(On the internet, no-one knows your outfit is one middle-aged guy with a couple of part-time jobs, unless you tell them!)
I have been a big fan of Cross Sums puzzles since I first encountered them as a teen growing up in small town Ontario. I used to wait eagerly for a new Dell Variety Puzzles magazine to come out every month, and then I would rush home and do the Cross Sums first! On summer vacation, I would take old back issues and hand-copy the puzzles onto graph paper, so I could solve them again. If I got stuck, I'd make my sister check my copy against the original to see if I'd made a mistake copying over all those row and column totals! This turned her off these puzzles forever, I'm afraid.
After high school, I got a degree in Computer Science, and a job as a systems analyst with Nortel. I was too busy with the job and a growing family to spend time with any puzzles.
Last summer was very slow for me, work-wise - I was now an independent IT consultant (thanks, Nortel!) in a sector that is feeling the pinch of off-shoring these days. Between contracts I started toying with the idea of making Cross Sums puzzles - after all, it seemed to me that I probably knew as much about this type of puzzles as the people who originally made them!
Well, not quite, it turns out. Anyone with strong programming skills can probably write a puzzle generating program, but most of the puzzles it creates will be boring, tedious or impossible to solve unless you have the patience, perseverence and processing power of a Pentium. In other words, it is hard to create fun puzzles by machine alone.
Which brings me to this juncture. I have figured out a way to craft fun puzzles, and I have several hundred of them at hand. And I am making new ones all the time.
And better yet, you have found this site, so you are enjoying them too. (At least I hope you are!)
I am interested in your feedback, good or bad. Because I work several part-time jobs, email is the only reliable way to get in touch with me. I check my site email at least once or twice a day, but it may be at odd hours, so don't expect an immediate response. You can email me at webmaster@freexsums.com.