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The Magpie Developer
Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer. |
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Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry.
(Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that. |
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Drinking stories that put yours to shame
Via Keith
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood. |
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making vodka pills in 24 hours
Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms. |
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Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz. |
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(Tuesday, July 17)
Come a long way from Tecmo Bowl....
Since 2003, every year there is a right of passage that starts to get me pumped about football season: The yearly NCAA purchase. For 2002 - 2006 it was for the PS2, last year and this year it has been for the 360. It is weird, some years the gameplay itself will change dramatically, other years the actual gameplay doesn't change that much they just add new features to the menus (season mode, dynasty, cut scenes, replay etc). So I downloaded the demo last week for the 360 and played the core game it really felt like barely anything had changed in the gameplay except the way to navigate in the play calling UI. Regardless I knew I was still going to get the game (they had me at season 1) so my annual pilgrimage after work to pick up the newest version came today and I brought the game home.
So I start setting up my dynasty for this year, a few new features here and there for recruiting; player callups, promise system, etc. I started playing around with setting up a non-online game. If there is any hint I can give to any new x360 owner that wants to play a sports game online the night they get the game is - Don't do it. Period. It doesn't matter if it is the day the game came out and you just KNOW noone has played the game yet and can be decent, The 'Great Law of Videogame Balance' says that you will get obliterated for an entire 4 quarters then find out it is a 11 year old if you try to play online the first night the game is out. Disgraced, the loss will leave a bad taste in your mouth when you play the game the next time.
There is also a few other cool new features I notice like realistic weather for location and night is now done by Weather Channel which is amazingly BA. They can tell you the temp/conditions right now in Big Bend if you want to play a game there right at this moment. if we ever get a snow here in Atlanta again, the first thing I am going to do is login and setup a UGA/GT match and to verify weather.com's temps. You can also get a lot more news and such via espn.com on the ticker at the bottom which is pretty cool.
So usually my first game in any new NCAA title is a little UGA/GT match up just so I can get some practice against a team that I know won't be a challenge. I started up a game, selected my teams and began to play decent (I am a little rusty). At about the 2nd quarter I started to try to figure out how to change my audibles when I saw the EA movie/picture highlight section of the config. I checked into it and low and behold you can save movies of any play during the game (and take pics). Then I look further and see that you can also upload it to easports.com and login and view them. Interesting I say, i wonder if they went all the way and made these movies embedable! That would rock if I could show people kick ass plays, and I found out that you can... to a point. As of now you can download a .FLV of your movies (5 at a time max), while I think you can just embed that I went ahead and found a wrapper online to wrap around it for controls, so this is actually pretty damn cool. Here is absolutely the best play of the night from my UGA/GT game:
The Setup:
At this point in the game I am pretty down. There is only about 42 seconds to go in the game and I was leading 15-12 and they scored with the 2 point conversion. So with 41sec left in the game they kick off to me, I am losing 20-15. The return on the kick sucked ass and subsequently put me on my 27. So I decide to go the long haul down the field, and this play happened:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
For those that don't understand what the above shows when you click on it, it isn't a demo of the game. That is the actual movie of a play from my game I played tonight. I was in control of Stafford (QB) and I threw to Goodman (#85) in that play.
Good stuff EA. Web integration is awesome. Labels: NCAA2008
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Travis - The Boy With No Name
Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho. |
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Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross)
One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake. |
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Feist - The Reminder
I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice. |
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Catan - Xbox Live Arcade
I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game. |
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Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare
No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say. |
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Beautiful Evidence (Tufte)
Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting.. |
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Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather
Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better. |
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Game of Thrones (Martin)
I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more. |
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
© Copyright 2003-2007, Eric Thompson |
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