There must be a
program for this.
As I've mentioned previously on ye old blog, I've been doing a lot of
Sudoku puzzles in my copious free time. I noticed Book 1 of the
Times series on a table at Chapters one day a few months ago and it piqued my interest. I've never been very interested in crosswords
[1] [2] but the logical nature of Sudoku appealed to me. I did a puzzle here and a puzzle there for a while. I'm not sure when I started chain-solving but I can now while away multiple hours at a time, happily marking and erasing until I solve one, then eagerly turning to the next.
I Googled "Sudoku anonymous" and found others in my predicament but no help.
I'm not sure whether I'm responsible for spreading this to my co-workers but a few of them have gotten into it as well. I think this is perfectly logical (smirk) behaviour for software developers, because at its core, development is about problem solving. There's also something very appealing about knowing the problem you are trying to solve definitely has a solution. This is all too frequently not the case in IT.
As if the books weren't engrossing enough, I have recently been introduced to two new wrinkles which have only intensified my obsession.
The first is samunamupure, aka Killer Su Doku. The grid is overlaid with "sum boxes" which connect multiple cells. The digits in those cells must sum to the number on the sum box. Often these puzzles have no starting digits at all. John and I went to Chapters on Tuesday; I picked up Book 3 of the Times series and he picked up the Killer book. I took one look at it and chickened out. No starting digits? The hell? I was intrigued, though, and I decided to try one at lunch later in the week. I proceeded to completely geek out over it and after work, I went immediately to Chapters to pick up my own copy. It is truly diabolical.
The second is websudoku.com. Tracy sent me the link on Friday afternoon. I shared it with the guys and went back to work. Turned around ten minutes later and they were all still there. This should have been a warning sign... hehe. The virtually unlimited supply of free puzzles is compelling enough. They really nail you with the ability to work out the puzzle in the browser, including multiple entries per cell. It's like the difference between word processing and writing longhand. You can erase so much faster. They also compile stats - you can see how well you're doing compared to the average, which is kinda cool.
In hindsight, the Wiktionary link for "geek out" was probably unnecessary. :)
In other news...
- John played a short set at the Right Spot last night. It was a charity coffeehouse organized by one of the help desk techs. I knew John wrote songs and I knew he played a mean guitar, but I've never seen him rock out like he did last night. He played four or five originals and about as many covers, including a seamless melding of Beck and Weezer ("Loser"/"Undone - The Sweater Song") plus an encore of "Underwhelmed" and "What You Waiting For?" It was spectacular. He should be quitting his job and heading out on the road any time now.
- I picked up Season 2 of Arrested Development on DVD this week. My love for this show knows no bounds. The DVDs are a little light on special features - the highlights are three commentaries and a gag reel. I'm enduring a short hiatus to accommodate baseball playoffs, so anything new is welcome. The gag reel actually ends with a profanity-laced tirade from David Cross on Fox's inability to effectively market the show, which gets pretty low ratings despite being a critical darling. It was awesome, and I still can't believe they included it.
- Some of you know that I've got a couple of academic credits to my name. When I was at UNB, I did a co-op term and some part-time work as a research assistant to Dr. Colin Ware. The work I did with Colin served as the basis for two papers, one in a conference proceedings and another in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. I wrote the software, recruited subjects, conducted the experiments, and edited the text. Today I got to wondering whether those papers were ever cited by other researchers in the field, and with remarkably little effort (I typed "colin ware jeff rose" into Firefox) discovered that they have. I highly doubt I'll ever continue my academic career, but I still think that's really cool.
I started writing this post two hours ago as methadone for the heroin of websudoku.com. I think it worked. Let's find out...
[1] Once upon a time I did the TV Guide crossword regularly. This will not come as a surprise to those (Will) who believe I am the epitome of pop culture geek. (back)
[2] I'm trying out footnotes for my longer diversions. I picked up the technique from alt.sysadmin.recovery and used it quite a bit on FTE back in the day. I think it's less annoying for tangents than dropping a sentence for a line or two and picking it back up. Yes? No? Anyone? Bueller? [3] (back)
[3] Yes, nesting footnotes is all too common. My Atom feed specifies a base page for each article. When I read this post in Thunderbird, the footnote links launch the post in Firefox instead of scrolling the message. I doubt I can do anything about this. Hrmm... (back)
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