Kevin's Compendium of Useless Fantasia

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Let's take a look at what I did in May and June:

• I made chicken thighs in onions, lemon juice, red curry paste, tamari, and honey. Yum.

• I made a Perl program to solve the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle for 27 April 2003:

  Take the word ELONGATED. You can rearrange the letters into three 3-letter words: LAD, EGO, TEN. If you set these one under the other, you'll have what's called a double-word square, with LET, AGE, DON reading vertically. Now, take the 16 letters of THE CONVERSATIONS, the title of a book by Michael Ondaatje, who also wrote "The English Patient." Rearrange them into a 4 X 4 double-word square, using only common uncapitalized English words.

  My first attempts at solving this were turning up way too many false positives, some using uncommon words and some not following the rules. So I used a pared-down word list and spent some time thinking about the algorithm. I came up with a very nice recursive algorithm the program found the answer:

  VAST
ECHO
IRON
NETS


• I started the Jotto Puzzle of the Day Web site. Every day for almost two months now I've been putting up a Jotto puzzle generated by a Perl program that I wrote a while ago. In the beginning, I was trying to provide an annotated solution to each puzzle. However, that's pretty time consuming, and I haven't added any solutions in a while. I may start that up again.

• A friend was over the limit on her Yahoo! Mail account but didn't want to individually download thousands of messages. So I made a Perl script with the help of WWW::Mechanize to download all of her email. It appears to work just fine, and she has now been able to get below her limit by deleting a bunch of email that she now has a saved copy of.

• At the request of a friend, I made a program to automatically change the security level of old LiveJournal entries, something you can't do with the standard client without going back and editing every single entry. The first version I made I put up as a form on a Web site and posted about it. It got massively swamped and just about killed the server I was on. So I shut it down and retooled it and released it as command-line script. I've had quite a few people request it, but I haven't heard back from anyone who has used the script.

• I made pizza. Whole wheat dough. Olive oil, 2 minced habaneros, granulated garlic, onion powder, mozzerella-flavored veggie shred (cheese substitute). It was pretty decent. I should make that again.

• I made pizza with avocado, salt, a little paprika, lemon juice, garlic powder, and onion powder. I put the avocado stuff on the pizza (over olive oil), then put vegan cheese (cheddar flavor) on. Unlike the veggie shred, I found out that the vegan cheese is not meant to be melted. In fact, it didn't melt; it just burned. It was pretty inedible. Lesson definitely learned.

• I held my second annual Boggle tournament. I made a T-shirt with a printed iron-on transfer for last year's winner. The front said that it was a Boggle champion's shirt with the date and location of the tournament, all in a little circle on the breast. On the back were two pictures from the rules of the original Boggle, showing RIGHT and WRONG ways to find words on a Boggle board. I also made up the iron-on transfers to make a shirt for this year's winner. I haven't actually made the shirt, yet, since I ended up winning it myself.

• Also for the Boggle tournament, I made a program to generate tournament seating. Last year, I just randomized it with a deck of cards every round. This had some fairly skewed results (as should have been expected), with some people playing each other several times and some people playing each other not at all. I made a program that would randomly generate a bunch of seatings, but then would choose the best one based on how evenly people played each other. It turned out fairly well, I think, and it also was nice to have the seatings already determined in advance.

• I made boneless skinless chicken breats with soy sauce, red wine, ginger powder, and dried lemongrass. I put this over white rice cooked with turmeric.

• I was a bit upset and so wrote a fairly intense poem on the subject of nad kicking. I read it at a friend's story reading event. I got a couple of weird looks and a couple of compliments on it, so I consider it a success. I really should write more poetry. I really should write more, period.

• I made German chocolate cake for a friend's birthday. I followed the Betty Crocker recipe, except I cooked the frosting a bit too long, but no one was able to tell, and I think it might have added a richer flavor to it, anyway. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it, even people who don't normally like cake. And the birthday boy said it was perfect, exactly what German chocolate cake should be.

• I made dinner for a friend. Blackened tilapia, salad, and corn on the cob. For dessert, my friend pitted cherries, and I improvised a cobbler, somewhat referring to a blueberry cobbler recipe from Betty Crocker (I really love that book). Followed the book for the topping. For the fruit, I put the cherries, sugar, a little water, vanilla, cornstarch, and cinnamon in a saucepan and cooked and stirred until it thickened and boiled. Then I put that in an 8-inch baking dish, put the topping on, then baked at 400 for 25 minutes. Let it cool a bit and yum. It would have been even better with some good vanilla ice cream.

• I made lime Bavarian (guess where the recipe comes from?) with Hip Whip, a vegan, natural-ingredient whipped topping. The flavor was good, but the texture was not as good as with real whipping cream. It was pleasantly tart, though. I think I'll cave and make it with real whipping cream next time.