My Spare Time

When I am not doing anything important, (which is most of the time) and I am at the computer (which is when I am least likely to be doing anything important), I often play solitaire. To do that I use Windows (stop laughing) Freecell Solitaire and I have Thomas Warfield's Pretty Good Solitaire. Solitaire on a computer has both good and bad points. A good point is that you don't have to pick up all the cards and reshuffle them, the computer does that for you. A bad point is it is expensive when you throw the deck across the room in frustration.

Windows Freecell (I can still hear you laughing) for Vista is much better than it used to be. It now allows you to cheat properly. On the earlier versions, you could back up just one move. And, if you lost the game, it immediately went into the statistics. The only way to cheat was to hit ALT-CTRL-DEL and kill the task before you actually lost. Oh yeah, you can see it coming easily enough. Now, however, you can back up as far as you wish, even all the way to the beginning and start over. You can even lose and you'll get a chance to go back to the game and back up without it affecting the stats. In order to get a loss in the stats, you have to quit, resign the game, acknowledge defeat, crush your ego. This is a Good Thing in my opinion. On the New Computer, I am at 89 random games and no losses as of this writing. On the laptop, I am at 96% of 970+ games because I was unaware of the changes and quit when I thought I was going to lose a few times. My long term stat on my Old Computer (a fine little Win98 SE machine) was 83% with no cheating. Either I am getting better at that or the cheating is helping. Yes, I do know that starting over or backing up is cheating. But, since it isn't recording it, I am only cheating myself and I forgive me.

Thomas' Pretty Good Solitaire is actually a solitaire suite. That is, it has 700 variations of solitaire to explore and play. That's right, 700. I knew of about 10 of them before I got the suite. The best part of the suite is that you can create a "Tour". A Tour is a group of games which you play in a row and accumulate an aggregate score. The suite has several Tours built in and you can make your own. You can also create your own solitaire version with the Wizard built into the suite. I have not mustered up the courage to try that yet. Besides, I am going to play relatively few of the games already in the suite, just the ones that do not challenge my meager solitaire skills too strongly. By the way, I am not plugging the above suite for Thomas nor am I getting any kickback on it. I just happen to like it and I decided to let you know about it.

I don't want you to think that's all I do on this computer, besides blogging incessantly. No, I also play Mahjongg, watch the value of my holdings in the stock market dwindle, email the few friends I have and some family, and wander around the web following paths my curiosity takes me down. I also do a number of crossword and jigsaw puzzles online. I find puzzles and solitaire (which is really just a card puzzle) are good exercises for the mind. The medical world seems to think so, too, since they say it often enough. In any case, the following ones are the ones I play on a daily basis. None of them are very hard so I use Master level on the first two. There are plenty of others on the internet, I just sort of fixated on these.

From the USA Today (Monday thru Friday only)
From the Palm Beach Post
From Thinks.com An untimed X-word
From Australia Another untimed one
From Heritage News A Weekly one
From the JigZone A daily timed jigsaw puzzle
From JigsawOnline A daily group of three jigsaw puzzles (untimed)

It's nice to be retired. But I did much of this when I was working too. Only not when the boss was around, of course.