Larry Hosken: New: 2010

100% Organically Farmed Software The book The Mythical Man-Month pointed out the organic nature of software development in 1975 ...The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness... If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we...
Book Report: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere It's a collection of short stories. Easy-to-read stories about folks going through tough times in their lives. The protagonists tend to be thoughtful persons of color surrounded by not-so-thoughtfu...
Book Report: How to Win Friends and Influence People This is a popular book about how to be well-liked. The good news is that there's some good advice in here. E.g., try to see things from the other person's point of view. The bad news is that some o...
Book Report: Influencer Good grief, it's another pop psychology book. I've been reading a lot of these recently, it seems. I swear, if I have to sit through another discussion of children who can/cannot delay their consump...
Book Report: The Internet in China (Zixue Tai) It's going to sound like I'm slamming this book, like it's bad. It's not bad. I just chose the wrong book, is all. The thing is: this is an academic work. [It might also sound like I'm obscurely refe...
Book Report: the Pragmatic Programmer This book, The Pragmatic Programmer is difficult to find by searching, since there's also a series of books by that name. So maybe I'll give the full title here: The Pragmatic Programmer / ...
Comic Report: Suspended in Language Last night I had dinner with a few co-workers and conversation of course turned to what Albert Einstein would do if we extended his lifespan 1000 years. Would he ever get used to quantum physics? F...
I Didn't See Your Mail; Facial Hair Happy New Year! If you sent me email in the last few days, I maybe never saw it. My site's spam-detection software thought that mail dated 2010 or later was likely to be spam. (This was apparently a...
Kindle Thoughts I tweeted Reviewed an early-draft novel via Kindle. It worked well for that. Search was handy. Highlighted lines of interest. Over on Facebook, my cousin Sierra asked some questions about that. And ...
Meta Vanity Searching: Nearby Search Suggestions You know how some people are so shallow that they Google themselves? I do that. I did that today. But this time was different. You know how when you type a little into the Google search box, it p...
Not-Really-Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, even Denmark At work, I work with training/educator folks. Tonight, I posted a message about stuff I'd read this evening. But it's not confidential or anything so I guess I'll post it here, too: LARPers run a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even det kravmärkta molekylärgrönaprogrammet It's a wonderful time to be alive. Of course, I'm referring to widespread automatic translation, the magic which allows me to find out about Swedish puzzle-hunt-like activities, like, say, a team bu...
Book Report: Asterios Polyp It's a comic book about a stick-in-the-mud architect who gets out of Manhattan, out to the sticks, and there learns to appreciate other points of view. It's pretty artsy. It's pretty, it's artsy. ...
Links to some Early 2010 Posts I'm switching blogging software. The good news is that blog posts made via the new system won't clobber my old blog posts. The bad news is that I didn't really try to "weave together" the old stuf...
Book Report: Silent Thunder I saw two cousins today, which is good. As of this morning, I didn't hope to see any. But that's not what this blog post is about. This, as you might guess, is a gratuitous blog post to see if I g...
Under Construction, as Ever Thanks, Blogger.com, for five wonderful years of managing this blog! Sorry that y'all will stop supporting FTP publishing, which I was using. I've been scrambling this weekend to throw together som...
Comic Report: T-Minus Radven livetwittered a shuttle launch. The excitement shone through, even at less than 140 characters per. Hey, speaking of NASA, this must be a book report for T-Minus. This is a comic book about...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Rashomon Gate The BANG 25 Writeup Addendum over at Puzzalot gets into a tricky aspect of team puzzle-solving: figuring out who had which insight. It's a hard problem; I've given up on it myself. If Player A tell...
Book Report: Rapid Development Today at work, we talked about ripping of^W^W repurposing some material from that McConnell book on software engineering, Code Complete. So maybe today is a good day to post a book report on another...
Comic Report: Persepolis An autobio comic about growing up in Iran. First under the corrupt Shah. Then under the Fundies. Getting away to Europe without parents, without much of a support system... You get the idea that ...
Rapid Development: an Example Speaking of Rapid Development... There's a protocol called pubsubhubbub by which your blog can tell the world that it's updated. Usually when I hear the word "protocol", that means "oh man, complica...
>> A little pre-new years apartment cleanup. Wow, some notes from the Viking BANG. That was back in... Hmm, I should clean more often. ...
Book Report: Hackers It's another Steven Levy book about the history of technology. As with other Levy books, I keep spotting things that I know are wrong, so it makes me not trust Levy to tell me things I don't know. ...
Photo: Alarm Will Sound You can never have too many photos of me. So I uploaded a photo taken by Benjy Feen in scenic Kirkland, WA. Someone looking at this photo might think that I'd just set off a building alarm by blund...
Comic Report: Trotsky It's the morning after the GC Summit, and I'm still feeling inspired. One of the things I'm inspired to do is download a file with all of the Wikipedia article titles. That would sure be handy for ...
Link: Puzzle Forum @ Puzzalot If you're a puzzle-huntist, I'm sure you're already subscribed to the excellent Puzzalot blog, so I don't know why I even bother to link to link to his post announcing that he set up a puzzle forum. ...
"What is a Content Management System?" At the GC Summit, Debbie mentioned that the organizers of the excellent DASH treasure hunt game will start using a content management system to keep track of their puzzles. Someone in the audience a...
Book Report: Brain Storm This novel is by Richard Dooling, the same guy who wrote Bet Your Life, one of my favorite books of 2003. This book was pretty good, too. It's a legal thriller—hey, come back! It's a legal th...
Site: Tag Cloud Tinkering with blog software is fun. I set up one of those tag clouds. There's not much there yet, but give it time. ...
Book Report: Between Silk and Cyanide It's the autobiography of the codemaster of the SOE an English spy organization during WWII. Wait! Dont' run away! It's not just math and cryptography and war. There's good stuff in here, too. Th...
Life of Pi: Another Perspective You might have noticed that I changed my blogging software recently. Yes, I do go on about it. Sorry. As part of this, I shut down blogger.com's access to my web site's file system. Otherwise, it...
Book Report: Down at the Docks Back in 1999, I traveled in New England. I told intrepid traveler Tom Manshreck that I was going to visit New Bedford. He said ""Yeah, man--New Bedford used to be a good place to go to--to get shot...
Kindle for Book Editors: I'm doing it wrong A while back, I smugly tweeted that I was using my Kindle to read early-draft books by friends of mine. (Hi, Curtis! Hi, Piaw!) These weren't detailed mark-up-every-sentence read-throughs. Just ga...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Disneyland Excerpt from the bottom of Matt Haughey's Disneyland travelog Another highlight of the trip was using the Wishing Stars iPhone app in the park. It's basically a photo and clue-driven scavenger hunt ...
Book Report: Strengths Finder 2.0 Strengths Finder 2.0 is an online personality test disguised as a book. The test administrators charge you to take their test. To make the idea of spending $25 to take a personality test palatable,...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, with no hidden niches There was this conversation at the GC Summit. Brent Holman of Shinteki/the Scoobies said something. It troubles me. Maybe it shouldn't but... We were talking about making these puzzle-hunty games...
chris451's comment on Caja [Edited to add: If you have questions or concerns about Caja, the Google Caja Discuss group is a good place to ask them.] Since I switched blogging software, people who think they're commenting on m...
Puzzle Hunts Are Everywhere, even in Brent Holman's Memories (but not so much in writeups) Veteran gamist Brent Holman Facebook-replied to my post yesterday about recaps, the internet, and memetic monoculture. His post deserves a wider audience than my Facebook friends, so I'm posting it ...
Book Report: Not Becoming My Mother Ruth Reichl's mother was kind of depressed, kind of goofy. Reichl's written some autobiographies with scary parts. The scary parts were dinner parties. Yes, really. When her mother hosted dinner ...
3.1464466 March 14th is Pi Day. Maybe that's why I'm seeing lots of hits on my website for people searching for information about π. You might be surprised that they'd come here. I'm no Eve Andersson; I'...
Zine Report: Giant Robot #64 If you like Giant Robot magazine but have fallen out of touch, this would be a good time to get re-acquainted. Times are tight and they're running a fundraising drive. It's a good time to buy thing...
Link: California Secretary of State on Voting Systems I'm doing taxes today. In my California tax booklet, there's a form asking me if I'm registered to vote. That's great. We citizens are supposed to get angry about taxation without representation. ...
Comic Report: Meanwhile... The local members of the National Puzzler's League had a party last weekend, their Equinox party. I didn't go—I'm still not quite enough of a puzzle enthusiast to want to join the NPL. But I wa...
Site Update: No Comment Today, I'm home sick. I've been sleeping; when not sleeping, I've been sleepy. Meanwhile, I have a long TODO list. Surely, some item on that list was something that I could take care of, even if s...
Book Report: Wiring up the Big Brother Machine Google stopped censoring in China; as a result, more Google search results are censored. The Chinese people can find less stuff now. Why? Because of the "Great Firewall". The Chinese government c...
Site Update: 36 Views, Some Different I'm finally looking at the photos I took when I was in Seattle a couple of months back. One advantage of waiting a couple of months to do this: I've had time to forget pretty much everything that ha...
Book Report: Tetraktys I read this novel because it was recommended via a computer security discussion group at work. That doesn't sound like a good way to make decisions, does it? Oh, Amazon.com recommendations, why do I ...
I am an Aardvark I joined Aardvark, the social search service where you ask questions and they're answered by your friends, your friends-of-friends, or whoever. And then I totally failed to think of a question to as...
Book Report: When You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish What's that you say? The Gathering for Gardner was this last weekend? Then I'm a few days late to be topical with a book report on When You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish. But books are a slow me...
Link: PhotoCity Pervasive Capture-the-Flag Photo Game Just watched a video of a recent talk by a University of Washington professor named Popovic. His schtick is crowd-sourcing difficult tasks by turning those tasks into games. (Have you heard of Rosett...
Book Report: Sane Asylum This book is about Delancey Street, mostly about the way it operated as of 1974-ish, based on a visit by an East Bay reporter. I grew up with a big Delancey Street building in my neighborhood, but fr...
Link: Blue Door Puzzle Trail I ego-surfed for mentions of the 2 Tone Game, and found one: a post on an ARG (Alternate Reality Gaming) forum. (Thanks for that!) The poster there called the 2 Tone Game a "puzzle trail". Apparen...
Link: My Secret Identity Revealed on CPedia The folks at the Cuil search engine have a new way of presenting their data, Cpedia. Instead of the stereotypical list-of-ten-results, they construct an encyclopedia article. Where by "they", I mea...
Book Report: Planning Extreme Programming For me, this was a "Casablanca" book. By that, I mean it reminded me of my experience watching the movie "Casablaca." I kept thinking Big deal, I've seen all this before. But of course, that's beca...
2-Tone Game: Pacing Yar wrote some email talking about the 2-Tone Game. One of my answers got pretty long. I guess eventually it should find its way into a game write-up. But it won't if I lose it in my old mail queu...
Book Report: China Underground I hoped that this book was about subversives and criminals in China: reporters, human rights lawyers, whistleblowers... I read news about China's internet censorship measures; I can follow the inter...
Link: Kung-Fu CB Mamas on Wheels vs. the Aztec Motorcycle Wrestling Nuns Happy National Poetry Month, USA people! Perhaps my proudest poetic month was when I constructed the couplet The Kung Fu CB Biker Mamas and the Aztec Wrestling Nuns Lined up along the freeway...
Last-minute improvised Mystic Fish Hat I can't find my usual Team Mystic Fish hat, so I jury-rigged this. ...
Book Report: Pervasive Games (Theory and Design) Several months ago, I ran into a little post from a blog called "Pervasive Games". The blog post was interesting, so I wrote a little blog post about that, as one does. But I didn't really notice th...
>> McSweeney's is running a riddly hunt. There's real treasure at the end. Doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but maybe it sounds like your kind of thing. ...
Book Report: Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development This book is about software development process. I guess it's aimed at project leads, project managers, and managers. But it's organized into Design Patterns, a form loved by many computer programm...
Musicians about the Internets Yesterday, I went to a party at which I knew almost nobody. (Well, I knew some folks, but they mostly showed up at about the time I had to leave.) What's an introvert to when faced with a crowd like...
Lowell Darling: coherent correspondent It's election season—not just in the UK. There's an election coming up in California. I'm looking over the voting materials, and one name stands out: Lowell Darling. He is, as you no doubt ...
Milestone: 16 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 16-millionth hit: 207.46.13.132 - - [08/May/2010:13:51:57 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/old_misc_sf/sffloat.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot....
Seattle 2010 Trip Notes Remember how I went to Seattle months ago? I finally got around to writing down some Seattle 2010 travel notes. Time-saving tip: you can write up your travel very quickly if you first procrastinate f...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sveden A page with a couple of RebusRally photos makes me think that Rebus Rallies happen more than once a year, though I rarely hear about them. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Places that are Gone This is another spoiler-free (I think) post about the 2-Tone Game. Things change. Cities are things. Therefore, cities change. Last weekend, I was in the neighborhood of a puzzle site, a puzzle f...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, like Lindy Hop Yesterday, Debbie Goldstein was at a playtest and so was I. And thus I got to hear a little about her trip to New York City. Debbie is, as near as I can tell, the force of cajolery behind the DASH ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Sharing Space After the playtest on Saturday, we walked and talked with Debbie. We talked about the Jejune Institute, which Debbie and Sunshine had played; the rest of us had not. I'd seen mention of Jejune on C...
Book Report: Inherent Vice I'm too blissed out from playing Shinteki to write a new blog post. Fortunately, I have a backlog of book reports. Thus: Inherent Vice It's a mystery set in Los Angeles, but it's 60s Los Angeles. T...
The One with the Hats Yes, I am behind on writing up games and such. And I really hope I get around to writing something more about DASH2 than one photo. But wow, what a photo. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but the Edges are Fuzzy On my way to Saturday's excellent Shinteki Decathlon game, I swung by a few places to take care of a few things. E.g., I stopped to take an unhurried look at that worn-down Jejune sticker I'd spotte...
Book Report: Masterminds of Programming I just read a blog post, The Myth of the Superior Programming Language. In it, he points out that people who insist on using some wack-ass different programming language are kind of annoying. I agr...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Decaying You remember how I wrote that Blood and Bones behaved particularly classily on a spaceship-sized climbing structure? That climbing structure is gone now, it's just a big sandpit at the bottom of som...
Shinteki Decathlon Photos Behold some photos from Shinteki Decathlon 6. I played last weekend, volunteered this weekend. It was pretty awesome. I got to see some places in San Francisco I hadn't visited before. Speaking o...
Comic Report: Wilson! Some of my readers are gentlemen of a certain age and sophistication. To these, it is enough to say: There is a new Daniel Clowes comic book out, and it's pretty good. If you don't know about Danie...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even ****where (and more than usual today) I [think I] finished off another episode of that Jejune Institute San Francisco persistent treasure-huntish ARG thingy. I guess I should call it Games of Nonchalance. Advertising posters went up re...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Prelinger Library So I finally visited the Prelinger Library, after having heard about it for months. The front door was locked. I wasn't expecting that. But it made sense: the Prelinger Library shares space with o...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and yet you can be in the wrong place Yesterday after work, I stood on a painted rectangle of sidewalk for about 45 minutes. I did this for what turned out to be no good reason. I thought that somebody was going to call me on a payphone...
Zine Report: Giant Robot #65 In the new issue of Giant Robot (available at fine periodical stores and the Giant Robot store on Shrader just off Haight), there's an interview with Eric Cheng! He doesn't talk about The Game, only...
Puzzle Hunts^W^W LARPs are Everywhere, Even the Transbay Terminal Girts noticed something Nonchalant-Game-ish to do this evening in San Francisco. There was a nicely-done stroll. (It was fun! I'm glad I went! I still don't want to do Nonchalant-ish things that don...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, albeit one less place Corby sent me mail yesterday: some of the environmental data for the 2-Tone Game went away. I was already planning to take today as a vacation day, so now I had a morning activity. Confirm that the...
Book Report: Two Bits Two Bits is a book about the free software movement, explained in terms that an academic can understand. The author tries to steer around debates about what exactly constitutes an example of Haberma...
Book Report: Offshore It's a novel; it's litrachaw. I tend to approach a book of litrachaw as a puzzle: spot the theme, spot the metaphor, that kind of thing. I was feeling all clever for having figured out this novel, ...
Paranoia is Everywhere You See It, even just South of Market When Debbie talked about why she wasn't that enthused about continuing with the Games of Nonchalance, she described her experience as "creepy". And there's plenty of creepiness going on. A few weeks...
Comic Report: City of Spies My parents did pretty well playing the 2-Tone Game. Like, I don't think that the Burninators team needs to worry any time soon. But my parents did pretty well. And as they were walking from the &l...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Hypothetical Magazine Articles This afternoon, I talked with a couple of people about puzzly treasure-hunt game thingies. Now this conversation was kind of important, so I'd planned for it. I'd sketched out some talking points....
Link: Snoutcast If you're wondering What is this mysterious "conversation" for which Larry felt he needed to come up with "talking points" ahead of time? the truth can now be revealed: it was a Snoutcast interview. ...
Book Report: The Battery and the Boiler You think you've seen cultural imperialism? The Battery and the Boiler shows you what cultural imperialism looked like in 1880s England. I read this book because it's an adventure story about the l...
Gadget of Intent The Samsung Epic looks like it's going to be a pretty sweet phone. (This is a good time to mention: Despite my place of employment, I don't know more about the Samsung Epic than you do. Its abilitie...
Book Report: Transition It's a novel by Iain M. Banks but it's not set in the Culture universe. It's set in a multiverse. I wasn't into it. I have a tough time with multiverse novels. So there's an infinite number of un...
Michael C. McMillen: Aristotle's Cage I'm taking art notes for my own benefit and you're stuck along for the ride; sorry about that. Years ago, on a Los Angeles vacation, I saw a piece of art at LACMA. It wasn't a painting, a photograp...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Justin Herman Plaza and SoMa The Shinteki folks say that they're not keeping Decathlon 6 under wraps anymore, so now I can reveal more photos on the Mystic Fish vs Decathlon 6 page, along with a couple of photos from t...
Book Report: Finite Fields for Computer Scientists and Engineers I'm not at Blackhat, nor will I be any time soon. Crypto is hard. I didn't finish this math book, Finite Fields for Computer Scientists and Engineers. My math is pretty shaky. Usually, when I'm t...
"And they look at the puzzle and they say 'Oh that's so hard; I could never do that'" SnoutCast #25: "Puzzled Pint #1 Debrief" (around minutes 17-19 or so) talks about folks who say "I could never do one of those puzzle-hunt things; the puzzles are too hard." And if you're a BANG enth...
Book Report: Whole Earth Discipline It's been a glum time at work lately. A co-worker was sick for a long time. Last week, he passed away. In our department, we could count on him to cheer people up when things went wrong. So now we m...
Boring Photos: Cathay Bank vs Spier, O'Neill, et al Pardon me as I once again use this blog as a place to keep track of notes to myself. I'm keeping track of some photos that seem boring, and that I hope continue to seem boring. They're photos of a no...
Zine Report: Giant Robot #66 It is another issue of Giant Robot. There is an advertisement for Android figurines decorated by Andrew Bell. There is an article about MSG advising you should use it even though a few people have ...
Book Report: Museum Legs I ran into Mahlen and he recommended this book. It turned out to be pretty good. It's about the place of museums in society. Yeah, I know it sounds awful, but hear me out. It's sufficiently interesti...
Fear and Loathing in Alternate Reality Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for act two of the Games of Nonchalance a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: 2-Tone Game GC Notes If you've played through the 2-Tone Game and emerged, thinking Wow, that was strange; I wonder how it turned out that way?—you're in luck. At long last, some rambly essays about how the game c...
Book Report: This is not a Game It's a thriller/mystery, so you wouldn't expect me to like it. But the main characters are Game Control for some big Alternate Reality Games a la I Like Bees. So along the way, there are diverting m...
Jotting Notes on Ian Tullis' 2010 GC Summit Talk "Reflections on Puzzling" In this talk, Ian Tullis talks about puzzle design; in general and in the puzzlehunt style. He talks about what makes puzzles interesting in general; and the weird areas that the puzzlehunt communit...
Book Report: The Sorcerer's House It's a fantasy novel in which our characters start out in the normal world and then discover a magical gateway to a world beyond our own where blah blah blah. It sounds like the plot of the worst te...
Book Report: Nmap Network Scanning I just got back from a 9-day tour of various western USA places as the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Kodachrome, and Zion National Park. Along the way, I busted my travel laptop, so I haven't been upda...
Green Tortoise tour photos Yesterday, I got back from a Green Tortoise (backpacker/hosteler bus) tour of some northern-USA parks, including the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Zion canyon. I haven't done a write-up yet, but the...
Milestone: 17 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 17 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 70.38.64.234 - - [06/Sep/2010:02:36:30 -0400] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/42_golden_gate_bridge_halfway_along.jpg HT...
Photos from New Camera Since my old camera got me hypothetically (but not really) trampled by an ornery moose, I got a new camera this weekend. And I took some photos to try it out. Most of them turned out pretty badly! ...
Book Report: Coders at Work I used to post an annual list of top 10 fave reads of the year. Nowadays, I post a "book report" for every book I read. It takes less time than writing up the top 10. It took too long to pick the ...
Link: Jet Lamp video/talk about Text Adventure Games Yesterday after work I went out to see a movie, sort of. And I recommend you go see it, depending on where you are. The movie is "Get Lamp", and I haven't actually seen the whole thing yet. It's a...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Bvrlingame Behold, it is a handful of photos from BANG23. You notice how I'm carefully staying ambiguous about whether there's a full writeup coming anytime soon? Let's see how long it takes me to finish writi...
Book Report: Apprenticeship Patterns For some reason, I thought this would be a book of mentoring patterns, but that's not what's going on here. This is a book for a computer programmer who wants to learn more about the craft. If you'r...
Zine Report: Giant Robot #67 In this issue: shopping for a Wurlitzer 106 keyboard in LA, a memoir of someone getting high-radiation cancer treatment across the street from me at UCSF, Daniel Wu writing about airsoft BB guns, and...
Book Report: Kraken I guess this book's genre is horror. Or urban fantasy. In modern-day London, some normal folks are drawn into conflicts between wizards, armageddons, and objects of worship. So there's a secret Lo...
15 Games Meme I got tagged by a meme in Facebook. It's about games. Since I'm on the front seat of this bus and the people on the seat behind me can see my laptop screen, I guess I won't playtest any puzzles rig...
Book Report: An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups I read an early draft of An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups months ago, but didn't blog about it then because it wasn't published yet. And then, when it was published, I forgot that I had...
Question for GCs: Observing Playtesters The latest episode of Snoutcast is about location scouting for games. But my brain got ahold of one little twist in the conversation, and then drifted off to a little incident and then... Like, when...
Zion Nat'l Park (et al.) I'm a little slow on the updating, but as of a little more than a week ago, I'm done with that cold. It's nice to breathe easy again, but I still feel fairly busy what with playtesting on Ghost Patro...
Book Report: Tilings and Patterns I know what you're thinking: Oh no, Larry tried to read another math book. No doubt this means the blog's"unfinished" tag will soon be attached to another book report. But I made it to the end of t...
longest gap between solves? Someone, I'm not sure who, finished the 2 Tone Game today and used its built-in taunting system to ask: yay, finally got the last one, so do i win the prize for longest gap between solves? More t...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere within and without the bounds of convention A few months back, Ian Tullis talked about puzzles, specifically puzzle-hunt puzzles, and how they've evolved. The quest for novelty drives puzzlehunt designers away from the "plain" puzzles that mos...
Ghost Patrol BA'NG: some photos and a line chart I posted some notes about Ghost Patrol BA'NG, mostly some photos from one of the puzzle-construction parties. I attended two puzzle-construction parties. (But during the second one, I didn't work mu...
Concert Report: The Glowstick Story In theory, this web site has a concert report section. It's OK if you didn't remember that. I haven't written down any concert stories since... since 2001, apparently. (Except I guess last year I m...
Book Report: Gimme Something Better This book was interesting, a lot more interesting than I expected. After all, I'm not a punk. I didn't grow up a punk. So why would I read—brace yourself—an oral history of the SF bay ar...
Two more Snippets of Online Answer-System Hindsight I wrote that answer system for the 2-Tone Game, modified it for Ghost Patrol Bang, and hope to work on similar systems for future hunts. Jotting a couple of notes here on things I wish I'd done diff...
Jotting Notes on Debbie Goldstein's 2010 GC Summit Talk "DASH 1: One Game, Eight Cities" I just watched the video of Debbie Goldstein's 2010 GC Summit talk about the first DASH game. It was pretty cool to see Debbie talk. If you want to know how someone can be nice enough and energetic...
Book Report: Marketing in the Age of Google (Disclosure and/or disclaimer: I don't speak for my employer. If you know who my employer is, you might guess I have all kinds of confidential insider Search Engine Optimization secrets, but I don't....
Jotting Notes on Scott Blomquist's 2010 GC Summit Talk: Confidence and Acceleration in Puzzle Theory I'm jotting notes about another Game Control Summit 2010 talk: Scott Blomquist talks about Puzzle Theory, conceptual thinking about puzzle design. (Yeah, he talked about puzzle theory in 2009, too.)...
Book Report: Priceless Yesterday, I dodged Black Friday, but didn't quite make it through Buy Nothing Day. I bought a streetcar ride and then a train ride down the peninsula. How much were those worth? I don't know. I k...
Thinking about Puzzle Hunt Answer Systems, Unlock Codes The goal of the Universal Longshots Scoring System is: A team's score should consider hints and time spent on puzzles; it should not consider the time between puzzles. You can agree or diagree that ...
Charitable Giving for People with Tiny Mailboxes, Part 2 Once again, I saved my bulk mail from charities for a couple of years and just now counted it out. Some organizations get things done without sending me a bunch of crap; some organizations send me a...
Jotting Notes on Dan Egnor's 2010 GC Summit Talk "Computer Tools for Puzzle Creation+Solving" Jotting notes about another Game Control Summit 2010 talk: Dan Egnor on Computer Tools for Puzzle Creation and Solving. When I saw the talk live, I didn't follow it all, and got distracted from the ...
Art Hunts are Everywhere, even the Presidio I was just reminded of a walk I recently took in San Francisco's Presidio. There was an art event going on around the Fort Winfield Scott area; exhibits scattered around outside. You could approach...
These are the steps Steps to reproduce the computer bug: The computer doesn't do what I want. Frustrated! Rest head on desk. One hair falls off head. All rested! Try to use the computer again. Computer mouse runs ove...
San Francisco Restaurant Recommendations This morning, instead of doing what I meant to do, I bumped into Google Hotpot and rated a bunch of places (mostly restaurants in San Francisco). It's a "social" service, so in theory I can share re...
>> When I write a post at this here blog, that post gets around. It's syndicated on Friendfeed, Google Buzz, LJ, FB, ... and probably other places I forgot. People can comment on it in all those place...
Book Report: Trick or Treatment It's a book about alternative medicine. Going in, I had some idea of what I wanted to learn. I figured that some alternative medicines are probably good for curing some things... but probably not g...
>> Years ago, I failed to get a Sam & Max game running on an underpowered Windows laptop. Today, I am more technically sophisticated: I failed to get Sam & Max running on a Linux desktop under ...
>> Set apartment wifi to password "openopen". Put password in the SSID so neighbors can still use it. Hackers can still snoop, but they'll have to work harder. ...
Jotting Notes on John Owens' 2010 GC Summit Talk "Metas I Have Known" Jotting down some notes from John Owens' talk about Metapuzzles at GC Summit 2010. I sometimes think that people think too much about metapuzzles... but on the other hand, just last week I was helpi...
>> Turns out my net hookup is too slow for onlive service. Now trying to find a place to put an Xbox in this tiny apartment. May involve hollowing out a wall and adding a load-bearing television set. ...
Fake BBC Book Meme I got tagged on Facebook to fill in the fake "BBC Book Meme". (It's a real meme, just not really from the BBC.) The key... x: I read it; x+: I read it and loved it; * I plan to read it; =8 tied for ...
Graph Pebbling and a Proof that there is an Infinite Number of Composite Numbers Yesterday, a plurality of the folks hanging out were math nerds. I'm not a math nerd, but I likes me some recreational math. Graph Pebbling has some fun little problems. The idea is that you have...
>> Wikipedia article data is available again: http://download.wikipedia.org/enwiki/latest/ Now you can tinker with nutrimatic. ...
Headlamp Ideas? I lost the triclops headlamp. I need a replacement. I look like a dork when I wear a headlamp; the triclops headlamp was an effort to push the dorkiness so far that it came out the other side to awe...
>> I created an about.me profile. I'd heard about about.me, wondered what the fuss was about, so I tried it. Now I've tried it and... I still wonder what the fuss was about. So now I have yet another p...
Book Report: The Making of the Atomic Bomb I've read plenty of books about the development of the atomic bomb, but concentrating mostly on Los Alamos. It's a tale kind of like Camelot for nuclear physicists—for a time, the world's best...
>> Was Rich Bragg's record for longest http://2tonegame.org/ puzzle solve five months? Because I just noticed that another person took seven months on a puzzle. ...
Milestone: 18 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 18 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 66.249.67.228 - - [29/Dec/2010:07:30:11 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/200405_rwc/10_earth_mover_cliff_tank.html HTTP/1.1...