Author Archives: Tin Man

Crossword Squares Record

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Occasionally I go into crossword puzzle geekery here in my blog. Here’s some more.

Today’s New York Times crossword had unusually few black squares, and I wondered if it might be a record. So I checked. It turns out that it doesn’t break, but it does tie, the record for fewest black squares used in a typical daily 15×15 grid: 18 black squares. The record was set about two years ago.

Here’s the grid:

On the New York Times crossword blog, puzzle creator Joe Krozel discusses how he created the grid.

1984 Guided Tour of Mac

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I was looking for stuff online about the original 1984 Macintosh, and I learned that the original Mac came with something called “A Guided Tour of Macintosh,” consisting of a 3.5-inch floppy disk and an audio tape. Because, of course, there was no way to play audio files on the computer.

I was curious about this, so I hunted around and found an online version of the Guided Tour of Macintosh, including screenshots and an mp3 file of the cassette. It begins with totally New Age-y piano music. The tour includes a lesson on how to click with the mouse, how to open and close and change the size of windows, etc.

Kinda fun.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I don’t read very much fiction, let alone bestseller fiction, but last night I finished Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Matt bought and raced through it a few weeks ago after reading an article about the author. (Stieg Larsson died in 2004, shortly after submitting his trilogy to the publisher.) Matt enjoyed it, so I decided to take it with me on my business trip to Banff. I started it on the airplane and read it on and off during my trip.

I had several meals at the hotel alone, so each time I’d bring the book with me. Not one, not two, but three servers commented on it. My waitress at lunch one day said she had just finished it the night before. My waitress at dinner that night said she was reading it. My waiter at dinner the next night said he had just finished it and that I was in for a ride. I guess the book had been going around the hotel.

So I finished it last night, and I liked it.

But it’s a curious book.

First, it’s an English translation of a Swedish thriller, and a British English translation at that, so on top of the occasional stilted sentence there are Britishisms like gaol instead of jail. It’s like looking at something through two window panes.

And people in the book are always drinking coffee and eating sandwiches. I did a word search inside the book on Amazon, and coffee is mentioned 98 times, an average of once every six pages.

And the author focuses on weird details. He goes into detail not only about the types of sandwiches characters make, but also about their computers — the brand, the hard drive storage and memory capacity, and so on. (Those details are interesting to me, I’ll admit.) He repeatedly refers to one character’s iBook. (In fact, iBook gets 19 mentions; laptop, only 10.) Details in a work of fiction are a nice touch, of course, but it’s like a fetish or something.

The book moves slowly. There are long stretches when not much seems to be happening. The story involves an extended Swedish family, and it takes a while before you start to remember who’s who — but maybe that’s supposed to echo the main character’s confusion? I don’t know. It rambles at times and could be more tightly plotted.

And yet it’s an absorbing read.

During the summer of 1992, I read John Grisham’s The Firm. Say what you will about John Grisham’s later work: The Firm was an exciting book, amazingly entertaining, well plotted, with a great payoff. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not quite like that. It’s idiosyncratic and some editing might have helped. But I’ll probably read the next book in the trilogy anyway.