Talk Like a Pirate Day

I don't recommend that you actually talk like a pirate, but there are other ways to celebrate this dubious holiday, based on your level of commitment to living the life:

1. Slap on an eyepatch, drink some rum, and perch a parrot on your shoulder. That's real ultimate pirate power!
2. If you're content to play at being a pirate via the magic of videogame entertainment, Sid Meier's Pirates! is a fun facsimile, for a little while. I picked up this game for about a dollar at the local Savers thrift store, and I totally got my money's worth in pirate fun.
3. One level deeper is the online game Puzzle Pirates (which you can try for free), wherein you pretend to be a pirate who pretends to do piratey things as represented by minigames. Avast! It's meta-tastic!
   

I played Puzzle Pirates for a couple of months until I got married. It was very fun. They have added a bunch of puzzles since then, enough so that I'm considering giving it another look, just to try out the new content. As you might imagine, I especially enjoy the distilling game.

Puzzle of the week: Nonograms

Thanks to my puzzle friend in mysterious land, I have a new entry in my collection of delightful time wasters. Nonograms are number-based logic puzzles that can be arranged to display a hidden picture when solved. The puzzles are known by many names. If you lived in Japan and owned a GameBoy, you might know it as Mario Picross!

The default 5x5 format is good for learning the rules. After that, you can choose from larger game boards, and it gets a bit tougher. Can you solve a 10x10 grid? 15x15?

Cidouri: 'cuz Sudoku is for suckers

Do you have some time to kill at work? Of course you do! If you like doing things that are fun, take a shot at a Cidouri puzzle. They are not very hard. I enjoy Sudoku, personally (I liked it before it was "cool" to do so). But to solve one of those puzzles, I have to think about numbers and math, and sometimes I just want to connect the dots. Once you learn the simple rules of Cidouri, it's like a mindless kind of Zen exercise.