Project: Studio Two

I like puzzle games, and one that I’ve always played in a rather mindless way, just to kill time, is the one called Flood It. Or Color Flood. But whatever you call it, it’s the one with a grid of random-colored squares where you start in one corner and keep flood-filling from there in different colors until you’ve flooded the entire board. The fewer moves you make, the higher your score.

But the more I’ve played it, the more curious I’ve become. What is the optimal strategy? Should you always flood as many squares as possible, or is it sometimes better to choose a smaller move to set up a bigger play? And if so, when?

Well, I don’t like just wondering about these things - I want to know. So I wrote a version of the game to help me find out. I call it FloodBoard.

If you know who Varys is, you’ll know he’s nothing without his “little birds.” They’re the ones who listen to the whispers of power and then tell him all about it.

Well, my varys needs some listeners too.

For years I’ve protected my office server from the harsh indignities of sudden power failures by shielding it behind a traditional UPS battery backup. For more than a decade, this arrangement has kept my pixels glowing through half a dozen actual power outages, and any number of brown-outs and glitches. Over that same period, the internal battery has eventually died and been replaced twice. I don’t begrudge the battery for failing - it’s an ancient battery tech that has more in common with the battery in your car than the one in your cell phone - but the replacements are expensive.

So when the battery failed again this week, I decided it was time to re-evaluate.