Meme-Free Zone

Just wasted about twenty minutes on a Sudoku puzzle (from a cheap book I usually keep in the loo). My usual time for the puzzles in this book - which are all fairly easy, despite being marked "beginner, intermediate" and "expert" - is about four minutes. This one just wouldn't come out... until I realised that there were actually two possible solutions, neither of which was erroneous. Basically there were two pairs of 2 and 4, on the left side and in the middle - you could have 2 on top and 4 below to the left, with 4 on top and 2 below in the middle, or vice versa, without affecting anything else.

To say that I'm annoyed is putting it mildly - these things are supposed to have ONE unique solution. But someone messed up the error checking and this is the result. The real bummer is that I can't now trust the rest of the puzzles to be OK, so I might as well bin the book.

Later: Found another one, this time with four pairs (on horizontal lines 4 and 5) which give a valid solution either way if they're all flipped vertically. I'm now finding looking for the errors more interesting than doing the puzzles!

Pointed out by the_magician and peteyoung

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjiGH9QNiU0

Absolutely lovely animation.

If like me you don't like the way that putting the mouse cursor near a user pic now brings up a little floaty menu, help is at hand!

When I moaned about this in another thread lnr pointed out that you can get rid of it by going to

http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/

And turning off "contextual hover menu"

I'm pretty sure that doing this has speeded up page display too.

Obviously my night for posting to Livejournal!

I've been thinking about another BtVS / Veronica Mars story, a sequel to Subcontractor possibly involving a crossover with another fandom, and came up with a mission statement for Cordelia Chase in a post Not Fade Away world where everyone knows the supernatural exists. Does this sound interesting?

Cordelia is without a doubt the most accessible Higher Being in the world. No rituals, no sacrifices, no prayers or summoning, no signing away your soul. Just dial her toll-free number and you're talking to 'the patron saint of occult detection' (source Newsweek, April 2006). Of course you need to have good reason, otherwise the reply tends to be short and sharp, and occasionally leaves the phone melting. Nevertheless thousands of people have risked it, and since Higher Beings gain power from people believing in them, or at least that's what the Watcher's Council web-site says, Cordelia is rapidly becoming a major occult player. Dad thinks that sooner or later the other Higher Beings will pull the plug on her - I'm guessing that most of them dearly wish they'd thought of the scam first, and are trying to work out ways of getting in on the act without looking like copy-cats. The thing is that calling her works, often extremely well; provided that you aren't personally involved, she can give you answers that can bust a case wide open. For some reason she can't help you if you're personally involved - for example, she couldn't help me with the Lilly Kane murder or the bus thing the following year - but there are twenty cases that are purely business for every one that gets personal.

The case probably won't involve Veronica working for Cordelia directly, but I think that at some point Veronica will be picking up the phone.