As I continue to play with getting pages formatted and so forth, I thought it important to get the purpose out on the table... Because people are going to look at this and think it is all about playing and useless stuff.
And it is about playing and useless stuff; but that's not all it is about.
I suppose I need to begin at the beginning...
In about mid 2002, two things happened nearly simultaneously. The first was that the company I work for, in a draconian moment, had the computer support people go around and disable games on everyone's computers.
Now, it says one thing about me that, up until that moment, I had not realized that the games were still installed on my machine. I had assumed that they were not available when I first started, and had never bothered to look. It says something different about me that I was miffed at having the games removed from my machine.
The second thing was, I learned my first bit of VBA code.
I was impressed with my own new powers, frankly. I could (and did) add VBA macros to a number of spreadsheets for very marginal reasons. But I was learning something new, and that was exciting and cool. And then it hit me: I could program minesweeper.
Why not, after all? What is minesweeper but a bunch of cells? Very much like an Excel spreadsheet. That program has sat on my C: drive ever since, and I play it perhaps once a month. I've even made programmatic improvements to it (which if you are a programmer and look at it will tell you how limited my skills really are...)
There it might have stayed indefinitely. But last year I launched a website to show the world the result of another effort I had made at using Excel for non-productive reasons: to create sudoku puzzles. And I rediscovered that it is fun to have a website, to share with the world, and so forth and so on. Then my mind drifted back to minesweeper.
Sure, I can program a game for myself. But why not let others enjoy it as well? Others who work at companies where the games have been uninstalled... It goes against the human spirit! We humans are made for play; it is in our very genes. So time to launch another site, to share this too with whoever wants it.