Had a very small, but quality turnout yesterday for the coffee house. Pleasant evening discussing history, poetry, websites and the like. Brendan has a truly prodigious memory, he can quote greater and lesser poets at length in multiple languages. He didn't recite much of his own, however. Hopefully he'll put up a selection on his new website.

Grams is still recovering from the broken hip, so no pool today. Helped her neighbour Tony (who used to produce CBC Radio shows (as well as being a voice actor for them)) set up his PVR-style DVD-RW recorder. Was a missing cable and a failure to initialise (format) the disks.

I made the cardinal mistake when reading Slashdot today, I thought "hmm, I wonder what a program to do that would look like" and then proceeded to waste the entire (originally OpenGL-ctypes booked) night on the project... well... that and some mindless television when I realised my hands were on fire. Anyway, for those who care, click through to read Python code for generating acrostic puzzles (that is, puzzles that read the same down as right, as seen here).

    ABIGALE
    BEVELER
    IVORIAN
    GERMANE
    ALIASES
    LEANEST
    ERNESTO

There seems like there should be dozens of other ways to optimise the search, but they all begin to look a little awkward compared to the straightforward recursive implementation.