As soon as I saw a guy solving a nonogram, on his phone in Japan, I knew I was going to get into nonograms again. Nonograms are logic puzzles played on a grid using numbers as clues. This descriptions sounds a bit like Sudoku, but that's where the similarity ends.

The square grid is empty, and the clues are at the side of each row and column. Your task is to colour certain squares in the grid according the given clues. The clues are a sequence of numbers, for example 3, 4, 7 of consecutive coloured squares, separated by at least one or more empty squares. In the case of the above clue, it means that you have to colour a sequence of 3 squares, then have 1 or more blank squares, a second sequence of 4 coloured squares, white squares and a final sequence of 7 squares. Typically when the puzzle is complete a picture is formed.

These puzzles can be called many different things, amongst them: Hanjie, Paint by Numbers, Pixel Puzzles, Oekaki Logic, and Tsunami.

If you want to try out some puzzles the Sapphire Games site offers some interesting puzzles you can play online. I even managed to find a nice version of the puzzles for the Pocket PC from Conduits. The Japan Puzzle website has a good list of links for PC programs and other platforms.

With the Sudoku craze still alive and slowly evolving in a Kakuro craze, I think there's a good market for nonogram puzzle books.

Some more flash goodies, this time with the flash game Line Rider but beware this is ADDICTIVE. What you've got to do is to create a race track to guide the tobaggonist down a path. There's no hope I can explain how funny it can get. Just to give you a clue there are currently over 11,000 videos on google of Line Rider tracks.

Via The ten most addictive online flash games ever made

I'm under rugby world cup fever. While I'm waiting for my new laptop to arrive (had a wait time of 4-6 weeks), I found a BBC online rugby game. Considering it's just a flash game it's quite sophisticated. You get to pass, kick and win scrums and there's even a tutorial which at was way more difficult than beating Italy. The game was designed for the 6 nations rather than the world cup, but it's good fun anyways.

I'm not a rugby guru but I still can say that Ireland were a total disaster last Sunday. They played Namibia, a bunch of white African farmers, and even risked losing the match. They’re reminding me of when Italy failed to qualify in the European cup. I'm seriously considering forsaking the green team for the black team. After all I identify more with black than with green.

I'm starting a new game. This may be a bit more intellectually demanding than the boyfriend or the 'where I'm from' games, but hopefully more rewarding. Actually I might start a new section in the blog called silly games.

The game is this: Ask 10 questions regarding any profession. The questions must be directly related to the profession not generic questions.

My first set of questions is for an unconventional job in the software industry. The documentation writer.

1. What type of documentation do you usually write (user manuals, API documentation, or other documentation)?
2. With the event of the web many programs are publishing their documentation on the web. What medium do you prefer for publishing documentation, web or HTML, PDF files or printed documentation?
3. With whom do you interact most in the development team to write the documentation?
4. What part of the documentation do you prefer writing?
5. Have you got any tricks of the trade of making your documentation more accessible to be understood by the non-technical person?
6. What do you think about the quality software documentation in general?
7. Do you feel that your role in the production of software is appreciated enough?
8. Would you write documentation for an open source project?
9. Did you ever contribute to improve the usability of a product while you were documenting it?
10. What do you think is the major shortcoming software developers have when they write the documentation themselves?

If you're a documentation writer and would like to reply, please feel free to comment.

You're also free to play along and write your own 10 questions to a profession of your choice. What I might try to do is find some people with blogs in the mentioned profession and ask them to answer the questions.

Remember that experiment with the colour, animal, body of water, and room? Well here's the reason for it. In Diary, Chuck Palahniuk says that Carl Jung used these questions to represent these things :-

• The Colour and description of the colour you gave are representative of how you think about yourself.
• The Animal is other people.
• The body of water is your sex life.
• And, the all white room is your thoughts on death.

This tip isn't to save your time but to waste it. These are some flash games/animations I found on the web through Stumbleupon!

Tilt - Balance a stand on your finger. Simple and addictive

Icon war - Icons fighting each other

Interactive art - Get immersed in the picture

The Angry nintendo nerd (youtube) - Finds fault with crappy games and rants about them. hilarious. Parental Advisory.

Come on I need some replies on this. I'll tell you why later.

• Name your favourite color and 3 words to describe why?
• Name your favourite animal and 3 words to describe why?
• Name a body of water and 3 words to describe why?
• Describe how you would feel if you were locked in a white room with nothing in it but a simple wooden bench on which you were sitting naked, waiting?