Sunday, March 18, 2007

fill in the blanks, or why Yahoo! crosswords is so awesome

We finished this Yahoo! crossword with three mistakes (boxes wrong), although really I am willing to just count it as one. The correct answer for 12-down was AVER, not AVOW. And I spelled 4-down incorrectly, so that doesn't count.

Yahoo! Crosswords (a tiny subset of Yahoo! Games) is a good example of the Internet making my life better one small step at a time. The crosswords here are essentially like the pen and paper sort, except it is better in at least three ways (which I feel make it more instantly gratifying, like most post-net versions of things do):
  1. You can instantly check to see whether or not you have answered a clue correctly, without having to peek at the entire solution (possibly spoiling other parts of your puzzle).
  2. As you move your position marker around different boxes in the puzzle, the relevant clues are automatically highlighted for you on the side. No more wasted time searching clue numbers.
  3. Entering things digitally via your keyboard instead of a pencil (or pen, for the bold) means that all of the letters are uniformly centered in the boxes, and mistakes are a breeze -- just delete!
My motivation to do a Yahoo! crossword this evening was related to our board game playing activities last night. We had guests over for some friendly Cranium. Overall, we totally rock. But on these word game category (the yellow box!), the majority of which ask you to do RIDICULOUSLY EASY tasks like spell "catastrophe" backwards or spell "quiche" forwards, they also had fill-in-the-blank clues, of which WE DID NOT GET A SINGLE ONE RIGHT. Hence the practice. +1 to Cranium Skills.