Riddle me this

Click now for JiffNotes

Here's some stuff you've been asking lately...

-Did you make that cake?
Nope, BUT my oldest sister did. She is kind of crazy in the kitchen. One year I threw a Christmas tea for some friends, and she made all the food...including piping iced holly leaves and berries ON THE SUGAR CUBES!!! This coconut cake came with amaretto-chocolate sauce...it was like eating an Almond Joy!

-Jill said I should post some stats (posts, comments, # jiff notes, # hits). Unfortunately, it's post-blogiversary, but here they are to this point:

Number of posts: 125
Number of comments: 374 (Wow! You like me! You really like me!)
Most comments per post:
Now, it's the sad post on me going full-time.
When I started this, it was...
Tie between Disney Arrival (which sort of doesn't count, because I was one of the commenters) and the blogiversary post (what a shock!), both with 10 comments
Runners-up are my finished Quaker Sewing Case (which I really appreciate, since I was rather proud of it!) and the inaugural JiffNotes post

Which brings us to...
Number of JiffNotes: 57

And from BlogPatrol (http://www.blogpatrol.com/) (at time of writing):
Total hits: 5597
Total visitors (by IP): 3363

Most hits/day (I'm going on memory here): 31
Typical hits/day: 10-15

Most frequently visited posts (by URL, other than "main page"):
The one about the sofa
Dumbledore's ArmyThis is also from my memory, rather than what BlogPatrol says. They are both due to search engines....

My favorites:
Casserole de corn
Inept contractor
Pollenpocalypse
Also a search engine favorite...When Geeks Talk Trash
Fireworks gone awry
Free food, priceless company
ASG redux
Life-changing Pancakes
Heather has skillz
Yeah...I know...they're mostly "blah blah blah" posts. Click on the needlework tag on the right if you want more pretty pictures. =)

-Jill also asked about starting the Herringbone block shawl at the other end.
This probably won't make any sense if you haven't seen Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton's Benedikta sweater...but anyway, here's how it looks now:
The directions say to keep knitting diamonds 'til it's the length you want, then knit another piece like the pink/purple sawtooth piece (at the bottom) and seam it onto the end. Instead, I'm going to knit another piece like in the picture above, then keep knitting them both 'til each is half the length I want the whole thing to be. Then, I'm going to seam them together in the middle of the shawl. I think the purl ridges will line up in a cool way. Fortunately, I have another skein of the Kureyon I knit the sawtooth with, so I just need to get it to the point where the same color range starts.

-Richard said, "Wait! I want to hear more about neural nets and natural language processing and Lisp code that writes itself!"
Well, he is probably the only one.... =) But here goes.... When I was getting my Master's in Computer Science, one of my specializations was Artificial Intelligence. One quarter I decided to participate in a research project, for two reasons. First, I was kind of tired of being a teaching assistant. I loved it, but I'd gotten tired of having to have office hours and no one ever showing up (the class wasn't rocket surgery, as David Lee Roth would say). Second, I was toying with the idea of getting my Ph.D., so I thought I'd better see what it was like and have some experience in case I was trying to get into the program. I am honestly kind of fuzzy (HA!) now on what exactly the overall goal of the project was, but my part was to write LISP code that would ask a remote database questions about its structure, map that to a master database's structure, and automatically write functions that would map data between the two. There is really nothing cooler than code that writes more code! This conversation came about because one of my coworkers found this book for cheap and was talking about how cool all this stuff was, so I started talking about all the cool classes I took in college.... Sorry, Richard, nothing specific or helpful. =)

-Jill, still full of questions, wanted to know if I got some gold dance shoes for my DDR win (or a mirror-ball trophy)
Sadly, no. Just the virtual trophy. And since I already own four (!) pairs of tap shoes, I probably won't be buying myself any. ;) Oh, yeah, I did get an achievement for it!

And, since I haven't done it for a while, here's a brief list of recent searches that hit the blog:

• "quaker turtles" [sorry you didn't see much here!]


• "Catherine Theron" [at least you found one finish]


• foxglove socks [you only got 1/2 a sock]


• giant metal tea ball [say what?]


• Disadvantages of Graffiti [you're kidding, right??]


• sleepys dynasty headboard [schwunh?]


• "hawaiian programmers" [I'd love to know if you want one or want to be one]


• carved monkey coconut heads [I'll let you have one cheap]


• hop 2 you drop [did you mean "'til"?]


• what to do first arriving disney [I could write a book on this. It totally depends on what time you get there and where you're staying.]


• nora bellows [love her]


• jiff notes [!!! I bet they were really searching for CliffsNotes. I ain't that famous]

JiffNotes
I do eventually answer all questions...eventually.... Julia, yours is the first one at the top. =)