Puzzles

228 Untitled444

I've added jigsaw puzzles to my solitaire repertoire. I play one or two a day, they take about a half hour each. I limit myself to 150 pieces, more or less. Larger puzzles can take hours. Mostly I've doing landscapes and cars and girls, but then this one showed up and my mind said 'wow'. Total gut reaction, no thinking involved, so I had to go play it. 228 pieces. I started early this morning and finished sometime around noon. I wasn't working on it continuously, I had other things to do like a couple of hours of driving around town and taking a nap and eating breakfast. Still it took a while. Funny that it didn't seem to be any harder than a regular puzzle. I really like this picture, but I can't tell you why. I would never produce something like that. 

All my artwork is pencil sketches on scrap paper. Or computer code. I think it's pretty. It's kind of like building a machine out of metal, you build it to do something. There are lots of ways to build machines. You can build them out of wood, or steel and concrete, or aluminum and plastic. But after you've got the machine working, do you spend any time improving its appearance? 

Lamborghini V-12 Engine

Some people do, and those machines appear at car shows and some even show up in museums. 

Likewise, there are lots of ways of writing code, and I like mine to look a certain way. 4 spaces per tab, tab indents, braces on lines by themselves, no braces unless they are necessary (adding braces around a single statement after an else would require two more lines. Besides, they look stupid. Try to keep lines under 100 characters. The rest of it is too esoteric to describe, or maybe I just don't know how to explain it.

I got my number-jigsaw puzzle program working. I kind of like it. I'm thinking about a post and hope to get it up later today or tomorrow.