Speedcubing weekend

Last weekend I met up with some UK cubers - Dan Harris, Duncan Dicks, Sean Connolly and Paul Nixon. There was an article about it in the local Stroud newspaper. Actually, the article was really about Duncan and it briefly mentioned that he was hosting the cube gathering.

The weekend was a lot of fun. Obviously there was a lot of cubing happening, but also other puzzles as most cubers solve puzzles other than the standard cube. We played with the 4x4x4 cube, the 5x5x5 cube, the Megaminx, the Clock, the Magic and the Master Magic. I also learnt very nice algorithms for the final two PLL cases I didn't know (thanks Duncan!)

Dan and I discovered that we both love Scrabble, so we had Scrabble games going in the background for most of the weekend too. Dan had packed a Scrabble board, but we ended up Scrabbling on my iPAQ instead (iPAQs make almost everything better). I'm usually not too bad at Scrabble, but Dan was really on fire. He won 4 of our 5 Scrabble games over the weekend. Dan was in training for an upcoming regional Scrabble competition so I'm not too disheartened my my Scrabble defeats. :)

Dan and I also had a go at speedstacking after Duncan showed us the basics. I still can't believe this exists. How is it that someone thought 'hey, let's stack plastic cups into pyramids really fast and call it a sport'?? In case you're wondering how it is that speedcubers know about speedstacking, it's because we use the speedstacks timers at official cube competitions.

For more detail and pictures of the UK cubing weekend, check out Dan's Cubestation.

Dan took this cool action shot of my hands mid-solve.