Jed Pittman

This weekend I found that I had some free time. In the near future, I will be able to take a week off from work and hang out around the house. One of those days, I have been hoping to play a round of golf. It has been years since I played so I decided I should try to find a driving range. However, I could not find a driving range within a reasonable distance from my house. Even a call to a local country club was no help because I ended up in voicemail hell and didn’t get to speak to a real person.

Thankfully, I didn’t need the internet to solve this problem. The solution was found by accident later on this weekend when I stumbled on to a golf course in my travels. Since it was open I decided to see if they had a range and once they did I found out it was open to the public. Of course, that feature is not advertised on the internet. This is something I plan to let them know about when I visit this weekend.

In the end, this speaks to not just the quality of search available. Because I feel like search engines are pretty good at this point and their algorithms are amazingly complex. But for the average person, the real issue is lack of good content. In this case, the golf course that I was interested in had a website, but it did not say that the driving range was open to the public, I found that out only by asking.

About six months ago, I received a free-trial of the newest expansion to the World of Warcraft game. It was something that I didn’t really bother with because I knew how expensive it would be to buy it and I had really lost the zeal that I once had for the game.

World Of Warcraft is a MMORPG. MMORPGs are massive, multi-player, online, role-playing games. In this game you create a character and run around and do quests to build your character up. For some people, it can become seriously addictive. I really enjoyed playing the game for about a year, especially for the camaraderie that I felt when playing with a large group of forty players working on a single quest together.

People who play MMORPGS in large groups in a serious fashion often use technology that allows all players to communicate just like a telephone using Voice over IP while playing the game. Its funny because we generally all look like telephone operators or aspiring singers while talking into our headsets or the microphones in front of us.

The free trial of World of Warcraft wasn’t all that exciting. The game hasn’t changed much. Certainly there is new scenery and there are new quests to explore. However, it is not as simple as that to hold my interest. When I logged on to the trial I found that most of my gear was obsolete since I had not played in a while. Furthermore, the guild experience takes months to develop. I didn’t want to invest that kind of time again. In the end, it was not for me.

Certainly the game will continue for quite a long time. I know that there is still a huge demand, but I cannot say as to whether or not it will last really long term. I think blizzard makes great games, so I will remain quite loyal to them for that. But when it comes down to it, I personally don’t want to spend all that time on something that is just 0s and 1s and has no real lasting result. So, when I want to play a game now, I am content to play something that I enjoy, but with a reasonable time limit, measured in hours, not months. And then I can finish and say I enjoyed it without regretting what I could have done if I had that time back.

For more than a year now, I have been a huge fan of sudoku. Granted, I got on the bandwagon a little bit late, but I think that they are quite fun. Usually, I will do them on the train on my way to or from work. And it seems there can’t be a paper or magazine published these days without including a sudoku.

Here are some interesting facts about sudoku that you probably didn’t know. I know I didn’t.

In order for a sudoku to be proper - it must contain at least 17 starting digits. A proper sudoku (one with only one solution) has not been discovered that has 16 or fewer starting digits.

Sudoku are a special kind of Latin Square.

There are over 3.5 trillion unique sudokus.

This is the interesting article about sudoku graph theory where I learned all of this.