Blog  |   Puzzles  |   Books  |   About

Archive for 2010

Goodbye Kennie, Hello Inky!

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Apparently, “Kennie” was a little too close to “KenKen” for Bob Fuhrer, who sent the following missive this morning: Dear Mr. Bumgardner, I am President of Nextoy, LLC and KenKen, LLC, which owns and controls all rights in the KenKenĀ® and KendokuĀ® brands of mathematical logic puzzles. I have recently learned that you are publishing […]

Hey KenKen fans!! Meet Kennie…

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Apparently, the paltry few KenKen puzzles published in the Times weren’t enough, so a number of you wrote to me asking for KenKen puzzles. I’m publishing a new kind of puzzle called a Kennie. It’s similar to a KenKen, but has a few minor differences. Kinda like those chocolaty sandwich cookies that aren’t exactly like […]

Colr Pickr

Monday, June 21st, 2010

I’m currently working on a significant update to my classic Colr Pickr. Stay tuned.

Apathy-Gas

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

While waiting around at the local Michael’s, I picked up a 3 dollar copy of the Great Illustrated Classics version of The Time machine by H.G. Wells. I was surprised to open it to an illustration depicting a character from a cheaply made 1950s Sci Fi film — most certainly not a character from Wells’ […]

On making software with heart

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

In a software design meeting the other day, I found myself saying “it needs to be a little less here” (tapping myself on the forehead) “and a little more here” (tapping myself on the heart). As a pointy-eared technical guy, I’ve long been resistant to this type of language, knowing it to be logically meaningless. […]

Five Points

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

The last few days, I’ve been obsessing over the island of Manhattan (which I’ll be visiting briefly in May), and Google Street View. I’m currently working on a few Street View related hacking projects in my spare time. Here’s one of them. I wrote some scripts that did an exhaustive search of the Street View […]

Krazydad, circa 1996.

Friday, March 26th, 2010

My nephew Ben, a budding computer programmer, found this old picture of me in a book about computer programmers. The photo has the following caption: “Sometimes programmers play computer games when they need a break from their work projects.” What the author perhaps didn’t realize (the photograph was obtained from the Corbis Stock photography archive), […]

Mining juicy words

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

This weekend, I counted all the words on Project Gutenberg. This has been done before, notably, here. My script crawled most of the English language books on Project Gutenberg (about 20,000 titles), and counted how often each word appears, and how many books each word appears in. The script ran for about 20 hours. You […]

Mayor of the North Pole

Monday, February 15th, 2010

[NOTE: I’ve posted some recent developments at the bottom. ] I’ve been blatantly cheating at foursquare for the past week. I didn’t mean to start the week this way. Most of my friends know me as a responsible father who occasionally plays piano at local open mics, and makes puzzles. Last Sunday, while checking into […]

The Griddle

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

The Griddle is a beautifully designed puzzle site by David Millar. It will especially appeal to more advanced solvers who are bored with the same-old same-old. You’ll find a new puzzle variety, in PDF format, nearly every day, including some interesting variants on Sudoku, Kakuro and Slitherlink. Check it out!