wikipedia page 4 - Dave's Blog

Portal is fun; the cake is a lie!

2007 Oct 22, 4:47I 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

Wikipedia Tools

2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use Everything2. No need to check references there.

There's the much hyped WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.

Also, via Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.

As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?wikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report

Awesome Movies Unknown to Me

2007 Aug 12, 2:50Thanks to Netflix I've been able to enjoy several movies that I'd never heard of.



Brick is a classic PI film set in a modern high school. Its fun figuring out which high school students correspond to which film noir archetypes.

Primer is a sci-fi movie but it doesn't focus on action or effects. Its like watching an excellent Twilight Zone episode. I hate to describe this any further for fear of giving something away.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is an animated version of the one shot comic. It feels like the 1800s precursor to the The Venture Bros. and stars Screw-On Head, a steam-punk robot head thing and Abe Lincoln's top spy for occult matters.

The Quiet Earth is the movie version of the book about a man who awakes one day to find himself alone(... or is he?) It was made in the 80s and in Australia but don't hold that against it.scifi primer movie amazing screw-on head personal netflix brick the quiet earth

Chicken Roundup

2007 Jul 11, 3:52I realized that I have short list of chicken related things I find humorous and they're all available for the linking to via youtube.

Chicken: The Powerpoint Presentation. This is a power point presentation of a research paper written in the language chicken. (video)

Bluth Family Chicken Dances. From the show Arrested Development many Bluth family members had their own chicken dance. (video)

Peter Fights the Giant Chicken. A man sized chicken fights Peter from Family Guy for multiple minutes in several episodes mimicking famous action sequences. I must admire the writers dedication to the gag. (video1, video2)

roundup video personal chicken humor nontechnical

Ozzie

2007 Jun 25, 3:13I keep seeing 'Ozzie' on emails and such now due mainly to Ray Ozzie who is now the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and his brother Jack Ozzie. Whenever I see his name I think of Ozzie from Chrono Trigger. He was one third of a trio of villains, the other two being Flea and Slash. I feel like I should be thinking of the Ozzy for which this Ozzie was named but I really don't.

My next thought on Ozzie is the Scottish guy who went to my high school. He'd shout 'Ozzie! Ozzie! Ozzie!' to which listeners were compelled to respond 'Oi! Oi! Oi!'. The wikipedia article on the chant has some thoughts on the origins but I suppose at Microsoft it could take on entirely new meaning. I really hope I'm someday in a meeting with Ray or Jack Ozzie and have the opportunity...ozzy personal ozzie random nontechnical

Unspun IE List

2007 Jun 21, 2:38Unspun is a social list creation website from Amazon. For instance, you could create a list named 'Most Desired Features for Next Version of Internet Explorer' and users of Unspun fill in and rank the answers. There's a mix of serious answers that are excellent suggestions, fan-boy answers that are lame, uninformed answers that are already implemented, and hilarious answers that are awesome. The following is the very short unsorted list of the awesome suggestions.

Innovative Anti-Phreaking Technology

Given the work done in IE7 on anti-phishing, subsequent work on anti-phreaking just makes sense.

AXELROD 2.8 Acceleration with XML Bindings

I'm not sure what AXELROD 2.8 is but accelerating it sounds good. Also I enjoy binding things to XML so...

Larger Buttons for My Mighty Fingers

For maximum humor this should be read by Richard Horvitz as Zim of Invader Zim. This one makes me laugh every time I read it.

amazon personal ie humor nontechnical

Cat Roundup

2007 May 17, 1:04I've seen several humorous kitty related stories recently and then happened upon the whole lolcat scene. Rather than post all the links to humorous kitty lolcat photos to delicious I figure I'll roundup the links here.

A cat in England enjoys riding the bus and does so regularly (associated lolcat commentary).

A cat trees a bear (also with lolcat commentary).

xkcd has a comic on the topic of lolcat commentary. xkcd also had a non-lolcat cat related comic recently that I found funny.

And now I'm out of commentary so I'll just... "X cat is X": interested, aggressive/defensive. VG related: SF, Zelda. Other: cookie, sad.roundup comic kitty personal cat humor nontechnical

Movie Times

2007 May 1, 3:48The Sunday of the weekend before last I had friends over and we watched Antitrust and Sneakers. Watching Antitrust makes me wonder if Bill Gates has seen it. Tim Robbins plays a character that is essentially based on him but so over the top that its ridiculous.

A few days before that I watched The Prestige with Sarah. I can't tell if I was or wasn't supposed to know what was going on until the end but it was cool anyway. I didn't know until later but David Bowie plays Tesla which is just awesome all the way around.

We also watched The Illusionist sometime before. Both movies are adaptations of novels with stage magicians set in turn of the century England. And I enjoyed both of them. I thought one would be a rushed attempt by one studio to compete with the another on the same ground but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've noticed this before with those asteroid disaster movies and the two movies about Truman Capote. It turns out Wikipedia has a huge list of competing similar movies.personal movies nontechnical

Trivia

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

Opera Speed Dial Code-less Hack for IE7

2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.

By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by malicious software to hijack "about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.

Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.

1. Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
2. The user should be able to modify its content.
3. Show links that the user uses.
4. Show thumbnails of those links
5. Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.

Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing but hey, I said this was ugly.

In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...browser technical hack

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

2007 Apr 15, 7:37Friday Jon, Daniil, and I saw Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. It was really great. The quality of individual Aqua Teen episodes varies wildly but this movie was very funny. It was like watching an excellent episode that happened to be 87 minutes long.

I had some difficulty generating interest for the movie as many didn't think this was 'their kind of movie'. I asked Sarah and she said no but I talked to her about it again later after she watched a clip and she said she really didn't want to see it because it looked too weird. I asked her what she saw in the clip and she said a man with weird pants was talking with french fries while a drink was getting a meatball to push him around in a cart.

Well, when you put it like that it does sound weird...movie personal nontechnical