- SteamBirds: Survival is a fun little turn-based flight battle game.
- I’m as bad at Jenga on the computer as I am in real-life.
- You Find Yourself In A Room is a text-based game that is fun if you’re into that sort of thing.
- Orisinal has another game out: Carrot Track, and just like all its others: it’s quite simple but a load of fun.
- Spikes Tend To Kill You: Simple little platformer that will slowly start to really anger you.
Time Killers For The Evening
Reading Material
- The Vendor/Client Relationtionship in Real World Situations.
- I didn’t know video game graphics could look this realistic.
- The Background Dope on DHS Recent Seizure of Domains.
- Five Lessons Netflix Learned withUsing AWS (I think the Chaos Monkey idea is a great one).
- The Big Picture has their photos of the year series going: Part 1, 2 and 3.
- Wiki’s should have an ignorance test.
- Why one man rated the book as “very good”.
- Booboo Kills Yogi.
- 22 Essential Resources for Android Owners.
- Steam’s Holiday Sale has begun, and this Reddit thread will make it easier to follow.
- For the serious geeks: vmail is a Vim interface to Gmail.
- I don’t know where this hilarious image came from, but more parents should be given this in poster form.
- The NYT geeks are smart folks: Using flat files so elections don’t break your server.
- Those molesting pat-downs aren’t working: Man boards plane with loaded gun in carry-on.
- Favimon is a RGB-style battle of Favicons.
- I’m mostly book marking this for my future reference, but unRAID looks fairly interesting.
- Nudity detection with JavaScript with nude.js.
- Speaking of nudity, Accidental Penis (Safe for work, don’t worry).
- Google Labs has debuted Books Ngram Viewer which allows you to type in a word or phrase in one of seven languages and see how its usage frequency has been changing throughout the past few centuries. Naturally, somebody tried it with “penis” and there was apparently a spike in the early 19th century that has a bit of a phallic shape to it.
There Goes The Rest Of Your Weekend
Flight is an addicting little game will kill off any time you had the rest of the evening.
Vote For My Sis-in-Law’s PPP Logo
So my sis-in-law is a poor college student who’s studying graphics design at George Fox. She’s tremendously good at graphics design (she has a few of her older designs posted here, but she’s done much more and much better work since I put that site online for her a couple years ago). In an attempt to get a few bucks and some local fame, she submitted a logo for this year’s PPP Logo Contest, Her submission was thus:
Personally, I think it’s far superior to the 2010 logo, but I’m obviously a bit biased.
If you live in Bend, a vote for my sis-in-law would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, you have to go to the downtown Bend US Bank Branch to cast a vote (which I guess is fair, since they are the title sponsor of the PPP). But if you happen to have an office downtown (I know many of you do), then just take a walk during your lunch break, and cast your vote.
On a related note, if any of you local marketing or advertising firms is looking for a talented, fresh-out-of-school designer to add to your staff, contact me. She’s graduating this Spring and would like to move back to Bend. Obviously George Fox is one of the more expensive schools in Oregon, so she’d love to be able to start working and paying that down as soon as possible. Contact me and I’ll put you in touch with her.
Phallic Fun In The Snow
I always try to check my office web cam in the morning, mostly to see if my cam has survived another night fully functional (it’s dying a slow death, so sometimes it won’t make it 24 hours without needing to be reconnected to the host PC). This morning, a co-worker who was going there to check out the Mt. Bachelor conditions saw this image on the Sunriver Lodge web cam (owned and operated by KGW in Portland). Warning, NSFW if crude drawings of a man’s ding-a-ling offends you or your co-workers:
They’ve since scratched out the phallic symbol, but I can’t help but wonder how long it’s been on there and who was responsible for it.
Remember when Bend used to be a quiet town with very little violent crime?
BEND, Ore. — Two people were killed and one wounded in an apparent shooting at a home in northwest Bend Thursday evening, police said.
Around 5:50 p.m., Deschutes County 911 dispatchers got a 911 call and responded to the 60000 block of Fresca Street, said Lt. Ben Gregory.
They arrived to find three people inside with injuries – two dead and a third taken by Bend Fire ambulance to St. Charles Medical Center-Bend, Gregory said.
Video link here.
The family and I were enjoying some donuts when the news broke, and the donut shop owner said there were a pile of police cars speeding up third street to the scene. Scary stuff.
Maybe it’s just that we have better news coverage now than we did back in the day (thanks to the ‘net), but I just don’t remember hearing about all this kind of stuff nearly as often when I was younger.
It’s Not A Photoshop
It looks like it is, but it’s not.
Mario’s A Jerk
He’s been picking on Yoshi since he was a baby:
Whoops…Mt. Bachelor Forgot To Pay Domain Renewal Bill
Saw this when loading up Mt. Bachelor’s web site this morning at the office:
If you’re not familiar with that screen, that’s the Network Solutions default domain page when your domain is expired or has no nameservers set.
Looking at the Whois record, it appears that the domain expired last week (Dec. 8, 2010):
I’ve let my contacts at Mt. Bachelor know so hopefully they can keep their domain, but I can only imagine the grief this is causing them right now right in the middle of ski season.
Update: It appears that it’s working in some places, it just depends on your DNS provider or what you have cached (like, for example, I’m seeing their mobile site). OpenDNS has the IP address 166.70.18.97, but Google’s DNS is still pulling the NetSol IP of 209.62.105.19, so obviously something’s gone wonky. As somebody who’s had to troubleshoot DNS stuff like this, I don’t envy them as you’re at the mercy of DNS servers around the ‘net to get their act together and clear their cache, which can take days sometimes.
Looking at the NetSol whois, they appear to have renewed it today through 2019, but are just waiting for things to clear. They have the IP address as 206.71.85.71, but that doesn’t appear to be loading for me at all. So who knows what it’s actually supposed to be.
Reading Material
Time to get some of these links off my desktop…
- Cool Facebook profile picture using the new profile layout. Directions and examples (along with PSD templates) on reddit, gremlin media.
- Google Wave is now Apache Wave.
- Instant Virgin Detector: The Hover Hand. Speaking of Baby-makin’, one man’s quest to create the ultimate soundtrack (warning, NSFW language).
- Interesting interview with the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit.
- Interesting tidbits in an interview with Mario’s creator.
- Interesting audio recording of a speech made by JFK before the American Newspaper Publishers Association where he warns the press about the secret societies that are the real power in global affairs.
- Everybody’s got a talen: Girl who can really burp.
- DMV finally decides to not move to south Bend. Personally, I wondered why they chose such a lousy location, as that area of town is a pain to get to from pretty much anywhere in town. Their current location is fine and owned by ODOT already, so wouldn’t it be a cheaper lease? Maybe I’m missing something.
- Glenn Beck, the lone voice of reason in an age of hysteria.
- Looking for a place to work? Find a desk near you.
- Meet Robert Gagno, the Rain Man of Pinball.
- If you’re looking for free data recovery software, I’ve heard good things about this one.
- Now that I have an Android phone, I really need to start playing with the cool apps out there. Gmote looks kind of fun, and wirelessly syncing music to my phone would be nifty — if I could get it to work (still playing with the new Winamp for Android).
- Agent 8 Ball is a really well-done HTMl5 game.
- A new “What Is A Geek?” venn diagram.
- I honestly cannot believe I haven’t seen PostSecret before. I could spend all day looking through their archives.
OK, that’s enough for now. Enjoy!