Archive for April, 2005
I like the game Gish for its squishy physics play. I also like Half-life 2 (but not just for its physics, though they are fun too)
I just found N - the ninja game - basically Loderunner with physics. Frustrating and funny. Download and just watch the game play itself. See the ninja get chased by heat-seeking missiles, sliced by lasers, blown up by mines, with full conservation of momentum and gravity applied to the fried and exploded little bits of ninja.
Edge magazine also recommended this little gem: The Tower of Goo. You have to build a tower out of goo-balls. The goo balls form semi-rigid struts as you drag them around. Overbalance your tower and the rubbery structure slowly starts to topple, at which point you start to try to counterweight it to right it. Eventually the whole thing topples too far. There is no penalty though - you can just keep building on top of the ruins. The sounds the little goo-balls make as you drop them in place make the experience that much more fun. It reinforces the action, gives you immediate feedback - a core component in a pleasurable experience.
April 30th, 2005
Just paid my taxes on-line and sent in my tax form by text-message. Now that my stock report is also handled automatically, I didn’t even have to go on-line to submit the form. Sweet!
What’s the point of having a big governmental bureaucracy with oodles of computers if they aren’t going to help the citizenry with their tax forms? Compared to my tax tribulations ten years ago (when I was lucky to find a PDF I could print out) I’m amazed at how far the goverment has come in automating and making this annual duty (ooh - an obscure pun!) remarkably pleasant and effortless.
In Soviet Norway, the Government Works For You!
April 30th, 2005
DarthSide - Anakin Skywalker’s personal notes from the Star Wars. Brilliantly done. Wonder how long before it gets shut down?
Big day. Storming the rebel ice fortress.
Took a nap first so I would be peppy. Leg feels pretty good.
Admiral Ozzol took the fleet out of hyerspace too close to Hoth, and the Rebel Alliance were — you guessed it — alerted to our approach.
April 28th, 2005
I just spent an hour talking about how to gradually introduce commands into our app at work.
Then I read this article, and I can just nod my head in agreement.
The de-coupling of GUI and model is a key part of MVC, but the decoupling of GUI and actions (the C part of MVC) is easily overlooked. SuperOffice started out as a Model-Document app, but we’ve found that the Command pattern is vital as your app grows larger. Without Command objects you end up duplicating the logic throughout the app, along with all the enable/disable state handling logic and bindings to context. Yecch!
As the Pragmatic Programmers say: Don’t Repeat Yourself.
April 26th, 2005
Span have made a couple of ok albums, but they kick ass as a live band. They should do a live album. We left the vorspiel at 10:30 and arrived just before the show started.
April 24th, 2005
Huckabees is a surreal movie. Not as funny as I’d hoped, but funny enough in places. Unfortunately it turns out that having ordinary people suddenly spouting off about nihilism or suffering bouts of existentialist angst is not that funny. The plot is rather thin, the movie skitters from philosophical rant to situation comedy and back again, occasionally jumping sideways into some quite funny dream-sequences. The best part of the film is that the reality the characters inhabit is absurd and bizarre, and the philosophical detectives help them realize it. The actors do a great job - the problem is more in the story.
Jude Law plays a charming asshole AGAIN. (Alfie, Closer, now this - he must like playing the bad boy). Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are great as always. Mark Wahlberg plays a fireman who toys with nihilism and loses his wife and kid because of it. Jason Schwartzman has the unenviable job of playing the whining protagonist with philosophical issues.
And that is where the biggest problem is - the main character isn’t that likeable. An inept poet who wants to save the swamp and the forest by reciting verses in front of a rock. Next to the charming sleaziness of Jude Law, his charmless whine becomes even more annoying. This makes the dream sequences where Jude Law gets chopped to bits with a machete strangely funny.
The philosophical points the film makes are all pretty valid, and they’re illustrated quite nicely (usually with help from Isabelle Huppert). Everything is interconnected. Everything is the same, even if it’s different. But it’s also nothing special. Nothing makes sense. There’s no such thing as nothing. Human drama cannot be avoided except by withdrawing from the world, but everyday life will always drag you back.
So: worth seeing if you have a hankering for deep thoughts, but worth avoiding if you’re looking for a simple laugh.
April 14th, 2005
All of MP3.com is sweet: not as good as iTunes, but unlike iTunes it works here and now, and it has the Burnout 3 tracks i can’t seem to find here (like The Mooney Suzuki and Bowling for Soup). The download interface is a bit too simple: right click Save-as links works great when you’re buying individual tracks, but if you buy a couple of albums worth then the repeated right-click button clicking gets old fast. Being able to download all the queued tracks in a single zip file would be nice.
Ah well - iTunes is supposed to land in April 28, making life easier (and more expensive most likely).
April 10th, 2005
I’m trying out skype phone services - I dropped my landline about ten months back, and my mobile is my official phone. But I want to see what Skype is like - so see if I’m at home by buzzing christian_mogensen on skype.
April 10th, 2005
Caol Ila - peppery finish to the this robust single malt Islay whisky. Tasty - a nice balance between peaty and seaweedy, oily flavours
April 6th, 2005
Spent the brisk and clear weekend strolling around town. Walked up to Akershus where I took this.
April 5th, 2005
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