Thank you for stoppng by.

Pull up a chair, have a seat, relax with me for a while as we talk about some things that matter, and some things that don't.  Yes, this site is a bit rough yet, but I'll be adding content and functionality as I go.  Use the Forum page to tell me what you like, and what you don't... or to interact with other visitors.  You can also feel free to send me email at the address implied in the footer.

I intend this website to be an informal way for me to share some of the things that delight me, or make me think, or make me laugh, to learn from you and add to my list of 'cool' things -- and to use the power of this network of friends to share those things to a broad audience.  Use the buttons to the left to navigate to the things of interest to you.  Suggestions welcome via the "Feedback" form on the Forum page, or email (see below) -- tell me what *you* love.

New Musical Discovery: I don't know how... probably by 'accident' if it was a featured video on YouTube.Com... but *somehow* I ran across the videos of Terra Naomi there.  I'm floored.  She's remarkable (IMNSHO) for her voice (opera-trained, she says), and for her songwriting skills -- but also because she's *got it*: she's figured out how to use YouTube as a marketing campaign, and from what I can tell she is doing it Very Well.  Give her a listen; some of my favorites are Up Here (there's a Bad Word in that song), Say It's Possible", but there are a bunch of others, some only on her CD.  The easy link to her site is http://www.myspace.com/terranaomi.  But you'll also want to watch the "Ask a Wanna-be Rockstar" videos to get to know her a bit better, and probably the rest of the vids you can see of her by searching for terranaomi on YouTube. 
I think you'll be impressed.  Oh, genre -- It's definitely singer/songwriter music.  She plays acoustic guitar or keyboards, depending on the song.  I guess you could call it pop, or rock... you tell me what you call it!

See my review of the Hazmat Modine CD on my Music page.

Help still needed on the "most dangerous word in America": What's the most dangerous word in America today?  Send me a quick email or use the feedback link on the last page and let me know what you think.  Oh, I will accept a two- or three-word phrase if it's usually hyphenated, but really prefer single words.  I'm not looking for complexity -- but want to use this as the basis for a speech in Toastmasters, or maybe even an op-ed piece for the newspapers.  As a for-instance, in the 1950s, someone might have answered, "Communism".  What's the most dangerous word in 2006?

England Travel Tips Needed: I'll be going to Bristol, England on business the first week in October.  I hope to spend some time after with my dad (him flying over, too) in London or thereabouts.  Where do they play the blues in London?  What are the off-the-beaten path cultural sites in the south of England?  I just picked up a travel guide, but I really like the offbeat and unknown more than the well-known over-hyped.  Or maybe you know of an out-of-the-way great place to eat or local beer to drink?  I'd welcome your suggestions!

Play Sudoku?  Help me kick Sudoku butt: My wife got me an electronic Sudoku puzzle for Christmas.  I'd never played the game before that, althought I'd seen the puzzles in the paper and other places.  The electronic version was pretty disappointing due to the limitations of the hard-to-read LCD... however... I did get interested in the puzzles.  After playing a bit, I realized that it would be a fun challenge to write a computer program to solve the puzzles.   Heck, *anybody* can solve a Sudoku (they are logic puzzles, not math puzzles, and start out pretty easy), but writing the program would be altogether different, fun (at least for me), and a challenge (at least for me!).  Rather like making your own bread when you can buy a loaf cheaper and easier at the store...

To that end, I picked up a primer on C++ to refresh my programming skills, and the book came with the Quincy C++ compiler (really an interpreter, fwiw).  And I set to work on my program.  The first version turned out to be simpler logic than I had expected, and surprised me by solving most all the puzzles up to level 4 (of five).   I've figured out how to make it even better, and am now making mods to get it to solve even harder puzzles; I expect it will solve most of the level 5 difficulty puzzles in the Chroincle.

But there is a class of solution that I haven't figured out how to model, yet.  Bear with me as I try to describe it.  Easier puzzles let you find the answers when you can eliminate values by looking at the known values in the same row or column or 3x3 square.  Assume that each 3x3 grid is called a, b, or c (across the top row), then d, e, f for the middle row, and g, h, i for the bottom row of 3x3 sub-squares.  What I need are examples of puzzles where you have to reason something like, "I need a 4 in either row 1 or 2 of block 'a' or block 'b'.  But because row 2 of block 'b' has three values filled in already, I have to have the 4 in row 1 of block 'b', and therefore the 4 in block 'a' must go in row 2 of block 'a'.   Does that make any sense?

If it does, and you are a Sudokuer, please take a moment to send me the puzzle you've found that has this kind of problem (or other advanced reasoning needed to solve).  Preferred format is each row on a separate line, numbers separated by commas, with a zero where the cell value is unknown.

More thoughts on Sudoku -- The puzzles I'm talking about above are all solved by concrete logic, that is, you can figure out for sure what each cell's value needs to be without having to guess.   I could see that some puzzles would actually require guessing, where you run out of knowable values and then have to 'test' one of the possible values in some cell and see if that value leads to a good solution.  I have not figured out how to make my program guess yet (I'd really like to do it 'right', and solve every puzzle solvable without guessing first.  You can also solve any puzzle by brute force by guessing [hmmm... it looks to me like you'd do it with a recursive subroutine, where 'guess' calls the subroutine when you've run out of 'knowable' values; guess then puts a possible value in some cell and continues to solve, calling 'guess' again when you've run out of knowable values, or testing the next possible value in that cell when the guess proves to give an invalid 'solution'.  See, I've almost written the thing already....  <grin>] but that's an 'expensive' solution in terms of processor power and memory.  What I've got so far is (I think) pretty minimal in the resources it uses.).  So I'll save the guessing until later, if I find puzzles I can't solve another way.

Oh, one last comment on Sudoku: I'm sure I'm not the only person who has written their own solver.   Any other readers of my site who have taken a stab at it?  If so, when I'm happy with my solution, I'd love to take a look at yours.  It might also be fun to trade 'problem' puzzles... see if you can come up with some that stump my solver, and vice versa.  Not to mention seeing which one works most efficiently, etc.

Quote of the Update:

We have enough youth.  What we need is a fountain of smart.

                                           - unknown