I've been hooked on MTN's televised scrabble since Kate Bauer and I stumbled across it a few weeks back. The only on-line mention I can find of it is an old review in a student paper.

I'm thinking of getting a group of folks together to play as a team semi-regularly, but while that's getting setup I decided to start archiving the games, because that's the sort of thing I do, I guess.

I'm a happy Netflix user. Before I used Netflix I used to maintain a list of movies I wanted to see. Now I just use my Netflix queue for the same purpose. The only problem with my new system is by the time a recommended movie goes from the back of the queue to the front, about a year, I've long since forgotten who recommended it.

If Netflix offered a way for me to put a little note next to my own queue entries, I'd better be able to track who recommended movies or just why they made it on to my queue in the first place. Netflix does offer a feature they call their two cents system wherein you can write reviews of movies, which other members on your friends list can view. That's not really what I'm looking for though. I just want some space I can make notes to myself -- not for others.

There's a ton of poker time software out there and even some nifty looking dedicated hardware. At the games I attend we'll usually use a computer for the timing, but often there isn't one in the room and no one wants to bring over a laptop. However, there is almost always a TV with DVD player in whatever room gets temporarily re-purposed as the game room.

That got me thinking that a DVD that could serve as a poker timer would work in all the rooms in which we play poker and would offer these other benefits:

The policy here at the UnBlog is that I only write up things I've created -- not just things I've seen. Last month, however, most all my creative output went into work, with very little time and energy left for side projects. I've got a few nearing completion, but nothing worth writing about yet.

I did manage to get a few small projects done -- some of which involved a little ingenuity:

Last weekend I was camping and the person buying the food bought frozen pizzas. I couldn't think of any good way to cook them until I saw we had some aluminum foil. We defrosted the pizzas and cut them into slices. Slices were places face-to-face, wrapped in two layers of tin foil, and then tossed into the coals of our fire. After ten minutes or so they were fished out, and they'd turned into perfectly palatable pizza-pocket-alikes. It's not good camping food, but its better than raw frozen pizza.

When getting or giving directions I always prefer a map to written directions. Maps are great because they don't become useless if you make a wrong turn. With a good map you can always find where on it you are and can always build a new route to your destination.

Unfortunately, one can't always produce a map on the spot -- especially a good map. In those cases you have to fall back on written directions. I've given and received plenty of directions, some good, but mostly bad. I'm thinking a list of guidelines to use when vetting directions could help.

When editing source files checked out from CVS I sometimes want to prevent them from going back in to source control without further edits. Until now I've just used // FIXME comments and have tried to remember to grep for FIXMEs before committing the files back.

Problem is others use FIXME comments, and sometimes I forget to grep. So I've tweaked our CVSROOT files to prevent custom FIXME tags from going in to source control.

For years I've been using garble to pull track and way point data off of my Garmin eTrex GPS. Unfortunately it produces data in a completely non-standard format. In the past I've written a little custom software to turn the garble data into maps.

Now I'm using http://gpsvisualizer.com to produce much nicer maps, but it takes data in the superior GPX format. The GPSBabel software will pull way point data off of Garmin GPSs and puts them into GPX, but it doesn't handle tracks.

I was just digging through some old files, and I came across my first web pages. They were hand written HTML done in late 1995. Among the worst of them design-wise was my 'Adopt a Vegetarian' page. It was a joke started in October 1995 wherein non-vegetarians would "adopt" vegetarians and agree to eat twice as much meat, so as to balance the vegetarian out.

The Adopt a Vegetarian website was up before most of the world had even heard of the web, and certainly before folks learned not to take anything on-line too seriously. The volume of vitriolic hate mail I got was amazing. I wish I'd have saved them. The site existed during the period when the mainstream press was writing a lot of "gee whiz, look at this crazy website" articles. I ended up getting written about in a few different publications including Der Spiegel (wikipedia), which I've got clipped and stored somewhere.

Approval voting is an alternate voting system that has many benefits as compared to Instant Run-Off Voting. For years I've been running the on-line officer elections for the local campus chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery. Last year I talked them into switching to approval voting (even though it probably violates their charter), and it worked really well. Their elections have kicked off again, and once again I'm hosting them and using my voting script.