CCH, trivia

We Won!

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We won the trivia contest again. This year the format was adjusted a bit and the questions were divided into nine categories. The categories were:

  • General Knowledge
  • Music
  • Geography
  • Literature
  • Sports & Leisure
  • Movies
  • History
  • TV
  • Science
We did well in most categories and were perfect in Literature, Movies, and Science. TV came close to smoking our posteriors. Nothing like none of us having a clue. The team this year was the same as last year, so we had a CPA, a lawyer, a surgeon, a retired librarian, the young guy, and myself. Not a one of us watches TV other than for some sports or old movies. So when one of the questions was “What was the name of the coffee shop the characters in Friends often visited?”, we shared the blank look. We couldn’t even think of a good crowd pleaser for an answer. (The answer was “Central Perk”.)
It was a close battle this year. A new team (The Cracker Jacks) from a small town about 40 miles to south of here was in the competition for the first time and they came on strong to tie us at the end of regulation. It was the first tie in the history of the event at the end of regulation. So the moderator finally got a chance to ask his tie breaking questions. He had had them sealed in his Funk and Wagonall’s Mayo jar for at least 8 years. Our team and the other team both got the first three tie breakers correct. The tie breaking questions included such tidbits as:
  • What is the shortest verse in the King James translation of the Bible? (“Jesus wept”)
  • What are the colors of the three rooms on the first floor of the White House? (Red, Blue, Green)
  • If a plane travels 300 yds in 10 seconds, how many feet will it travel in 1/5 of a second? (18)
  • What were the names of the seven original Mercury Astronauts? (Glenn, Grissom, Shepard, Carpenter, Slayton, Schirra, and Cooper)
When the final tie breaking question “What were the names of all seven original Mercury program astronauts?” was asked, we scribbled like mad on our answer pad. We came up with all but Schirra . We could not for the life of us think of who the seventh astronaut was. We finally guessed Young, but that was wrong as he was a Gemini and later astronaut. Fortunately for us, the other team could only come up with 5 names to our 6, so we won! Yea us!
On the “crowd pleasing” side, one of the better answers was given to the question “Who is Angelina Jolie’s Oscar winning father?” (Jon Voight) One of the teams who was stumped supplied the answer “Shrek“.
On the “stump people” side, the best question was “What is the name of the one state whose name does not appear in the name of a university? I.e. there is the University of Colorado and the University of Hawaii and … Which state isn’t in that list?” I don’t think anyone got that one correct. (New Jersey – Rutgers is the State University of New Jersey)

All in all a fun evening. This year there were several new teams, including one organized by my grand-niece composed of seventh graders. I say grand-niece because she refers to me as uncle XXX, but the real relationship is that her mother is my cousin. It made me glad to see the new blood participating this year – there were 19 or 20 teams and all the entry fees go towards supporting Community Caring Hands.
By the way, just in case you wondered, CCH was originally founded to be a part of Habitat for Humanity, but we were too short on population out here to qualify for a chapter. Thus CCH was born to carry on the work out here in the rural boonies.
So once more our names will be engraved on the trophy and we’ll be able to show it off for the next year. Well maybe rub it in people’s faces, but you didn’t hear that here …
CCH, trivia

Trivia Contest

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This weekend is the Community Caring Hands Trivia Bowl. It is one of the more fun charity events to support the local CCH group. For those who aren’t familiar with CCH, they are a non-profit which does services for the elderly and poor in the community such as window repair and handicapped ramps and … Basically home improvements and repair for those who can’t do them without help.

The Trivia Bowl was started by a faculty group from the local community college many moons ago. It grew from a game they played over the lunch hour that is much akin to a team version of Trivial Pursuit. The way the local version works is that you get together a 4-6 person team, enter, and have fun.  Each team is assigned a table in the Elks Ballroom. A local retired faculty member and author of many trivia books is the Moderator. The normal flow is:

  • Moderator asks a question
  • Moderator starts the 60 second clock
  • Your team writes its answer on a slip of paper
  • Clock expires and the slips of paper are collected by the runners
  • Runners give the slips to the panel of judges
  • Your team is awarded a point for each correct answer

The winner is the team with the most points after all 6-8 categories of human knowledge have been exhausted.
What makes the event fun is that every one is heckling everyone else between questions and there is food and drink for all teams. Not to mention the audience in the galleries is hooting and hollering, especially when the judges announce a particularly inane answer to the crowd. You score crowd points but no game points by making up a Rube Goldberg style answer to any question you have no clue about.

Needless to say, it is a couple of hours of fun. Teams spend a lot of time visiting and talking between rounds, so it is a social event as well as a trivia contest. Teams seem to persist for years as a team. The team I am on has been competing for some years now with changes in personnel when schedules prevent some of us from participating. Our leader is an old high school classmate and former CPA. He is a bit obsessive, to the point of analyzing any question we missed in the previous year, etc. Another of our team is local lawyer who was also a high school classmate. Finally, to round out the core of our team, we have a youngster (he might be 27 by now) so that we can cover the youth trend questions. Some years we add a local surgeon or doctor or teacher or movie writer or … It all depends on who we can recruit.

We usually get a rousing round of boos at the start of the contest as the teams are announced – both because I am the mayor and because we have been the champions 3 out of the last 4 years. (We were sub-par one year and lost to the local community college faculty team. *gasp*) Most years there are 120 questions divided into 6 categories. We usually end up getting 110-115 correct. Second place is usually around 105-110 correct and then there always seems to be a gap before a cluster of other teams. But the real fun is the ones where you have no clue and so can go for the crowd points.

So think of me tomorrow night as I trivialize my way down the road … I’ll try to remember a few good questions and put them up here after the contest.

friends

Good Friends

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Yesterday, with the downer of the upchucking dog and other such wonders that one hopes to forget, was a wart on the toad of life. Except! Except that a good friend that I haven’t spent much time with in the last month called and said let’s go out to eat. Sort of like a lifeline to save the week. And so we did indeed go out for Chinese this evening and it was good.

It is all too easy to lose the connection with friends in the hassles of day to day life. Just being able to sit down with my friend and his SO and enjoy the conversation on a breadth of topics was so relaxing and uplifting. Given that I live the bachelor life during the week (well, I don’t *think* the Molly the dog can be considered my mistress in *that* sense), I have a tendency to  withdraw into my computers. The day to day tasks as mayor keep me out and about, sometimes to the limits of my sociability and beyond, but do not do anything to assuage that deep need that true friendship satisfies. It’s sort of like an itch you didn’t know you had until after you scratched it. And then it feels so good you cannot figure out why you didn’t scratch it long ago. It was that kind of a relaxing evening. I hope you all remember to scratch your itches in a timely manner.

Here’s to good friends who remember to scratch your itch even when you haven’t realized it needed scratched!

(I don’t know who to credit for this picture. If you know, leave a comment.)
challenge, history

I remember when …

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(This is a post for Mama Kat’s challenge .)

I remember when … I registered my first domain name. It was the pre-historic stone age of the internet. In fact, at the time there was no internet. A small group of universities had begun experimenting with a thing called DARPA net, but there was very little connectivity and nothing but DARPA related usage. Machines that communicated at all used a store and forward dial-up network based on the uucp protocol to exchange email. If you were lucky, fast links exceeded 110 baud up to 300 baud. The dinosaur phone companies still monopolized the earth. Some of us even took to wearing animal furs as a step up from the fig leaves then in vogue. {*grin*}

Seriously, there was no network, browsers were a distant gleam and the PC had not yet been been invented. I wanted to exchange email with some colleagues via the store and forward uucp network that was just starting out and thus needed a domain name to specify my address. So I ponied up the 20 cents for postage stamp and mailed an application to domain registry (no commercial registrars yet) and a few weeks later got a letter authorizing my use of the domain name in perpetuity. No fees and no renewal.  I convinced the IT department at my employer to let me use a modem to connect to their machine as my local store point and let them forward it late at night via their phone line. So I was emailing happily in the stone-age.

Several years later, networking cards became available and local networks started to become common (still no internet). At that time I contacted the predecessor to ARIN and asked for some network numbers (IP addresses in modern lingo). They assigned me a Class C block that I still use today. At the time, there was no hint of a future value for the numbers nor was there a fear of running out of numbers. Today the impending shortage of numbers is driving the move to IPv6 . Back then, if you requested a lowly class C, it was granted. (Class C – 2^8 addresses) If you wanted a bigger Class B (2^16 addresses), you had to supply a justification letter. If you wanted a full class A block (2^24 addresses), you actually had to have a proposed use. Today you have to justify, show utilization, and pay a rather large fee every year. Even so, the chances are good you could not get a Class A address today under any circumstance.

To bring this journey into the past to a conclusion, I sold that original domain name in the early 90’s when a couple of companies who share my last name got involved in a bidding war to acquire the domain. Once it reached a certain price, my response was simple – “Give me your best bid and the highest bidder gets it.” Needless to say, that was the best investment I ever made in my life. Somewhere on the order of 25,000% growth a year. It also made me real glad my last name wasn’t Smith. {*grin*}

Things Done Right