Rising in the Ranks of Starcraft II.

How I went from Silver to Platinum in two weeks.

Traveling across the country and selling your computer has it's perks. It also had this bizarre affect that made me stop obsessi... I mean... playing this game I enjoy called Starcraft II. I moved back in at my folks house to help them out in the yard and what is that you're storing in the basement, Dad? Is that a computer capable of running Starcraft II? Turns out, well. the demon is back. But after 1.5 months of absence do you still have a knack for something as tedious and involved as Starcraft II?

Welcome, ladies and gents to the last day of 2012 season 3.

I am a silver league player, that got very lucky near the end of the season. I played for HOURS and HOURS to try and get out of silver league. I even skipped a few classes here and there (which is a huge nono in final year) to try to get to that prestigious gold position. All my friends were in gold, why not me too? So after all this playing, I finally was able to stay in the top 8 for a few days. Everytime I'd log on I'd fall a few spots then go back up. So, it's getting close to Season 3, I'm getting nervous, I log on to battle.net and it tells me that the lock is coming soon. THE DREADED LOCK. I'm in the top 8, spending most of my time between 1st and 5th. But where is that damn promotion?

I took a break and decided to find some motivation somewhere else. I took a look at the series MaximusBlack from Lifes a Glitch TV (great show by the way) and MB's Quest to Masters. As a Protoss player I thought maybe I could use a few pointers. Well... he four gated every single time against a Zerg. It was pretty effective too! What the hell. I log back in to battle.net and I end up going up against a hatch first zerg.

FOUR GATE!

Four Gating is funner when you don't use warpgate.

After some cursing, swearing and generally offensive back and fourth banter my opponent leaves the game and I see the ever elusive gold promotion popup! And I kept all my points too! I started Gold League in 10th! That was great. The next day the lock happens and I'm stuck in Gold. Awesome. I end up finishing the gold league in the top 8 and here comes the next placement match.

I end up playing a Terran for the next game and am able to draw his army out in to the open, while I warped DTs in to his main at the same time. Many consider this to a be a complete dick move. I agree.

But it got me placed in Platinum. What... the shit?

I was in silver a week and a half ago? Well... here we are in platinum and funny or not, but I'm not losing everygame like a chum. The odd game I'm actually doing much better than my opponent. But now it's time to fly across the country and leave my life of Starcraft behind.

Until about a week ago.

I logged in to my account and found out that I was still in platinum league, I had fallen in rank to 60th because I hadn't played in forever. Also, because I hadn't played in forever I had a bonus pool of over 300! That's huge. I made it my goal to use every little last juicy point from that bonus pool to propel me through to diamond. That's right, I want to be a diamond. I sit down, I'm tired, and excited and this fucking game happens. (Click to download). So I get below 50 and I am ecstatic. Bonus pool down by 50 (I won five games) and I'm up to 49 wins!

Being half way through the middle league. I'm exactly average. Hurrah.

Here is the final march to victory, folks. I can taste blood in the water! Well a few games later then I played this guy LiquidSnake, cool name I thought. He must be a wanna be. I was also kind of hammered when that happened and... Well... fuck. This is what happened in that game.

You know what happens when you play with snakes? YA GET BIT!

Well that was humiliating. It's a weird thought thinking you can play two leagues up and two leagues down, second best and second worst. Well whatever playing a mix of platinum and golds with this HUGE bonus pool had its perks. I was winning most of the games I was playing too. Look at this stellar ranking.

9 of 13 also happens to be a relative of my favorite Star Trek character. 

It's also extemely convenient to get twice as many points for a win as you lose for a loss. The next milestone: Breaking into that top 25.

You could fly with wings like these.

With a week of intense evening gaming till 1:00am, I have managed to beat down that bonus pool to a mere fraction of what it used to be and I couldn't be prouder. I had to question some of the ranking methods when I got past that 25 mark. At this point I am playing top 8 platinum players and diamond players more so than gold. And some of the diamond players did not seem like 'diamond' players. If you know what I mean. Case and point in this game here.

Regardless of my thoughts I am now finished playing Starcraft II for season 3 and am very happy to have finished in the top 25. I was able to use all of my bonus pool and now have a whopping 706 points!

"Veni, vedi, veci" - Julius Caesar

I have a sneaking suspicion I will be likely to get back to gold if I lose my placement match when season 4 starts. Perhaps a Quest to Platinum is in order?

Here are all the links to the games.

First game.
Masters.
Diamond.

It's been delicious,

-Rois

How many squares on a chess board?

Hello friends!

I'm a bored nerd that loves really elementary maths. M4TH$ B1TC4ES! Yeah that's right. I used the letter four for two different letters. Wait, holy shit four is a number. Now I've got you second guessing yourself!

Anyways. I was bored tonight, lurking through facebook pictures of friends when I found this gem. 

The goal with this puppy is to count the squares in this picture. How many do you count? There are few different ways to do this. If you're a normal human being, you just.. .fucking count them. Easy peasy. Start with the single squares, then double it up for 2x2s, 3x3s, 4x4s for all larger boxes. They add up pretty quickly so it's only really practical do spend any amount of time on the smaller  puzzles. If you get to grids that 5x5,6x6, are those still countable? What about a chess board? How many squares are on that? It was a pretty easy problem to solve for squares in Calc (the OpenOffice version of Excel).

The logic is as follows:

The size of the square limits the size of the smaller squares (obvious, I know but bare with me). Therefor the squares in a grid with nxn length go from 1x1, 2x2, 3x3 ... nxn. And there is always only 1 nxn square in an nxn grid. Let's look at the chess board example. There is 1 8x8 square, and there is room for 2 7x7 squares horizontally and 2 7x7 squares vertically:

Or if we write it out:

Number of squares side-to-side: (8-7+1)

Number of squares up-and-down: (8-7+1)

Therefor the total number of 7x7 squares in an 8x8 grid is: (8-7+1)x(8-7+1) 

OR

(Length of side - size of square of interest + 1)^2

Since we desire all of the squares it is necessary to repeat this for each combination of square.

1x1: (8-1+1)^2 = 64 = 8^2

2x2: (8-2+1)^2 = 49 = 7^2

3x3: (8-3+1)^2 = 36 = 6^2

4x4: (8-4+1)^2 = 25 = 5^2

5x5: (8-5+1)^2 = 16 = 4^2

6x6: (8-6+1)^2 = 9 = 3^2

7x7: (8-7+1)^2 = 4 = 2^2

8x8: (8-8+1)^2 = 1 = 1^2

As it turns out it's just a simply sum of squares problem. So for any size square you can just use the equation for the sum (Sn) of squares, for n squares.

Sn = n(n+1)(2n+1)/6

See? Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. You can check out my Calc worksheet (don't worry it's excel compatible) here. So what about rectangles? Identical logic. Using our trusty formula for a square:

(Length of side - size of square of interest + 1)^2

And making it rectangley:

(Length of side - size of square of interest + 1) x (Length of other side - size of square of interest + 1)

Let's look at a 5x3 rectangle:

The largest square this can contain is 3x3, so it can really hold some 3x3s, 2x2s, and 1x1s. So looking at our formula we'll have:

3x3: (5-3+1)(3-3+1)

2x2: (5-2+1)(3-2+1)

1x1: (5-1+1)(3-1+1)

OR

In an NxM rectangle (where N is the longer side)

which reduces to

And voila. Notice that if N=M we get our original square formula? I'm not sure how to runs loops in OpenOffice Calc (I know, shut up, I don't have Excel) so I made the loop in my trusty TI-83 with the following code:

:Prompt N, M                N, for long side or rectangle, M for short.

:0-->S                           S, running total, or sum

:For(I,0,M-1,1)              I, the counter, starting at 0.

:(N-(M-I)+1)*(I+1)+S-->S

:End

:Disp S

It's been delicious,

-Rois

Afraid of postal workers, a box of kittens and heartbreak... again.

Day #5-54 End of June, baby.

What the fuck happened to motivation?

So today is Saturday June 30th. It has been 53 normal people days from the last blog post or in equivalent units, 1 productive Rois day. I live mostly on the Rois schedule of things, it's really great, I've got my own set of units, my own my own physical laws that some how rule my life (that means you special gravity).

So on the second day of blogging I shall share some fun things that I've been up to. Note: mostly nothing because I got back on the Starcraft train a few weeks after the last post, which... holy shit. The accomplishment/time ratio is teenie tiny. Like a li'l teenie bopper. I'll get back to Starcraft in a future post.

In other news, remember that pile of shit house I live in? I no long live in it! Tird Mansion is now the sole responsibility of the newest roommate. There were three, then one, then one more moved in. I have never been so exceedingly happy to move out of a place (did I tell you how big a pile a shit Duncan House was too?) yet the change coming back to what used to be a middle class house where my parents live is just phenomenal. <-- I know this word is a little inappropriate, but ... fuck you I'm a wizard.

I moved out of my house when I was 18 years old, half way through first year and have never been back 'home' for more than two months at a time due to my education on the other coast. And holy shit, the work that was put in to raising me and my brother ended up getting transfered to gardening and improving this house. Now, there is a furnished basement, a garden and a patio in the back. If you ask me how much teenagers cost, my guess is your life, a hot tub, and a bbq.

Now dealing with the laziness that I've been plagued with as a young adult. This has been a snowball effect and these bizarre problems started occurring over the last few years. The end of high school and in first year here at UNBC, I had a decent work ethic, my problem solving approach was pretty terrible, but I didn't like sitting still and not putting my mind to work for something. On the east coast, I got a little older and realized I didn't really need to apply myself to survive. The lesson learned here is there is a very large gap between survival and flourishing. I was the opposite of ambitious. "Will putting an extra three hours of work tonight in to this assignment be worth it?" My grade will go from a B to a B+. Not worth my time.

That and the added element of teamwork in engineering, has encouraged me to stay afloat by using collective resources and knowing enough for my professors to say "good enough." This shitty attitude now applies to my everyday thinking and I've been working to destroy it, but I am afraid this will take a very long time. Some consequences of this have been very noticeable with this mentality is weight gain. Being a lump on the road, not being very active, not healthy lifestyle or ambitions. How the fuck important is exercise? Well. Those bizzare problems I mentioned earlier. Like, shortness of breath when climbing a small set of stairs, excessive sweating on days with little humidity. The extra weight made me fatigued quicker no matter what I did (this and horrible diet) meaning getting out of bed was some times a chore. Bending over is difficult, since my flexibility has declined like crazy I find tying my shoes difficult, I have to put my foot on a raised surface instead of bending over.

I did run a few times a week with a good friend from Halifax, but today was my first day of actually attempting to motivate myself to run without help. Granted I walked up all the hills, I managed to get from my address here to the park and back without dying. I'm going to get some pictures up next week and see if I can't get my photography skills back on track.

Gotta start somewhere.

...

It's been delicious,

-Rois

Day #1Blogging, Smokie on Four Legs and a Spotless Tird

Hello.

I'm Rois. I'm A 23 year old graduate of chemical engineering from Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. That being said that is probably the worst sentence in the world to describe me. So I'll try once more: I'm bored. Like most people in this world I get stressed, depressed and exhibit very low levels of functioning when not stimulated in some form or another. I've been in school since I was five years old and never worked full time at a job for more than four months. I have relied 100% on school for my source of education, motivation, aspiration, and creative inspiration . 

Now that school is over and a job is not secured I have a lot of free time to pack up and leave the town where I was educated and start applying that knowledge in the real world. My goal during this period of time is to learn or experience something that is new to me, or I have fallen off the rails with (exercise for example) every day of the week. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to play out, so for now I'm going to update this blog everyday (because I have barrel's of time) and show you loyal readers what I've been up to.

Since this is my first ever post I will do a recap for my 'new' life adventures for the past three days since school has been out.

Day #1 Saturday May 5, 2012

Hiking at Long Lake Provincial Park, smokie on four legs (time since last hike ~ 8 years).

Hey guys I'm on a rock! at a lake! (Photo Ryan C. Kelly).

That's me in the photo above, the first day out of school, looking happy as ever with my fashionable summer wear and over-packed satchel. An no, we did not see any bears in the woods, but there were about 3.5 trillion dogs allowed to rampage their little hearts out on the trail. And all of them were God-damned adorable.

Day #2 Sunday May 6, 2012

Holy Shit a House Clean (time since last clean ~ 4 months).

My apartment is a pile of shit. It is an undersized, overpriced feces haven that has earned the name 'Tird Mansion.' It has always been messy and full of useless things because of the apathetic attitudes that my roommates and I employed while living here. Since my two roommates moved out it was about time for a change. Well, now it's clean, and almost looks like a normal flat.

Day #3 Monday May 7, 2012

Shit. (time since a nothing day ~ 1 week)

Didn't do a God damned thing.

Day #4 Tuesday May 8, 2012

Blog-a-log-a-log (time since last blog ~ forever)

So technically Tuesday is today. This is the day I decided to actually write down my new adventures which I hope will motivate me to actually overcome my laziness and live a little. The product of today's adventure will be repeated every day until I find something better to do with my time. :)

Also I made a youtube playlist of top 40 music that has been present at some point somewhere in my life.

It's been delicious,

-Rois