Answer for Bon Bon, re: winning a trip off Real Genius.

When the movie came out in Australia, the promoters decided to distribute some free tickets courtesy of Dick Smith Electonics, a Radio Shack or Tandy-like chain here in Australia. Well, DSE decided they could do better than that, and turned it into a full-blown national competition. The summarised version: there were three knock-out rounds. The first was conducted at the individual store level, the next was statewide, and the final level took the winners from each state and brought them to the DSE headquarters in Sydney for the final showdown. All of them were conducted as a 10-question multiple choice test, administered on a PC. YOu needed to get the most right; in the event of a tie, the fastest time took the prize. Characteristics as follows.

Round 1: Fairly simple general knowledge questions. However, you could play as often as you wanted, and there was a limited question pool. So, ultimately, it became a test of persistence and motivation. My best was 10 right in 11 seconds; someone in Tassie did it in 9.

Round 2: Same as round 1, but the questions were a bit tougher, and you only got one shot. It wasn't until the results were in that they decided to give the ACT a separate representative (me) instead of lumping us in with NSW; because I'd beaten all of NSW as well, and they felt it wouldn't look good to have the most populous state effectively unrepresented.

Round 3: Very interesting experience. Same set-up as before. I was the only state rep that wasn't dux of his/her class. The SA rep was only 12, and the Tassie rep had been the fastest in round 1. (We didn't know the comparative round 2 results at this stage.) But when we did the questions, we found that they weren't general knowledge anymore, but mathematics. And I was the only one there who was up on both trivia and maths. I beat all the other contestants by at least two answers. My grand prize: a trip to Europe. Oh, and free tickets to the movie.

I got interviewed on radio afterwards, and they asked me what I thought Australia needed to do in the future. Not sure why they thought I'd have an interesting answer. Anyway, some additional info about round 3: when my mother and I turned up to the DSE HQ, I was corralled with the other kids, and M went in the direction of the other parents. But she noticed that the staff serving coffee and generally running things looked rather overworked, so instead of sitting down she pitched in and helped out. Took some time before the other parents realised she wasn't an employee. ("How long have you worked here?" "About ten minutes.") And when they found I wasn't dux of my class, they pretty much went back to ignoring her.

I was thinking yesterday that if they'd asked me that question on the radio, I'd tell them they were asking the wrong person. (This didn't stop M from rubbing it in when I won. "Um... has your son ever done anything like this before?" "Oh, you mean like the trip to Europe he won last year?")

Here endeth the Real Genius saga.

Apropos of nothing, here's an excerpt from the instructions from my DH's Master's program. Keep in mind that it's only open to students of Lt. Colonel rank and higher.

Hee. And then they tell you which to do. I wish my profs told me which material I only needed to scan.

Announcement: Next time I go to the Bay Area, I'm going to Lush. I have decided this. Because I have never seen Lush products, and they sound wonderful, but I want to check them out in person before buying from the catalog, because I'm weird that way.

We have sun after a week of grey and rain. I think I must go outside now.

Emmett and I played tennis today for the first time. I used to play regularly (every Sunday for three years with Emmett's godfather), and he's beeen going to tennis camp for three years now. He's very good for an almost 9 y.o. I sometimes forget to factor that in because athletically he's more like what I was at about 10 or 11.

We came home and I told him it was electronic silence until 6pm, and he complained bitterly that without TV or computer he'd be bored into a catatonic state. But I held firm, and he's been happily playing with Legos for an hour now. Of course, they're all elaborate killing machines, but still.

Hee. And then they tell you which to do. I wish my profs told me which material I only needed to scan.

The Institute study material for my Life Insurance unit was supposed to be formatted to do this. In addition to the normal formatting, the bedrock vital stuff was in bold, and the less important material in a smaller font. At least, that was the theory. In practice, they'd lost the formatting for most of the notes.

I wish my profs told me which material I only needed to scan.

Wait. Isn't that all of it, until it comes time to write a paper? Am I doing grad school wrong?!?

Am I doing grad school wrong?!?

You'd better start over.

Crap.

But I held firm, and he's been happily playing with Legos for an hour now. Of course, they're all elaborate killing machines, but still.

Things I built with legos as a child.

• Elaborate killing machines
• Fleets of spaceships that were at war
• Ships or spaceships that had befallen some catastrophe, involving sinking, fire and/or explosions.
• A machine where you put marbles in the top and they came out of a random door at the bottom - made with several "randomizer" ramps to make it impossible to "cheat" and get a non-random door.
• A tower that went from the floor to the ceiling.

Things I built with legos as a child.

No Legos when I was a kid, but if you substitute wood blocks for the legos, tommyrot and I are as one.

My brother and I also made phasers out of TinkerToys so we could play Star Trek. My sister's cardboard house served as the brig. I figured out how my TinkerToy phaser could be made to shoot dowels, etc. with a rubber band, but I was dismayed that there was no way to stabilize the dowel in flight, like an arrow.