Today I felt like I'd lost a fight with the interior of a passenger van, but that wasn't the problem. I'd had a great weekend playing in the Griffiths Game, a 24+ hour puzzle hunt run by the Burninators and their band of merry volunteers. This morning, I was paying the price: bruises everywhere (from stumbling around inside a van) and achy bones (from sitting still inside a van), and more bruises (from walking into things after staying awake for too long). But that wasn't the problem.
The problem was how I prepared my backpack this morning. I remembered to untie the magic lasso, dumped out many spare sheets of not-exactly-hex paper, and carefully extracted a plastic bag full of puzzles. But I forgot to pack a book.
So it was a long bus ride this morning. I sat and stared out the window.
That wasn't bad, though. I looked at things outside the window and I thought of puzzles based around those things. I had a few ideas. It wasn't many by a true puzzler's standard. But up until this point, I'd had about one half-baked puzzle idea per month, so having a few ideas in one hour was quite a jump.
* ~ * ~ * ~ *
On the bus ride back from the office, I read an office copy of the book Effective Java. Thus I spared myself the ordeal of trying to think of any more puzzles. Exercising your creativity every so often is OK, but you wouldn't want to make a habit out of it.
Labels: programming, puzzlehunts