I've done nothing but post about Excel championships here this month, and I'm very sorry if it's bored you. But you shouldn't be reading my blog if you're bored by competitive spreadsheeting, so it's more your fault than mine. I'll go back to writing strange things about comics and cartoons as soon as I can, and I'll go into alarming length about how much I love Simon the chipmunk.
But today was the draw for the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship, and I have to say, this is kind of an ideal batch of potential opponents for me!
Paulo Guerra didn't quite get a high enough score in the qualification round at the weekend, but got a wildcard entry. My potential opponents in round 2, Ashleigh Roberts and Hunter Wylie, both qualified through the qualification round, but with lower scores than my just-for-fun total. All three of them competed in the Road to Las Vegas competitions this year, and Hunter got a higher score than me in the first one, but I was better than all three of them in all eight of the others.
So that takes care of the fear of being paired against someone who's unstoppably better than me. We still have the fear of getting a task that my opponent knows how to do better than I do, but the chances of that seem rather smaller. All three of my rivals, I can see from the score breakdown in the qualification round, did all the questions that I know how to do with Excel, and didn't attempt the ones I did by old-fashioned manual calculation because using Excel for them seemed too complicated.
This seems to suggest that if (or when) I lose these matches, it will be because of my own stupidity - which is somehow better than losing to someone who's just so manifestly better than me that I was always going to lose anyway. So really, thanks to this draw, overconfidence is going to be my worst enemy.
And if I get through to the last 64, there's a fair chance I'd be up against Lorenzo Foti, who is one of the seeds who I might almost possibly have a chance of beating on a very good day. Though he usually beats me without too much difficulty. All in all, though, a favourable draw!
I'll try to think of something else to write about until the championship starts on October 11th.
I don't think they do A-Level General Studies any more. It was an extra A-Level that everyone took, but which didn't count for anything - getting into university and getting a job or whatever, the only things that counted were the 'real' A-Levels you'd done. I have no idea why GS existed (and for all I know, still does exist), but I got a A, so I must be great.
I haven't thought about it for more than thirty years, but it just came back to me today as I was thinking of a title for this blog post, that one of the things in the GS exam I took in or around May 1994 was the requirement to write an essay on your choice of a selection of vague prompts. One of them was "The fascination of..." and the first thing that came into my head was "competition". I didn't write it, because they were more looking for a way to show off that you know about and are interested in some esoteric subject, but it just goes to show I already knew at that tender age I love competing in strange things.
And that was many years before I got into memory competitions, and found out that there was something I could not just have fun competing in, but have fun being the world's best at! But I still like taking part in these things just as much as I like winning them, and that's what still attracts me to the Microsoft Excel World Championship... it's just that I'm starting to increasingly get the feeling I could devote a lot more effort to getting really good at this thing!
Incidentally, the German Memory Championship took place in Paderborn last weekend (or "the German Memory Championship took, in Paderborn, place" - I always parse that sentence in the German word order, because I always read reports of it afterwards and they always start like that), and I would have been all over that ten or fifteen years ago, but being impoverished at the moment and not able to travel places, I'm getting very out of touch with the in-person memory world. Keeping up with the mostly online Excel championships is a nice substitute, and I did win an online memory match yesterday morning (the one I really needed to win if I want to stay in division 2 of the Memory League) before kicking off with the big final qualification round for the Microsoft Excel World Championship at five o'clock!
I was already qualified, so just doing this one for the fun of it, but I did rather well! 15th place, or joint-14th really, because I managed to get the exact same score and time, to the second, as Nick Boberg. He was doing the different case from the early-morning session (or whatever time that makes it in New Zealand), so it's not really comparable at all, but it's still cool, because he generally does much better than me at these things.
And so even though most of the top competitors were just doing this for fun, and even though there's really no difference between fifteenth and fiftieth in this kind of thing except a few lucky guesses... I'm happy with this. It was the kind of case where you could get a good score by whizzing through the easy sections, giving up on the one that would take a monstrously complicated Excel calculation, and doing as much of it as possible by working it out manually, one question at a time. And I usually thrive on those - I'm quick-thinking if not particularly knowledgeable about Excel, and sometimes that can carry you through.
But it really reminds me of my early days in memory competitions, when I got good scores in the old 'poem' discipline, and people said to me "If you could get good at the other stuff, you could be really great at this!" And I laughed and said I wouldn't know how to get good at the other stuff. And then I figured out how to get good at the other stuff, and I became the world champion.
Could I do the same with Excel? Is there scope for developing my skills at Excel formulas to put me more on a par with the top people, and let my general all-round problem-solving experience give me a little extra edge? It's the kind of thing I'm starting to seriously think about.
Meanwhile, it's the draw for the finals on Tuesday, at 3pm UK time! Probably live on the YouTube channel! So don't miss it!
My chances of doing well in this competition rely probably quite a lot more on luck than skill. Some cases of the type I was just talking about would help me - anything that can be solved easily with Excel formulas of the kind I'm shockingly ignorant of is going to handicap me pretty severely. And more importantly, who will I get drawn against?
Some of those 256 spots are a lot kinder to middle-ranked competitors than others. The top 32 in the Road to Las Vegas are seeded (I was 63rd), and you want to avoid them for as many rounds as possible. Get drawn against, say, Diarmuid Early, who amazed everyone on the live stream yesterday by finishing the entire case (including the bit I decided straight away was too complicated to calculate) in half the time available, and you're out at the first step. Get drawn against someone of roughly equal skill to myself for as many rounds as possible, and I'll be much happier, even if I still make a mess of it. Because it really is the taking part that counts the most!
So wish me luck, and bear in mind that I'm still considering whether it's possible for me to really work on this, and become really good at it!
It's possible some people don't realise how clever and appropriate the title of my last blog post, about going to Southwark for the Excel competition with 29 competitors, was. I refer you to the prologue to the Canterbury Tales:
Bifel that, in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And wel we weren esed atte beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,
That I was of hir felawshipe anon,
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take our wey ther as I yow devyse.
Which is one of my longtime fascinations that I've never really blogged about here very much, so let me rectify that tonight. I've never been into poetry, as a rule, because there's just so much really, really bad stuff out there that calls itself poetry. But I'll always make an exception for the man who pioneered English-language verse in the 14th century!
I got into Chaucer in a very piecemeal kind of way when I was young - it wasn't a school thing, at least directly, but I did end up with some kind of book of poems as a youngish teenager which included the portrait of the Miller from the Canterbury Tales, along with a modern-English translation, and I found it fascinating. It was the kind of thing that stuck in my mind, just because of the wild difference six hundred years can make to a language (if it's a relatively new one like English, cobbled together from Anglo-Saxon and Norman French over just a couple of centuries by Chaucer's time). And so when, a while later, I saw those same lines in a book I found in a charity shop in Long Eaton, I bought it and discovered the whole of the Miller's Tale!
The cover's meant to be orange all over; it's been left out in the sun at some point and partly bleached white. There's a stamp on the inside front cover saying it belongs to Carlton-le-Willows School, and it's signed with the name Joanne Penter. I'm very grateful to her for giving it away, because it started me on a new fascination, and got me searching around for other books about the Canterbury Tales! As I recall, the school library was of limited use, not having a copy of the Tales themselves, but I did come across other excerpts and critical analysis here and there. And eventually, as a birthday present, I finally got a complete works of Chaucer in the original Middle English!
Which is completely at odds with my other obsessions of my teenage years, which ran more towards comics and cartoons (I haven't changed much), but there's always been a place in my heart for Chaucer, and I can and do still quote big chunks of the really impressive poetry he managed to produce with such an ugly language. I never liked English lessons at school, and dropped it as soon as I was able to, but if there'd been at least a bit more Chaucer involved, I might have felt very differently.
Yesterday was the grand final of the UK Excel Championship, live and in person in London! It all happened on the first floor of the Blue Fin Building in Southwark, with 29 Excel experts gathered around a big conference table with laptops, supervised by a whole lot of other Excel experts who did a really awesome job of running the whole show!
I was staying in the student hall of residence just next door, and very nice it was too, and so was there in ample time for the 10:00 arrival before the 11:00 start, as per the schedule.
Actually, the whole thing started rather late, although they made up the time very impressively by the end of the day. As I've said before about memory competitions and other things, if everything went according to plan I would have no idea what was going on. I like a bit of chaos at these things. And the worst technical problem seemed to be organisers' laptops that would either connect to the internet or to the big screen, but not both.
Still, Hadyn's bingo-card prediction of a late finish didn't come off, but the rest of his awesome predictions video was very impressive!
I note that he originally had me finishing fifth (as per my own goal for the championship set out in my last blog), but then downgraded me to ninth when he thought of a better way to calculate it. Shocking! But I did make sure to fulfil the other prediction that I'd bring a pack of cards. I wasn't planning to bring cards to an Excel competition, but having seen the video I made sure to do it anyway. I've generally kept quiet about being a memory man in the Excel community, but it's all common knowledge now, so that's my thing in Excel world until I become world champion at that one too.
The organising team are a very impressive mix of genius characters who manage to get everything done and look good while doing it...
And our first case of the day was written by the ever-humble Giles Male about his wardrobe of fur coats and dance troupe:
I did relatively okay at this one, but only managed the eighth-best result.
Ha Dang stood out straight away as being the man to beat, and kept that comfortable position all day!
I was feeling more hopeful about the second case, by Harry Watson, because his cases tend to be my kind of thing...
... but actually, I really made a mess of it. Mixed up a formula for one of the levels in a way I could have spotted with a basic bit of double-checking but didn't, and ended up way down the rankings. It was still a lot of fun, though!
So that was unimpressive, and I could have done a lot better. Not better enough to come close to troubling the top three, but still better than 14th. But never mind! We had one more big exciting task after lunch, this time by Harry Gross! And word had leaked out that it was going to be based around Alice in Wonderland, so my preparation for this competition (while everyone else was designing custom formulas for every eventuality and practicing hard) was to buy a copy of the book to read on the train down to London. Which I forgot to put in my bag.
I thought I did okay at this one, though again I could have been better with just a bit more attention to little details and picked up some extra points. Still, seventh-best was a new high for the day!
Lorenzo came close to knocking Ha off the top spot overall, but didn't quite get it. A well-deserved win, and some awesome performances all round! And I finished ninth, so Hadyn clearly knows better than me how good I am at Excel!
Ha wins a really awesome champion's belt, and a free trip to Las Vegas for the worldwide finals in December! And everyone else got prizes too - a medal for everyone, and our really cool name badges showing how long we've been using Excel were a real treat!
Yes, I remember when Clippy was new. There were alternatives to Clippy the paperclip that you could select, and I preferred one of those, but I can't remember which it was after all these years. And I remember when the ribbon was introduced and Ruined Excel Forever. I'm old.
But the very BEST prize was a custom T-shirt for the winners of each qualifying round and each case on the final day! And as the winner of "Old Money", the third qualifying round, I got this amazing design (courtesy of Jaq Kennedy) -
This is far cooler than I could ever have expected. I wore my lucky Zoom-Zoom shirt to the championship, but that shirt is clearly only really lucky for memory competitions. From now on, this Old Money shirt is my lucky shirt to be worn at every Excel championship! I'll be the world champion before you know it!
Yes, it's the grand final of the UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship's competition on Saturday! There'll be a livestream from around 11:00 here if you want to watch it and cheer me on. Or the other 31 competitors, if you'd rather cheer for them instead. I don't mind.
Anyway, my target here is to finish in the top five. I think that's realistic, given how the season has gone so far. I've done very well in the last two competitions (round 3 of the UK qualifying and round 8 of the worldwide "Road to Las Vegas"), but those both happened to be the kind that rewarded figuring things out in your head more than technical skill with obscure Excel formulas. I've not done so well on ones that work the other way, so we'll just have to see how it goes in London.
You could look at the rankings on the UK website and say I'm the fourth favourite:
But you'd be wrong to do that, since there are (at least) two really really good Excellers who only took part in one of the three rounds and still qualified. Chris Clarke was second in the world championship last year, and Lorenzo Foti got to the last 24 on the big stage in Vegas. If we look at the Road to Las Vegas rankings for this year (filtering just for UK and Italy, seeing as Lorenzo counts as Italian there but lives in Britain now), we can see they're both a good way ahead of me, as are the others of the top five UK-ers up above:
Actually, we can see that Karim is just fractionally ahead of me in both rankings. He's clearly my arch-enemy.
Harry G, Harry W and Elliott are among the wonderful people organising this whole UK event, and creating the cases for us to use our Excel skills on. Michael Jarman, reigning world champion, probably isn't going to be in London, unless they spring him on us as a last-minute wildcard.
But all in all, if I finish in the top five, I've beaten at least some of these rivals who are demonstrably better than me, so I'll be delighted! And it'll be a lot of fun whatever happens, so I wouldn't even mind coming last. Much.
It's the first in the series of Usborne Solve-it-Yourself books, and by far the best of them. I eagerly bought some others in the range, only to find they were much simpler, less complicated and ingenious than this pilot episode. It's a great shame, but at least we got Blood Castle in all its glory.
Each double-page spread presents a puzzle for the reader to figure out before turning to the rest of the story. How does Ivor get into the castle? Obviously, he climbs up the lion statue, onto the roof, up the drainpipe and onto the ledge, where he fishes for the key on the windowsill using the nylon thread and sharp hook described in the text, then goes back down and lets himself in the front door. Ignoring the open door that leads to the snake pit, of course.
There's a page of hints (in mirrored writing) at the back of the book, just before the answers pages which explain everything. It's great stuff, and the following pages are perhaps the best of all:
What really happened? You might well ask, because the really clever reader of this book, i.e. me, might notice that the whole thing doesn't actually quite work. The answers page is wrong!
"The pendulum goes up not down. (Follow the cogs round to see why.)"
But if you do follow the cogs round, you'll see that the pendulum actually goes down, right onto Ivor! Check out the pink and yellow cogs on the left, just above the big wheel that the balls turn. It's disguised by the arrows being on opposite sides, but the two wheels are marked as both turning in the same direction! The artist made a mistake, and I'm clever enough to spot it! It's no wonder I was such a fan of this book.
And no, I didn't get the solution to a single one of the puzzles without looking at the answer page. But that's not the point!
I had a little practice in spotting flaws with Heath Robinson machinery probably shortly before getting Escape from Blood Castle - the Beano Comic Library no. 64, Baby-Face Finlayson in "Little Angel" came out in November 1984 and among the many, many silly pictures that were almost certainly the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life up to that point was this unusually-powered lift:
... which even my eight-year-old self (unobservant oaf though I generally was) could see doesn't quite work the way it should. The rope should be attached to the treadmill, not to the man on it. Was it deliberate (I mean, it's so obvious), or was it a glitch in the brain of the artist? To this day I'm not sure, but perhaps it encouraged me to start scrutinising every picture I could find in the hopes of spotting other gaffes...
Boots started it in both the big Puss and Boots stories I shared yesterday, so I thought there really should be one on here where the cat is the provocateur and gets his well-deserved comeuppance at the end of the tale. So here's an interesting one from the 1974 Sparky Book:
A full splash page with the title is something Puss and Boots seem to have often got. There are three others in this annual, one for I-Spy, one for the Kings of the Castle and one for the lengthy "Bushboy" story that takes up the last eight pages (all full-colour, too) of the book. A couple of others (Pansy Potter and the other Puss n Boots) have a big picture and two small panels beginning the story on the first page. I think it works best with this one - it doesn't feel like a waste of a page that could be used for more pictures, but an eye-catcher with still enough detail and reading to entertain the reader. That Boots wears braces with his football kit is brilliant.
The tongue-lolling enthusiasm of the first-aider is another high point. And see, this time it's Boots who's innocently going about his everyday business and Puss who torments him just for the fun of it!
I like the way Boots just carries on, still not expecting any more booby-traps.
You have to feel a bit sorry for Tich. The worst he's done to deserve that is a bit of pointing and laughing. Well might he say b-b-baggle!
And it's another Sparky crossover of sorts! Sir, the boss of the Sparky People and by implication the person in charge of this whole annual, intervenes to protect the readers' delicate sensibilities from the sight of the climactic duffing-up. Which is unusual - "We are the Sparky People" did supposedly represent the people who created all these stories, but they tended to live more in a world of their own. They also have a cat called Puss, but I don't think he's any relation to Tich's loving uncle.
Anyway, the most fascinating thing about the safety curtain there is that it's blue. Half of this Sparky Book's pages are full-colour, and the other half are duotone red, black and white. But this final Puss and Boots page and the title page, if not the middle two, are actually on the colour pages - they just use no colour other than red, except for the title and the curtain!
If it's a deliberate technique, it's very clever. It really reinforces the idea that Sir's interruption is on a different level of reality from the events of the comic story. The L-Cars story on the next three pages does something similar - it's all sepia-toned except for the sound effects lettering, which is very big, bold and all the colours of the rainbow! The story is about Frederic and Cedric driving the Inspector mad by making a lot of noise, and all the colours really make the point clearer. Someone at the Sparky was really doing creative things with the materials available!
