Hyperlinks
Link Log
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
- Shovelglove: Functional Sledgehammer Exercise
- This has to be the geekiest excercise routine I've seen. Well, maybe my table tennis robot is up there. Anyway, Cybil's personal trainer (who like Cybil is intellectually engaged in a field where few are) says that this would indeed be good excercise, but warns that the motions involved could easily strain the body. If you've ever put in a long day with a shovel or axe I'm sure you'll agree that she has a point.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
- Political bias affects brain activity, study finds
- I coulda tould you that. Back when we had cable TV, if George W. Cunthair came on I couldn't bear to listen to him speak for more than a minute, regardless of what he was stammering.
- Sex before stressful events keeps you calm
- I gotta line me up some stressful events. No, scratch that. I gotta line her up some stressful events. That's better.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
- Kevlar Work Utility Pants - Duluth Trading Company
- If I wore jeans, these'd be it. Look to be nearly the same cut (gusseted, etc.) as my Fire Hose Pants, which are comfortable enough to lounge around the house in all weekend.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
- gristlestick update
- My brother's hitting the road with his band in June. They've posted 3 more songs to their page. Nice music with nasty lyrics. Good stuff.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
- CUZZI Computer Desk STS 5801A
- Cybil ordered this desk for her new studio. We almost went with one that was 18" by 24" (this one is 4 inches deeper), but we settled on the CUZZI because it looks a lot more stable. Also, the dark cherry matches her other furniture. We'll be hiding it under a curtain (draped over the top shelf) but clients will still have to look at the thing when she's doing their paperwork, so not looking like crappy dorm furniture (relative to other compact desks) is a plus.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
- 12 Habits in 2006
- There's been a whole lot of new years resolution crap kicking around the web this month. It is as easily ignored as all the "best of 2005" crap. New Years resolutions are bogus. Good intent, zero execution. But this article stands out in that it sounds like it could actually work. There's a system behind it, a form. Things get written down. And if there's one thing I've learned it's that the only way to get anything done is to put it in a list.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
- Gristle Stick
- My brother's band. He's the one in the middle, on the bass.
Monday, January 09, 2006
- NOTEPAD v3.4: Auto-detect the UTF-8 files without BOM
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The day job requires two things of an editor, and historically UltraEdit was the only editor to achieve them. First, it needs to save UTF-8 files without leaving a BOM. Second, it needs to open UTF-8 files without any effort on my part. It appears that Notepadd++ has just added this second feature less than ten days ago.
I've really never been satisfied with the current alternative to UltraEdit that I've been using at work. Enough so that I still use HomeSite most of the time at home, a long dead program but the best front-end dev environment. The editor I've been using is PSPad. It's got multi-language color highlighting, but it is really flakey. It also has custom key commands for tags, etc., but you have to write them yourself in a raw text file, they don't always work, and they like to eat text. I keep hoping I'll find a program that fixes these problems, this might be it.
Jon, I'll run this through your UTF-8 encoding test files and let you know how it goes.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
- Grid Paper Generators
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If you've ever wanted some kind of specialized graph paper, for note taking, gaming, or game design this website's got what you're looking for. It's got everything from hex grids to calligraphy guides. You can adjust paper size, grid size, line weight, and color.
This time around working on Wizard's Duel I'm trying to spend less time on production and get to playtesting faster. I'll figure out what works and what doesn't work more quickly, that way I can toss it and try something different without throwing out much time or energy.
Friday, January 06, 2006
- Impulse Based Movement
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A description of the movement system that could finally* make Wizard's Duel a reality. What I'm going to change from this system is the very last sentence, "The impulses on which a piece moves are typically spread over the turn as evenly as possible." I will differentiate the distribution of moves between predators (mostly sprinters) and prey (distance runners). I also hope to come up with a clear visualization of the impulse system, since I will have the luxury of a custom board which is unavailable to piecepack games.
I came very close to this movement system almost two years ago when I last worked on this game. I had the idea of splitting movement into two phases: Sprint and Endurance in my blog post: Wizard's Duel Turn Sequence. The impulse system will allow for much more fine-grained control of movement, and let me present it in a visual format on the cards.
*I only have documentation of having been working on it since at least 2001 when I wrote the little javascript game at wizardsduel.com, although in reality I think it was conceived about 5 years earlier around the same time as Dragon Duel.
- The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism
- æand here we have evidence, in the form of a reality telivision show: Derren Brown: The Heist. I'll have to tie this with my human behaviour theory that attempts to explain why rich brats steal. But not now. More important things to think about. (games, of course)
Thursday, January 05, 2006
- jonplummer.com
- He's back! To launch something, just to launch it, plain HTML, no frills, no forever fussing over the design and growing tired of it after a week (even if it's better than what any of the rest of us could do), is a good step. Now if he'll just acknowledge that he hasn't the time to build something himself and just sign up for a Flickr account, then we'll see something. I guess it's a question of whether the project is the project, or the content is the project. If a project never reaches completion, does content stand a better chance? And if so, can an imperfect medium be tolerated? Looks like he may have finally said yes.
- Bundles Of . . . Misery
- what i've been saying all along.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
- Edge Question 2006: "What is your dangerous idea?"
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Jaron Lanier: Homuncular Flexibility
Once you've read it, imagine this concept in the hands of the people at Nintendo. Now how's that for a dangerous idea?
Not that far fetched actually, from what I've read about Nintendo's future plans, moving out of the television and into the 3D space of your living room is the next frontier.
