(For the two, maybe three curlers that read this, the skills contest comprised five “ends”: draw to the button, guard and tap, double takeout, draw through a port, and then a takeout free-for-all with 14 stones in the house and two to throw. There was also a written test on the rules, but I think I had an advantage there having skipped all year.)

The remaining two nights are a grudge match against Tim’s rink, and then a draw match with the same eight curlers, where no-one’s allowed to play the same position they played during league play. Mostly that was an arrangement for convenience’s sake — attendance now that league play’s done could be iffy, and we knew we’d all be showing up and that we’re playing at each other’s levels, so we might as well get in two more games.

I’m all signed up for next year’s weekend mixed league, although we’re still short one player, but that will work out one way or another. All in all, I had a great time of it this year. I’m not usually a “sports” person, let alone a “team sports” person, and especially not a “win at team sports” person, so I’m kind of surprised at how well it went!

(And thanks go to Dan and Jay at work for inspiring me to finally remember to sign up this year!)

And in case you’re sick of reading about me, check out this shot from the 2006 Olympics:

I’m also glad to finally have modern ringtones, since the BlackBerry was back in the single-voice MIDI era. I edited up a bunch of mp3s in Audition, and then realized that the phone doesn’t loop mp3 ringtones smoothly — between the mp3 frames and the phone, there’s about half a second between repeats, so now I have to go back and re-edit them all to be about three times as long as they are now, so they don’t have to repeat unless I let the phone ring and ring.

(I can’t believe that people pay for ringtones.)

Virgin Mobile continues to be good-weird. Setting up voicemail, I was prompted to record my name, but “if you want, you can make up a name, so if you’ve always wanted to be Shirley, then now you can be Shirley”. After setting up voicemail, it drops you into your mailbox, which tells you you have “no messages, not a single, lonely message”.

I need to call customer service on Monday to clear up how payment works, since I’m not 100% clear on how the combination of prepayment, a monthly package, my second month free, auto top-up from a credit card, and the credit from the phone purchase all fit together. I’ve got this week off work, though, so I’ll have plenty of time for that and all the other stuff I want to get done, like talking to the bank about RRSP borrowing and a student line of credit for this whole school business.

In other news, we won again curling tonight, and it looks as though we’ll be keeping our rink together for the weekend mixed at Granite next year, which should be a blast. I need to start looking around for year-end sales on brushes and shoes.

We had about a dozen curlers total. Of those, only Eddie (the event organizer, Young Alumni president, and a member of that club) had serious curling experience. another three, including me, had been curling in a rookies’ program since September, and two others had curled but not recently, so I ended up coaching a bit. Eddie was all about the big picture, and I was more about suggesting to put the broom here and get your foot there and let go of the handle like this, so between the two of us we managed to get the basics across.

Everyone got in a half-dozen or so deliveries and some practice sweeping, and the new curlers picked things up quickly and we split into four teams of three. The team breakup was a little odd: my sheet had me, one very occasional curler, and four newbies, while the other sheet had Eddie, the two other rookie-league curlers, and two newbies. The occasional curler and I each skipped a team, and I made sure Candice wasn’t on mine so I wouldn’t have to teach her!

The game went well, with the strategy ending up along the lines of “See if you can get some rocks in the house”. My two newbies were both doing alright, but couldn’t be much more different: one was very interested in specifics and details and the mechanics of what was going on, while the other one… just sort of threw rocks and swept (regardless of whether or not the rock needed sweeping) and that was it. But we got through four ends of pretty good curling considering, and my interested newbie got to skip for a bit.

Candice’s team ended up beating ours by one point, although where that point came from was open to speculation: I went to get the measuring stick to show how to tell if a borderline stone was in or out of the house, an out-of-play rock somehow showed up back in the house. I don’t know what whoever did that was thinking — the end was a five-ender to begin with!

All in all it went well, though. At the bar afterwards one of my newbies seemed interested in doing a rookies program next year (I made sure to mention Granite’s, Eddie seemed unimpressed). I don’t think Candice is going to be signing up anytime soon, but at least she knows what I do Sunday nights now!

I nearly came home with a broom, too. I’ve been using the club brooms at Granite, which are fine but are club brooms. I stopped in the Hogline pro shop on the way out, but I didn’t want to buy too good a broom for what I need, but at the beginner end of the price range I couldn’t tell if I’d see a huge advantage over the club brooms, especially as skip.

(Dammit, I should’ve bought a broom.)

Here’s a weird one for you: I installed Windows (XP Pro) on my laptop the other day. Yes, yes, hell’s frozen over, I know. I need to work in both Windows and Unix regularly, so I had to have some compromise. Until now the compromise has involved running the Windows apps I need (Office, Notes, Remedy, MMC, mostly) either in Crossover Office or via RDP on an old P3 under my desk at work, but more and more I realized that there were a bunch of things where I could benefit letting Windows have control of the hardware, from proprietary VPN clients to games to soft phones. So I bit the bullet and set things up dual-boot, although I haven’t really needed to boot back into Linux yet.

I’m satisfying the Linuxy side of the picture with cygwin, and so far that’s been sufficient — well, that plus a native EXT2 driver. Still reading my mail in mutt, still editing in vim, still IRCing in Gaim, still surfing the Web in Firefox, but it’s nice to be able to sync the Blackberry, use Google Earth and Sketchup, connect over a VPN instead of an SSH tunnel to work, run MMC locally, and so on. I’m actually pleasantly surprised at how well things seem to be working, especially wifi, bluetooth and so on that were all a bit persnickety under Linux. The laptop runs 10 degrees cooler on the CPU and 20 degrees cooler on the hard drive and memory, too, which surprises me.

It’s odd to have to catch up on the last four or so years of must-have software, though. If there’s stuff you think I probably don’t know about but should, let me know!

Other than that, not much going on lately. I took Candice out last weekend to Domus Cafe for her birthday. Tasty! She had a barley-mushroom-truffle “risotto” and salmon with (more) truffles, and I had a hot and cold foie gras appetizer and crispy duck. It was the first time we’d been to Domus. The decor and service were almost a little too plain — I know that it’s more of a bistro-type restaurant, but the atmosphere didn’t really flatter the food compared to some other places around here I’m fond of, like the Urban Pear. Still, everything was very good.

I booked my GMAT for January 31. No turning back now! I’ve been doing well on sample tests so I’m not too worried. I just need to practice and practice and practice. Such a bizarre, impractical test!

Curling’s going pretty well. I’m still only making about a quarter of my shots, but that’s average from what I’m seeing. Apparently serious amateur curlers average about 50% of their shots, so it’s harder than you’d think! Even championship curlers come in somewhere around 85%. In the new year we’re done the instructional part of the rookies program, and it’s all league play from then on. I’ve got a decent team who play hard but don’t take themselves too seriously, and somehow I ended up being skip, so it should be a challenging few months!

Must post more often. Nag me if you see me.

It’s been ups and downs so far, but mostly ups. The first week’s session went well — curling immersion, walking us through delivery, sweeping, skipping and strategy plus two ends of game play in two hours. But I must have overdone it, because at the beginning of the second session I managed all of one delivery before I pulled a muscle in my leg and went home early. But then we had a week off, and that was enough for me to heal up, because Sunday night’s session went pretty well! We only did about half an hour of instruction (still on delivery and balance) before splitting up into teams to play a few ends (four, on our sheet). I played skip to give my legs a bit of a rest from sweeping, but I’ll make up for that later, since they make us rotate through all four positions before we play a position we’ve already played again.

By late January or so they expect us to be playing full 6-8 end games, and the instruction turns more to coaching, and at that point we should be able to fill in as spares in the social leagues. It should make this winter go a bit quicker — not only having a winter sport to play, but an indoor one, in a room that’s at best refrigerator-cold, followed up by a couple of pints in a warm room. And there wasn’t even any equipment expenditure — they provide the brooms (and the rocks, of course), and until I want to commit to (fast, slippery) curling shoes, a stripe of double-width packing tape down the sole of one running shoe is plenty slippery enough to learn on. (The other shoe needs to be grippy, and tennis shoes are grippy enough.)

We’re all still pretty bad curlers — scoring is 80% fluke and 20% effort at this point. But it’s a lot of fun to play, and a social game on top of that: the tradition is for the winning skip to buy the losing skip a beer, and the winning third the losing third, and so forth, and then reverse things for the second round. About half of the curlers stick around afterwards (it is 9:00 PM on Sunday at that point).

And now that you’ve had to read about curling, here’s some various links I’ve been meaning to recommend lately:

• Strange Maps, a blog about strange maps, via metafilter.
• Four Second Firestorm, a game comprised of tiny four-second minigames, via Good Experience Games.
• Get Rich Slowly, my favorite personal finance blog.

HURRY! HURRYYYYYY! HAAAAAAARD!

off. OFF.
HAAAAAAAAAAAARD!

Although popular in Scotland, which claims to have invented curling, and in Canada, which claims to have invented ice, curling remains on the fringe in the United States.

Editors? Editors?

But none of that compares to the title sponsor of the Canada Cup: Strauss Heart Drops. Strauss Heart Drops are a herbal “medicine” which claims to clean out arteries, eliminate angina, prevent heart attacks, eliminate cholesterol problems and so forth, all after six $80 bottles of drops made from extracts of garlic, hawthorn, cayenne, bilberry, motherwort, and white willow bark. (“White willow bark extract” is salicylic acid, of course, and small regular doses of aspirin are an accepted preventative treatment for heart attacks, but baby aspirin is not $80/bottle!)

(Jim Strauss has an interesting history with the government, who charged him in 2003 with 73 charges under the Canada Food and Drug Act for his heart drops as well as a bunch of other Strauss Herb products, including false advertising, deceptive packaging, and not including expiry dates or lot numbers. A few years before that they were acquitted in provincial court having been charged with practicing medicine without a license.)

Their FAQ is a gem:

Question: Should I work with my doctor?
Answer: Ask your doctor for a copy of your angiograms and to monitor your progress.
Question: Do Strauss Heart Drops have any side effects?
Answer: No. We have never had a report of any negative effects from Strauss Heart drops. However, you may experience the following:
[heartburn, skin rashes, diarrhea, increased urination, headache, dizziness, nausea and/or gas, rise in cholesterol levels]
Question: What is the success rate with Strauss Heartdrops?
Answer: In our opinion, heart conditions that are caused by clogged arteries are improved in 95 per cent of users.

Ah, yes, their opinion! Well, that’s good to know.

To bring the bizarreness to the next level, there’s also apparently a multilevel marketing opportunity surrounding Strauss Heart Drops!

And somehow these guys can end up the title sponsor of the Canada Cup! Granted, the Cup is held in Kamloops near where Strauss is based, and they advertise heavily during the Brier, but still, I shudder every time I see their ads during this thing.

(And this turned out to be another year in which I think about learning to curl and then do nothing about it. And I can even see the Granite Curling Club from our balcony. I never think about it until late November, and the beginner’s clinics and leagues all seem to start in late September. Oh well, next year.)