Spring fireworks
 

I recently starting listening to the NPR Sunday Puzzle podcast. I started listening to the oldest one I had from Jan 7. It had a challenge to find a 4x4 grid of 16 different letters, making four, four letter words across and four, four letter words down. As a hint the listener was told that the second row is the word 'ruly'. I worked on it briefly by hand and then decided to write a program to do it instead.

The code is basically a brute force search with a couple of short-circuits. I came up with a list of four letter words by taking a word list, grepping out all the four letter words, then adding all the three letter words with an 's' added (except the ones that ended in 's'). Not perfect, but close enough.

Python source: sundaypuzzle2007-01-07.py.txt
List of four letter words: four.txt

My answer below (select text to see):

bash
ruly
item
gown

gash
ruly
item
down


My answer matches the answer given in the Jan 21 show.

Blue skies, briefly
 

More signs of spring
 

No longer a puppy.
 

Another picture day. This time we went to Gas Works Park and then to the locks in Ballard. Unfortunately, it started raining as soon as we got to Gas Works.

Spring is on its way.



To me, this shot of the path looks like it is a miniature model, kind of a tilt-shift effect. I've thought about getting a Lensbabies lens to play with this type of effect, but they cost more than I want to spend.

Weekend Projects

My kids and I watched a podcast on trebuchets this weekend. My daughter thought it looked really interesting and wanted to use it as her science fair project. So we built one with stuff around the house. This trebuchet project on instructibles.com was very helpful.




While on instructibles.com we came across a project on stop action movies. The kids and I had recently seen this video from minilogue and the kids asked a lot of questions on how it was done. This project was perfect since all that is required is a camera, whiteboard and MonkeyJam. We each made a video: Shapes, Hotwheels, Rubiks

Here is a picture of our animation studio. To keep them from moving, the small whiteboard is taped to the floor and the camera is taped to the computer. I pulled in a floor lamp for extra light.

I volunteered to help with the science fair at my kids' school. Part of that was to do a project and demo it at a school assembly. Our project was Popsicle Stick Structures, where we wanted to find out how much weight we could support with Popsicle sticks. Here is the aftermath.

The "small" dog is our 90lb. lab mix. The big dog is a great pyrenees that we are baby sitting. Notice how he sits on the counch.

I ran the Pigtails Run yesterday. I did the one lap event which was 9.6 miles. There was also a 19.2 mile event and a 50k event. I grabbed my camera after I finished and took pictures of other competitors as they were coming in to finish or to start their next lap. Below are some of my favorites. I ended up with about 225 pictures .

Full moon
 

I took 19 shots of the moon and this was the best one. I had the camera set on aperture priority but all the shots were coming out over exposed. I tried increasing shutter speed, but even at 1/1000 it was overexposed. Then I went to manual and tried a shutter speed around 1/250 and cranked the aperture at various stops down to f22. This picture was at f18. It was shot at 300mm (485mm equiv) and is also cropped by a fair amount.

Back from the library after ballet
 

A friend and I went to Tacoma to take pictures on the waterfront. Here are some of the favorites that I took.