Friday Hodgepodge

Four Random Wins From the Last Couple of Weeks

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1. Last weekend, I enjoyed playing Catopoly with my daughter. I was happy to see that the Turkish Van, the breed of the best cat I ever owned, was included on the board.

2. In the process of playing a clone so I could "fail faster" at Wordle, I realized that a set of eight words ending in the same four letters was responsible for most of my losses.

Since any of these words also fit my policy of front-loading vowels in my earlier guesses, I now start with one of those words to guarantee enough guesses to solve. I now lose less than half as often as I did before, and it is also more common for me to solve in two or three guesses than needing all six or losing.

I still have yet to lose at the official game, but I give myself time and paper if I need it when I play that.

3. Continuing last week's emergent theme of controlling my own computing environment: It was really satisfying, after gathering or scanning in all my tax documentation to type two commands to (1) combine everything into one PDF document and (2) password-protect it.

The first script I wrote to support a completely unrelated project and the second I wrote after wishing there were an easy way to password-protect a PDF and saying so to the internet genie.

4. Today, and simply because I have a reminder in my planner not to miss "positive focus," remembering one of yesterday's small victories prompted me to follow up sooner rather than later. I'd forgotten to add that to my planner!

-- CAV