Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

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• I wrote some poetry based on Dictionary.com's Word of the Day. The intent was to have a daily writing prompt. I didn't do too many of them, but I'm pleased with what I did do. I subscribed to the Word of the Day RSS feed through my LiveJournal, so I see it every day in case I feel like writing more poetry based on it.

  Check it out on my poetry page.

• I made a small Perl program, dictionaryize.pl, to take a list of words and turn them into links to their Dictionary.com definitions. It's a trivial script, but it saved me time, which is nice.

• I used my online dictionary and some simple searches to find various lists of words in the English language. Then I used dictionaryize.pl to make them suitable for posting in my LiveJournal.

  double u:

  continuum
  duumvir
  duumvirate
  lituus
  menstruum
  muumuu
  residuum
  vacuum
  

  double w (double double u):

  arrowwood
  arrowworm
  bowwow
  glowworm
  hollowware
  powwow
  screwworm
  slowworm
  strawworm
  swallowwort
  willowware
  yellowware
  yellowwood
  

  triple letter:

  brrr
  wallless
  

  four doubles:

  successlessness
  

• At the request of the editor, I submitted some code to go with my Jotto article mentioned last month. That's the extent of the progress on that.

• I went to the long-awaited release party for New Genre #3. It has my name in it, listed as an intern. This issue was the one that I helped proofread and edit. I look forward to starting work on #4, but that might not be for another six months or so.

• I found an outdated link on the Car Talk Web site. I found the new link and sent it in. I got a response back thanking me. Yes, it's fairly lame, but I wanted to put it in here anyway.

• I made an RSS feed for the Compendium and set it up so that people on LiveJournal could use it. I added the first four issues at once. This fifth issue is going to be the first "real" update. There is a link to the RSS feed at the top of this page.

• The directory for the Bookbuilders of Boston came out. I have my name in the credits for it since I did some proofreading for it.

  Editing, Kevin Jackson-Mead
  

• I made stuffing and deviled eggs for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's house.

  I made two kinds of eggs. One was hot and had mayonnaise, chili powder, cayenne, and paprika mixed in with the egg yolks. I also sprinkled some cayenne on top. The other was not hot and had mayonnaise, lemon juice, and salt mixed in with the egg yolks. Both were good, but I got more compliments on the spicy ones. I was inspired by an article I saw in a magazine, but I didn't actually follow the recipes when the time came to make the eggs.

  The stuffing was a modified version of the Betty Crocker recipe. Celery and onions cooked in margarine. Added dark rye bread crumbs, salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, and apples. I got compliments on the stuffing from the people who generally like stuffing. I liked it as well. This was my first time making stuffing, and I'm certainly going to make it again. I think next time I'll leave it uncovered a bit near the end of baking so that it is a little more crisp.

• I made beef jerky for the first time. I cut up sandwich steaks and marinated them overnight in soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, hot pepper sauce, chili powder, garlic powder, white pepper, black pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, salt, and brown sugar.

  I put it on a broiling pan in the oven at 170 degrees for 5 hours. Some pieces are spicier than others, but it all tastes like beef jerky, which is good. I will definitely make this again.

• I cooked up some boneless chicken thighs in the leftover marinade from the beef jerky. At the suggestion of my dinner companion, I added in a can of black beans. It was pretty good, but it was extremely salty. I may try to use low-salt soy sauce for the next batch of beef jerky, or I may try to find some other way to cut the salt if I end up using the marinade again. After we ate it, my dinner companion suggested that sour cream might have been good with it. I will try that with the leftovers and see how it goes. This definitely goes in the do-again pile.

• Based on an idea from a friend, I made a program to play a Jotto variant, called X-Jotto, where the secret word is an unknown length from 3 to 8 letters. Here is the first game I played to test that it is actually playable:

  livid - 0
  creative - 2
  seven - 1
  wimpy - 1
  oblique - 3
  lower - 3
  belfry - 4
  robbery - 6
  snobbery - 6
  (then I started eliminating other letters)
  gooks - 1
  hajji - 0
  bubbly - 3
  adz - 0
  sex - 1
  (searching the word list for words containing o, b, e, r, y)
  *yobbery*
  

  Now I need to make easy versions of all of the dictionaries, so that I don't get words like yobbery if I don't want to.