Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

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

• A friend posed the following problem: What pair of synonyms are a Rot-13 of each other? I wrote a Perl program to solve this. I went for the longer words first, but it ended up being two three-letter words: vex and irk. It was interesting to see how many words were Rot-13 of each other. The longest Rot-13 pair I found was abjurer and nowhere. I didn't find anything longer, and I checked up through sixteen-letter words.
• I made orange chocolate mousse for dinner with a friend one night. I added grated orange peel in near the end of the process. It tasted a bit too strongly of orange for my tastes, but my dinner companion liked the level of the orange. I definitely like flavored mousses, but I've only ever made raspberry and orange. I'd like to experiment with some others.
• I used XML::RSS to make an RSS feed for the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle. I set it up so that it updates the feed every Sunday night at 11, in case they are late getting it up on the Web site.
• I'd been tossing around the idea of a grapefruit meringue pie for quite a while. I'd even had two sets of grapefruits go bad sitting around waiting for me to make the pie. Well, I finally made it. I just took a lemon meringue pie recipe and substituted grapefruit juice for lemon juice and grapefruit zest for lemon zest. It turned out nicely. If you didn't know it wasn't lemon, you probably wouldn't have noticed. I also made a French silk pie that same night. That's nothing new for me, but I once again learned that making two pies at once can be quite a workout.
• I went back and rewrote some of the testing code for the Jotto AIs. It's much nicer now, and it will be much easier and faster to run. I did a test run with the dumb AI, but I have yet to rewrite the smart AI and test that. I've gotten involved in other programming projects, so I'm not sure when I'll get back to this.
• I did my first bit of Perl consulting. A friend had some data in an Excel spreadsheet about how many days it took for his call center to close calls. He had the starting date and ending date, but it just computed the number of days, not taking weekends into account. So I used Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Date::Pcalc to write a Perl program to read the spreadsheet and calculate the average time to close certain categories of calls. I even put in functionality to take holidays into account, once I find out what the holidays for his business are. This is something he has to run every month, so I think it will be fairly useful.
• I wrote a haiku. It happened after a painful incident that occurred while folding laundry. Damned dryness and static electricity.
• Having recently made a meringue pie, I thought I'd make some meringue cookies. I don't really like them, but other people do. Plus, I thought it would be interesting to try. I followed a recipe to which I added a bit of cocoa powder. The recipe had the cookies bake at 275 for 20 minutes and then stay in the turned-off oven for an hour. They turned out to be exploding cookies. Very light and fragile. People seemed to like them, though. I confirmed that I didn't really care for them. If I'm going to be eating a cookie, I want a real cookie.
• I made a Web page to act as a front end for LiveJournal's export feature. The one offered by them only lets you download one month of your journal at a time. My front end lets you specify a range of months and downloads the whole thing. The next LiveJournal-related programming I want to do is make something that will allow you to download your whole journal, comments included.
• I made dinner (and leftovers for lunch) for myself. I made up white rice in one pot. In a skillet, I put a little bit of canola oil, chick peas, lemon juice, cinnamon, chili powder, and black pepper. After that had cooked for a while, I added some red wine. I put the beans on top of the rice. It was a very different taste, but it was yummy.
• I made some mango-pepper jam. I decided to use some pectin I got for Christmas. Instead of being activated by sugar, this pectin is activated by calcium. Instead of the 6 cups of sugar I might normally use for a batch, I only used 1 cup. I didn't add enough liquid near the end, though, so I only got 2 pints out of it, and it's really thick. Still, it actually tastes like mangoes and peppers instead of just tasting like mango-flavored sweetness. I put some on a peanut-butter sandwich, and it was really good. I am definitely pleased with this, so I think I will continue to use this pectin.
• I wrote a Perl program to help me solve the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle from 23 February 2003. "Think of a five-letter word, with the consecutive letters AL. Change the AL to an O, and the result is a four-letter word that means the opposite of the first one. What words are these?" The answer: valid and void.
• I joined a community on LiveJournal where a photo contest is held each week on a different theme. This has me taking more pictures. I have so far entered contests on the themes of reflections and sunsets. I enjoy taking pictures. Someday, I'll put up a gallery of some of my favorite ones.