Excitement on the Internet!oneoneone

scrottie and I have been having Skype dates on Thursday evenings lately. Yesterday evening, I was a bit bummed out because of work-related concerns (hashing out some paper-writing details with our colleague), and unsure about how to spend our date night. Neither he nor I is the sort of person to sit around and blab, so we tend to do things like cook food or read books at each other. Last week, I worked on my bike, for instance. (come to think of it, I should plan on doing more crafting with reflective stuff during an upcoming date night!)

Eventually, we each turned to a couple of individual projects we've been meaning to work on. I, for one, got my digitized recipe archive uploaded to my website! It's as non-fancy as a website gets, just an alphabetized list of recipe titles:

http://www.acromyrmex.net/recipes/

HOWEVER it is much more complete and comprehensive than the blog archives here. A couple of weeks ago, I went through this blog and pulled out all the recipes I could find, but I haven't always posted things to the blog, as that has depended on my mood and whether or not someone has specifically asked for the recipe. I also annotated as many of them as I could with the original recipe sources, although I should note I've edited the vast majority of them in some fashion or another.

The main downside to the current format is that you have to actually download and open the individual files to read the recipes and see my commentary on them. Also, it's a long list. There's also a link in there to recipes I've been interested in trying, but haven't tested yet (look for the "Untested" link). I might eventually convert these recipes over to .txt so you can preview them without downloading, but at the moment I didn't feel like it. Sorry. Also, I'm not big into food porn photos, so you'll notice there are few/none of those. Too bad for you, me, and any chance that I'd ever make it big with a glossy cookbook. [That was unlikely anyway, seeing as most of the recipes are adaptations, not innovations/inventions].

Anyway. Ahem.

While I was getting the recipes uploaded, scrottie worked on converting a game interface he had written for the game Illuminati over to a simple Scrabble interface. And, success! Well, sufficient success that he and I were able to get in a game of online Scrabble:



After I took this screenshot, I switched over to scorekeeping on a spreadsheet instead. It was really fun, and a million times better than the most recent interface on Book of Face written by the big game company that has bought out Scrabble and has been trying to squeeze money out of it in every way they can. Despite the fact that we can currently see each other's tiles. If you look very closely, you will also observe that this version is true to my hard-copy set, too.

I have to admit, I don't want to share this version too widely. I saw what happened to Scrabulous; it got replaced by something horrendous by Big Game Company, and then most people just wound up switching over to Words With Friends anyway. Many of the computerized versions also take out the joy of fake words and challenges, too. What would make more sense would be to share the instructions for setting up the simple game interface, so groups of people could adapt it for whatever game they want to play virtually with their family and friends.