  I really like the way he explained the biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies.  He does a good job of explaining how you can avoid the fallacies for yourself.

If there is one issue with the series it is that there is no good explanation on how to get other people to avoid these biases.  I guess the point is to just introduce them to this series and have them learn for themselves.

Audible Link

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Housewarming

I had people over for my housewarming on Monday.  It turned out to be a little too warm.  When I turned on 2 burners and had the oven going the little amount of airflow that I could get from the apartment just wasn’t enough and it started to heat up substantially.  Steve was probably the most effected by it, but everyone felt a little warm to say the least.

I ended up having Jeremy B, Adam, Andrew, Amy, Adelaide, Tina, Amit, Candice, Brian, Nick, Steve, and Steve’s wife over.  It was a very large crowd for the space and I could not have fit more people in than were already there.  I was somewhat surprised by the turnout since only half of them said that they would be there.

We played some cards against humanity and open faced chinese poker.  The games worked really well in the space, and with the crowd that was there.  Everyone liked the kitties, and played with them using the laser pointer.  I think things went as well as could be expected.

I cooked a baked mac ‘n’ cheese dish, that turned out really well.  The bacon was super tasty in it.  I think I’ll make it again and take it over to beachhead for dinner on Thursday.  Jeremy brought over a cake, Amy brought over ice cream and root beer, Brian brought over some chips and dip, and Wit brought over some really tasty beer.  Nick also brought over most of the Liquor that we had built up, I’m assuming once he finds a place he’ll want me to bring over some of the nicer stuff that he likes to his housewarming.

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Kitties in Harnesses

I put the kitties in the harnesses and they don’t seem to mind it too much.  Archer is still a little small for his, but it isn’t getting in his way badly. They are soooooo cute!

Steph and I played with them using the laser pointer, and they were moving incredibly quickly, even in the harnesses.

Video of Kitties

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Umami and Japanese Candy with Steph

Sunday night Steph and I took a bike ride to Stanford.  We saw the horses there and Steph petted a few of them.  After that we went to Palo Alto and stopped by Rocket Fizz.  I got some of the cream filled caramels that I like.  I was able to get all the bottle caps from them, and it will go well with the other ones in my collection. I’m just about ready to make the table with them, and I expect it to be a nice table.  I’m most likely going to do a rainbow pattern or random pattern.  I had considered making it into a compilation, somewhat like pixel art, but that didn’t appeal to me too much.

We had dinner at Umami and it was really tasty.  I got the Greenbird over fries and gravy.  We got the fried pickles, which were surprisingly bad.  I normally like fried pickles, but these were too much pickle and too little fried.  Steph got the beat salad, and we shared some truffle fries.

After Umami we biked back to my place and Steph made some japanese candy that she found at Rocket Fizz.  The candy was for a tiny japanese pizza, but it wasn’t the normal kind of japanese candy that actually tastes like the item.  This tasted like sugar covered toffee, and not great toffee at that.  Steph still enjoyed it despite the difficulty in eating it.

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Open Faced Chinese Poker

This variant of poker is much more my style of game than other poker variants.  I can use strategy and planning in this version, whereas the other ways of playing poker are more about meta game and probabilities.  The way the game is played is each player has 3 hands, a top, middle, and bottom.  The top hand is only 3 cards and must be the worst hand.  The middle and bottom hands are 5 cards each, and the bottom must be better than the middle and top.  The players are dealt 5 cards to start, which they can split any way they like.  The cards are then dealt out 1 by 1 and each player chooses where to place the card in their hands.

The scoring is the tricky part.  If you fault you lose all your hands, that is if the strength of the hands is not bottom>middle>top.  From there you go hand for hand against each player.  If you beat a player for all 3 hands then you get 6 points from them.  If you beat the player for 2 of 3 then you only get 1 point.  You lose the respective points for losing in the respective manners.  If you have a really good hand (straight or better) in the middle or bottom then you get bonus points.  If you have a pair of 6’s or better in the top you get bonus points.

The last rule is called Fantasy Land, and only happens when you have a pair of queens or better in the top.  I’m not going to go too much into how that works, but it is really powerful and you get all 13 cards at once.

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Russian River Beer Revival and BBQ Cookoff

I went to the 13th annual Russian River Beer Revival and BBQ Cookoff.

None of the pictures here are mine, since I wasn’t about to take a phone or camera to this event.

On the way there Nick and Fred came to pick me up.  Fred is the Box intern from last summer that is now full time at Box.  The drive there was longer than expected and Nick and Fred were mainly talking about Box and SF Living.  I dozed off for a bit, but joined in the conversation when it went back to other things.  We got to the campsite right at sunset.  I set my tent up wrong at first and had to get Brian and Andy to help so that I could get it set up.  We then ran by the grocery store to get food and beer.  We had a nice sit around the fire.  Andrew and Adam showed up later and they got the tent set up quickly.  I went to bed decently early, and had a really restful sleep due to the 4 beer.

The owner of Camp Outback in all his glory.  He does fire dancing at night for anyone who wants to watch.

Saturday morning we went into town for some coffee, and I just walked around the town a bit.  It is a nice little place.  There were a good number of real estate places in the town, and the surrounding area seems incredibly inexpensive when compared to SF or the Bay Area.  Shortly after the coffee run we started walking to the main event.  I had with me the holder for the small glass, and a cloth for wiping my hands on.  Nick, Brian, Candice, and I were VIP, so we got in a little earlier.  There was maybe a 5 minute lag between the VIP getting in and everyone else getting in, which wasn’t even close to the 1 hour that was promised.  I wasn’t too bothered by it but it was strange how quickly they let in the rest of the crowd.  I was a little upset at the first few places giving me so much of the beer, since I wanted to try a little bit of a lot of different beers.  The only bad part about the VIP is the larger cup that doesn’t fit the holder, and is far to much when filled up.  There was a really amazing ginger beer that I would like to find more of.  I’ll have to try some ginger beers to find something as tasty as this was.  At the ginger beer booth, one of the hosts offered me a towel and the small glass for the VIP cup.  I gladly took it.  Nick then went over and got a T-shirt and a small glass for his VIP cup.

I had soooo much BBQ of beef, pork, and chicken.  I didn’t even taste the sides this time.  All of it was tasty, and most of it was absolutely delicious.

After a little while I decided to get in the river.  It was trying to get down the slope to the river while as drunk as we were, but not too bad.  The water was colder than I would have liked, but incredibly refreshing for being as cool as it was.  I snuck off for a bit after that to take a nap behind the stage.  It was incredibly relaxing and I had such a good time.

As the festival was winding down we all started making our way to the upper deck.  We set out from there for the pizza place in Guerneville.  We got a good bit of pizza and I ate a ton of it.  It is quite surprising how much pizza one can eat after an all you can eat and drink beer and bbq festival.  It was really tasty pizza.

After the pizza place we went back to camp, and decided to play some open faced chinese poker.  It is an interesting game with all sorts of subtlety.  I think it would be fun to have poker at my place every so often and play this variant.  It has a lot more strategy to the game itself, whereas other forms of poker have more strategy to the meta game.  I took a bit of a nap once the light was too dim to continue poker.

Nick and I decided to leave that night, and Andrew decided to join us.  We watched the fire dancing, which was pretty good that night, then we left.  On the way back we ran into some crazy construction on 880 that took the highway down to 1 lane.  It took us around 45 minutes to clear that section, but that was the only delay.  I was dropped off first, since I’m just on the other side of the Dumbarton Bridge.

I really enjoyed the festival, but I don’t think I’ll be going again.  The over-drinking and over-eating are things that I will be doing without as much of.  I think Nick was feeling the same way about it.  I love the atmosphere and the festival, but it has run its course for me.

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Catch-22

Wow.  This book was one of the most confusing, entertaining, frustrating, and comical books I’ve ever read.  I’m going to look for a film version of it.  The humor is exactly along the same lines as the movie Airplane, and 10 times more than that.  I had such a great time listening to it, although I’m sad at how much death there is.  I think that is part of the intention of the book is to have the twisted, but logical lookout on life.  It is hard to do that without some death.  All of the crazy situations in the book follow perfect logical sense, but the premises on which they are based are just slightly off.  I’m not sure exactly what the point of the book was, since there was a ton of twisted logic and weird scenarios to think about, but I can now say that I’m 100% sure what a catch-22 situation is.

Audible Link

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Meeting the Housemate

Today I had dinner with my housemate, Randee.  She is a really nice woman, and we talked about our jobs, our hobbies, and our habits.  She is very down to earth, which is nice.  We had some pasta and meatballs, as a simple dinner that can’t really be messed up, and isn’t terribly offensive to anyone.  I got the ingredients at Milk Pail, so they were tasty and healthier (I hope).  She brought over some sides, and a bottle of wine.  We each only had half a glass of wine, and it was quite tasty.  I think things will go well living with her upstairs.

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Gauntlet of Fools

This game is really well balanced, and automatically so.  The way in which you take boasts to balance out the character offering is genius.  It is a form of drafting where nothing is ever out of the question.  We played 2 rounds.  I lasted the longest on the first, but wasn’t able to kill much of anything.  The priest is kind of like that if he doesn’t have a great weapon.  The second round I was the prospector with a sling.  Normally that wouldn’t be good, but since we had some really big monsters and a lot of tiny ones, I was able to use the sling and survive a while.  I also got really lucky with a few of the rolls to make me absolutely destroy the others.  I ended that round with 28 gold.  This is a really amazing game that only takes about 30 minutes to run through and is pleasantly synchronous.

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