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Toy Blast Level 120 Tips

This level doesn’t leave you enough moves to meet the goal if you don’t focus on clearing one side. Start from the second level of building blocks on whichever side lets you clear two at a time (right side with the yellow blocks in this case). Clear from that one down to the bottom, hopefully getting a torpedo/TNT combo at some point to speed things along.

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State Boundaries – Florida

The westernmost boundary between Florida and Alabama is formed by the Perdido River along its thalweg (lowest point) up to 31°N.

 
The northern boundary of Florida follows along 31°N from the Perdido River to the Chattahoochee River, then south to the confluence of the Chattahoochee and the Flint River. It then follows a straight line mostly east to the source of the Saint Mary’s River, along the thalweg to the ocean.

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You might be house hunting in the DESERT…

On House Hunters today, somehow people with a massive house in the middle-of-nowhere-Phoenix have lots of demands on their new property.

  • They want to move into the city.
  • Traffic noise on a busy street is obnoxious.
  • The master bathroom doesn’t have a bathtub (the main bath does)
  • Everything is so small.
  • A dance studio in the house?
  • Not as modern as they want it to be (shown while the camera is panning on stainless steel appliances and modern countertops)
  • They’re sick of “desert landscape” yards. (Um, move out of THE DESERT?)
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Ups and Downs of Working Remotely

  • Downside: “F— this, I’m goin home” doesn’t have the same impact when you’re ACTUALLY AT HOME.
  • Downside: You lose some ability to discern what’s acceptable to wear in public. (Dirty workout gear? 5-day old jeans?)
  • Upside: No one can see you working.
  • Downside: No one can see you working.
  • Downside: For those with office-dwelling co-workers, getting free food notices makes you feel left out.
  • Downside: Office co-worker drive-bys replaced by family member drive-bys.
  • Downside: Office co-worker drive-bys replaced by instance message and phone call swarms from the same co-workers.
  • Upside: Better coffee
  • Downside: You have to pay for your own coffee
  • Upside: Internet connection is as good as you want it to be.
  • Downside: The network administrator/IT person who screwed up your network/computer is probably you.
  • Upside: More lax office pet policy.
  • Downside: Office pets apparently need food, water, and potty breaks.
  • Downside: You start talking to the office pets.

 

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Better Interview Questions and Tests

Big tech companies are famous for their esoteric questions and other tech shops put developers through basic, but challenging, coding tests where they’re asked to write a routine to find the palindromes in a text and sort them by length in n log n time or something like that.

I have a better idea. For programmers and system administrators of UNIX-like systems, I propose the following tests (to be performed without consulting a man page):

  • Successfully create a symbolic link to a file.
  • Create a tar file for a set of files and extract it to a predetermined directory in one attempt.
  • Open a file in either emacs or vi, navigate to the bottom of the page, and exit without temporarily (or permanently) modifying the file.
  • Remove the third field in every row from a csv file without using perl or ruby.  If they opt for awk or sed, assess whether you want someone who sees things as awk or sed problems.
  • Name their current programming font.
  • Name a unix shell that’s not bash.
  • Name the package manager that you’re most familiar with.
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Tetris Blitz Tips

Tetris Blitz (Amazon affiliate link) is available on the Amazon Appstore for Android for Free (free to play)

  • Unlock Power-Ups when they are the Power Up of the Week
    • $2.99 ($3 off) to unlock
    • bug your friends
    • use the power up in 90 games
  • Buy the “No ads” upgrade. Then, the only ads you will see are the ones for free coins (1000 coins per ad)
  • Battles and tournaments still help you make progress against achievements.
  • Bronze tier battles: you’ll need 2-3 power ups, but a finisher is usually not necessary.
  • Silver tier battles: you’ll need 2-3 power ups, and a finisher is usually necessary.
  • Build up Tetris set ups (one column open) for the first 60-90 seconds of a game to run up your multiplier.
  • Rapidly clear lines the rest of the game.
  • The last 10 seconds of the game, be sure to have minos even stacked in every column.
  • Best combo items:
    • Power Ups
      • Blitzn: Drops one “gift” of 4×4 minos and two of 3×3 minos. You’ll often get a Tetris out of it, or at least a cascade.
      • Frostbite: Automatically results in a Tetris (which also increases your multiplier).
      • Twin rams: Inserts four rows of minos, which will *usually* result in a cascade or a Tetris.
    • Finishers
      • Gifting Tree or Birthday Cake – gives you a bunch of the power ups in your game which result in many cascades and tetrises if you pick the above power ups.
      • Instant Replay – only if you’re really good at big plays
  • Good combo items:
    • Power Ups
      • Avalanche: Not quite as nice as Blitzn, because you only get a wave of 3 rows of minos.
      • Time Shift: Really nice if combined with a finisher (like Inversion or Mino Rain) that doesn’t give you power ups at the end. Time Shift power ups from a finisher are usually wasted.
      • Lasers/Quake/Instant Frenzy: Really nice for clearing lines and getting cascades going, but can be useless if you don’t have much of a stack (and doesn’t add much if given through a finisher.)
      • Multiplier: Nice, but Frostbite gives you a Tetris score *and* increases your multiplier.
      • Magnet: Really good for Tetris setups, but doesn’t add to the score on its own.
    • Finishers
      • Inversion
        • If you’re meticulous about even distribution of minos, this may be a good one for you, but it’s hard to work with if you like setting up Tetris plays.

Challenges:

  • You can complete the last level of a daily challenge even if you haven’t completed the previous ones yet. The best example of this is the “Score [some number of points] using Amplifier”. The 3rd level of that challenge is 600K points, but you can load up on power ups, score over 600K in one game, and collect all challenge rewards at once.