Tag Archives: crosswords

I am a young person who solves crossword puzzles and maybe you should be one too

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I am a pretty good crossword solver. I solve between 150 and 200 crosswords per month, and in 2014 I came in 46th at the national crossword puzzle tournament.

My interest in crossword puzzles is not something I talk about very much. I move in pretty uncool circles – computer geeks and academic nerds – but even there, this hobby gets a “what a dweeb” reaction from most of my friends.

As chance would have it, though, over the last few days a few friends and colleagues have talked publicly about solving. And my wife pointed me toward this piece in the Atlantic, which paints a pretty dour picture about the future of the puzzle. So I thought now would be a good time to come out of hiding, as it were, and do a bit of crossword advocacy.

It is a pretty awesome time to be solving crosswords. Since I started solving seriously about ten years ago, puzzles have become more innovative, varied, weird, funny, vulgar. It may be true that the demographics of crossword solvers skews old, but the puzzles themselves generally don’t. If you don’t do crosswords because you think they’re for blue-hairs, you’ve got another think coming.

Cool things about crosswords

Here are some cool things about crosswords that should appeal to the kind of dweeb who reads my blog:

  • Puns
  • Pattern recognition
  • Intentional conflation of use and mention
  • Syntactic and lexical ambiguity
  • 80s pop culture references
  • You can do them on shiny things like iPads

Places to find good crosswords

The first step to getting into crosswords is finding high-quality puzzles. Here are a couple of my standbys:

  • New York Times – This is “the crossword”. Puzzle difficulty increases from easy on Monday to quite hard on Saturday, with the large Sunday puzzle at about a Wednesday or Thursday level of difficulty. $40/year.
  • Los Angeles Times – Similar to NYT puzzles, but generally a bit easier. Free.
  • Creators Syndicate – Weekday puzzles are generally very easy. Saturday Stumper puzzles are typically the hardest puzzle of the week. Free.

Special shout-out to the following puzzles, which are not put out by large publishers, but are instead supported by subscription and donations to individual constructors. If you really want to support the future of crosswords, you should be supporting them:

  • Brendan Emmett Quigley – Twice-weekly(ish) puzzles. Funny, cool, free. Thursday themed puzzles are moderately difficult. Monday themeless are pretty hard.
  • American Values Club – Very awesome, not particularly PC. Works like a collective for crossword constructors, offering them some of the best pay in the industry. $18/year.
  • Fireball Crosswords – Hard puzzles that are also the bomb. $20/year

Get out there and do some crosswords, and one day you might be as cool as me.

2011

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A bunch of stuff happened in 2011.

Like 2010, 2011 was a year of transitions for me: in my relationship with academia, in the way I earn a living, in the way I present myself as a citizen-builder of the internet. Being a parent is the biggest transition of all, forcing me to put into perspective the ways I spend my energy and the ways in which I define myself and what has value to me. (This transition has been overwhelmingly a Good Thing.) Continuing to strive for the right balance in these areas will, I’m sure, be a hallmark of my 2012. (Thankfully, I have no plans to have a child or get married in 2012. A man needs a year off from major life events!)

Happy new year!

Looking back at 2010

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2010 was a wild year for me, one that I’ll look back on as a turning point in my professional and personal life. For that reason I thought I might take stock of the past year. (Here’s 2009’s post.) If you are one of those snobs who think that year-end retrospectives are schlocky, feel free to get the hell out of my blog.

As 2010 opened, I was working full-time as the educational technologist by Queens College. I believed strongly (and continue to believe) in the importance of the work I was doing there, but I already knew a year ago that I wouldn’t be able to stay at the job for much longer. I identified as an ed tech, and part of the (really great) ed tech community, but it was a label that never really felt right. When people asked what I did for a living, I hesitated. I left the job near the end of May.

Since then, I have been supporting myself doing custom web development, almost exclusively using BuddyPress. In the last six months, I’ve transitioned from an uneasy edtech to a confident (though still n00bish in many ways) developer. It’s a classification that feels better in many ways. Moving into development has allowed me to be personally productive in ways that the structures of my old career simply couldn’t support. I produce a lot of software that is used by a lot of people; moreover, I am moving toward a position where I get to select only those projects that are of independent interest to me. Measured like this, 2010 was the most productive year of my life, made possible by the career move (and the new self-identification that came with it).

My move into development is not without misgivings. As an educational technologist, working in the confines of a traditional university, there were always connections (sometimes tenuous, but always discernable) between my day job and my identity as a graduate student. Granted, in the time I was at Queens – first as a graduate fellow and then as a full-timer – I made next to no progress on my dissertation. But the fact that I was in a university, and enabling teaching and learning in a hands-on way, kept me in constant communication with my inner philosopher: drawing on my teaching experience, speaking in academic tones with faculty members, engaging in debates on the goals and methods of educational technology in ways that never strayed far from the kinds of discourse I learned in the seminar room. My work as a developer, in contrast, is much less explicitly academic; while some of my projects (notably, the CUNY Academic Commons) have sustained my contact with the university, mostly I am paid to think about software and websites rather than anything else. In the short term, this will undoubtedly be a good thing – I attribute the progress I’ve made on my thesis in the semester since I left Queens College to the fact that my day job provides me with some much-needed release from the mental anguish of the university life. But the more I make a name for myself as a developer, where ‘developer’ is unqualified by ‘academic’ or any similar modifier, the more I have to make conscious decisions about how (and whether) I want my paying gigs to connect with my academic interests. It’s an issue I’ll continue to wrestle with in 2011.

Paralleling my move into a development career has been an increased participation in the WordPress world. In July I was made a moderator on the buddypress.org support forums. In October, I was brought on as a committing developer for the BuddyPress project. I spoke dozens of times through 2010 on WordPress and BuddyPress, at WordCamps, meetups, conferences, THATCamps, and various other fancy places. At the beginning of 2010 I felt like I’d staked out a position on the outskirts of the WordPress community; at the end of 2010, I feel like I’m much closer to its center. And while I could live without the occasional drama, tunnel-vision, and personality cultishness of some WordPressophiles, for the most part it has been a real treat getting to know, and getting to work with, so many of the best WP developers. It’s broken me out of that other echo chamber I come from (academia), made me a much better coder, and introduced me to some really fabulous folks.

In 2010, I also got more and more tangled up with the digital humanities community. In July, I spent a week at the Center for History and New Media for the One Week | One Tool project, where I was on a team that built Anthologize. I attended a number of THATCamps and was witness to a number of Twitter arugments of truly epic proportions. And while I could live without the occasional drama, tunnel-vision, and personality cultishness of some DigitalHumanitiesophiles, for the most part it has been a real treat getting to know, and getting to work with, so many of the best digital humanists. (Is there an echo in here?) My intellectual connection with DH is such that it is hard for me not to put scare quotes around ‘digital humanities’ every time I write it: I am an academic, and I do extensive work with digital technology, but the connection between the two is not manifest in my own work. Still, DH in 2010 has been an exciting place to locate oneself, with cool projects, smart people, and the occasional Big Idea rising to the top over the course of the year.

I continued being a dork in 2010. I came in 66th at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (breaking 50 in 2011! You read it here first!). I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak. I visited the Googleplex. I wrote a lot about pizza and barbecue. I made the decision to stop buying Apple products. I completed Angry Birds. I wrote 45 blog posts on Teleogistic, with a smattering of posts elsewhere. Teleogistic got 960 comments. I wrote many tens of thousands of lines of code, much of which was terrible, and much of which is sadly hidden forever on client servers, but some of which is free and helpful to many.

On June 5, 2010, I got married. I mention this last not because it is the least important event of the year but because it is the most. The process of preparing for a wedding, with the help and support of so many friends and loved ones, was something I will never forget. The wedding day was the most perfect day I can remember. And the girl I married – well, duh, she is the best part of 2010, or of any year.

The changes of 2010 were more significant for me than any year since I was in college. Nearly all of those changes have been for the better. I have some exciting plans for 2011, but for now I am happy to reflect on the year that was. For me, it was a good one.

2009 by the numbers

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What’d I do in 2009? Some of my numbers are paltry and lame, but here they are anyway.

I posted 51 posts to this blog, teleogistic.net (and a handful of posts in other places). Those posts brought 183 legit comments. 3,299 unique visitors stopped by from 84 countries and 49 US states (WTF South Dakota?). The most popular search terms that led people here were: 1) read it later kindle, which led people to this post, 2) os x migration “less than a minute remaining”, which led people to this post, and 3) boone gorges, which led people to my beautiful face. The most popular posts on this blog were 1) Help me alpha test BuddyPress Forum Attachments (which is listed as the help page for a BuddyPress plugin I released, and so probably gets a lot of confused eyeballs), 2) Displaying the BuddyPress Admin Bar in Other Applications, which got added to StumbleUpon and, appropriately enough, contains hacks that did not originate with my paltry brain, and 3) Hub-and-spoke Blogging with Lots Of Students, which was interlinked with a lot of other great posts on the issue of classroom blogging. Not terrible for the first year of a blog, considering that BLOGS ARE DEAD.

I learned a lot about coding during 2009. When 2009 started, I knew quite a bit about HTML and CSS, as well as a smattering of PHP. I opened my first WordPress code file in about March. Since then I have released seven WordPress/BuddyPress plugins, a MediaWiki extension, and a handful of smaller hacks through the GPL, comprising some 4300 lines of code (about half of which was modified from existing code, and half of which is more or less from scratch).

I tweeted around 3300 times this year.

I racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 hours of time this year commuting to and from work. Less impressively, I ran a pathetic 675 miles.

As some of you know, I do lots of crossword puzzles. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I did around 1,960 crosswords this year, a number that is made up mostly of the first 13 puzzles listed on this page. I made a pledge at the beginning of the year to do my crosswords with pencil and paper (rather than on the computer) to improve my lackluster performance at ACPT. I stuck to that pledge: I can remember doing about three crosswords on the computer this year, as the rest were done on paper. We’ll see how all the practice pans out in February.

Here’s to a better 2010!