I’m through, being cool…. at least, I’m through with strep.  But I still have this nasty tickle-based cough that prevents me from rocking out on SingStar 80’s or SingStar Amped as much as I deserve to.  I am pleased to report, however, that my Guitar Hero awesomeness is unimpacted by my throat malaise.

Find the Star

Speaking of “stars,” I found a pretty cool little online game/puzzle thingy.  It’s in Chi-japanese or whatever, but still you get the hang of it pretty quick.  I’ve only spent 5 minutes on it so far, and that was back on Friday, but as soon as I get a free moment I’m going back.

The goal is to find the star in each of a lot of little flash games.  The trick is - you have to figure out what the trick is.  YOU have to figure out what you’re supposed to do to get the star.  It tells you NOTHING about how to play.  I think that’s the cool part.

The ones with the little star in the upper left hand corner are the ones I’ve completed.

Lateral Thinking Puzzles

One of my favorite things to do with friends (and especially with my 13yr old daughter and her friends / cousins) is to do Lateral Thinking Puzzles.  You need to get people who aren’t impatient or will ruin the time.

Here’s how it goes:

• One person knows the answer.  (If more people know the answer, they voluntarily sit out.)
• The puzzle is read aloud by the person who knows the answer.  The puzzle describes a situation but is cryptic, and the other people are supposed to figure out what the situation is.
• The people can only ask yes/no questions.  The answerer can only answer with one of three answers: Yes, No or Irrelevant.

Some of the puzzles are like riddles, and others are just descriptions of an event.  They key here is to learn how to ask questions that narrow down the possibilities, and to question everything and make no assumptions.

If you google for Lateral Thinking Puzzles you can get a few good ones.  For some reason, most of them are a little morbid.  Here are some of my favorites

• A man leaves home, makes three left turns and encounters two men wearing masks.
• Anthony and Cleopatra are found dead on the floor with broken glass everywhere.
• A man is found naked and dead in the desert, with a piece of straw on the ground nearby.
• A man and woman are found dead in a cabin on the side of a snowy mountain. 

This kind of thing sure beats watching a bad movie.

Jaden on Guitar Hero

I haven’t dumped the pictures from Christy’s cell phone in a Looooooong while, so I did that over the weekend (while trying to get p2k commander to work and other tools for syncing off of a Motorola RAZR) and found this picture from i-dont-know-how-long-ago. 

This was probably 6 months ago.  He’s a lot more into Singstar now, and you can hear him belt out “We’re not gonna take it” or “Hold me now” and it’s completely awesome.  He also does “Rio” pretty well.

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