2008 Nov 20, 10:58I, like Matt, am a bit incredulous but this is still funny. "Check, cash or money order are acceptable forms of payment when the bill collector comes knocking (or e-mailing), not a picture you
doodled of a spider."
via:swannman humor art spider money 2008 Aug 29, 10:44Cool 30's Soviet Union tourist brochure logos and designs. "Intourist was renowned as the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and was responsible
for managing the great majority of foreigners' access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union. It grew into one of the largest tourism organizations in the world, with a network embracing banks,
hotels, and money exchanges. Some of the best Intourist labels and brochures produced during the 1930's were designed by A. Selensky. Some of the labels in this set are signed by him, including a
rare constructivist style travel brochure I have included as well."
flickr photo propaganda graphic russia history design 2008 Aug 18, 11:29"A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why
did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money."
podcast audio economics npr radio mortgage 2008 Apr 21, 12:05ISPs show ads for unreigstered domains including subdomains which malicious folk use to XSS. Oops.
article security internet web xss advertising 2008 Apr 1, 11:21'95 article on the Internet fad: "So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the
Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a m
humor article internet news history future 2008 Jan 14, 10:24Alarm clock that donates money to a charity you dislike when you hit the snooze button.
alarm clock humor geek gadget gift thinkgeek wifi wireless product alarm-clock 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Sep 28, 11:10"The Microsoft fallacy has the following components: If a company has a lot of money, this means that they have sufficient resources to do anything. If a company has a lot of money, every piece of
that company has access to all of it. Every large company
article microsoft humor mac blog 2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my
N-dimensional
Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the
issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the
user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.
Anyway, I did a little
research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and
Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a
Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my
computers had one already. I used
GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer.
GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.
Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a
Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long
forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on
Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose
in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I
can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a
comparison list of implementations and tried the ones
that support javax.bluetooth.
None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried
bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use
that address.
And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...
java bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote 2007 May 2, 1:12Voting records from congress people available as well as money trail information.
article politics mashup web blog social public privacy voting 2007 Apr 21, 11:38This previous Wednesday, I went to
trivia at the
Wilde Rover. Our team consisted of Sarah, myself, Jane,
Eric,
Rachel, and Ansen. Before the last round we were 16th (out of ~32) but after the final round we were 6th!
The previous time Sarah played there the exact same thing happened. Of course you must be in the top five to win money (or last place who gets their money back). You could say, of those who didn't
get any money we did the best! I didn't contribute too much except for spotting a street from Paris in the picture round and knowing which generation the Wii is of Nintendo home consoles. Mostly I
focused on increasing our bill =)
bar game personal trivia nontechnical 2007 Apr 9, 12:51One of the greatest classical musicians in the world plays as a street performer to see how much attention and money he gets.
art classical music social video article humor news via:swannman 2007 Jan 26, 3:20I wondered how long it would take for these to appear. Maybe you don't pay money to use your neighbors WiFi connection but you do pay in information.
article wifi free security windows airport 2003 Mar 8, 8:15Finals week is closing in quickly. This quarter seemed to go by faster than usual. With the end of the quarter almost here I've got a variety of assignments to finish. Today is supposed to be the day
I work on them all, but I'm easily distracted. For instance, I had read Ken Thompson's
Reflections on Trusting Trust a few days ago. As the author
suggested, I tried writing
my own self-reproducing program. Rather than brevity, I went for clarity and good style. That was my intent
anyway. Now I'm avoiding work by writing in this journal. Last night I lost my money fairly early on during poker. After that Scott gave me a dollar which, surprisingly, lasted me much longer than
the previous five. Though despite that, It was a good time.
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