Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Packing

For the last couple of weeks we have been very busy packing up everything we own into boxes.

This is our new house:

Photo from Google Earth.

It looks small in that picture, but it's much bigger than our current house.  The dark blue patch in the bottom right of the picture is the swimming pool in the backyard, it looks like the cover was on when the photo was taken.

We close on Monday (tomorrow) and we'll be moving on Wednesday.

 

Not Dead

The process of buying a new house continues.  We had the new house inspected the other day, now we are dealing with the issues that came up during the inspection.  We are progressing in the process of moving - much of the house is now packed up in boxes.

As part of that, a guy came over this morning to give us an estimate on how much the moving would cost.  He thought he smelled gas when he came in.  Anne called the gas company and they came out and discovered that a cap on the gas feed to the dryer was leaking (it is not used because our dryer is electric).  Apparently it wasn't capped properly years ago and it had degraded, and quite possibly a certain orange cat that will remain nameless also had something to do with it, as she wanders around there.

So the leak is fixed and a new cap put on and we did not die in a gas explosion.

FreeCell helps measure Cognitive Ability

Interesting article about FreeCell being used to measure cognitive ability in the elderly:

A Free Pass for FreeCell

Highlights:

FreeCell, the Solitaire-like card game that comes with Windows (and elsewhere), is not a waste of time--it's therapeutic.

"We discovered that we can take an existing computer game that people already have found enjoyable and extract cognitive assessment measures from it," said Holly Jimison, associate professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology and the study's lead author. Jimison and study co-author Misha Pavel, a professor of biomedical engineering and computer science and electrical engineering at OHSU's School of Science & Engineering, studied nine people with an average age of 80. All were regular computer users who played the FreeCell game frequently over a six-month period. Each participant was given a cognition score based on a brief battery of tests, and three were found to have mild cognitive impairment.

Pretty Good Solitaire Wins Shareware Industry Award

Last Saturday, Pretty Good Solitaire won the 2006 Shareware Industry Award for Best Non-Action Game.

This is the 7th award for Pretty Good Solitaire.  It previously won the People's Choice Award in 1999, 2000, 2004, and 2005 (Bejeweled won that this year), and previously won the Shareware Industry Award (voted on by members of the shareware industry) in 1999 and 2001.

All of this years winners and nominees are listed here.  Congratulations to all of the other winners this year and to all the nominees.

I was unable to be at the awards banquet this year, due to everything that is going on.  Gregg Seelhoff accepted the award for me at the ceremony.

Househunting

After we returned from vacation, we began looking for a new house.  We have been feeling increasingly cramped in our current house.  We've lived here for 9 years and it is time to move to someplace better.

The last time we looked for a house, the internet was only just getting started.  While we were able to view some house listings online, for the most part looking for a house required you to go look at lots of houses in person.  Today, it is far different.

We looked a literally hundreds of houses online.  While some realtors are still in the dark ages and have only minimal information online (such as one or two pictures, a paragraph description, some square footage numbers), many of the houses we looked at had a great deal of information online.  Many realtors now put up lots of pictures and even complete floor plans on their site.  We looked primarily at those houses where the most information was available online, particularly the floor plans. 

There were a couple of realtors that require you to give all of details of your first born before they allow you to look at the listings on their site - these houses were eliminated.

In many cases we were able to just eliminate houses on the basis of their floor plans, so we never had to waste time even going to them and looking at them. 

Once we had a group of promising houses from our online search, we then went driving around the neighborhoods we targeted, looking for what houses were available and what the general area was like.  We had a pretty good idea of what parts of town we preferred to be in.  Some areas of town are very nice but are awfully close to the malls - there's just a ton of traffic there.  Then it turned out that some of the houses that looked good online had serious location problems - such as one fine house that turned out to have a major street (Koke Mill Road) right behind its backyard.  Of course you can see that on a map online, but until you actually drive there you don't know what the geography is actually like.

Throughout the search, we kept coming back to one house that had a great floor plan.  We then went to actually see the house and it was fantastic.  Every other house we looked at online or went to see physically had some sort of major aspect that didn't make it suitable for us.

Last week we put in an offer on that one house and it was accepted. 

Now we are starting the process of packing.  We don't have a moving date yet (there are still details that have to happen, such as an inspection on the new house).

Obviously I'll blog more about the new house as we get closer to moving, but for now I'll just mention that it is located close to (but not directly on) Lake Springfield (the actual shoreline is a park in this area).  We are increasing our square footage by nearly 50%.  But primarily it is a better house rather than a bigger house.

It has a huge sunroom on the south side with two stories of windows.  Even better, the house was built with 2x6 construction, making the exterior walls very thick.  This means that all of the windows have very big windowsills.  Cats will actually be able to sit in every window (our current house has no windowsills - we had to built cat ledges).

In addition to the house hunting and buying, I am getting a new version of Pretty Good Solitaire ready for release soon.  All of this meant that I was unable to go to the SIC this year.

Vacation

OK, it's been awhile since my last post.  So here's what's been going on since late June:

We went on a vacation to Lake Michigan in Michigan.  We stayed at a very nice cottage on the lake.

It was a great relaxing vacation.