Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

Let's take a look at what I did in August:

• I wrote a poem for a friend who took advantage of my offer to write poetry based on a phrase. I also did the same thing for a friend of that friend.

• I got a programming bug one night, so I finished my Jotto-by-email program that I had made a start on a few months ago. If you'd like to play it, just send an email to kevin@jmac.org.

• I don't know if this really counts as creative, but I'm putting it here anyway. I ran across this page, which has a list of neat phrases that result when you append a book's author to its title. Here are some that I found on my own bookshelf:

  The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury
  Rose Martin Cruz Smith
  The Power of One Bryce Courtenay
  Neptune Crossing Jeffrey A. Carver
  The Warlock Enraged Christopher Stasheff
  The Warlock is Missing Christopher Stasheff
  When the Bough breaks Jonathan Kellerman
  Private Eyes Jonathan Kellerman
  Cradle Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee
  L'etranger Camus (funnier in English: The Stranger Camus)
  Red Mars Kim Stanley Robinson
  Green Mars Kim Stanley Robinson
  Blue Mars Kim Stanley Robinson
  

• A friend of mine gets a share of vegetables from a farm every week. She was on vacation one week, so she had me pick up her share for her, so that the vegetables would get used. She wanted to know what was in the share, so I decided to take some pictures of them. Well, it got a little out of hand.

• I made a LiveJournal userpic for my Jotto entries, since I was doing a fair bit of Jotto programming. The userpic is a series of Jotto guesses and scores. I picked the word I wanted to use, then fed it into my Jotto guessing program, and this is what came out. One of the features of my Jotto guessing program is that it reports the number of possible words it could be (according to its dictionary) with every guess. So, according to my dictionary, there is only one possible word for these guesses and scores. If you can't figure it out and would like to know what the word is, mail me.

• As I mentioned above, I did a lot of Jotto programming this month. I made an attempt at a smarter AI. While the attempt failed because my algorithm for determining the best guess was faulty, I did learn a lot about Perl in the effort to get it to work. I have a lot of the Jotto stuff in an actual Perl module, so I'm pretty happy with that. I may go back some day and try out a better algorithm. But, then again, I may not.

• I made an all-kosher dinner at my place with my ever-expanding collection of kosher cooking implements. I made my first bread puddings: a chocolate one that turned out really well, if a bit sweet, and a spicy fruit one with strawberry-rhubarb jam, rapsberry jam, and cayenne pepper sauce that was too weird to eat. I also made haddock filets with salt, pepper, butter, and onions, which turned out very nicely, and topped it off with rice.

• I wrote a poem in the middle of writing an email. I really get satisfaction from composing poetry on the fly, whether it's good or not.

• I wrote a Perl program to solve the August 11 Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle. It was "Think of a certain 6-letter word. Move its first letter to the end to get another 6-letter word, then move its first letter to the end to get yet another 6-letter word. Three 6-letter words in all -- what are they? Will says he's aware of two different answers." I found stable/tables/ablest and estrin/strine/trines, and I sent that in. Estrin is not in too many dictionaries (I really had to dig to find it in some medical dictionary), so that one wasn't one of their two answers. The other answer they listed was stripe/tripes/ripest.

• I made a Perl program to generate random Boggle boards. It uses the distribution of the cubes from the Boggle Deluxe set. I ended up coming up with a neat way to have two people be able to look at the same board (each board is uniquely identified by a couple of variables that you can pass as parameters). This was also the first Perl program that I made using the CGI Perl module, and this was the first web page that I made using tables in HTML.

• Okay, this isn't really something I did, but it's really neat. A while back, I helped with the beta test for a new Looney Labs game, and I wrote up some thoughts about it on their mailing list for it. Nanofictionary came out this month, and, much to my surprise, I ended up in the credits in the rules for the game. Pretty sweet.

• I broke in my kosher food processor with an experiment with salmon burgers. I took some salmon filets, cut the skin off, and put them in the food processor. I added bread, onions, lime juice, fresh dill from the garden, and fresh chives from the garden. I made a sauce for it that had mayonnaise as a base and added lime juice, dill, and chives. I didn't really care for it too much, but the people I fed it to really liked it and happily ate the leftovers the next day.

• I made a stupid little name generator in Perl where it would come up with a random word based on a specified pattern of vowels and consonants. It was easy to write, and it worked correctly the first time, which I think means I might be getting the hang of this Perl stuff. I'm really ready to do some more Perl programming, especially as soon as my Perl books from Amazon finally get here, since they were apaprently lost by UPS the first time.

• I wrote the first part of a story, using the name generator to come up with some names. I posted it in my LiveJournal and got some useful comments. It's nowhere near finished, though, so I'm going to hold off on posting it on my web site for a while.

• I made two things in one night, both of which turned out too strong for my tastes. I made an onion soup. I sauteed onions in canola oil, then I added water, a few radishes, dried basil, salt, and (too much) Worcestershire sauce. However, it was salvaged the next day when I mixed it up with some mashed potatoes. Yum. I also made my first-ever jelly, which I didn't realize it would be at the time. I took frozen orange juice concentrate, added frozen cranberries and blueberries, cooked it for a while, and then added (too much) rum. It gelled up very nicely, as I've heard that cranberries and blueberries are both high in pectin. One taste of it told me that it just wasn't for me, however. I salvaged it, though, by making it into a jelly roll, which actually turned into a jelly roll crumble. I made the Betty Crocker jelly roll recipe with some added cocoa powder and sugar, but the roll ended up coming apart after cooling, so I just layered it with the jam. I took it to a party, and at least four people told me that they liked it, and I found a home for the excess jam. So, it turned out well. And I think I have confidence to make some more jam, especially if I don't have to can it.

• I put something semi-substantial (well, more so than the "Woot" that was there before) on my jmac.org home page. It's a list of links to all of my Perl web scripts that are hosted on that machine.

Watch for Issue 03 coming out 1 October 2002.