malvasia bianca

Miranda had her first German lesson today. Which has taken me quite some time to arrange: while I’m reasonably good at getting around to trivialities, I’m not always so great at doing actual important stuff. So we’d been planning to get her foreign language lessons for a couple of years, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing much about it.

I did actually try to arrange something a year ago. At that time, she was more interested in French, so I did some googling and called a few numbers, but I didn’t find anything that seemed quite right. Not that I looked very hard – I should have followed up some of the possibilities more. Then I let it rest for a while, and when I asked her again, she’d decided that she’d rather learn German.

One of the other parents who helps out in the school library is from Germany; she gave me a few references. I didn’t do anything with them for a few months, but I eventually got around to sending some e-mails at the end of November.

We visited one potential class three weeks ago. It was a group lesson, and neither Miranda or I liked it at all, for different reasons: Miranda was quite nervous at the idea of being in a group where the teacher spoke almost entirely in German and the other kids already new something, while I didn’t like it because most of the kids apparently had no interest in paying attention and the teacher wasn’t doing much to fix that. Based on that, it seemed like individual lessons might be a better idea, so I exchanged a few more e-mails with somebody who was offering individual lessons. It took a few weeks for us to actually meet (everybody involved managed to come down with a cold), but Miranda finally had her first lesson yesterday.

Which went quite well. It was an hour-long lesson, the teacher was very friendly and sensitive to Miranda’s nervousness, and they covered a lot of stuff. And Miranda said she really enjoyed it. So early signs are good!

Sun gives us the week from Christmas to New Year’s as a holiday; this year, those days fall on Tuesdays, and they’re giving us Christmas Eve as well. And we’re not going anywhere over Christmas, nor is anybody visiting us.

This means that I have eleven solid days at home with no demands on my time. Has that happened since I left academia? I’ve certainly taken two-week vacations before, but those involved flying somewhere. And then there was the time I missed three weeks of work because of a flu that turned into pneumonia, but this break from work will (I hope!) be different. (Less vomit, for one.)

The mind boggles at the number of things that I could possibly do. In fact, I’m kind of scared of making a list or plans, because if I start, I will make one that is too long for me to accomplish even in that vast expanse of time, which will lead to disappointment. Some reading, some programming, some blogging, probably a fair amount of video game playing, probably a noticeable amount of going through long saved items in the feed reader. (Even if I keep my blog reading time constant, the amount of incoming posts will probably decrease.) And, of course, hanging out with my delightful daughter. (But she is eight years old, which means that she won’t be demanding my attention as frequently as she would have when she was younger.)

I am looking forward to it. Don’t get me wrong, I quite enjoy my job, but it is nice to be able to dive into a somewhat broader range of my interests at times.

Over the months of reading server usage states for the blog, I have noticed that many of the search results that bring people here include the word “bianca”. Hmm, I thought, I didn’t recall writing about “bianca red latex”. Is Bianca some character in a video game that I wrote about but have since forgotten?

It only dawned on me this weekend that the frequency of the word comes from the title of the blog. I am slow at times.

Though that did get me thinking: I should have an Xbox 360 arriving tomorrow, I plan to sign up for Xbox Live, so I will need a gamertag. (I believe that’s what account names for the service are called.) I normally use names that are relatively closely aligned with my real name, but I assume said service is popular enough that carlton, dbcarlton, etc. will be taken. But surely nobody has taken “malvasia bianca” as a gamertag? The idea of using a female-associated name on the service (which is apparently full of sexist, bigoted assholes) has a certain sick interest.

Not that I plan to play multiplayer much, if any.

From 37 Signals’ Getting Real:

People often spend too much time up front trying to solve problems they don’t even have yet. Don’t. Heck, we launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers! Since the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a 30-day gap to figure it out. We used that time to solve more urgent problems and then, after launch, we tackled billing. It worked out fine (and it forced us into a simple solution without unnecessary bells and whistles).

Not sure I would have thought of that strategy myself. Or had the courage to follow through if I did…

It looks like the Warriors are going to be more entertaining than the A’s this year; maybe I should change my TV-watching habits? Starting the season 0-6 was not so great, but getting back to a .500 record a mere 8 games later was quite impressive, and they’re now 11-8 after a very good comeback in tonight’s game.

I recently turned on “fast user switching” on the Mac, and just discovered that the login dialog keeps the previous user’s keyboard layout, instead of reverting to the system default. Which is a problem if the previous user uses Dvorak, the new user doesn’t, and the new user is typing in a password so she can’t even see that something’s gone wrong by looking at the characters that appear.

In fact, switching layouts and then switching users doesn’t work, either: it goes back to Dvorak! Weird. Changing to the Finder, then switching layouts, then switching users works.

To be fair, I can see how this sort of usability bug could slip through testing…

I was in an Apple store the day before Thanksgiving to get a replacement power brick (the cable on mine had started to fray), and decided to pick up a copy of Leopard while I was there: the .1 update was already out, and while I was worried about the keyboard freeze problems, it didn’t seem widespread enough to terrify me. So I installed it over Thanksgiving.

Works fine. I gather there’s nice stuff under the hood, but I don’t particularly care about any of it yet. (Though I may buy a USB hard drive for use with Time Machine – there’s nothing irreplaceable on the machine, but it still feels like the right thing to do.) The extra eye candy is stupid, and in particular I could do without the new low-contrast “important folders” design, but I’ll live. The guest account is a nice idea, and my father used it that same weekend.

The autostarting X server is an interesting idea, and I like it if for no other reason that it means that I only start X if I ssh to another machine (which I only do about half the time), reducing the number of times that I have to tell the computer “yes, I really do want to shut you down, even though an apparently incredibly precious X server is running”. Though I could do without the new Safari warning when I have the temerity to shut down the computer if I have multiple tabs open in my browser.

Nice to see SVG support in Safari. There’s a bit of focus weirdness that interferes with my Reader workflow; I hope some of that gets fixed, but it’s not a big deal.

Not really sure that I’ve gotten $129 worth of value, but not a bad experience.

I’m going through a low energy point in learning Japanese right now: I’m on the ninth chapter (out of thirty) in the textbook, I’m going at a rate that makes it pretty clear that I have at least a year to go before I’ll be done with the book (a year and a half looks more likely), and I’m past the stage where I’m reviewing old material (either grammar or vocabulary) but nowhere near getting a real payoff yet. No big crisis or anything – I knew this was going to take a while to pay off (I’m no longer seven years old, paired with an excellent teacher, or about to be living in a country that speaks the language), and this is a natural time to expect a down spot. Still, I might as well look at my workflow and see if there’s anything I can do to help improve my mood.

Actually, I started looking at the workflow a couple of weeks ago. One problem I was having was that it was taking me more and more time to review my vocabulary each night, and yet I still wasn’t sure I really really knew words when I claimed I did! Before I go further, I should explain my vocabulary flow: I have three bins of cards. One is a bin of words I know, one is a bin of words I don’t know. And there’s a third bin, of candidate words that I think I know, but need to prove it.

I go through the “words I don’t know” bin every day. But, on weekends, I also go through the cards in the “candidate words” bin, and every card either gets promoted to “known” or sent back to “unknown”. On the same day, I also go through the “unknown” bin and promote words that I’m comfortable with to the candidate bin.

The theory here is that having words spend a week in the candidate bin will give me time to forget them – it’s one thing to be able to remember a word night after night, and another thing to remember it after not seeing it for a week. I’ve been using variants of this system for decades, and it works pretty well. (I wish I could remember exactly how I used this system back when I was in college – was I using it just like this, or in a different way?)

The problems, though, were that I wasn’t sure spending a week in the candidate bin was long enough for me to forget words, and that also I would spend a noticeable amount of time going through words in the unknown bin that I actually knew pretty well. Fortunately, when you phrase it that way, the solution to at least the latter problem is pretty obvious: promote more frequently. (I was probably conflating the notions of transfer batch and processing batch.) The easiest way to do that is to introduce another bin, the “early candidate” bin; I can move words in there at any time, and then, on weekends, after clearing out the candidate bin, I promote everything from the early candidate bin to the candidate bin without looking at them.

Seems to be working well so far – it’s cut down the time I spend on vocabulary review each night, without any obvious cost. And it actually helps my first problem, too, since words are in one of the candidate bins for a week and a half on average instead of a week. If that’s not good enough, I guess I’ll introduce another candidate bin, to let words sit for (at least) two weeks before final approval instead of one.

That’s helping with the time I’m spending midweek. But, last week, I must have spent three or four hours studying, which is a pretty good-sized chunk of my weekend free time. And today, I really wasn’t excited about doing the exercises in the current chapter over again, as well as writing new vocabulary cards, going through the above candidate rigamarole, etc.

I’m not entirely sure about what to do with that, but at least part of the problem is that I’m trying to do too much at once on the weekends. (Especially on weekends when I’m starting a new chapter.) I think the lesson here is that I should just avoid doing everything in one sitting: I shouldn’t read through a chapter, do the exercises, sort through old vocabulary, and write down new vocabulary on a single day. There’s simply no need for me to do all of that at once: e.g. today I sorted through old vocabulary and wrote down new vocabulary, which was maybe an hour’s worth of work, so why not defer redoing the exercises until tomorrow? And, on weekends when I’m starting a chapter, maybe I can defer some of the work until midweek, or even the next weekend?

The down side of splitting that up is that it means that, on weekends when we have something planned to do, it will be hard to find time on both weekend days. Still, I don’t want to stay in a situation where I’m not looking forward to learning because of the quantity of work; if need be, it’s better to take three or four weeks for a single chapter than to push myself too hard, I’m fairly sure.

On a related note, Miranda and I looked at one German class today, and will probably look at another one next week; hopefully she’ll start lessons this month or next month.

I was happy when volume 11 of the DVD of Hikaru No Go included 5 episodes instead of 4 – more stuff, and we’ll make it through the qualifying tournament, right? Well, no: more stuff, but they leave us half way through Hikaru’s match versus Ochi. (Instead of stopping before the match, as would have happened if they’d included 4 episodes.) Grr…

From Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns (p. 20):

Once a set of implementation patterns has become habitual, I program faster and with fewer distracting thoughts. When I began writing my first set of implementation patterns (The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Prentice Hall 1996) I thought I was a proficient programmer. To encourage myself to focus on patterns, I refused to type a character of code unless I had first written down the pattern I was following. It was frustrating, like I was coding with my fingers glued together. For the first week every minute of coding was preceded by an hour of writing. The second week I found I had most of the basic patterns in place and most of the time I was following existing patterns. By the third week I was coding much faster than I had before, because I had carefully looked at my own style and I wasn’t nagged by doubts.

I was in Japantown in SF today, and picked up copies of Tales of Earthsea and Ocean Waves. (Both in Japanese, with English subtitles available.) The former of which I’m wondering about: no booklet, bad printing, claims to be region 1, and now that I’m poking around, I’m not convinced that there is a legitimate region 1 version available? We’ll see what the video/presentation quality is when I play it…

The latter is region 2; now I have to figure out how to play it as well. I’m planning to use my Mac for that; my options are:

1. Use an external DVD drive, set to region 2.
2. Use the internal DVD drive, with software that can read from all regions.
3. Use the internal DVD drive, set to region 2.
4. Use the internal DVD drive, with new firmware.

Which is more or less the current order that I’m planning to try them in: I have an external DVD drive around, so I might as well set it to region 2, but if I have to end up setting the internal DVD drive to region 2, no big deal – I don’t plan to start watching DVDs on it in general, and if I change my mind later, the machine will let me change regions back to region 1.

Still looking for a copy of Only Yesterday. I was thinking about doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I guess I’ll just throw it on that.

Some things that have passed through my earphones recently:

• In a recent lean blog podcast episode, Norman Bodek talked about how great mistakes are, because making a mistake is the best way to learn something.
• In an episode of The Cranky Middle Manager that I just listened to, Patrick Lencioni talked about how one of the signs of a bad job is that you can’t tell whether or not you’re doing a good job at it.

Everybody wants to do things right. But if you make a mistake, don’t freak out about it: notice that you made a mistake, figure out how to do things right the next time.

This has two hard parts: you have to notice that you made a mistake, and you have to not freak out about it. Which points at a problem with our educational system (among other aspects of our culture): it’s designed to get you to freak out about making mistakes, without giving you nearly enough tools to help you notice that you’ve done it. As math teachers all know, telling students to check their work isn’t sufficient support; helping students develop the skills to notice when they’ve made a mistake is hard, and I suspect that attacking them when they screw up probably isn’t the best way to go about it.

Of course, while making mistakes is all well and good from a learning perspective, we don’t want to go too far with that. Which is why, as Bodek continues, we should distinguish between mistakes and defects. Making mistakes is all well and good, but we don’t want other people to suffer from them. This is where poka yoke devices come in: they help improve quality by making it as easy as possible for people to notice when something is going wrong.

The big news around here for the last week has been the oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The news coverage has been all about whether or not it was the fault of the pilot or of a machinery malfunction: train wreck management, or at least train wreck news coverage, at its best. I have no idea what really happened there, but I hope the actual investigation is focusing more on learning about what went wrong and preventing this in the future than on figuring out whom to point fingers at.

(I can’t remember where I read this – Gerald Weinberg somewhere, maybe? – but if you really feel a need for a rule on how to point fingers, here’s one: if you aren’t authorized to sign off on a purchase for X dollars, then you’re not ultimately responsible for a mistake that costs your company X dollars. Again, I don’t want to excuse defects, but people higher up in the company should be growing an environment that minimizes the chance of defects happening at an unacceptable frequency.)

I would seem to be more confused than normal these days. Which, in the past, has frequently been a good sign; maybe my brain is figuring something out? Or maybe I’m just clueless. Anyways, I present to you a random collection of thoughts, which may or may not be related to each other in some way.

• At work, I think we’re doing a reasonable job of adding new features. Though I’m sure there’s room for improvement.
• I also think we’re doing a reasonable job of fixing bugs: acceptance test failures are way down, and we’re even successfully attacking sporadic bugs and old, thorny bugs.
• Not so sure about code maintainability: there’s even some evidence to suggest that our code maintainability has, in some areas, gotten worse recently.
• Code maintainability is harder to measure than features and bugs. And there’s less external pressure to get it right, so not surprising that it’s fallen by the wayside. Because of our successes in other areas, and because we’re doing a better job of planning this release than the last one, though, we have some time to attack it.
• I wish I were better at helping various teams that I’m part of improve our processes.
• One-on-ones are a good idea, even (especially?) if you don’t know what you’ll get out of them. And the more frequently you have them, the lower the pressure, which is a big help to everybody.
• The book I’m currently reading at work is Matthew May’s The Elegant Solution. Which is reminding me of some aspects of lean that I hadn’t been focusing on, especially on the “respect for people” side.
• Having the team all focused on the same, small-granularity tasks is wonderful in terms of making concrete progress in ways where our work reinforces each other and matches business value. Not necessarily so great in terms of letting people, say, focus on what they do best or define their own job.
• One thing that May talks about is the power of opposing goals (make a car faster and get better mileage and lighter and cheaper by these specific amounts), and the evils of satisficing. Simultaneous satisfying all your goals sounds wonderful if you can do it; I wish I knew how. I suspect that Toyota has some very useful techniques to this end.
• Alexia Bowers gave a good examples of meetin opposing goals, if I’m remembering the podcast correctly.
• The book before last that I read was a guide to the ToC thinking tools. (See also It’s Not Luck.) Do these actually work? My brain is strangely resistant to even giving them a try.
• I think I’m getting better at not talking in meetings, about chiming in and then letting other people argue for a while. Gratifying that, not infrequently, other people make the arguments that I would have made were I talking.
• I stayed home on Friday, because Miranda was sick, and called into two meetings. Both of which were very frustrating. I think part of it was that I missed some of the cues of the flow of the meeting, and part of it was that I wasn’t very good at explaining, or even seeing, how we were talking past each other. (I did think of an evaporating cloud to explain one of the conflicts after the fact, for better or for worse.)
• I wish I spent more time talking to people in other parts of Sun.
• What do I want to do when I grow up?
• After taking a break for a few years, I’ve gone to one conference each of the last two years, and gotten a lot out of each of them. I should continue this going forward. (And possibly even ramp it up a bit, since if there are further Agile Open Californias, I’m not going to stop going to them.) Where should I go next year?
• What communities do I want to be part of? What does it mean to be part of those communities?
• What teams am I currently part of? Do those teams behave how I think a team should behave? If not, how should I behave?

I could probably ramble on in this vein for quite some time; time to go to bed. Happy Armistice Day, all.

Watching Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk was an excellent use of 19 minutes of my time; if you don’t know the examples (both historical and present day) that have motivated his recent work, you’re missing something.

To all you Wii owners, I add my voice to the chorus of recommendations for Zack & Wiki. I’m not sure whether to call it a point-and-click adventure game or a puzzle game: it’s a sequence of set pieces all revolving around manipulating your environment to get to where you can open a treasure chest. Say you, for example, see a chest behind a door surrounded by bad guys. If you just go down there, you’ll die, so you go around the side passages until, say, you find an item that you can use to distract them. But the door is locked; you need a key. Oh, there’s a key hanging from a peg that you can’t reach; can you find an item that will let you reach up there?

The pointing and clicking to move and examine is, of course, done with the wiimote. But using items is also done with the wiimote, and is one of the better uses of its motion sensing: you hold the remote like would hold the actual item, and turn it or shake it or flip it or whatever to cause the item to do what you want.

We’re all playing; the puzzles are usually too hard for Miranda to figure out completely on her own, but she likes watching us and giving us suggestions, and then replaying the levels on her own later. I suspect that the levels will soon be hard enough that Liesl and I won’t be able to solve them independently, and will need to both work together to solve some of the tougher ones.

Something new, and the game isn’t getting nearly the publicity or shelf space of some other titles, so I wanted to help spread the word. It’s even a bit cheaper than your typical game.

Okay, my stylesheet is mostly back: I’ve turned off comment formatting idiocy, restored my list bullets, turned off double justification, bumped the text back up to a non-microscopic size. I left the widths as-is, though, this time: I wish it were a bit wider, but I can deal with it, and it doesn’t look so bad on this computer. (I’ll see what it looks like on the mac.) Hmm, looks like I reordered the sidebar last time; I certainly don’t need 38 months of archive links right at the top of the sidebar, do I? (It would seem that I’ve been at this for a while; many thanks to all of you for putting up with me!) I’ll go move that, too.

One of these days, when I have some free time, I’ll go and look for a new theme. Though the last time or two when I did that, I just ended up back where I started. Which is okay, nothing wrong with the default one.

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. Seems to have gone fine; the fancy window decoration stuff still doesn’t work, but I still don’t care. And, in a fit of industriousness, I’ve just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.3. (I even decided to switch to managing the checkout via subversion, just for kicks.) Now time to go and fiddle with stylesheet details, I guess…

Warning: this post consists of discussion of management of queues that matter only to myself, and is therefore extremely unlikely to be interesting to anybody else. Despite which I insist on writing it, because of my excessive fascination with the effects of and management of queues.

Two months ago, when discussing my lists of saved items in Google Reader, I claimed that:

my bet is that I’ll be down to 50 items in another couple of months, and will be down to 10 items in half a year.

Which, two months later, turns out to be false. I’m down to 89 items, and the only reason why the number is under 100 is because I took a sick day today. (My brain is not up to programming, but blogging and blog reading are not so demanding.) The tags that I’m currently using are:

• blog: 4 items. (Would be longer were it not for my last post.)
• commented: 5 items. (A bit longer than normal.)
• flash-game: 8 items.
• long: 6 items.
• podcast: 11 items.
• read: 0 items. (That’s the imperative form of the verb, not the present or past tense.)
• recommendation: 33 items.
• think: 10 items.
• video: 12 items.

The numbers add up; as is normally the case, I don’t have anything double-tagged. (Other than numerical tags used for indexing purposes, which I’m not worrying about here.)

These lists have a different feel from each other. The simplest is “read”: that’s a temporary overflow area, nothing should stay in there for more than a day or so, it’s usually empty. The categories “blog” and “commented” are short-term queues for a specific purpose. (Well, they should be: all the current posts sitting in “blog” are from September. I should do something about that. Hmm, I’ll go and delete one of them right now!) Some of “podcast” fits into the specific, short-term category, too.

There are also queues of stuff that I want to get around to going through, but which is too long to fit into my normal rhythm: “flash-game”, “long”, “video”. (Some of “podcast” fits in here, too.) I’ve been making my way through that: these days, items that take 15 minutes or so to process don’t last in there for very long, but longer stuff can stay there for a while. Even so, the numbers in these categories are dwindling, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it takes a year to go through it all. (Hmm, does that add up? A net removing of one every two weeks? Seems plausible, but hopefully I can do a bit better than that.)

Looking at those three queues, it’s not clear to me that they’re the most useful choice anymore: am I getting anything out of segregating them based on content type? Maybe I should merge them all into “long”? Or maybe have “long” and “medium” categories, where “medium” means “about 15 minutes”? Or maybe I should put items of 15 minutes or less into “read”, and accept that occasionally items will stay in there for up to a week? Hard to say; the flip side is that I do like to have categories that don’t get much larger than about 10 items, so if I have reason to feel that way, then I shouldn’t merge them just yet. So I’ll leave them as-is for now, but I probably will merge them in a few months.

And then there’s “recommendation” and “think”. These, especially the former, are the big sinks. I use “recommendation” for blog posts that mention a book that I might want to read, a CD I might want to buy, etc., while “think” is for things that I’m considering doing: upgrading my WordPress installation, taking Alexander Technique lessons, learning a new way to tie a tie, various random stuff.

Those two queues don’t move very fast at all. My rate of reading books is dreadfully slow these days, for example, and I have other sources of book recommendations than blogs, so it’s a rare month when I knock off more than two or maybe three books of the recommendation list, while I can just as easily add two or three new recommendations back on. Similarly, I buy a new CD every week or two these days, but a lot of those are from artists that I’ve discovered elsewhere or artists that I already know I like and am working through the back catalog of. (Fortunately, or rather “fortunately”, I don’t subscribe to many blogs that give me good music recommendations.) To make things worse, some of the posts contain lists of recommendations where I’m interested in more than one item on the list.

Honestly, I’m not sure if the “recommendation” queue is growing or shrinking these days. And its size rather stands out. I should attack both of those problems by breaking it up into multiple categories; that makes since, after all, since I drain the different sorts of recommendations at different rates. Let me go and do that right now…

Okay, I’m back. It turns out that the oldest 8 saved items all fit into that category, which is further evidence that it was a bit out of control. (It would have been the oldest 10 if I hadn’t just shed a few.) The former “recommendation” category has turned into:

• book: 18 items.
• music: 9 items.
• recommendation: 7 items.

So now I’m left with three decent-sized categories instead of one large one; that’s better. And one of the remaining ones is still the largest category on the list! I should clearly spend more time reading books.

I guess I should make another prediction, if for no other reason than that it will let me continue saying false things. Over the last two months, the list has more than shrunk in half, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep that up. I’ll predict that, over the next two months, the list will shrink by 20 items, that I’ll eventually reach a steady state of 20 items in total, and that it will take me a year to reach that steady state.

• xkcd:
• One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.)
• Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.)
• Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.)
• I don’t have much to say about The Wealth of Networks, other than to second Lawrence Lessig’s recommendation and to say that it’s useful to be reminded that, from the point of view of mainstream economy taking a snapshot of one isolated state the market, copyright makes no sense. (The book is available for free, by the way.)
• Synesthesia meets color blindness.

Also, some notes to myself: these are links that have stuck around as saved items in my blog reader where I can’t imagine what will either trigger me to act on the information therein yet where I want to keep them around somewhere. So I’m moving them here.

• Ergonomic keyboard recommendations.
• Martin Fowler on board games.
• Zelda reorchestrated. (Via Opposable Thumbs.)
• OpenID notes.

I essentially finished Brain Buster Puzzle Pak some time towards the end of the summer. I’d finished all the built-in levels for the puzzles that I cared about; it has a random puzzle generator, though, which I wanted to explore more. But I never got around to doing that, and then I looked for it last week, and couldn’t find it! Annoying because, if those random puzzles are good (which they were in my brief experience), it’s actually a perfect game for having available at odd moments. Not sure if I like it enough to buy another copy, but I’m considering it. (If I can even find another copy; Amazon for one doesn’t carry the game.)

Enough blathering: I suppose I should tell you what the game is. As you might suspect from the title, it’s a collection of puzzle games. (Of the pen-and-pencil variety as opposed to, say, the falling blocks variety.) It has five types of puzzles in it: Sudoku, Kakuro, Nurikabe, Light On, and Slitherlink.

The sudoku interface is crap, at least compared to the interface in Brain Age. (Or, for that matter, the interface in a random physical book of sudoku puzzles.) And I don’t particularly like kakuro. So I gave up on those puzzles ten or twenty into them, and only made it that far because the initial puzzles were so mindnumbingly easy.

The other puzzle variants, however, were much better. I’d seen nurikabe and slitherlink before; they’re both pleasantly geometric (or perhaps topological would be a more appropriate adjective?), and have a completely different feel to me than most other puzzle types that I’m aware of. (Masyu is another example of that; a pity there aren’t any examples here.) Nurikabe is actually the reason why I’m currently subscribed to Games magazine: before a trip a few years ago, I picked up a copy to go through on the plane, and they had some really fun nurikabe puzzles. Of course, not all puzzle makers are of equal quality, but the ones in Games magazine and the ones in this game are both by Nikoli, and they definitely know their stuff.

So: good puzzles. The DS screen is only so large, and they decided to avoid scrolling, which meant that there weren’t any enormous nurikabe puzzles that take an hour to solve. I can live with that. The slitherlink puzzles were actually done on a grid that was a bit too small, so it occasionally read me as trying to draw a line somewhere other than where I intended; annoying, but I could deal. I’d never seen light up before; it’s a pleasant genre, though all the puzzles that were included were basically trivial, which makes me suspect that it’s impossible to make difficult light up puzzles unless you’re working on a larger grid.

And, in my brief experience, the randomly generated light up puzzles were good, too. I didn’t get around to trying the randomly generated nurikabe or slitherlink puzzles before I lost my copy of the game, unfortunately.

I recommend the game, and Liesl enjoyed it as well. Having said that, if you’re only going to get one DS puzzle game, then Picross is the one you want: Liesl is sitting to my left playing it right now, and it is insanely addictive. But this is good, too; writing this review, I want more of those puzzles to work through! Hmm, I was thinking of doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I should throw in some of Nikoli’s puzzle books…