I recently finished Braid, the Xbox Live game, and a comparison with Portal is helpful. From a screen shot Braid
looks like a normal 2D platformer, but that's like looking at a screen shot of Portal and saying its a first person shooter. While the scaffolding of the game-play may sort of fall into that
category, the games are actually about exploring the character's ability and solving puzzles. In Portal the ability is bending space and in Braid its bending time. However, whereas in Portal there
is one space bending mechanism, the portal gun, Braid's protagonist explores several different time bending techniques including, most prominently, reversing time, but also time dilation, multiple
time-lines, and other odd things.
Similar to the difference in game-play, while Portal has a strict simplicity to its visual style, Braid is much more ornate, like you're playing in an oil painting. Without seeing video of the game, or playing the demo (which is available for free on Xbox Live) its difficult to convey, but it is quite lovely and the animation adds quite a bit. Both games too are rather short leaving you just a bit hungry for more and have an interesting plot and an ending that I'd hate to spoil although Braid replaces Portal's humor with melancholy. If you enjoyed Portal and Twelve Monkeys then I'd recommend Braid.
I've got a new office and I must clean off my inherited whiteboard. The previous owner left various diagrams, code snippets, etc. on for such a time that they can no longer be erased
by conventional means: the whiteboard eraser is useless! I couldn't find any whiteboard cleaner either, but Ali told me the following secret. You can write over the dried on text with a normal dry
erase marker. When you erase the new markings the old are erased as well. It sounds too fantastic, but believe me, its true! I don't know the brand or material of the whiteboard but the whiteboard
markers are 'Expo, Bold Color Dry Erase'.
My previous window office was ripped from me when our team moved buildings but now I've got another.
The photo is poor because I didn't get the lighting correct and it depicts the office before I've moved all my crap into it. I have a lovely view of our parking lot and freeway which Jane spun as
an 'urban view'. At any rate I'm not complaining: I like knowing what its like outside and that there is an outside. The day after I found out about my office, I also got two new patent cubes. I didn't have any pictures last time so I took some
now and blacked out their text for fear of laywers.
The weekend before last I saw Dark Knight with some friends from work and then we all ate at Z'Tejas after. Like everyone has said and as the name implies Dark Knight is... dark. Dark Knight was a little over the top at times as compared to Batman Begins but I really enjoyed it. Two times during the movie I thought it had ended but I was wrong. The Joker is both frightening (Cringe inducing line "Wanna know how I got these scars?") and humorous ("Where is Harvey Dent? ... You know where Harvey is? You know who he is?", as well as the pencil magic trick). I can certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Batman Begins. The previews included Burn After Reading a new Coen Brother's comedy that I look forward to, and Quantum of Solace which hopefully does the same thing Dark Knight has, keep up the new direction on the refreshed franchise.
This past
weekend Sarah and I went to a Mariners baseball game. I think this is the first MLB baseball game I've seen in person. Sarah's company gave out tickets for the game and the use of a suite. Its a
room half way up the stadium with comfortable chairs, a mini-fridge built-in to the marble counter-topped center table, and a big flat screen television with the game on it. I suppose that's in
case you don't want to turn to the right and sit at the window, or walk out onto the balcony which features three rows of comfy chairs overlooking the field. Anyway there was free food and drinks
and I met some of the people Sarah works with.
sequelguy posted a photo:
My new window office, before I took out the old furniture and moved in all of my crap. A lovely view of parking lot and freeway.
In my previous home, just after I moved in, my neighbor which was the city of Redmond's various city government buildings, decided to build a parking
structure. This was maybe 30 feet from my window, lasted for at least a year and would regularly wake me up at seven or eight in the morning. Determined to not be so punctual for work, I got
earplugs which meant in addition to not hearing the construction outside, I couldn't hear my alarm. I had an idea for a combination ear plug, headphone, alarm clock that I never did anything with,
except to write down the phrase "earplug / headphone / alarm clock" on a list that I just now found. In retrospect, I think this problem might be too specific to result in my earplug alarm clock
selling well.
The weekend before last was Sarah's birthday and as part of
that, last weekend we took a trip to Victoria, BC. I've got a map of our trip locations and photos. Not all the
photos are on the map but they're all in the trip photo set on Flickr. It turns out there's a lot of tourist intended
activities right around our hotel which was in the inner harbor and downtown Victoria area. As such we didn't get a rental car and did a lot of walking.
On the first day we checked out the Royal British Columbia Museum which had
some interesting exhibits in it and the Undersea Garden which was interesting in that its like a floating aquarium but was a bit grimy. There was a group of Japanese tourists next to us during the
undersea show in which a diver behind the glass in the ocean would pick up and parade various animal life. The group all repeated the word starfish in unison after the show's narrator and one of
the tourists was very excited to see the diver bring over the octopus. The diver made the octopus wave to us while it desperately tried to get away.
We flew in and out of the Victoria International Airport
which is a smaller sized airport. Although we needed our passports we didn't need to take off our shoes -- what convenience! The US dollar was just a bit worse than the Canadian dollar which was
also convenient. The weather was lovely while we were there and I only got slightly sun burned.
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