morlockhq
They are good examples of puzzle design and help expose the underlying pieces of a classic text adventure should you need some inspiration for your text game, as well. I own a complete set of physical copies, but you can pick the PDFs up for a couple of books from his site, Memento Mori Theatricks (http://www.memento-mori.com/parsely/).
I was raised to do it, but I am now barred due to the note on the eligibility sheets. I talked to a Red Cross area administrator about it and he said that, even though it has been over 20 years, they are unlikely to lift the ban until effective testing and treatments are found. Since there are no tests, they can't risk the blood supply.
[1] Check the details of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Variant (vCJD); "Mad Cow Disease" option: http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requ...
Given that, I was able to use dbus to come up with a quick solution for a department feature in an afternoon using Pidgin's libpurple dbus bindings through purple-remote to create a presence tracker and simple announcement bot with bash.
A little digging into Pidgin's DBUS Howto gave me all the documentation that I needed. It just took a lunch hour to have something functional up and running without any real in depth programming knowledge required or needed. In an afternoon, I'd hacked up an RSS feed that showed everyone in the department's current presence as reported by their IM status and that feed could then be consumed by the required apps.
I don't know about dbus' other merits or flaws, but it did help me solve a specific problem quickly. This was a dead simple use case though.
At the time, I assumed that people more knowledgeable than me could do a hell of a lot more with it.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/back-dead-simple-bash-co...
Do you do a lot with your mind during the day? Take up wood working, knitting, or sewing as a hobby. Work with your hands.
Do a lot with your hands during the day? Do something that engages your mind more. Take up art, writing, etc.
Take dance lessons. If you are not a dancer already, learning to dance and then doing it has a lot of health benefits, social benefits (see below) and makes your mind work in different ways.
I highly recommend trying square dancing (as corny as it may sound). Square dancing is very intricate and requires careful attention to called queues in order to maintain a steady stream of dance transitions. It is the fastest way to get into "flow" that I have ever experienced and have heard of number of other writers and technical types that rely on flow express the same sentiment.
Learn, teach, and play more board games. Modern board games have a vast array of different mechanics and strategies in them offering lots of different problem spaces for your brain to tackle. There is also a good social aspect to them that is inter-generational (we have board game nights with ten year old kids regularly playing with retirees) and some decline in cognitive ability is linked to the lack of social engagement people experience as they age.
It won't be pretty, but neither was the Timex Sinclair 1000 that was the first computer that I programmed with BASIC.
I have a Windows partition on my laptop for some work stuff and to help with Windows support, but I almost never boot it. I generally just work from memory on that stuff.