A picture is worth a thousand words:
(my sister is publishing tons of these over on her blog - I’m just cherrypicking the best of them but if you feel the need to overdose on cute, check it out).
Archive for January, 2008
There’s a pretty good piece over on wired.com about a company that’s developed a strain of bacteria they claim can produce fuel at around $1 a gallon using non-food biomass as the source. It’s pretty interesting and one of the most promising of all the alternative schemes I’m aware of. The article fails to mention that a gallon of ethanol contains much less potential energy than a gallon of gas, but even so based on the comparisons between corn and switch grass based ethanol production this process looks really promising.
…this faked O’Reilly book cover gave me a laugh. We just rolled out a bunch of new services at work as part of the start of the spring semester, and as per usual, only negative feedback. Needed something to brighten my day and found it.
Here’s a friday fun link quickie - Seizuredome, a robotron-esque shooter with whimsical asian pop culture inspired graphics and a soundtrack only a (Japanese teenager?) could love, that you can can download and play on windows in less than 2 minutes. The gameplay is fast paced, simple to understand, and fun in that classic arcade style. Games are quick t00 - at best they last only a couple of minutes. A perfect friday fun link - grab it and get blasting.
…while you’re eating lunch, as a coworker’s dog runs behind your desk and begins kissing your face:
“oh! Don’t let her kiss you, she’s been eating her own poop.”
!!!
Man, was that ever disgusting.
Longtime readers know I’m a die hard Giants fan. I figured they would be lucky to win 8 games this season, so I’m in complete but very pleasant shock that they’re headed to the Superbowl. The last two weeks have featured two of my all-time favorite Giants games, rivaling only their Superbowl wins and their ‘90 NFC championship upset of San Francisco. Both games have been down to the wire knuckle biting finishes, with me pacing back and forth in front of my TV, cursing the miscues (god help tynes if he had not redeemed himself in overtime after missing that field goal at the end of regulation). I also find it especially poetic that the game was basically decided by a Farve interception. I love Farve…just not when he’s facing the Giants.
Anyway, hats off to the Giants for a fantastic season. I don’t think they have a shot at beating New England, but I do hope they play a competitive game. Besides, I didn’t think they could beat the Cowboys or Green Bay either, and I was even worried about the Tampa Bay game, so…who knows 
Skitch is this great screengrab/editing tool with great integration with existing services. It makes it really easy to take a screenshot of something, edit it, and get it posted online to your blog, flickr, wordpress.com, whatever. It’s been in private beta for quite a while, and I use it pretty frequently. At this week’s Macworld Expo they made the beta public. If you don’t already have a copy, give it a try, it’s a great little tool. This is a commercial product but they’re not yet charging. Right now only the Mac version is available, though a Windows version is coming as well.
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Check out Soolin’s new best bud Nori:
Nori is Susan’s black lab mix. She’s roughly the same age as Soolin, and as you can see they’re getting along fine.
And it’s true! According to this piece on the BBC News site covering research from the University of Wisconsin, drinking stout regularly provided dogs with reduced clogging in their arteries. Works for me - I already regularly drink stouts, this just makes it an easier decision to make when I’m choosing what to drink.
Here’s a super handy resource I use frequently - it’s a database maintained by the USDA that lists the nutritional contents of foods, both commercially prepared packaged foods and the raw materials they’re made of. I use it to check the carb counts of foods, but it’s useful to anyone trying to figure out what’s in a given food, from a twinkie to a stalk of celery. The interface isn’t much to look at but it’s speedy and has a ton of content.
My sister has been blogging since she moved to Australia. She’s also posting a ton of pictures, and this one:
serves as indisputable proof - I have the cutest niece ever.
(My sister’s blog is linked to at the right, and is at www.aussieizzy.com. Personally, I think she should have gone for awesomeizzy.com).
It was an absolutely beautiful winter day today, with temperatures in the mid 40’s and a bright, sunny sky. Susan and I took the dogs hiking near Miller’s Falls, MA. We originally intended to hike in the trail system on Northfield mountain, but for some reason the trails were closed so we headed down the road to Wendell Mountain State forest and hiked a mile or so around a lake there. A lot of folks have been asking me to post a picture of Susan, so this gives me the perfect excuse to do so, using a photo I shot this morning:
Ok, she’s so cute I can’t resist posting another photo:
Kongregate has been around for a while, and it’s finally coming into its own. It’s a gaming portal site that attempts to collect all the flash games on the web and wrap them up in a social networking framework with achievements, friends lists, daily and weekly challenges, and more. It’s all free to participate in, and it’s more compelling than it sounds - I’m increasingly addicted to logging in and playing a few rounds of games like Desktop Tower Defense and Endless Zombie Rampage on my lunch break or after exercising in the evenings. It’s even displaced some of my regular Team Fortress 2 sessions. Many of the games incorporate a variety of challenges and achievements into the Kongregate framework, which earn you points and cards to be used in their upcoming collectible card game. The whole premise is clever, too - they subsidize development for games, they reward game developers with cash for developing popular games, and they reward the players for helping rate these games.
I really hope this succeeds for them on a broad scale. They should work on integration with the gaming consoles to build an even broader audience. Meanwhile, if you want to give it a shot, accounts are free and take only a moment to setup. My username is Tempus on the site, and at present I’m a 4th level… space potato? Who knows what that icon is.
Oh…and this week’s challenge is to win their new Campaign Game, which is sort of a mashup of risk and chess. The chance to watch an animated bobble-head Hillary Clinton bitchslap a bobble-headed Rudy Guiliani makes it worth checking out, trust me.
I finished the latest Ratchet and Clank game last week. This represents a number of firsts for me - first Ratchet and Clank game I’ve finished (despite owning all of them, and despite making it literally to the last boss battle on the first one and far into each of the others in the series), first PS3 game I’ve finished, first next generation console game I’ve finished, and the first game I’ve finished in 2008.
I’ll keep this brief and simply say if you like action adventure games, or have enjoyed previous Ratchet and Clank games, get this game. It’s great, and a nice rebound after the mediocre (but still fun) 4th game. The graphics are fantastic, the trademark humor is there in fine form, the creative weapons are there with some clever new ones (the best being a disco ball grenade - toss it and all the enemies on screen proceed to boogy down while you lay into them), and the level design is good. Best of all from a 40-year old gamer’s perspective, they hit the difficulty level just right. I have less time than I used to and found the game somewhat easier than previous installments, making it possible for me to play through to the end before losing interest or becoming so frustrated that I moved on to something else.
The game is also good enough that it made me pine for more, so now I’m playing through Up Your Arsenal (my previous favorite Ratchet game) again, with an eye on solving it. It’s worth noting you can pick all these previous games up for very cheap ($10-20) and they work fine on PS3 60GB, the model with full backwards compatibility. They even support widescreen/480p.
I haven’t been banging the RSS drum much lately. For a while I was regularly promoting it on this site. I guess at this point I figure either you’ve gotten the message, or you’re beyond hope. Still, I can’t help mentioning that two of my favorite RSS products, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, are now free. I used each for extended periods over the years, and paid for licenses to both of them, but stopped using them when they were acquired by Newsgator several years ago in a pique, angry because instead of solving the synchronization issue in an open manner, they tied the products to one commercial provider.
Synchronization isn’t likely to be an issue for most users, and they’re fantastic products. If you need an RSS reader they’re definitely worth checking out. NetNewsWire is for OSX, and FeedDemon is for Win32. If you don’t think you need an RSS reader… you’re not keeping up with the times, and you’re wasting your own time. Read up on it, then go grab one of the above and get busy!
So I caught a cold when I was down on long island, which went into full knock me on my ass mode 2 days ago. It’s snowed twice since then, each time about 6 inches. The first one I wasn’t yet fully sick, or at least I managed to muster up enough energy to get out and shovel, but today I’m wiped. I was washing the dishes this afternoon, noticed motion out in my yard in the corner of my eye, and discovered my girlfriend had snuck over and was shoveling my driveway for me.
!!!
Of course my male ego is about the size of a pea now, but damn she’s cool. She’s been around me quite a bit since I got sick, so I figure she’ll come down with what I have soon enough and will have a chance to repay the favor
In an attempt to make an achievable New Year’s resolution this year, I’ve chosen something simple. Since I first started buying my own groceries when I got to college, I’ve been drinking a coke (now diet coke) or two a day. In the last few years I’ve dropped that down to 1 a day, almost always with lunch. No more - I’m resolving to drop that from my diet. Soda is basically poison in a can and it should be easy enough for me to stop drinking it.
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