Today's Bridge: We didn't have enough people for new guy Brent to sit and watch, so he joined us to learn firsthand. Perhaps fortunately, Dan H. and I had most of the power, so Brent was on defense most of the day. Ken declared one hand when he told Brent to balance over my 2D, even with a weak hand, because he'd passed a strong hand and didn't want to defend. But there were a lot of pre-empts, including one notable one where Ken opened 1C, Brent responded 1D, and with S A-K-Q-x-x-x H A-x-x-x D K-x C J, I jumped straight to 4S. Ken led the king of hearts, which really helped, since Dan had S J-10-x H Q-x-x D J-10-x-x C x-x-x. That gave me two heart tricks, but I still needed some diamonds, so I crossed to the jack of spades and led a low diamond to my king and Ken's ace. He cashed the queen of diamonds, then the ace of clubs. My jack made him switch to a heart, but it was too late - I could afford to pull trump ending with the ten and throw my remaining hearts on the diamonds. I think the heart switch is pretty much mandatory after I don't finish pulling trump - it should be pretty obvious that I'm saving a trump entry for once I set up the diamonds. Taking out that heart entry early is vital, since neither the club nor diamond winners can run away. Leading the queen of diamonds is a bad idea just on the surface, since it sets up two diamonds in dummy. I think he can afford to test the clubs once, since they clearly won't be taking three tricks without at least one club, but I can't establish the diamonds while he has the queen, and if they have a heart trick available, they need to take it before I sluff a heart on the diamonds. When he's back in with the queen, then it's time to guess whether my last card is a heart or a club, but he'll have all the available information by then.

Today's Work: The repository download is proceeding, but very slowly, and only when I'm there to watch it. I was going to bring my computer home and let the job run overnight, but just as I was getting ready to leave, it found 683 updates. I didn't think it was a good idea to wait on those, so I let them install. If it doesn't finish tomorrow, which I don't think it will, I'll try again tomorrow night. It'll finish eventually.