Someone recently asked Diana: "So, do you hire someone to do your taxes, or does Adam do them for you?" Funny stuff.

Last night while trying to get to sleep, I had a new SecondLife project inspiration. I need a snappy name for it, but it's basically a casino game where players pay to play and hopefully win money. Here's how it works:

Every 10th player wins 5x their money back. That's it.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. It feels to me like it satisfies two requirements of a good gambling game. It should feel very winnable. And obviously, since winners are guarenteed and predictable, this is true. In addition, the game must be in the houses favor (for obvious reasons). The beauty is that those two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The rules and odds are very transparent, yet the player should feel like they can win, and the house should make a profit.

So, let's say someone walks up and pays the machine. If they win, they obviously shouldn't play again. However, if they don't win (which is most likely), then what do they do? Whatever "you lose" message they get will make it clear to them that they are one step closer to winning the pot, which should tempt them to play again. If they continue, and don't win on by their 5th play, then what? They know that they must be SO close to winning some of their money back, so might as well just play until they win to cut their losses. That's how I imagine it, at least.

Now that I think about it, the smart play is to observe someone else playing the game, and try to get a handle on the internal counter to predict when the game is ready to payout, and only play when you'll win. If you're a careful player, you could actually make money. That could actually make for some really interesting sniping possibilities, where multiple people are playing the same machine.

Of course, I'll give away copies of this game, and collect a commision on each play. If the bet amount is 10, then from every 10 bet, I'll take 2, the house will take 3, and the prize pool will take 5. I'll probably also make the bet amount configurable, as well as being able to change "every 10th player wins 5x" to "every Nth player wins X * (bet amount)".

Best yet, it should only take an hour or two (my LSL is a little rusty) to code and test.

I like it.

RIP President Ford...



In honor and remeberance of our former President, we got a half day at work on Tuesday! Combined with a day off Monday for New Years, and taking Thursday and Friday as vacation days (Disneyland... wooo!), it's going to be a short work week.

Things have been pretty busy lately. Alicia and her Swedish boyfriend David, and David's sister Lisa have all arrived for the holidays (and since departed). It was great to see all of them. David is a particularly good guy, and I always enjoy seeing him, and seeing him with Alicia. They make a good couple.

We spent a lot of time with Diana's family over the holidays, as my parents are away in Montana. We did lots of present opening, dinner eating, game playing, etc. Good fun.

On Christmas evening, Diana and I had had a total of 10 people over for desert and game playing, which really went well and was a lot of fun. As early as was appropriate (after everyone had some drinks and desert and had segregated into various conversation groups), Andy and I busted out the Guitar Hero. It wasn't long before everyone was in the room, taking turns and getting into it. It was great to see Dawn and Mary rocking out to "Shout at the Devil" or whatever they played. We later retired into the living room where we played a huge group game of "Apples to Apples", which I decided is my least favorite game ever. Just thinking about it fills me with a seething ball of rage in the pit of my stomach. I hope I never play again. It was fun the first few times I played, but the whole game is kind of like hearing the same joke over and over again ("Richard Nixon is 'sensual'?! Ahh, that's funny!" x 1000). Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, though, which is the point of it all. All in all, though, it was really fun to host a big group. I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

Later in the week, Diana and I attempted to teach Alicia, David, and Lisa "San Juan", which crashed and burned. I think some of them started to get it, but the complexity of the game, combined with a non-trivial language barrier made it pretty difficult. So we played "Apples to Apples" instead (see above).

The next night, actually, we tried out "Carcasonne" at Diana's parents house, and that went really well. Although it's still a little tricky, it's a much more visual and probably easier to understand without having to speak any particular language. So that was good.

It's really interesting to compare these different types of board games. I don't know if it's "German" and "American" specifically, or maybe it's just "party/social" games vs. more thinking games, but the way you teach the game to someone else is vastly different. To teach someone to play Pictionary takes one sentence: "You draw a picture, and we try to guess what it is!" San Juan, not so much: "Well, you have these factories....."

We played a big game of frisbee golf one day, which was a lot of fun, and spent the rest of the day around Balboa Park. Diana and I got David and Alicia a GPS unit for Christmas, and helped them find their very first geocache! They picked up a TravelBug which they'll take back to Sweden with them.

My brother called sometime over the holidays, and said that he had set up a webcam, and wanted to try calling me on Skype and try it out, which we did. I guess he also got a webcam for my parents, and since then, we've bought one as well. It's pretty fun to be able to see the person that you're talking to on the phone. My parents could aim their webcam out the window and we could see the snow and Montana beautiousness. Pretty cool. I'm sorry I'm missing Montana this winter, and look forward to the next time we're able to go. Skype seems to work pretty well, but can still be a little awkward as voice and video cut in and out sometimes. I think headsets might help a lot.

New Years was pretty much a non-event at our house. My various friends were out of town or otherwise engaged, but Diana and I had a nice evening ourselves, culminating in watching a really fascinating documentary about people climbing Mt. Everest (I know, party animals!) New Years day, we met up with Diana's family and some of the Schatz's for tidepooling at Swami's, which was particularly successful. I saw two octopii, starfish, brittle stars, crabs, some shrimp-y thing. It was a beautiful day with nice company.

And now I'm back to work for today, and we're off to Disneyland tomorrow! Should be fun.