IE version 8, Hacienda, Challah

I installed the I.E. 8 beta. What they don't tell you is that it is incompatible with the google toolbar (which, incidentally, has all my useful bookmarks). Best I can tell, that information is lost, perhaps permanently. Also, I.E. gives me an alert every page I visit because some add-ons are disabled. I'd like to be able to turn that off. Maybe there is a way to do so, but they don't make it easy.

For 2-player Hacienda, we found the going to all the markets strategy to be quite dominating, as the triangular scoring means that after about the 5th market, every single one you go to will be on par or better than putting down a large water or hacienda. With only 2 players, there is insufficient competition for real-estate for anyone to get really shut out of more than one market. Since this has lead to monotone games, we have flattened the triangular scoring. We now score the markets, 1,2,3,4,5,5,6,6,6,7,7 which helps. I suspect that 1,2,3,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7 would be even better. This encourages more land-based strategies, slightly longer games and non-intuitively, overall higher scores. The last game we played, our midgame scoring scores were between 70 and 80; we'd each played a hacienda and two waters by that time.

I've experimenting with baking bread. Made a couple of challahs recently. There is something very primal about kneading dough, and baking bread to feed your family.