24 October 1997: Puzzlers

Friday, 24 October 1997:

Puzzlers

The first reactions I got to approaching people about talking in our morning development meeting at work were concerns that either the project I had in mind was too trivial ("there's nothing to talk about"), or that they were still working out the details and wanted to wait until they had more to talk about.

Hopefully this morning's meeting nipped that in the bud. Bottom line is, half an hour is not much time, and as long as we go into the meeting with a plan, I think we'll fill it up with no trouble at all. We even ran a little over today, talking about one of those "trivial" projects.

After work I did a little shopping. Bought some new jeans (I manage to wear the old ones out pretty quickly; I'm not sure how), and some scented candles (yes, I like both scented candles and incense, though I'm conservative in my use of each).

I also went to look for a copy of Galapagos. I didn't see it in the Mac section at Comp USA (the second store I went to), but then it struck me to look in the PC section. Well, there is was, on a CD-ROM with both Mac and PC versions. Bastards. No wonder Mac users order so much from MacWarehouse or like places, if the retail stores don't even stock them properly.

I promptly came home to play it for a little while and got stuck on the second puzzle. Galapagos' puzzles involve timing, to some extent, which is not a skill I'm very good at on computers. I need to be able to sit and think about things; this may be why I like MYST but don't care for Marathon. I think Galapagos will require a lot of trial-and-error on my part. However, it's not an especially violent game (your 'character' can get killed, but through impersonal means rather than hostile aliens), so people who like puzzles might enjoy this one.

My journal has been getting more hits over the last few weeks - and not just from search engines, either. Although obviously some of the entries have been accessed via search engines, since I can't figure out why else there would be much interest in my September 24 entry. It's pretty neat to see the hit counts go up. I think I'm getting about 6-10 readers of my most recent entries as they go up, which is about how many I once said would make me ecstatic. Is this ecstasy? :-)

My games page has also been getting many hits since it went up less than a month ago. It's not a very profound page, so I imagine I don't get many repeat visitors.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)