Pizza Arbiter

Way, way back in the golden age of the late 20th century, around 1995 or ’96, shortly after I first started at Crossover Games and was learning about the technical side of the web, I had an idea for a web app: The Pizza Calculator. The idea was that you’d enter in how many people were splitting the pizza, how much they wanted to eat, what kinds of toppings they liked/disliked/were neutral about, and it would spit back an order (“Two pies, one with pepperoni and half mushrooms, the other with pineapple and half anchovies.”).

I didn’t get far; turns out it’s a pretty daunting problem, which explains why it can take so long for a large group to agree on a mass pizza order. Someone else has come up with a more elegant solution — The Pizza Arbiter. You register your LJ handle, tell it what toppings you like, and it can construct pizzas that any given group of registered LJ users can share.

Want to find out what pizza you and I can share? Put your name in the box next to mine and click the button to find out!

Meat and more meat

I’ve dropped back to being a free user. I didn’t notice any real improved performance during my two months as a paid user, even when using the agrumer.livejournal.com URL. (In fact, that URL sometimes failed when the users/agrumer URL worked.) I wasn’t using the polls, and my free user syndication allowance seems more than adequate to what I’m spending it on.

I think this means I’m limited to posting some small number of times (three? five?) in a 24-hour period, so I may have to keep an eye on casual posting.

That column-top up there is from the 14th Street station on the PATH, sketched while waiting for a train late Friday night, after watching the Independence Day fireworks on TV in an apartment that had a partial view of the southernmost edge of the real thing. We’d planned to watch from the roof, but the apartment complex security blocked it off.

Today I went out with my family for my grandfather’s birthday. We went to a Brazilian barbecue place, one of those where they bring around freshly grilled meat on skewers and keep bringing it till you tell ’em to stop. It was good, but not as good as I remember it being last time. The stuffed and mounted head of a buffalo, or bison, or something, was hanging over our table, staring down at me the whole time, so I sketched it. Twice, actually, but I didn’t like how the grayscale marker version came out.

Kevin Drum of Calpundit posted about an amusing little difference between the American and British editions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (minor, shouldn’t be a spoiler, but some of the comments underneath might be), and one of his commentators links to a list of phrases from the book that are somewhat risqué taken out of context. Here’s one from page 9:

He let out a long, slow breath and stared up at the brilliant blue sky. Every day this summer had been the same: the tension, the expectation, the temporary relief, and then mounting tension again...and always, growing more insistent all the time, the question of why nothing had happened yet.

But yeah, you can do this with just about anything.