World of Excel Esport

 The last two Saturdays gave us five battles in the Microsoft Excel World Championship! I refer you to my previous post for details of how the whole thing works, because it's too complicated to go into the whole double-elimination thing again, but the important point is that I got all the way to the fifth and final round before being eliminated. So, very close to qualifying for the Las Vegas finals, and since I can't afford to go there anyway this is the optimum result - allowing me to boast about having done very well, without exposing my poverty to the world! It's win-win! Well, technically, it's loss-win-win-win-loss if you want to go into detail.

Round 1, "All Shapes and Sizes", was a puzzle involving a big grid of numbers, and having to work out the sum of the numbers covered if you overlay different shapes and patterns on different parts of it. And I had great difficulty in getting my head around how to do that in the time limit. Of the 32 people in the group, you had to finish in the top 16 to get a win, and I was 26th. Three of the competitors were no-shows, too. Bit of a slow start, there.

So that puts me in the "one loss" group for the remainder of the competition. Finish in the bottom half of that group again, and you're out. The second part of October 10th's double-header was called "Roll Dice Roll", and required you to track details of how a six-sided die would move if you rotate it from one cell of your spreadsheet to another. And this one went better, probably for one very important reason - remember that He-Man Adventure Game Book I did the other week? I left the die I used then sitting on my desk, and having an actual one there in front of me when I opened the spreadsheet was really, really helpful in visualising what the task was talking about! I got the third-best score of the sixteen who'd picked up a loss in round 1, improving my record to L-W and meaning I survived to the following Saturday!

Having turned fifty years old on the Wednesday, it was a more mature me who sat down on October 17th for round 3. Here I'm competing in a group made of eight W-L and eight L-W competitors, with the eight W-W people in their own section, and the eight L-L people having been already eliminated. It's perfectly simple if you get used to it.

Round 3 was "The Ultimate Spreadsheet", asking you to do all kinds of strange calculations about what would happen on a gigantic spreadsheet with many more rows and columns than Excel can deal with! It was fun, and I finished eighth of the sixteen in the one-loss group - the lowest you can finish without being eliminated, but it's good enough! L-W-W, and on to the next round!

Round 4, in a group consisting of the 12 remaining competitors with two wins and one loss (while there were four in the top group still on W-W-W) was "Portals III - Borderless". A map-based case, which is something I always have trouble with. We've got 25 different maps and we're told the way they join together, and you have to work out how quickly you can get from one point to another. Luckily, I've done this kind of thing before, and I already had a macro ready from the previous time I was left wondering 'how the heck do you do formulas in Excel based on what colour these stupid map cells are?', which certainly helped. I was relieved to see I ended up sixth in the group - once again, bottom rank of the qualifiers, but still clinging on with a L-W-W-W to my name!

But then Round 5, "Ashfell", either due to tiredness on the third round in swift succession, or maybe general ineptitude at Excel, I did really terribly in. It was a Dungeons and Dragons kind of thing where you're on an adventure with a pack full of goods and have to calculate their value to trade in for drinks at a tavern, and things like that. We were down to eight one-loss competitors now (while the two remaining unbeaten ones contested their own duel for top spot), and the top four would go through to Vegas. I was seventh, and quite a long way back from the others.

But still! Like I said at the start, it was a great competition all round! Roll on next year!

Liberae scholae de comune sigillum

 

Did you know there's a website called Thousand Castles, which has, or at least aims to have, a page documenting every "castle" in the world? Rather more than a thousand, obviously, especially since they're very broad about the meaning of the word "castle". The front page says there are 56,956 of them, including a lot of things that are a very long way away from counting as a castle if you ask me.

But I was pleased to see that the local castle from where I grew up, Tattershall Castle, was ranked 446th of all the castles in the world, and that you can vote castles up and down to affect the ranking - when I gave the place a vote, it went up to its current position of 434th. It really is quite a nice place, although being made of red brick instead of stone it really doesn't look so much like a castle should. But it's still cool to visit on a cheap school outing if you go to a primary school just down the road.

But the best part of the website was noticing that there's a page for another "castle" about ten miles further down the road - Horncastle!

I went to secondary school in Horncastle. That's the school badge up at the top of this blog entry, with a beautiful illustration of a horn and a castle. Horncastle is ranked only 46,619th on Thousand Castles, and the page describing it is a little lacking in detail, with no pictures. That's because it's a small town, not a castle. As we learnt at school, the name is nothing to do with horns or castles - it derives from 'hyrn' (angle, corner) and 'castrum' (settlement). It was a Roman walled town two thousand years ago, which I suppose just about falls under the website's definition of a castle. There are a few old bits of the Roman wall lying around the place. I assume the library's still got its mini-museum section with a couple of yards of wall on display.

We need to get more of this kind of "castle" added to the site. I've seen chip shops called Castle Chippy before now. Add them in there, and vote them to the top of the world rankings!

I'm five! (times ten)

 Can I just reiterate my shock that these moments are cut from the Bernadette Peters episode of the Muppet Show on Disney+?

And also, can I just say that it's my birthday today? But more importantly, I'd really like to hear Robin's version of "They Call the Wind Maria". I bet it would have been great.

So much for that annual tradition

Longtime bloglings might recall that every October I observe that ancestry.co.uk's DNA analysis thing has increased the percentage of English origin they think I've got. If not, you can go back and read them:

2022 - 69% English

2023 - 76% English

2024 - 77% English

2025 - 78% English

So I eagerly checked out their annual update this year, thinking I might have inched up to 80% English blood this year, but no - the 2026 update has thrown out all the foreignness in my nature, and confirmed what I've been saying all along, that not a single ancestor of mine has ever been adventurous enough to look beyond the borders of England for their marital prospects or fornication!

Yes, 100% English ancestry according to their latest calculations! I'm suspicious of the 2% Devon, of course, but it's getting closer to the very small area where most of my ancestors have remained since time immemorial (plus my mum's father from down south, can't forget him).

They reckon they can identify it by grandparent now, but I'm inclined to think it's all nonsense, and they cheerfully admit that a whole 32% of my DNA can't be assigned to a particular grandparent...

So where does my DNA journey go from here? Maybe next year they'll update again and think I'm more international, but I think we might have settled on England now. Perhaps there'll be more detailed refinements and we'll get to see the very small locality where everyone lived and spent their entire lives. It'll be a tiny dot or two on the map of England. I think my family tree is great, but I have to accept that I've got some rather boring DNA...

The Worlds

The Microsoft Excel World Championship kicks off again on Saturday 10th, with the 256 qualifiers not going head-to-head in knockout format this year, but sorted into eight groups of 32, and having a double-elimination series of online contests over two Saturdays. First two rounds on the 10th, three more on the 17th for people who haven't yet been eliminated.

I do like the sheer intricacy of the process, such that you can draw colourful diagrams of how it works:

At the end of it, there'll be 8 people qualified for the "semi-finals" live in Las Vegas, and another 40 qualified for the "quarter-finals", where they'll be joined by winners of the national competitions from around the world, and people who've come through the "last chance qualification round" the previous day. 15 quarter-finalists go through to the semi-finals to join those eight, plus top seed, reigning champion and European Open winner Diarmuid Early.  And the 24 semi-finalists are whittled down to 12 finalists, and one champion.

But that's very much in the future, and I doubt I'll be coming anywhere near it. Let's look at my group for the online rounds! Each group has one of the top 8 seeds (or seeds 2-9, with Dim Early being already qualified), and then 3 of the remaining top-32, and then the other qualifiers randomly distributed. 

By my count I'm ranked 12th in the group if you put us in order of "XQ" points (an Elo kind of thing based on results since 2023) and 13th if you put us in order of "World Ranking" (based on the results of 2026). That would suggest I should finish in the top half of the first round, and it would be a great achievement if I go on to finish in the top half of the green sixteen in the second round. Although there's still a pretty good chance I'd finish in the bottom half both times and be eliminated.

Honestly, the fun of looking at the competition structure almost outweighs the fun of competing in it. I'm a real geek for that kind of thing.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

 The Northstar limited series from 1994 wasn't all that good, but it did have some nice covers making the best artistic use of his black and white costume.

What always struck me as weird about it is that his face fades over the course of the four-issue limited series from a dark pink to a pallid white, and I've always wondered if that was deliberate, or just sloppy colouring? Probably the latter, but I do like when comics do unusual covers like these ones.

International bright young things

 It's the qualification round for the Microsoft Excel World Championship tomorrow, with 140 more slots available to join the 108 who've already qualified (plus 8 wildcards). I'm already in the privileged pre-qualifier list (albeit only by being the best in the 50+ age category in battle 3, and that despite not being 50 for another three weeks!) and I'm really rather impressed by how worldwide this whole thing is. Just look at that beautiful collection of flags!