Life and times of a webgeek
Team Fortress 2 is perhaps the greatest online fps ever. To celebrate this week’s release of new content for the Pyro class in the game, Valve is again allowing anyone to play for free, starting this friday at 11AM. Get yourself over to steampowered and download the client, then have some fun! My advice would be, pick a class with long range capability. Everyone will be playing Pyro this weekend, meaning the soldier, sniper, heavy and engineer will be enjoying a fabulous turkey shoot.
So check out this delicious pizza from the Japanese Pizza Hut:
Pigs in a blanket, fakeburgers, edamame, and corn, just to mention a few of the deliciously greasy items you can get on your pie. Sign me up!
…which doubles as your laugh of the day. Do you live in fear of monkey butt? You should head over to antimonkeybutt.com and buy yourself some anti monkey butt powder, which is apparently a real product you can buy to…you know, keep yourself from getting monkey butt.
[via]
My day job is website management for a small liberal arts college. We use drupal, which we arrived at after a process of review a couple of years ago which was overseen by me, and the ongoing maintenance and development of our publishing platform is also overseen by me. We’re growing our staff this year by 2 programmers. If you know drupal or have an extensive background in web application development, consider applying. The boss is cool, the wages are competitive, the benefits are excellent, you get to work in a college environment for one of the more prestigious schools in the US, and you get to help grow a CMS framework, focusing on open source tools while you’re at it.
[update] Per a suggestion from Andrew in the comments, I’m linking over to a case study on how we’re using drupal at amherst college which I wrote a month or two ago that covers what we’re doing in depth and has a lot of interesting commentary including a few kudos for us.
So, I’m back. I’ll write up how the trip went with some pictures over the next week or so, but I had to tell the unfortunate tale of airplane hell I went through yesterday. My original itinerary was: Seattle depart, 11:22 PM. Arrive Chicago at 5:40AM’ish. Wait for next plane which departed at 6:25, arrive Hartford before noon. Instead what happened was:
1) Seattle plane delayed by 20 minutes, which was then delayed another 40 minutes because they sent a guy onto the plane with a cat carrier which wouldn’t fit under the seat, only the baggage folks didn’t agree, bickered, sent people onto the plane to play tetris with the cat carrier (trying to stuff it under various seats), until they finally made the guy check the cat in as baggage. During the flight, I get 3′ish hours of fitful sleep.
2) Arrive Chicago at 6:30. Rush frantically to gate on the other side of the airport to witness my plane rolling away from the gate. Talk to customer service - get waitlisted on an 11:45AM flight. Get coffee, wander terminal, curse my fate for 5′ish hours. Try to get on flight, fail.
3) Fallback plane, I have a guaranteed seat on a 1:12 PM flight. Wander terminal. More cursing of fate. Watch as plane gets delayed in 20 minute increments, for 3 hours, moving from gate to gate as it gets reshuffled to other gates as part of this process. Watch in bemusement as the terminal starts to get overstuffed with people on delayed flights due to thunderstorms on the east coast.
4) Finally start boarding at 4:15, we are warned as we board that we may have problems due to the thunderstorms.
5) Arrive Hartford and are told we can’t land. Spend ~45 minutes circling at 32k feet in a tight spiral, until we have to bail due to low fuel. Diverted to Syracuse where we have a rough landing due to storms. Spend more than 2 hours stuffed in a hot, muggy, stinky, not air conditioned plane waiting for the storms to pass so they can refuel us. They run out of drinks before the drink tray makes it to us.
6) finally take off and have a rough flight to Hartford, where we land around 11PM, ending with me almost to the point of kissing the pavement I am so pleased to have escaped from airline hell. I speed off at 80MPH with a trail of mist behind me in the rain, grateful to finally be in control of my own fate again.
Thankfully the trip was really excellent which offsets the horrible flight experience. I’ll write more about that later.
Effective 3d inside flash? Impossible you say? I thought so too, until I played around with this. Pretty damned impressive! Still a long way to go until we have the equivalent of Quake IV in our browsers, but still, this makes other examples of 3d in flash that I’ve seen look silly. There’s another example as well, and more detail over on Rock Paper Shotgun.
I’m off on vacation this week. Susan and I are headed to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula for a week of exploring, hiking, dining, kayaking, and more. Possibly I’ll find wifi connections I trust enough to login and post, otherwise I may not post again this week.
Instead of a game I’ll link over to one of my favorite frivolous RSS feeds - Pulp of the Day, which shows a different cover from a pulp magazine every day. Pulp magazines had their heyday back in the 40’s and 50’s and often featured fantastic art on their covers. Their name is derived from the crummy ‘pulp’ paper they were printed on, and this site and others strives to remind us of these vanishing objets d’art. Bonus points for the chance to invent your own caption. Subjects range from the salacious to the fantastic to the sinister to the bizarre. Check it out!
Originally [via]
Ok ok, so you lack imagination and don’t appreciate my other friday fun link. Fine. I missed a week last week anyway, so here for your frenetic mouse clicking pleasure is Robokill, a flash-based action game built along Robotron 2084 lines. This is one of the best action games I’ve seen in flash, with great graphics and sound and tight controls. The link takes you to the demo, but it’s long enough that you’ll almost definitely get your fill, and the game is good enough that it’s worth considering a purchase.
Originally [via]
Recent Comments