The PolyBlog

Planning for my new hobby

April 24 2022

I probably don’t need yet another hobby, but I’ve become fascinated with 3D printing in the last year, and some of the things I can do. Some of them are an extension of not being very handy with power tools or woodworking options. I need something that is more “design and print” then “design and build”.

Over the last few months, I’ve waffled. Do I wait until life returns to normal after Andrea’s chemo? Except life is never “normal”. There’s always “something” that would suggest waiting. I am forcing myself to at least finish cleaning up the basement before bringing another project downstairs, and I’m slowly working on it.

But in my spare time, I’ve been trying to figure out what the 3D printer hobby will look like, even as simple as which printer to get.

On the plus side, there’s a good local place with well-reviewed support options. Some people just order kits online, which doesn’t really interest me, and there’s some irony in there. Starting on a DIY hobby where I don’t want to do the initial setup myself. Hmm.

Nevertheless, I visited them a few months ago, decided on the most likely printer to choose. They are cheaper than I expected, expecting to pay around $800, but I’ll likely get out for under $500. Not including supplies of course.

But the part that is messing with my squirrel-brain is NOT the actual 3D printing. It’s how to do multiple colours.

You know what they say about assumptions

When I started looking at this, I saw lots of multiple colour prints. Marvin the Martian, chess boards, Disney characters, etc. I am curious to do a Jiminy Cricket as a throw-back to my youth and to compare it to a statue I have in ceramic that a friend painted for me almost 30 years ago. And under the general info I had, and what I saw, I assumed that a 3D printer kind of worked like a colour inkjet printer. You put in multiple colours of filament, and out came a multiple colour print.

Nope. Almost all hobby printers are monochromatic. They print in one colour at a time. Technically, they say that it has a “single extruder” to paint the print with filament. But it means the equivalent of one ink cartridge at a time.

Now, here’s the fun part. If you WANT multiple colours, there are generally five ways to do it. Are you ready for them? I wasn’t.

A. Upgrade to a multi-extruder printer

That seemed obvious to me, a simple upgrade. If you have a monochrome paper printer, and you want colour, you get a different printer that can print colour. But hold on there. A multi-extruder printer is not as simple as choosing one with multiple heads nor simply changing heads to combine things. No, that would be too easy. Some have two, some have four, some have eight, but each time you go up, the printers get more complicated, more expensive, and often have more things to go wrong…all of which means your user experience gets complicated. Oh. Well, sheepdip. I do NOT want to over complicate my user experience. I was looking for simple.

B. Change filament during the print

This is the obvious approach. While it’s not QUITE the same, it’s kind of like printing a page in a normal printer, and when you want to switch from black ink to red ink, the printer pauses, you switch the cartridge, and it prints the next part, and then tells you when it’s ready to go back to black so you can switch the cartridge again.

Of course, 3D printers don’t really have cartridges, they have filament going into them. And you have to tell the printer when you want it to switch filaments — basically coding the print job so it pauses, beeps at you, has you change the filament being fed into it, waits until you tell it to to continue, does the next segment, and bob’s your uncle, it beeps to tell you to go back to the old one again.

That’s a bit annoying, but manageable, and it keeps everything linear, right? Except it’s not like paper, because you’re printing in three dimensions, a thin layer at a time. So, think of it like say a cube with 20 layers of black at the bottom, and then 20 layers with one half white and one half red, and then 20 more layers there are black again. In an ideal scenario, I would do layers 1-20 of black (which is true, it would do that). Then I would like to switch colours and do layers 21-40 of white (the back half of the cube), switch colours, and then layers 21-40 of red (the front half of the cube), switch back to black, and then do layers 41-60 of black again. It can’t do that.

It can do the first twenty layers (1-20) in black, just normal. But on layer 21, where the back half is white and the front half is red, it would need a colour change from black to white (still the same) AND then a colour change from white to red to do the front half of the layer. Then it would do layer 22. It can’t do 21-40 of one colour and then 21-40 of another, it has to do layer 21 x 2 colours, layer 22 x 2 colours, etc. With the colour change for every layer up to 40. So you CAN do it. But if you were doing something multi colour — perhaps a Simple Simon video game layout where you would have four different colours on the same layer, plus a form colour, that would be at least 5 filament changes for each micro-layer (where a microlayer might be only a couple of mm thick).

In other words, no, I can’t do really complicated prints directly in multiple colours. Don’t even get me started on the idea of a chessboard. 64 squares of two colours? Plus several layers of thickness? Yikes.

C. Use different materials

This is a lot more complicated, and in some ways is not much different than the multi-extruder option. But instead of using the same type of filament all the way through, you can use different materials of different colours within the print. If I thought colour changes were hard, printers that can do multi-material prints are way more complicated than I’m ready to handle.

D. Make it in pieces

If I go back to the chessboard idea, most people make the 64 squares of two colours in two separate sets of squares — one in one colour and one in another — and then “assemble” them together. So kind of like assembling 64x2x2 square lego bricks side by side on a pegboard. It’s a bit more complicated than that of course, with some people doing it with glue, others using overlapping tabs like models, others making a frame for it to sit snugly in, or others creating ways for the pieces to snap together. Of course, there are ways to attach parts together using external fasteners too, or some people actually put lego-like snaps on the bottom of prints so they can attach to other things. Literally snapping together.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one yet. When I was young, I had no interest in models that you put together with glue. I didn’t mind “snap together” options, but gluing? That was way too fiddly for my thick, uncoordinated fingers. These parts won’t be that small, but there is an aspect there that makes me pause. On the other hand, model glue was enough of a deterrent all on its own, and most people use bond or epoxy now from the dollar store.

E. Paint it

Okay, so this is the one that is driving me around the bend. I am not a painter. I have done a few ceramic things, not enough to develop any skill at it, and what I make tends to look like it was painted by a semi-talented four-year-old who was in a hurry. 3D printing can make some amazing models. But if I then have to paint them? Hell, I might as well just buy them.

Yet everyone says the same thing, “Just paint ’em, it’s easy”. And there are some tools available now that weren’t before. Very tiny hobby brushes are common place now, sure. But most people say to use paint pens. I didn’t even know there were such things, but apparently Michael’s has four different kinds! First, they have professional quality, that they keep in a locked cabinet, which come in a wide variety of palettes and nib sizes. Second, they have more hobbyist quality, with three sizes of nibs — basically fine/small, medium, broad/large. Both the professional ones and the hobbyist ones come in acrylic or oil paints. And there are some decent collections on Amazon too, of course.

I have watched a few videos, it looks easy enough, but it will obviously take practice to get any skill. And I say “will” instead of “would”, because it pretty much is the main option open to me. I’m going to have to learn to paint stuff. Some people buy a small air brush, others use spray paint for larger models. I saw some real cool stuff done with a small spraycan on a model to get a really good even coat to make a Disney like character. It’s DOABLE. I just hope that I like doing it enough to actually make it worthwhile.

Taking the plunge

I’m taking the plunge on May 6. Fingers crossed that it works. While I can’t really wrap my around the five options above completely, I’m going with the same printer I originally chose. I considered going with a smaller one — smaller investment in case it doesn’t work out. I considered an alternate one with multi-extruders, but the reviews are not kind for a bunch of complications. And I considered going up in level of machine, none of which anyone else recommends. So I’m going with the Gantry Pro.

My overall rallying thought, and why I have put time into trying to pre-load my brain with the right parameters, is that 3D printing has a lot in common with astronomy and photography. The best gear is the gear you will actually use.

But I’m having to let go of the options a little bit. On the plus side, the worst-case scenario is that I try it and it doesn’t really work for me. So, as a result, I might end up selling the printer within a year.

I’m okay with that. At least I’m trying something new. And I’m hoping Jacob is interested too. We’ll see.

The Conqueror Challenges and House Rules

April 20 2022

I have to confess, I had seen the ads for the Conqueror Challenges all over FaceBook and while part of it seemed interesting, part of it seemed completely ridiculous. The premise of the CCs (and others like it) is that you basically register to do a “challenge”, say walking across England. It equates to X number of miles/kilometres, and each day you record your own distances that you walked in your own neighbourhood…when you submit it / post it to the group, an app or website says, “Thank you, John/Jane! You walked 2.3 miles today. Here’s where you are on your challenge!” And it uses Google Maps to show where you would be if you were indeed actually walking across England.

Do you need an app to do this for you? Of course not. And tons of people comment on the ads to say exactly that…if you wanted to figure out how far it is from say Toronto to Ottawa, you could use Google Maps to do it (or other tools), and then once you’ve discovered the distance (about 402 km), you could just keep track yourself. When you get to 400, you’re done! Congrats!

So, if you read the comments on the ads, many of them are the form of “What a waste of money…figure it out on your own!”. Because of course, it does indeed involve money to use the actual app. It loads images from Google StreetView to simulate where you walked, you register your various exercises and distances in it (walking, cycling, running, whatever), and it’ll keep track for you. It’ll even synch with other apps or fitness tools like FitBits or Apple Watches. So you don’t even have to keep track separately, you just synch, and it’ll let you know how you’re doing against your challenge.

The CC tool is a bit hardcore in terms of automated support. It will show you the StreetView equivalent of where you went that day, it’ll show you on the map how you’re doing, it’ll even show how others are doing on the same challenge around you to build a community, etc. But the real “motivation” with CC is that you register for the challenge, pay your $15 or whatever it is, and when you’re done, they send you a completion medal. THAT’s what you don’t get doing it on your own — handholding and a symbol of your completion.

I didn’t have much interest in it, not really. If I “hiked Mt. Everest”, it was not like I really was hiking Mt. Everest. But I did wonder about setting some distance goals, like maybe figuring out Ottawa to Peterborough or to Montreal. Or across Canada while hitting all the capital cities. Or just a couple of them. I even wondered about what if you did it in a group, more like a relay race as part of a United Way campaign or something. Teams of walkers building on each other to see how far we could go together.

But walking to the Giza Pyramids? Would that really motivate me?

Blame inertia

With a bunch of pandemic stuff going on, I’ve hit a wall of inertia in the last few months. So I was wondering about doing SOMETHING to get my butt literally moving again. I wanted to start walking around the block more, and I wondered if I bought a t-shirt, chose a distance for a medal, and actually DID one of these pre-planned / low administrative burden challenges, maybe I’d be motivated or at least consider it. They recommend Giza as a great starting one for sedentary people starting small, so I said sure. Registered. Ordered a t-shirt. And I’ve actually been doing some basic walking. Is it the medal? I can’t say it’s NOT the medal.

But a funny thing happened when I joined the FaceBook group. I found a small sub-community of people who are REALLY into the challenges. All with different approaches. There are some like me, basically into it a little to give it a try, see if it helps get them moving.

Others have done a few and they are HOOKED. They think it’s a fabulous way to stay motivated, generally indicating they are the type of person who are motivated by extrinsic validation (we all have different triggers), so it works for them. If you do one, the company offers you discounts to buy multiple packages of challenges to do more.

Others are more motivated by specific challenges. Like they always wanted to go to the Amalfi Coast, but could/would never go. So for $15, they’re doing a virtual walk of their dream trip. I find that kind of sad, to be honest, but hey, who am I to judge? Whatever floats your boat.

Some view it with a healthy amount of perspective. Others feel that they’re ACTUALLY DOING A VACATION. Umm…okaaaaay. One woman celebrates her “completions” by printing out the cover photo for the challenge, along with virtual postcards that the company sends you along your route, mounts them in a display case, and puts them on her wall with the medal. That is definitely not me or my approach. I bought the medal, sure, it was the price of admission. But I can’t seem myself “celebrating” it particularly. Reaching a milestone? Sure. Getting a participation medal for it? Not so much.

Or would I? I don’t know yet. I love the idea in other contexts, like badges in school. I got one for math when I was in Grade 7 because I came in first in the math contest. It’s one of the few things I ever “won” in my life, but it was more participatory than celebratory. So who knows, maybe I’ll rave when I get my medal.

Yet what really surprised me was that there is a wide range of people who have completely differing views about how the challenge works. Not just ideas on how it SHOULD work in the future, for example, but actual differences in how it DOES work currently.

House Rules

The premise of the Challenge is relatively clear. If you register to do a challenge, you then enter your distances for the day towards the challenge. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

But how you calculate your distances, there’s the rub.

I know what you’re thinking…isn’t that relatively obvious? You use an app, a Fitbit or pedometer, something to register. That’s not what I mean.

I mean, quite literally, which distances count? For me, I just assumed everyone would view it the same as I do — additional “unique” mileage that would be towards the challenge. Why would it be anything else?

Well, for some people, they’re already walking, say, 10 miles a day. Some of that is around their house doing chores, some of it is grocery shopping, some of it is actual dedicated exercise related to the challenge, others might be something else entirely. But they count all their steps. That seemed like cheating to me, I confess. It would be like someone getting to the start line of a marathon and saying, “Oh, my smartwatch says I already walked 2 miles today, so I only am going to do 24 for the marathon.” Why would you count day-to-day stuff towards a Challenge goal? It didn’t seem to make any sense.

Other people wanted to count their time on a treadmill. Makes sense, what difference would it make if it was inside or outside? Nothing, I guess. Sure.

Others want to include cycling distances. Wait…wasn’t it a walking challenge? Well, sure, sort of to start with, but really it’s just a distance, and you COULD simulate riding it. So why NOT do it while cycling? Or running? Or maybe even swimming? Seems a bit weird to use swimming distances against a land distance, but well, what difference does it made? You exercised, you made it X distance, so why not count all of it? It seems a bit odd a first, but sure.

Then someone points out that their watch registers time on a stationary bike differently, and it recommends using a conversion factor to convert it to a land distance. So now the cyclist is multiplying by 1.5. Wait, that doesn’t seem right, does it?

Then the rabbit hole opens. Someone wants to count all the steps they’ve always done. So, for example, if they’ve averaged 2 miles a day and they’ve always done that, they’re counting the 2 miles on the challenge. No increase, no “extra” distance, just what they’ve always done. Their baseline, no “challenge”, it’s what they were already doing if they didn’t even do the challenge. What’s the point?

Someone else loved the idea of the challenge as a way to gamify certain activities, but she wasn’t able to do much on the fitness side due to some limitations. So she decided to count her reading as her goal — a chapter in a book would be the equivalent of 1 mile. And while that seems at first just completely bonkers, the more you think about it, the more you realize, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

It’s not a competition for anyone but you. You’re only competing against yourself. There aren’t any prizes — you PAID for your medal yourself. Heck, you could lie and say you did 20 miles a day when you only did 1. What difference would it make to anyone except you? Absolutely none. I might think it’s off the wall bonkers, like the woman who was incentivizing her knitting somehow, but it doesn’t change what I’m doing.

I want it to be unique mileage, not something I was already doing. It’s partly why a step monitor never motivated me. But going around the block and counting that when I wasn’t even doing that before? That works for me.

But here’s the thing. There are people in the group, like in any FB group, who are, well, “judge-y”. They look at those counting all their steps or those counting books and they are very quick to chime in to suggest, lightly or heavily, that anything other than unique mileage for the challenge is somehow not kosher. Despite the fact that there are no official rules, other than paying to get your medal. And then of course, there are people who want to argue otherwise, and there’s drama and hurt feelings, blah blah blah. None of which interests me.

But what DID interest me was that it basically comes down to House Rules. I’m not a great golfer, only have gone a few times, so my keeping strict score against the official rules when playing for just giggles is kind of silly. For example, when I’m golfing with my father-in-law, and I inevitably hit that really stupid tee shot that only goes 10 feet, we just do a mulligan. House Rules that work for us. Would we do it in a tournament? Of course not. But just us? Why not? Who cares but us? We’re just playing for fun. Out of bounds? Sure, we keep that rule for me. Penalties if I end up in the water? Sure. But a completely flubbed shot? Nah, we can take that one out.

I also grew up playing card games. And invariably we’d have someone over, we’d go to play a game like say Crazy 8s, and we’d have to have a conversation about what the rules were. We played that 2s were pickup cards, 4s were miss a turns, 8s were wild, As could be played anytime as long as you had nothing else you could play OR the other person was on last card, Js were pick-up THREE, and the Queen of Spades was pick-up five. Some people didn’t use the 2s as anything special, or 4s were reverses. 8s and Js were almost always the same, some variation on the As. Q of Spades was hit/miss. We had to discuss the House Rules so we could play together.

Casinos have House Rules for certain games, of course, although there is fairly decent standardization. But for those who just play poker with friends, it is NOT uncommon to wind up playing with someone who has some weird-ass five-card poker with 3 two-card draws, one-eyed jacks and skip-3 counts (3, 6, and 9s, like pregnant 3s) are all wild, unless you have a red eight which nullifies all wilds. Etc. Etc. Etc.

House Rules. What works in one house isn’t what works in another.

In lots of online fora, the phrase you see is “Your mileage may vary” (ripped off from car company ads). And while I still found a lot of people in the various challenges to be a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic in their passion for a made-up challenge, it is still fascinating to see the variety of ways in which people have tried to take a simple approach to a challenge (simulating a distance) and twisted/tweaked/adapted it to meet their goals. Right now, the big discussion is around the new Lord of the Rings Challenge. Where they have calculated how far the Fellowship went in the books. And now you can do that challenge. A fake challenge for a fictional place? And people are going GAGA over it. It makes ZERO sense to me. But some are REALLY into it. They took the official distances, and have researched the wikis online about LotR to figure out how many days it took them (186) and how long they did each sub-mode of transportation so they can MATCH exactly the books. Others are reading at the pace they’re going to walk. I mean, wow. That is some serious dedication.

As I said, I registered for the Giza challenge. It is 74.6km long, which is not much in the grand scheme of things. My father-in-law easily does that distance in a week, often within a few days even. I’ve given myself an official year to do it, and I’m hoping obviously that it won’t take that long. But my House Rules are that it is has to be unique walking that I wouldn’t have done originally. I hope, if it all works, that if I do another one, I would deduct some form of a baseline against future challenges; for me, I would want to see what I was doing “uniquely” to accomplish a new one, not simply what I was already accomplishing after the first one. Maybe I won’t deduct, maybe I won’t even finish the first one. But for now, I’m still with it.

House rules. It makes me think all those other approaches are a bit odd houses, but their house, their rule. I’ll stick to my approach for my challenge. And try not to get ahead of myself to figure out other ways to incorporate a similar gamification approach to some other challenges I have in mind.

When Apple misunderstands the assignment

April 17 2022

I’m not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. I run PCs, not MACs, and I used to have an Android phone and tablet. I switched to an iPhone for three reasons. First, I wanted to do some astrophotography through my telescope, and the best app to do that with is only on iOS (NightCap, for those who are interested). Second, Andrea and Jacob were moving into the world of such tools, and since I provide tech support to them, I wanted things to work as seamlessly as possible without being complicated…which is definitely an Apple selling point since they lock everything down within an inch of its life.

But the third reason, and it isn’t me being a fanboy, just admiring when something is done well, their phones and tablets are slick as anything. There’s a reason why they have such huge market share, they just work. Relatively well too, with a lot of time and effort put into how consumers interact. They may not be able to customize anything for you, but if you want it in the base colours they have, great.

So it surprised me when I had an issue with the way they did something recently that shouldn’t happen in a relatively well-run company.

Let’s start with the simple scenario — we have Apple Music as the family subscription. Andrea, Jacob and I are all on the plan, we all get unlimited Apple Music play. Which I use extensively for music at times. On top of that, I have iCloud (as does Andrea) for backups, AND I also use Apple Arcade. It adds a few dollars a month, under $20 in total with Apple Music family.

But we also have VMedia, Netflix, Prime and Disney+. I sometimes add on specialty channels like BBC Canada to watch a specific show I want for a month or two, or in this case, I decided to add Apple+ TV.

Which SEEMED like a relatively simple idea. I browsed on the TV, it gave me an option to bundle the four services together — Music, TV, iCloud and Arcade — all in Famly mode, and while it would individually run $22+, you save a few bucks bundling, it comes out to $20 or so. Great. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, I click, it does its bit, it synchs everything, adds it to my service, sends me a confirmation, and I watch Slow Horses, a new show on Apple + TV with Gary Oldman as a grouchy old spy running some screwups in MI5.

Then, the next morning, I get a confirmation from Apple saying, “Thanks for subscribing, here’s your bill for the first month”. $20. Wait a minute. I already PAID to May 12 for Family Music. Now I’m paying for Apple TV to overlap that for $20 INCLUDING Music / iCloud / Arcade. If I had just got Apple Music, it would have been only $5.99. Nothing in the email indicates that there’s anything existing already on my account for the same time frame. In fact, when I go to the subscription services, it has bundled everything (as it should have), and it is showing, yes indeed, I’m paying $20 to get to May 15th or so.

WTH?

So I go in, go to the subscription, ask to cancel the charge and that the reason is “it didn’t work the way I thought it would” (a wonderfully lovely way that would also capture every user error option too), and I look for where I can type in my explanation of double billing. Nada. Okay, it must be on the next screen? Nope, it submits it with no option to explain. Frak.

On to the help chat. Daniel was very helpful, but could do nothing. He explained that although I received nothing ANYWHERE that would have told me this, I would have (supposedly) received another email later this month that refunded the prorated portion for the other services. Uh huh. I mean, it makes SENSE, sort of, but why wouldn’t the original click buttons tell me that OR the confirmation email OR the invoice? A simple note to say, “Oh, btw, there’s a good chance this looks like we double-billed you, but well, we didn’t, not really, stay tuned.”

Sooooo, I ask Daniel to cancel my refund request. Oh, no, he can’t do that, he doesn’t have that power. Which means the solution is:

a. I wait for the refund to come through;

b. I go back in, resubscribe to the bundled option (Apple One Family) because it not only took OUT Apple One Family, it also didn’t put the others BACK because my initial subscription/bundle would have cancelled them being separate and the refund didn’t undo that; and,

c. Wait for a future email with my refunded difference.

Umm, okay.

I waited. This morning, I got the refund notification. Great, go back in, yep, all the other subscriptions are “gone” (without any refund notification for those, btw), and I choose Apple One Family. And it tells me THIS time, oh, btw, there’s a free month with it. Well, great, then I don’t care if they refund me. Perfect, let’s do it.

Click, click, click.

Confirmation. All good.

Three hours later? I get a receipt from Apple. They charged me for the full month again anyway. Sigh.

I saved the chat log from the help desk exchange. It VERY clearly says I will get another refund. I don’t care HOW they do it. I just want to pay only once. Why is Apple making that difficult? They are, generally speaking, WAY better at these interfaces and exchanges than this would appear.

So why are they screwing up this simple combo that likely applies to just about EVERY customer they have?

Feeling shallow on the lighter side of life

April 1 2022

While my blog of late has been dealing with lots of more serious matters than normal, I am still trying to keep it “light” with some ME time. I’ve mentioned before that I play various games on my phone, and of late, that’s mainly one of 9:

a. Traffic Puzzle is still a popular choice for me, although I lost a bit of interest when I cracked the 2000+ board mark, and actually caught up to where their new content ran out. I actually had to wait for new boards to be released. I’m at 2453 now, and I think they’re likely somewhere around 2600, but I’m not actively trying to catch up. I do a board or two every few days. Somewhere there was a run on free rewards, and I now have so many, I could literally play nothing but powerups for about four boards (I wouldn’t, but I could).

b. Penguin Isle was something I thought was cute, with a base to develop with lots of little penguins running around. The downside is that while it is cute, there’s not much to do, and once you get past a certain level, the delays between levels is HUGE. I only play once a day anymore, if that, but it could be weeks to the next level up. Not a lot of “fun”, just grinding.

c. I have three games I use for quick distractions — Super Yatzy has six dice instead of five, and some extra things to aim for; Euchre is similar for duration, although it is either too easy (the opposition is on the highest level, but they frequently don’t lead trump to clear stray trumps from taking aces) or it is ridiculously hard (they make it every hand, including with 3 low cards and no bowers, but their partner has both, cuz that’s not suspicious); and Farkle, another dice game, although not super exciting by yourself.

d. I was really excited previously about Lily’s Garden and Penny & Flo, but after I got through some speed story, it has become agonizingly slow with very little happening. It feels more like a soap opera than the adventure book it was resembling.

So where does that leave me these days? Well, I tried out a new game called Trainstations 2. And I am relatively obsessed with it. Most of the “actions” you can do is either picking up freight or delivering it, or generating stuff in factories, and as I’ve advanced, some of the activities take about an hour to complete. Apparently, this is a great source of frustration to other players, but I have no issues at all. I’m happy to play for 5 minutes or so, send trains off to do their thing, and come back a few hours later. Jacob is playing too, but I’ll play through the day, take a break here or there or at lunch, while he only usually plays for a bit after school. It isn’t particularly challenging, relatively mindless, but it is diverting.

But while all of those games are relatively innocuous, it is NOT the one that is making me feel shallow.

Instead, that honour goes to…drumroll please…the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.

Every day, the MS team releases five new “daily challenges” ranging individually from easy to medium to hard to expert for five different solitaire games.

Klondike is the classic solitaire that everyone knows and loves or hates. Easy and medium are way too easy, even hard is usually relatively straightforward. But often the hard or expert ones will come down to a choice of two cards to play, and if you play one, you win, while if you go with the other one, it likely ends in a stalemate. So you back up and go to the other one. I rarely if ever miss a Klondike game in the daily challenge, but there are hundreds of extra games available in the collection for you to “practice”, so to speak.

The second game is Spider solitaire. On easy and medium, it is one colour/suit; on hard and expert, it is two colours/suits. I have played Spider solitaire for years, and it is one of my favourite e-versions to play. Once in a rare while, I can get stuck, but it doesn’t usually take me much to get “unstuck”. I had one a few days ago, and it was really challenging right up until the last draw from the pile, I think I had cleared about two rows out of ten before I ran out of draws, and still managed to solve the deck.

The fourth game (yes I skipped #3) is Pyramid solitaire, and it isn’t a challenge for me on ANY level. I can do them with my eyes closed. There are only a couple of things that can mess me up, and if I miss something, I almost always know why and how to fix it on a replay. Most of the time, I only get in trouble if I’m trying to go too fast and not really paying attention. Some people hate pyramid, but there’s symmetry in it for me and I find it highly relaxing.

Similarly for game #5, TriPeaks. It’s a BIT trickier at times, some of the expert ones can bite me in the butt, but I can usually go a slightly different direction earlier in the round, and make a difference to the end.

So where does that leave me to be “challenged”? Game #3 — FreeCell. I have consistently sucked at FreeCell for years. There was just something about it that I’d play, and without fail, I’d get stuck. Now, the MS collection has the advantage that it ONLY posts challenges that are actually solvable, unlike some other games that just give you a random deal (no different than dealing paper versions yourself), so you KNOW with this version that it CAN be solved. You just missed something.

I’ve played MS Solitaire on and off for about three years. It comes with Windows, you can play direct from the browser or install the app, but it wasn’t until probably January that I realized they have an app version. Of course they do, duh. And it is totally synchable with your MS account so I can play on laptop or desktop or phone, and it is completely synched. I pretty much ONLY play on my phone now, but still, I COULD play on other devices.

In previous years or months, with five puzzles a day and about 30 days per month, that gives about 150 puzzles for the month if you want to get perfect. And now it is time for the really shallow part.

About 3 years ago, I would regularly get about 120/150 in a month. I didn’t play consistently every day on my desktop, but if you miss a day, you can go back and fill in the gaps. I regularly would end up playing about 10d in the month, so every one of those days, I had to play 3d worth of games. Last year, I played a couple of months consistently in a row, and I bumped my score up to almost 140 / 150. There were always a handful I couldn’t get that were almost all FreeCells, and then perhaps a wonky Klondike one or something.

But when I started playing in January on the phone, I played a bunch of these other collections too. It levels you up with your gameplay, and I’ve raised myself up to about level 50-70 for all of them, which is nothing compared to the hard core fans who are well above 1000 in their game levels. I’m shallow, but I’m not crazy. At least not in that way. Maybe.

I missed under 10 in January. In February, I tried REALLY hard, and I missed about four or so. There is a FB group — I mean, why not? — and someone posts SOLUTIONS there for really hard ones. So I checked them out, looked at the solutions to get a perfect month, but it isn’t really a perfect month if I had to cheat, right? But here’s the funny thing. When I looked at the solutions for the FreeCell ones, I picked up a few tricks that I likely wouldn’t have figured out on my own.

The game play is VERY different from the other four games, and there’s actually a bunch of gameplay theorists out there who study optimization techniques tied to FreeCell. I noticed in the solutions that often they will run a suit to the stack quite high, something you would almost never do in Klondike for example, at least not without it likely messing you up. Equally, even when there are obvious lines of advancement sometimes, it’s better to try and get really long runs in one or two columns, leaving the others with room to move. Again, that often bites you in the behind in Klondike and a few others. Plus, Pyramid and Tripeaks, and even Spider to some extent, require a general symmetry to most of the solutions. FreeCell embraces asymmetry for many of the solutions. And I’m learning.

For March, I only missed ONE game all month, an Expert FreeCell early in the month. I almost wish I hadn’t looked up the solution, as I think I could probably get it now.

And I am ridiculously tickled pink by my performance. Seriously, it’s SOLITAIRE. Why do I care? I have no idea.

But it is a bit of brainpower applied to permutation and combinations theory, and as I said, I’m learning. If I get a perfect month in April, what will I get out of it? Almost nothing. It pops up with a little “ta da” sound, and it says, “Congrats, you got perfect this month!”. No ticker tape parade, no prize in the game. In fact, there are a LOT of cheaters in the games … they show the leaderboards, and it is not uncommon for the scores to say that the person who came in first overall for the day managed to solve the five games in 3 minutes. It is literally not possible, they could barely click that fast, let alone solve it, and there have been some with solutions down to barely a minute. Apparently, they are coders who create bots that play for them…they treat it as a coding challenge to look at the cards, choose an optimal strategy, and let the AI play for them.

I don’t know what they get out of that, as they aren’t tweaking the AI every day, they’re just letting it run every day for giggles I guess. But who am I to judge? My mood is controlled way too much by whether or not I got all five of the day’s challenges on the first try.

I really am quite shallow.

Round 1 of my wife’s chemo is complete

March 29 2022

Today marks a bit of a milestone, although perhaps only to me, oddly enough. My wife started her official chemo 4 weeks ago, and she’ll go through six cycles. While the routine is “meet with the doctor on Tuesday, have dose 1 of chemo on Wednesday, and have dose 2 on Thursday”, that first meeting isn’t really part of the “round”. It’s leading up to the round. So Wednesday is the first day of the cycle by most people’s calculation, including my wife’s. Which makes today, Tuesday, the end of the previous round.

I wondered if my wife would embrace the day somehow, feel like it was a “closure” of round 1. That the allergic reactions, some nausea, aches, pains, headaches, and fluid in her lungs were all part of Round 1’s symptoms and that she had survived to come out the other side. I wondered if she might want to “mark” the occasion somehow, perhaps I was wondering because I felt like if I was her, I might want to mark it. Even as her support and advocate, I want to help her to celebrate any milestone that she can. Walking around the block again after not being able to breathe well enough two weeks ago. Going in and out of the hospital on her own, not needing me to push her in a wheelchair, or fearing collapse. Finishing Round 1 and starting Round 2. Nope, she didn’t seem to be feeling it, and with the two days ahead of her to gear up for, that’s probably not surprising. Her results from R1 are encouraging, things are doing what they’re supposed to in her bloodwork, but as I’ve noted before, that’s her story, not mine.

This round is going to be, I think, a bit harder on me as her support. For R1, I was allowed to go into the room with her, sit there while it went drip, drip, drip, talk to her, distract her, notice the rash on her neck to signal a reaction had started. For R2, they don’t want to risk any infection of others, although there were obvious partners there last time for lots of people who weren’t first-timers, so I don’t know why I can’t go this time. So she has to do the two treatments by herself. I can’t say that I’m a fan of that, feeling a bit like Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy.

On the positive side, as her potential advocate, we got a bit more info and perspective about her time in the hospital where it seemed like nothing was happening. In today’s meeting that I did by phone while Andrea was there in person, I asked her main doctor, and I said it was my Q as her advocate, was there something that should have been done last week that wasn’t — by me, by her, by him, by the ER staff, by respirology, etc. It seemed, to us at least, like she was in the ER but nobody was in charge of her care. So she sat there for three days waiting for someone to present options to her. Which they did, on Wednesday, and she had a procedure to drain fluids on Friday. Spectacularly so for volume. But while that Monday-Wednesday period may not have been ideal, the alternative to just go through her main doctor as the lead would have been way worse. If she had just had him treat her in clinic, he would have ordered the chest x-ray and then respirology would have looked at her somewhere around three weeks later; because she was in ER, she got seen in three days. And she was monitored while she was there in case it became more urgent.

Coming out the other side of that, there’s a game plan in place if the same issue crops up again i.e. she’s being seen in two weeks for ongoing monitoring and followup, as she still has fluid on the x-rays taken after the procedure. Which is great, not the fluid but the game plan, but my real question was if something NEW comes up, and we’re back in the ER, is there something more we should be doing?

Mostly not. While the doctor in the ER could have been more forthcoming in explaining what was or was not happening, the outcome would have been likely the same…even if she had been seen on Monday, the procedure would have had to wait for Friday for a drug to clear her system and for them to find room in the schedule. But three days is better than three weeks, so ER and urgent care was the best option we had at the time. And likely the best option for a potential future “different but similar” issue.

I think for me, I’m starting to see my supporting journey a bit more clearly in the three phases. Phase I is to help her get through the treatments. In that regard, she’s completed step 1 of 6, 28 days down, 140 days or so to go (the last one won’t exactly end at 28d, but well, let’s go with it). I don’t know all the bumps coming in the road for Rounds 2-6, but I have a bit more info after R1.

Phase II is likely to be the six months afterwards as her body recovers somewhat from the ordeal, as she gets some of her immune system working again without being attacked by chemo treatments. We’re thinking ahead to a potential trip, something big and commemorative perhaps for the three of us. We have some cash set aside from pandemic savings, so perhaps that’s not a bad way to use some of it. But I feel most of the phase will be slower re-emergence and just helping her on days when that re-emergence is more overwhelming to her than she might be ready for, than she used to be able to handle.

And then Phase III will be that post-treatment and recovery period, the dreaded “wait and see” era. With the type of cancer she has, we were initially told that it could go into remission relatively easily for up to ten years. That sounded very hopeful, but it is not necessarily the reality. Relapses can be as fast as 3 years for some, probably 5 on average. So she as an individual and we as a couple might have some other decisions to make in there about careers, retirement timelines, sequencing, etc.

For the part of the journey that is mine, I am struggling a bit to juggle everything. Not in the sense of I need someone to come in and help, although that has been appreciated too with people dropping off meals, or Andrea’s sister looking after Jacob for the R1 treatment period. If I divide my life into four areas, the three that are support for Andrea, managing life with Jacob, and carving out some “me” time, are all going okay. I’m tired, sure, but it’s mostly functioning at something resembling a sustainable level for the foreseeable future.

For actual career stuff and work, I am not keeping that ball in the air as much as I would normally like to do. I don’t mean with the individual files, I have a handle on what we should be and are doing, the work itself is fine. What I have a hard time doing is caring. I don’t mean “at all”, I care about my work and files, sure, but more that I am incredibly distracted. Late this afternoon, I updated my leave requests for the last week, which was a bit of a crapfest. Two hours off here, three hours off there, another two here or there. Nothing major, just distractions in the day.

For Wednesday and Thursday of this week, I have no real role during the day other than as Hoke, the chauffeur to take Miss Daisy to her appointments and bring her home again, and to take care of her once she is actually home. So I don’t NEED to be off work during her treatment, I might as well clock in, but I won’t be surprised if I’m too distracted to do anything and I’ll just clock out again. My bosses and coworkers are great, they know what’s going on, and I’ll cover what I need to cover or someone will cover for me, if need be. But it feels different from even when Jacob was born and we were dealing with all the early health issues for him. Once I was AT work, it was like a separate world for 8 hours. When I emerged again, it was chaos, but there was calm in the world of work. Some others have described it as work being a refuge from the storm of your personal life at those kinds of times, and while the metaphor doesn’t totally work for me, it’s not a terrible one. That isn’t happening now. I feel no sense of distance, maybe it’s the WFH thing that’s different, or more that when it was Jacob, Andrea had him covered during the day, while now it’s her, there’s no spouse other than me to take care of her. It’s not quite right in its description, I don’t feel alone or anything, it’s just with Jacob we had two primary caregivers, now we have just one. Our bench strength is down a peg, so to speak.

So while things are generally going okay at work, if I’m brutally honest with myself, I wish I wasn’t acting director right now. The timing is just wrong. It’s a job I’m ideally suited for, I love it, I would like to keep it long term, but all things being equal, I’d rather just be plain old manager again, and not have the extra concerns to worry about every day. I also feel something odd, and this is a bit insidious and thus I have to stop it from going too far in my squirreldom, but I feel like I’m not really making the most of the experience.

There are a couple of files I would love to dig into, just to manage the heck out of, fix it the way I think it should be done, and then get the hell out of Dodge City. A chance to leave a lasting imprint on a few files where I would like to lock in the “PolyWogg approach to planning”, so to speak. Instead, I’ll settle for keeping the lights on and the trains running right now.

A missed opportunity, from a career standpoint, perhaps, but I have no regrets about it, I know what the right decision and approach is, and I’m doing it. Still, though, it is not what I thought my first sustained acting would look like, particularly if I was hoping to make it permanent. That seems highly unlikely at the moment with the timing we’ve got, and honestly, I don’t really care. Just not on my priority list, even though it’s the best shot I’ll likely ever have at it.

Somewhat related to that, I’m also in a period of mild uncertainty. My official acting ends May 17th or so, with the plan being to extend me to July 17th (4m to 6m). After that, I have no specific plan other than to return to my previous position. Which is a good job, and I’ll be fine with that, or something else. Although I have been thinking of something else, tied into the above considerations of Phase II and the end of Andrea’s treatment, perhaps I might want to take a few months off between gigs instead. A potential bit of recovery time for me too before commencing the likely final leg of my career.

The funny thing is that I am not that excited by the potential leave or Phase II or Phase III. Those are markers too far in the distance. I’m more jazzed by the calendar and that we can soon open up our deck and gazebo and be able to sit outside again. Even if, as Andrea joked today, we might have to wear our snowsuits while we do.

Come on warmer Spring weather! Where are my red-winged blackbirds, my harbingers of a long quiet summer? I’m looking forward to those too. They should show up just about mid-way through Round 3.