2004
- The ‘Give a penny, take a penny’ tray is completely out-of-bounds for the change game. You may not deposit a penny, or any other coin, into it or use a coin from it in your transaction. Ever!
- You cannot tip your way to a win. Simply taking the change you have and putting it in a tip jar disqualifies a win.
- The value of the coin is irrelevent for the change game, you only care about the number of coins. Having three quarters is as close to winning as three pennies.
- You win when you have no coins left!
Change Game
Introduction
When my wife and I decided to get married and start living together she found one of my habits to be a little annoying. It’s a habit that most guys have regarding change. Most guys probably have a jar, shoebox, or some other type of container that is filled with spare change. At the end of the day, you simply empty your pockets of change and put it in there. I had, over the years filled various containers full of change and every few years would lug it to the bank to be counted.
She didn’t think much of the boxes of change sitting around, so she tried to convince me to make a game out of using my change. Instead of thinking of all that spare change as a nuisance, it was a challenge to figure out how to use it in the right combinations. The goal of the game? To complete a cash transaction and have no change left in your pocket.
My slightly obsessive nature took this game and just ran with it of course! If you wish to play along, continue reading.
Recommended Equipment
The change game requires no equipment at all, but even intermediate players will find that their game play is improved with a simple coin purse. Here is an example of a leather coin purse that is ideal for the change game. Buy one here!
Coin purses can also be found in plastic, however they do not wear as well as the genuine leather type. This coin purse will allow you to keep your change organized, and by simply squeezing it’s sides the change game enthusiast can determine their change situation.
Rules
There are only a few rules to the change game.
Basic Strategy
When playing the change game you need to keep an eye on your current status. Strategically, certain combinations of coins are more likely to yield a win or be used quickly. Also, remember that small coins can be moved quickly.
For example, while 5 pennies are a lot of coins, you can use them very quickly as a nickel substitute.
 
A great tip while playing the change game is to combine nickels and dimes in place of quarters.
Advanced Strategy
To the uninitiated the change game can be a simple game of luck. It seems straightforward that you will have a set amount of change, hopefully less than $0.99, and the transaction will require change between $0.01 and $0.99. You have a 1 in 99 chance of winning. However, this assumes that the change required for transactions is evenly distributed.
To test wether this is indeed the case we analyzed 2,886 transactions over a 7 year period. These 2,886 transactions excluded restuarant bills (since they are typically rounded with a tip) and recurring payments or utility bills that would bias a specific cent value. We also excluded all transactions over $1,000 since it would be unlikely that cash would be used in such a transaction. The average transaction was $61.15 and the median was $35.29, with 1,850 of the samples being below $50, a very reasonable amount for a cash transaction. We then plotted the distribution of the change required for these transactions.
The distribution is not even. Nine values appear over 40 times in this analysis: $0.02, 0.04, 0.50, 0.80, 0.90, 0.94, 0.95, 0.98 and 0.99. While these 9 numbers only represent 9.1% of the possible winners, they are 15.8% of the transactions. In fact, if you just focus on the values above $0.90, those four values which only represent 4.0% of the possible outcomes are 7.8% of the actuals.
It is also clear that certain ranges or values should be avoided. There are nine more values that appear fewer than 20 times: $0.12, 0.27, 0.31, 0.33, 0.41, 0.58, 0.62, 0.66 and 0.74. While these should represent 9.1% of the winners, they actually are only 5.3%. Clearly combinations that should be avoided.
In general you can observe in the pattern that the range above $0.50 has a slightly higher likelihood of winning than the range below it.
Winning
You win the change game when you have depleted all of your coins. The coin purse on the left is an example of an ‘in play’ player and the coin purse on the right is after winning (the safety pin is not relevant to the change game).
Xbox Mod Night
Circuit boards, chinese takeout and ultrageek action. What can be more fun!? Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. 🙂
Operation was successful on the first try. Now it’s time to play with the software side of things. Big thanks to Chris and Chad! That nice soldering work is all Chris, can’t take any of the credit for that.
Stiff
I just finished reading what has to be one of the stranger books I’ve read. Stiff is in a way like an owners guide for future cadaver owners. That is to say, all of us. Mary Roach goes into impressive, if not at times unsettling, detail about the processes by which cadavers contribute to education, safety and numerous other ventures. It is initially off-putting but after a few chapters is very interesting.
I found the references to pre-1900 practices of regarding cadavers to be alarming and the advancements of recent years interesting. Perhaps most interesting was the next to last chapter regarding ecological burial. Most interesting I think was understanding how radically different various cultures work with cadavers and in general human remains.
Interesting read, glad to have read it, don’t think I’ll read it a second time.
MarketWatch Acquired by Dow Jones
News hot off the wire! MarketWatch is being purchased by Dow Jones. Still very early. It’s great news on many fronts with lots of open questions still to be figured out.
Jay Farrar at Cedar Cultural Center
I realized as I was watching Jay Farrar play on Thursday night that I’ve been watching him play music and sing songs for 14 years now. I’ve liked other bands for well over a decade. Bands like R.E.M. for example. But I there is no connection with a huge band like that like there is with the small band that you see every time they come into town. Tammy has a parallel to this in Tina and the B-Sides.
Farrar was billed at First Avenue, but was rescheduled to the Cedar Cultural Center after First Avenue shutdown. The concert would have been much different at First Ave. More energy I’m sure. But on the plus side you can’t smoke at the Cedar which is really nice and it is a much more intimate venue.
Farrar played a good set, almost entirely from his solo catalog. He played three Son Volt songs and no Uncle Tupelo songs. I liked this, even though I really love those old songs, there is something a little sad about someone playing songs a decade old to an audience yearning for the ‘glory days’. The fresh material was welcome and very good.
Farrar is a reluctant performer. He always has been. Very different than his Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy now fronting Wilco. Tweedy seems to love the stage and attention. Farrar draws away from it. He’s gotten better since the early days of Uncle Tupelo where he would never say any thing and just looked at his shoes while he sang, but he’s still not one to banter with the crowd. It makes his solo live performances somewhat awkward, but the music is that good and that real.
Fiasco!
This morning we had a mini-fiasco right here at home! Tammy was taking pictures with the Canon Digital Elph. If you are not familiar, this is a tiny camera that you can put in your pocket. Great little camera. She was sitting on the floor taking pictures of Gypsie. I got my big camera and took a picture of her and Gypsie. Tammy decided it would be funny to put the wrist strap for the Elph around Gypsie’s neck and I could take a picture. This is where the fiasco starts.
Gypsie moved her head and got freaked out at the noise of the camera. She immediately went into hyper-frenzy mode and made a bucking bronco at the rodeo seem tame. She ran through the chairs of the dining room table. Across the living room floor. Jumping up and down as she could to free herself. Meanwhile this not-terribly-cheap piece of electronics is draging on the floor, banging into chairs and smacking against anything else nearby.
Gypsie then ran into our bedroom where she somehow got the camera tangled into the pull on our blinds and she actually ripped the blinds off the window! Who would have thought this cat had such mighty strength! She ran under the bed and at somepoint everything got all tangled up and she broke free of this weight on her neck.
Amazingly enough, the camera has some dents but it works fine still. The blinds require some crazy glue. Tammy was laughing like a maniac at all this. It was quite funny but I was freaked about the gear. After a deep breath, everything is fine. I really wish we had video of it though – was really funny.
Check In
So far, so good in the quest to return to normalcy on the bathroom scale. Mostly the sugar headaches are gone. Body is getting used to eating 4 meals a day and going to bed hungry. I feel good, even a little excited. Not logging food is nice, but I question the effectiveness. I know this is just my obsessive nature kicking in, so it’ll be cool. Friday set my starting point at 271.2 lbs and 29.7% body fat. I need to get back to my “100 Pound” mark so that means 232, the math is simple – I’ve got 40 lbs to lose. Whew!
To give some perspective here is a view of the last four-and-a-half years. Yes, that really is 340 in the upper left hand corner. I certainly am good at moving the line in either direction. Time to move it on down. 🙂
Time for the weekend. This week I really just focused on eating well. Didn’t do anything other than my weekly workout with my trainer for exercise. Next week I need to get the exercise rolling.
Day 1
It seems that I always decide to start focusing on eating better and dropping weight on Mondays. More on that later.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve had a really hard time keeping my weight under control. For those that have known me for a long time you know that I used to be a “big guy” tipping the scales well over 300 lbs. I set a goal in 2000 that I was going to lose 100 lbs. It sounded a little crazy at the time, even to me, but I knew that if I set that goal clearly and publicly I would stick to it. And I did. It took about 10 months of very focused and dedicated effort and I got there.
I stayed in a range of 20 lbs for quite a while. Then things got disrupted. In a one month period I went back to work, got engaged and bought a house with my then fiance. Over the last two years particularly my weight has trended back up. It would go up for a while, then go down, then back up. As you can expect, it would always go up a little bit more than it ever went down.
Now I find myself at a point were I need to reassert more discipline and focus. I know what I need to do, I just need to do it. It’s Monday. It’s not a great time going into the holidays but there never is a good time. There is always an excuse why you need to push this stuff off. November 8th sounds just as good as any.
This is where you all come in. I know myself and when I lost my weight before a big part of my success was telling others I was going to lose 100 lbs and then not failing on that. So, it’s time I returned back to my “100 lb” weight which means less than 232 lbs. I need to drop around 40 lbs, we’ll see for sure on Friday. This is going to happen. And I’m going to share it with all of you. Wether you like it or not. 🙂
I expect two weeks that are pretty hard. Sugar withdrawal. Get used to exercising hard and regularly again, etc. Then it’s just staying the course. In the past I’ve always logged my food religiously when I’ve lost weight. I’m going to work hard not to do that. It’s a crutch for me and I really don’t need it. I think logging is tremendously powerful but at some point you know the data well enough and it’s not needed.
That’s enough for now. I’ll check in again on Friday and get the numbers started.
The Incredibles
On Friday night we went to see The Incredibles on opening night. We erred on the side of caution and went to the later show to avoid the overflow of kids that were sure to go to the earlier one. However, on the flipside Tammy found it impossible to stay awake. Somehow we have really turned into early risers.
Pixar did a great job on this one. I remembered back to Toy Story and it’s amazing how far animation technology has come. The nice thing is that you no longer even think about the fact that this is all computer generated (unless you want to), it’s completely transparent which I think is proof that this stuff has matured.
The story was fun and funny. It was surprisingly longer than I expected. I guess I’m used to these animated things being 80-90 minutes and at 105 this was notably longer (or maybe it was the later hour!). Anyway, fun flick for all, recommend it.
Ira Glass at the Pabst Theater
On Saturday we found ourselves doing something that we both recalled we hadn’t done probably in a decade. We were hopping into the car to drive hundreds of miles just to see a performance. Now, a decade ago I may have been found doing a road trip like this for a punk rock concert, today we found ourselves driving 360 miles to see Ira Glass of This American Life.
We headed out on I-94 and went straight from home to Milwaukee. As we were driving I noted again that either Wisconsin has tremendously more road kill or they do not do a good job of cleaning up the roads. We saw more than twenty deer in various states of decay on the side of the road. Driving I-94 West instead of East for a dozen hours as I’ve done many times you will see a deer on the side of the road dead, but it’s rare. For some reason Wisconsin peppers the side of the road to a disturbing amount.
We arrived in Milwaukee and checked into the Wyndham hotel downtown. The hotel was perfect as it was in the same building as the Pabst Theater. We had dinner with a friend of Tammy’s family, Jennifer McDaniel. Tammy was friends with Jennifer when she was like 9 months old. We had dinner at the Water Street Brewery and then walked back to the theater for the evening with Ira Glass.
We saw Ira Glass perform about a year-and-a-half ago in Minneapolis and were amazed by how great it was. The show is about how they make This American Life. We both love the show – we listened to five episodes of it on our drive. The show that we saw was the same structure as the one that we saw last time, however it was still great. The content inside the structure was updated. I can’t encourage you enough to go see one of his performances.
By the way, the Pabst Theater we found out while there is the 4th oldest operating theater in the country. It was a very nice place with the exception of pretty tight seating as is common in old theaters.