Time to retire

After a rich and illustrious career, these two JoL's are finally retiring.  Thanks to KP, PP, EM, and LB for guessing whose is who's.  PP and LB had it right: Christine's is the classical and mine was the emoticon.

Bon voyage, my friends.

Monster 635 Scrabble Game

I had an amazing game of scrabble at our Calgary Spring Tournament recently, and scored 635!  I was playing my friend Randall, one of the top rated at our club.  To get 600+, you often need some free turns due to your opponent challenging or exchanging.  But neither happened, to Randall's credit he recognized all of them.  Sometimes, it's not even the letters you get (I only had one blank, one S, Z, Q), but the synergy between them and the right openings on the board that count.  I played 6 bingos in all.  Final score 635-275.

 

Studing Fatties

Certain words have many anagrams and it can be hard to remember what all of them are. Here are some visualizations I produced using GraphViz, to aid in this task:

Blue Rodeo

Just got back from Calgary Folkfest with Christine - we had an amazing time and were lucky to see Blue Rodeo again. We've seen them together 4 times now.

I remember Vik used to bring home Blue Rodeo CD's from the library all the time, and was always playing them. I couldn't stand it much at first, with all the strange instruments and long guitar solos. Five days in May is one of my favorites now and I love listening to the inspired solos.

As Christine said tonight, just when you think they're playing your favorite song, you hear the next one and that's your favorite too.

After all these years, they still impress. What a fabulous show.

Juraj

Art + Scrabble

I've seen a lot of Tag Clouds on the web. They are a short visual summary of the contents of page, where font size, color, etc are used to convey things like importance.

I thought it might be interesting after creating a list of bingos I played in our recent Scrabble tournament. I won the top division and won the prize for most bingos, 30 in 14 games. I looked at the study sheet I made here:

30 Bingo Study Sheet

and thought about combining the idea with tag clouds.

I created a handful of study pages here, in that style. "Anagram Clouds"

Reno, incredible scrabble game

There's photos in the article I posted on the recent Reno WGPO scrabble tournament. Checkout the game with 8 bingos out of 9 turns by Jerry Lerman.

http://www.calgary374.org/NewsArticlePage.php?id=436

Randomness in Art

An interesting discussion about 'random art'. My favorite was the 4 9x9 panels of random colors - can you spot the fake?

http://tinyurl.com/4nuvoma