The Spark Between

[Update]: Well, it seems I’m actually rather stupid. Tim solved it in less than half an hour… over 5x faster than me :( [/Update]

So I’ve been working this puzzle from the Google homepage ever since I noticed it (which would probably have been the day it came out). It looks like this:

The idea is to fill in 14 of those cirles with the numbers from 1 to 14 (inclusively), such that the distance between 1 and 2 is strictly less than the distance between 2 and 3, which is strictly less than the distance between 3 and 4, etc. (Distance is taken from the center of the circles, so assume the distance between two centers in the same row or column is 1, for simplicity’s sake.) You’ll note that there are 18 circles. You must leave 4 unfilled.

I’m pretty sure I worked on this puzzle for 2½ hours. Here is proof that I completed it. Note that I have blurred out the distance values calculated automatically by the puzzle, because it would be a huge clue as to how the solution works. [SPOILER WARNING] clicking this image will show you the solution. You have been warned.

It was a lot of fun, and I was pretty ecstatic when I solved it.

In other news:
I got to see Katie Roarty tonight! She was in town visiting her brother Matt, who (if I correctly understood) just graduated from college. Hurray for Matt, and for seeing Kate again (do you go by Kate now? sorry for not being sure…). I witnessed an intense nerf war and was nearly killed in the heavy crossfire. Fortunately the only true casualty of the night was a bit of free time when I got lost twice on the way home. (Yeah, so I wasn’t actually supposed to follow you quite that far, Kat[i]e… more like I should have veered left to end up on 520 again. Oh well, not like I was really going to break a record and make it home without turning around tonight, in a new place, in the dark!)

I also reinstalled Windows Vista as a clean install this time. Some fun statistics:
Installation time required for upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, which resulted in a lot of broken or otherwise dead drivers & hardware (like my sound card): 2 hours and 20 minutes
Installation time for a clean install of Windows Vista onto a newly-formatted partition: 37 minutes.
Much nicer.

Here’s a fun UI bug: before activating Windows, this dialog box was exactly the right size. But now that I am reassured by the “Genuine Windows” emblem, it no longer fits, and thus I cannot see the whole emblem. Lol.