WHAT IS YOUR (WORD) GAME?

As I spend most of my time at home, I find myself much involved in various word games on the smartphone or the laptop computer.  Before the pandemic, I regularly played Lexulous, as a Facebook app, with the only player I can count in the environment, and Words With Friends.  Through one of those ads that kept bombarding the WWF interface, I checked out Scrabble Go and am kinda addicted to it.  I may be wrong but it seems the tiles in Scrabble Go are purposely distributed as really lousy, to nudged players toward using the diamonds collected, or worse (for the players) cough up real money to buy power-ups etc.  The ads are a pain, too, but I just used that down time to close my eyes briefly.  In the Scrabble Go world, good players seem to be difficult to come by.  For me, a good player is someone who moves regularly and not once a day, but also someone with an average point per move similar to mine.

At times, opponents in Scrabble Go took too long to move so I recently resorted to playing Duel games.  Instead of having all the time in the world for each move, there's a time limit, go pass that limit and you lose your turn.  The board is also smaller and the game is limited to five moves.  It sounds stressful and it is.  Not a great way to relax but I hate waiting.  I do wonder if the players are real people.  Words With Friends have that, computer players, somehow I find it unappealing.  I remember in the old days playing chess against computer opponents.  The first few levels the computer would take forever to move, or make quick, totally dumb moves.  Then at some point it got really smart and never make mistakes so there's just no point of playing.  Some of the opponents in Scrabble Go Duel are like that.  They are really awful and try to spell long words but miss the high-score tiles altogether.  Then there are "people" who use fancy words that are found only in some medical dictionaries.

I miss playing the crossword puzzles in the free newspaper Metro New York, which not long ago combined with the other free daily news, AM New York.  I actually play the puzzle in both papers but I prefer Metro's because the grids are larger, easier on these old eyes.  I was really happy that the combined newspaper kept the larger format, same puzzles.  Now that I'm stuck at home as a non-essential non-employee, I cannot pick up the newspaper any more.  Recently I went online and printed out the puzzle for that day, plus the day before.  Yeah, I'm an old-fashioned guy who still prefer pencil and paper.  When you do the puzzle interactively, it's too tempting to click some button to get the answer.  I have lots of pencils anyway.  I rescue them whenever I see one laying on the street.  Happy Word Playing!

Second Home USA

Enjoy the following slideshow of photos from my second home in the U.S. Click the speech balloon gadget in the lower left to show or hide the text. Walk through the slideshow manually is recommended as I find the speed is too fast to read the text.

All I Really Need To Know

...I Learned While Playing Yahoo!Games Daily Crosswords.

Well, it is far from the truth. I just couldn't help making reference to one of my favorite book, Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. I did learn a few new things of late primarily from playing crosswords.

• Eero Saarinen was the architect responsible for the St. Louis Arch. Sure I was there twice and maybe even read his name on some plaque but now that it took me a few seconds to look him up in Wikipedia, the name will stick better in my memory. The clue wisely read Young Saarinen because Eero's father Eliel was the designer who influenced him in sculpture and furniture design. Eero, a name any crosswords makers must love. Chances are my sister in St. Louis knows all about him already.
  
• Eider is a type of seaduck. Supposedly, the quack is famous for its down (feather).
• A hasp is the metal plate, one end hinged, the other end usually rounded at the corners, and slotted in the middle for the thingamajig to pass through, through which a padlock's whatamacallit would then go through. The clue simply read padlock adjunct. I didn't solve it directly but rather through the connecting words. I had to look it up in the dictionary afterward.
• Ides, not to be thought of as the plural form of ide (whatever id is), is the middle of the month, in the Roman calendar, i.e. the 15th day for some month and some other day on shorter or longer months.
• for the nonce means for the time being. Never heard of that phrase before. Maybe I should go out more often. Of course, it could be just things that only happen in crosswords, such as some words in Scrabble. For the life of me, I can never fully understand the word qua or when to use it. I think the teachers in Snoopy movies say it all the time, usually five in a row.
  

Crossword Express

It's been more than a week already and I still don't have the offer for the File & Print job. I guess I'll just have to wait for the bureaucrats to do their bureaucratic business.

So a few months ago, I had a renewed interest in doing crossword puzzles. Naturally, I wanted to make them myself. It's one thing to do them and it's quite another to make them. Years ago when I first started playing the puzzle and wanted to make them, I found it to be very difficult. Making the classroom puzzles, in which the shape of the puzzle is not a square and words are not continuous, with one-letter boxes with no definitions allowed, is easy. Making newspaper style where there's a symmetry to the puzzle, with the shortest word length of three, is much harder. I recall buying a DOS crossword maker on 5.25" floppy disk. I even filled out some form, wrote a paper check, mailed the whole thing in, and waited a few weeks for the ware to arrive. I do not recall ever trying the software seriously. I don't know what happened then, I was a single guy with an undemanding job, with no family and few other responsibilities.

Flash forward to the year 2007. This time around I need a Mac program to make the puzzle. There are not that many choices, really. Again, to make classroom puzzles there are a few choices, but I can even use online program like http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/CrissCrossSetupForm.html , no need to spend any money. My search ended with Crossword Express OS X (cwe OS X). While the interface is somewhat awkward and not pretty, it's a strong program that allows for customized dictionaries in addition to standard ones. Choose an existing grid or make your own, plug in some words that you want to be included with their definitions, then cwe OS X will fill in the rest for you. For my purpose, I needed to make a puzzle that includes words about my office life, the CNA exam, and computing in general. I entered the relevant terms and definitions into three separate dictionaries, then used cwe OS X's Construct Special Interest Puzzles feature to make the puzzle. I chose my three custom dictionaries as three sources for the program to draw words from, then whatever open is filled with words drawn from the English dictionary. cwe OS X actually can handle up to four custom dictionaries. If I had more time, I would have created a dictionary just for words related to the Mac.

The puzzle below, printed to poster size, is the current occupant of the whiteboard I usually decorated with my cartoons. I had much fun making up the definitions. For example, "You should get yours up-to-date" is the clue for RESUME. I'm not sure if the acronym PODS made it in, but I know I define it as "It's supposed to help you plan your career, if you are still here a year from now." PODS is the web-based tool to carry out performance review, which in my opinion is just a waste of time. Ideally, the puzzle should be about 21x21 in size and not have one-letter, undefined "word". Unfortunately, such puzzle would contain very few references to the three custom dictionaries. If I have more time, I would define more terms for the custom dictionaries, perhaps then 21x21 puzzle would be better. For now, I have to be content with this Huge gride and the many one-letter undefined words.

For security purpose, I've Photoshopped the picture that represents the puzzle and clues to not have some references to corporate info.