Category — Community

Crossword constructor, ACPT B-Division Champion, and all-around nice guy Joon Pahk spent this past week completely dispatching his competition on Jeopardy. Here’s a great recap of his amazing week.

Fortunately, his run ain’t over yet. He won again yesterday, so he’ll be back on the show on Monday. Plus, he’s qualified for the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, which will air in November.

Here, he dispatches his most recent set of opponents:

Tyler Hinman is that puzzle guy. Seriously. His Twitter account is thatpuzzleguy. And he really is. Among his accomplishments:

• Five-time (consecutive!) winner of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
• Twenty-one (and counting) published crossword puzzles in the New York Times
• Crossword contributor to The Onion AV Club, CrosSynergy, and other puzzle publishers
• Star of the movie Wordplay
• Star of the Bay Area Crossword Tournament
• Member of the League of Extraordinary Puzzlemen (aka “Kid Crossword”)

There is no possible way for a self-respecting puzzlehead to know too much about Tyler. Check out his interview with Ryan and Brian or his own personal web site.

I’m always looking for ways to increase user interaction in this little microcommunity, which means reducing barriers to participation.

To that end, I have just removed the requirement of registration on this site in order to leave comments. If you want to comment on something you see and you don’t want to go through the register-activate-post-approve cycle, you can go ahead and comment away with impunity. The only thing you need to fill out is a reCAPTCHA form. Registered users don’t need to use the form, so there’s an incentive for you to register!

If it works, it’ll stay this way. If I get bombarded by hackers who’ve figured out an automated way around reCAPTCHA, I’ll have to turn it off.

I’ve added a gadget to the blog that detects if you’re reading this from an iPhone and reformats it accordingly.

Unfortunately, I have no such device … if someone with an iPhone or an iPod Touch or Droid or some other such mobile gizmo wouldn’t mind using it to visit this site and let me know if it works, I’d appreciate it.

I’ve been cracking the whip on the Puzzlehead I.T. guys lately … unfortunately, they’re sado-masochists. But one such beating finally convinced them to hop on the Twitter bus to Tweetsville.

You can now follow Puzzlehead on Twitter as “imapuzzlehead” (yes, all other good combinations of “puzzlehead” were already taken). Check out the tweets at this URL:

http://www.twitter.com/imapuzzlehead

In my ongoing quest to explore all of the features of WordPress, I decided to start to make better use of the the blogroll feature to manage links to sites I think might be of interest to readers of this blog. So I’ve restructured the right-hand sidebar a bit now to feature various categories of links which I hope will be self-evident. Enjoy!

Calendar Widget Installed

I installed a new widget to show you puzzle events that are happening around the world. Any time I find out about a new puzzle event, I’ll add it to the calendar. You can find the calendar widget on the bottom of the right-hand column.

Page Layout Changed

I decided to clean up the layout of this blog a bit so that it makes somewhat more logical sense. All of the site natigation widgets (archives, categories, tags, pages, etc) are in the left column, while all of the other widgets are in the right column.

I’ve installed a new widget here on Puzzlehead.org down in the lower left column of this page. It shows you a running feed of puzzle-related news stories (mostly – sometimes it hits the word “puzzle” in non-puzzle news). Enjoy!

We’re having a going-away party for Gothicstorm & sweetpea3 on Sat Sep 12. You’re all invited.

Several of you have asked if I’ve considered doing a Puzzlehead podcast. I love the idea and have the equipment and technical skill to do it and make it sound good, but I don’t have the time to commit to doing it right. I figure this blog is just effort-intensive enough for me right now.

However, there are several interesting puzzle-related podcasts around. Here’s the ones I know exist, either from personal experience or from searching around in the iTunes store. If you know of more, please let us know in a comment here.

NPR’s Puzzle on the Air

http://www.npr.org/puzzle

The Car Talk Puzzle

http://www.cartalk.com/content/puzzler/

The Puzzle Podcast

http://www.puzzlepodcast.com