the zackattack

Check out this really supersweet blog: skotane.blogspot.com. It’s way better than this blog.

Have you heard about this crazy sudoku? You probably have, because it’s sweeping the nation. I didn’t know about it until Christmas Eve, when I got a sudoku book for my grandma. Actually, I had heard of it before, but I didn’t know really what the puzzles were all about. I wanted to be able to explain it to my grandma, so I tried one of the “Beware! Extremely difficult” puzzles in the book. It took me 4 hours to finish it, and now I’m pretty much addicted to them. I generally have a pretty unhealthy relationship with these types of puzzles. The sudoku puzzles are similar to chess problems, but in a way they’re more healthy for me. This is mainly because most mate-in-2 chess problems are simple enough so that I can memorize the positions and then I can’t stop thinking about the problem when I’m away from the book and chess board, for example when I’m trying to go to sleep. But sudoku problems are too complicated to memorize, so when you’re not looking directly at the problem, you can’t work on it. Anyways, here’s a good sudoku site I found. It allows you to actually work on the puzzle from the web page, and it corrects you if you make a mistake and enter the wrong number. This is good enough for the “easy” and “medium” puzzles, but for “hard” and “evil” puzzles you have to do a little bit more work on your own, and for this you need to write on a piece of paper.

i have another google idea. this one is for gmail. the keyboard shortcuts for gmail are pretty nice, but i don’t use them too much because you can’t use them mousefree. you have to keep switching between mouse and keyboard. the thing that’s missing is the ability to label and delete from the keyboard. what would be great is if one key got you to the drop down menu ‘more actions’, and then each command was coordinated alphabetically with a key. i love you google!

are you as excited for google calendar as i am? try typing in calendar.google.com. it redirects you to the google homepage, but the theory goes that google has set up the url in preparation for the release of google calendar sometime soon. i personally can’t wait. speaking of google, i heard that you have to take an online c++ test if you apply for a job with google! you know what would be a great feature to add to google stuff? that’s right… if the personalized search bookmarks could be added to the personalized google homepage. you can already add “bookmarks” as a module in your personalized homepage. but these are just plain old links. in the personalized search bookmarks you can label the different bookmarks and you can also add details about them. but these personalized search bookmarks take about 10 clicks and a password to get to. so they’re virtually useless. but it would be so great to be able to logon to your google homepage from any computer and have all your bookmarks right there. i wouldn’t even use my firefox bookmarks if i could do that. i love you google.