Awesome.

I don’t create the memes, I just report them:

AWESOME.

Myst: The Movie

Oh, God:

Keeping with the video game adaptations trend, news has come out regarding a very independent film version of the wildly popular game series, Myst.
Geeks Of Doom

Great, that’s all we need: an hour and a half of watching one guy stumble around a richly-detailed environment, flipping random switches to see what they do and occasionally pounding his fist against the ground uselessly where there appears to be something useful that doesn’t do anything.

If they stayed true to the games he’d just give up after the first half-hour.

Code Like An Asshole #2

In C++:

class Foo {
public:
    Foo( void ) { delete this; }
};

Obama Is One Cool Cat

A neat photo, courtesy Reuters:

Speaking of Obama, Ryan and I had the following conversation a few days ago:

Ryan: Change! Yes we can!

Stephen: Oh, you’re voting for Obama now?

No, daddy. Change my diaper. Yes we can!

Code Like An Asshole #1

In C#:

 private string fileName;
 public string FileName
 {
     get { Application.Exit(); return null; }
     set { fileName = value; }
 }

Playground Ball On Hamburger Mold

Mixed media, 2008

Part of Alyssa’s ongoing Toys & Tools series, currently on display in our kitchen. And the family room, play room, den, stairwell, bathroom, bedroom, and garage.

(And the backyard.)

Pig Farmers and Diamond Miners

Last night I was thinking about how, at my previous job, I’d been pressed to provide a status on problems that were both more complicated than were assumed, and for which I was only tasked with a small portion.

A concrete example would be being asked when the website would be finished, when my assignment was to write the supporting code to communicate with the database and manage state (which is more complicated than one might think), and could not control how long it took the designers and copy editors to contribute their portions.

As I was drifting off to sleep I came up with a few quips that I might use when I encounter those sorts of questions in the future:

You’re asking a diamond miner for a wedding ring.

You’re asking a pig farmer for a BLT.

Dumb Jokes

Q. What do you get when you cross a helicopter, an elephant, and a rhinoceros?
A. Hell if I know.

Q. What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A. You can’t cross a vector with a scalar.

Q. What do you get when you cross Tony Soprano?
A. Broken knees.

Q. What do you get when you cross the picket line?
A. A paycheck.

Hard Relay Mario

In April, I wrote about the hardest Mario level ever. As it turns out, that was not, in fact, the hardest Mario level ever.

Hard Relay Mario (part two) is the hardest. You have to know a lot about the quirks of the game engine just to get past the first screen, and successfully navigating the game is probably impossible without being able to manipulate the gamestate on a frame-by-frame basis.

This elevates the game into the realm of software debugging. Which might be fun for a certain class of people.

Full Circle

Home computers have finally come full circle. Witness the ZPC-9100, the long-lost cousin of the Commodore 64: