It's been a puzzly few days. Again.

Today I've finally managed to commit mpinna's new puzzle into my collection. The collection now stands at 21 puzzles, which is – not to put too fine a point on it – a fair few. I'm half tempted to have a coming-of-age party for it :-)

Also today I've implemented a new difficulty level in Solo, after a brainstorming session with Gareth earlier in the week turned up an interesting new form of deduction.

Earlier this week somebody mailed me and offered to pay to have me implement a particular type of puzzle, which is rather scary. And several times in the last week I've been speculatively sent descriptions of puzzle rules in the hope that they'll strike me as interesting enough to implement. I fear that if things carry on this way my puzzle collection will take over my life the way PuTTY did. It's terrifying.

Particularly worrying is what happened this morning, when someone said they'd like to write a puzzle for my collection but wasn't sure what, and so I passed on one of the suggestions I'd been emailed. That seemed like an obviously sensible thing to do, but it struck me as typical of what always seems to happen to me, which is that I start software projects out of a love of programming, but can't seem to stop ending up in these managerial/coordinator roles where I'm passing on suggestions from people with ideas but no time to people with time but no ideas, or constantly accepting and rejecting other people's code submissions, or running frantically to keep up with maintainer workload, or drafting broad policy and finding it being implemented by other people; I'd like to just sit down and write code, and I do so every chance I get, but it seems terribly difficult to find the time some days in among dealing with all the consequences of having done it in the past.

Anyway. I've been slaving over a computer for the whole of yesterday evening and the whole of this evening, so now I'm going to go and get some well-deserved sofa time before bed. Phew.