Category Archives: Tech

I found Nemo, and he is a jerk

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It seems that the travel gods decided that I have not been pious enough, and have decided to punish me on my trip home from Seattle.  Clearly despite the fact that I never ever travel, Nemo decided that I shall spend more hours away from my family than previously expected.  As you can imagine, I’m thrilled about the whole thing, and Nikki is too.  Newark remains a distant destination for now.  Its not all bad of course, I’m currently sitting in a nice little place called RockBottom in Seattle.  Not metaphorically (although I am having my 2nd beer), but rather that’s the name of the place. Anyway, Seattle is a good place to be.  It’s about 10 degrees and overcast, which is winter for Seattle, and by all accounts that’s pretty much paradise when compared to Ottawa or New York for that matter.  Methinks if I ever make it to Newark it will be much different.

Anyway.  The inevitable comparisons to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is obvious, just take out the Trains and Automobiles.  Planes, Planes and more planes.

Anyway, it was a fantastic week of training, not the least of which was a great party at Safeco Field in Seattle, where they obviously have regular sportsball competitions.  It was just too much fun.  I snapped a few pics, below.

Good times, now I just need them to end.

Tech Ready Safeco field Safeco TechReady

Hawky the hawk (not his actual name) looks dangerous

Hawky the hawk (not his actual name) looks dangerous

 

TechReady Death Star

iPhone 5 Complaints by SNL

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Saturday Night Live did a beautiful job on this parody of a technical review show, and the uncomfortable and ridiculous distance that exists between the folks that make phones and the folks that use them.  It’s aimed at Americans but I think Canada falls into this rather directly.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJh2eylm5BY

The final kicker joke is the money shot for sure.

Recursive Nerdery

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As some folks might recall, Minecraft was a favourite at our house, and from time to time it comes back and there’s lots and lots of building and fun.  I think it still is one of the more amazing and enjoyable games you can find out there, and really lets you use your imagination.  So I started to follow the games’ creator on Twitter, because I’m a nerd and that’s just what you do.  Naturally I was pretty interested about his recent mention that he was launching a new game. 

It’s called 0x10c.com (who knows how to pronounce that, but whatever) and you can read the thirty words that are known about it at this point here.

The thing that is boggling my mind is the revelation that while it’s a space game where you fly around in a spaceship and do things, you will essentially be required to program your own computer before your spaceship will do anything.  He’s building a fully functional 16-bit computer INTO the game.  Everyone will have one.  You have to use the in-game computer to operate your in-game spaceship.  You might be able to hack into other people’s in-game computers, build in-game networks, develop an in-game Internet, start an in-game online music company selling in-game songs… anyway you get the idea.  This kind of recursive nerdery is really baking my noodle at the moment. While he promises that non-programmers will still be able to play and enjoy the game, I can’t help but think that folks like me would just be the helpless sheep waiting to be slaughtered by the elite 13 year old nerds with far greater skills than mine.  In fact, there are a host of nerds who right now CAN’T WAIT for the creator of this game to start developing it, so they can start developing thjngs for this in-game computer.  Does anyone else find this ridiculous?

This kind of nested matryoshka doll kind of thing is what will eventually end us all in an as-yet-unknown, but certainly fiery noisy and painful way.  The universe doesn’t like recursion that much.  Sitting there, using your comically oversized and underpowered brain (a computer) to use your actual computer that connects to many many computers (the Internet), in turn connecting to a computer running this game, in which you then use a game computer to connect to other game computers, at some point the universe says “Enough, ok I messed up, let’s start over.” and we are done for.

Or it could just be a lot of fun.  One or the other.

I WANT ONE

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Good lord, this is amazing.  Like Iron Man, with water.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-7RlL3YtiQ&feature=youtu.be

 

I saw this on Metafilter and now want to swim like a dolphin.  A robotic one.

 

 

WordPress 3.2

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Good lord, but WordPress is fantastic.  The latest release is absolutely awesome, it’s hard to believe that this is free software.

Anyway, this is nothing but a placeholder to test out the new theme, which is actually included with the latest WordPress, which is also pretty awesome.  Lloyd is gazing balefully at you right now in the header image, but that’s because that’s the only image I had handy.  I will have to find something more appropriate.  Anyway, nice work on the WordPress.  I likes it.

Minecraft

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I don’t really play video games much, for reasons I blog about a lot here, the main problem being available time.  But being a nerd that at least USED to play some video games, I still keep at least a half of an ear open for interesting games from time to time.  So I did in fact hear about Minecraft when it was becoming a major indy hit (over a million sales of the BETA version is a pretty good indicator that at least some folks think it’s fun).  I decided to give it a try the other night to see what the fuss was about.  Needless to say, it took very little time for me to introduce it to the boys and now we are all three pretty much hooked.  Then, Jordy’s boyfriend happened to see us playing and mentioned that he just started playing too.  There’s something about it, clearly.  It’s not for everyone, however.

I showed it to Nikki and she was a little put off by the (apparent) pointlessness of the game.  There’s no winning.  There are very few clear goals, except surviving.  Which I didn’t do all that well at first.  And I haven’t managed to actually eat anything yet, so the whole thing is still a bit touch and go.  However, there’s still something about the incredible sense of utter freedom in the game.  You want to build an enormous castle for no real reason?  Go ahead.  Want to dig to the bottom of the earth?  Go for it.  That’s kind of cool, but then I’m a huge nerd.

The whole reason I even mention this is I was catching up on XKCD and saw this one:

 

I can relate perfectly to both the truly fantastic wisdom teeth drugs, and the whole “organize the entire world” aspect of the game.  For the record, I grew my first tree underground the other day, so I am feeling pretty fricking good about myself right about now.  That will wear off quickly if Nikki catches me playing and starts making fun of me again.