An interesting take on the potential “power” of Google Street View. Also, it’s hella funny. Via Google Blogscoped.
Archive for January, 2008
I’ve been reading A Softer World for about as long as I’ve been reading xkcd and while watching Jericho, this parody of the comic immediately popped into my head. It’s not really a parody, but I can’t think of a better word for it. I’ve been meaning to make it for a while, so today I finally did! Hope you like it!
So finally, my copy of Portal arrived. It came with some other games, but let’s be honest here, I only bought The Orange Box for Portal. Overall, it has been a life-changing experience. After my first Portal session, I had strange dreams involving portals. These weren’t the standard type like you see in the game that enable you to move through space. They looked the same, but had a drastically different function.
Most humans live their lives in a straight line as far as time is concerned. We’re just “falling” through time without any control over our journey through this dimension. In my dream, due to some unexplained phenomenon, I was living my life while popping in and out at random spots along the timeline. I was able to do so through “time portals” which would appear randomly and beyond my control.
So it’s got me thinking, what if the portals in Portal could move through time as well as space? You could have the ability to control the time, or it could be fixed at plus or minus 5 minutes, for example. Plain old space portals screw with your brain enough as it is, but spacetime portals would just blow your mind. It would add a whole new depth to Portal, and I want to see it in the sequel, dammit!
I finished the main part of the game last night, and also one of the advanced maps. I was stuck on this one puzzle for ages until I realised I had disabled “floor funnel” which helps you aim at floor portals while falling. I want to congratulate anyone who has finished the game with this option off, as I found aiming without it extremely difficult. I was getting frustrated and annoyed and I hate when that happens in a game. You’d pop out of a floor portal with much momentum in the vertical, but the game would just pull some horizontal vector out of its arse and you’d fly off into the toxic goop!
Portal truly is one of the most original games I have ever played.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been delayed yet again. Teh sux. I will have to resubmit my leave form as I am taking a week of work to play it…
It’s official, there’s no denying it. My brain has regressed a solid 11 years in the space of a week.
Watching Lockie Leonard and cacking myself senseless at the unbearably embarrassing puberty jokes. It has a C rating for crying out loud! And cringing at the oh-so-scarily-accurate portrayal of church youth group.
Watching Pokemon and worrying that Pikachu might fall into some water and be upset. And seriously considering getting an Ash Ketchum cosplay costume just to freak people out. Remembering Alt+0233 (as if I would forget).
Watching Sleek Geeks and waiting patiently for my childhood love of science to be rekindled. Nothing yet but I’ll keep watching. And being jealous of the guy who memorised Pi to 3000 places. Bastard.
Listening to Hit Machine 14, Real McCoy, Oasis, and playing Jazz Jackrabbit for hours on end. I got these all one Christmas. Best. Christmas. Ever.
I just made this up last night! Man, I should totally go on Iron Chef.
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon light soy
juice from 1/2 small lemon
drop or two of sesame oil (careful)
about 6 grinds black pepper
1/2 teaspoon mirin
1/4 teaspoon fish sauce
Shake well in a jar. Best served chilled.
It makes about 1/4 cup. If you don’t have mirin you could probably use some dissolved sugar. I was surprised this actually emulsified; it must be the soy.
It might be nice over cold soba noodles, too. Maybe with double the soy.
Today, I thought naively that I’d try out WordPress’s newly added tag support. The natural thing to do is to convert one’s categories into tags. There’s a built in Category to Tag Converter exactly for this found under Manage->Import. So foolishly, I selected all my categories and clicked the big button. Big mistake. This tool managed to actually deleted the entire ‘categories’ table from the database. And my current theme doesn’t yet have tag support so all posts showed up as filed in “uncategorizedin” whatever that means.
Luckily though, I had a backup of my DB from a recent upgrade to 2.3.2 so I was able to restore the ‘categories’ table in its entirety. But I also had to edit the ‘term_taxonomy’ table and replace every occurence of ‘post_tag’ with ‘category’. They are using bloody VARCHAR for this, can you believe it? Thankfully, the ‘term_relationships’ table which links posts to categories was untouched and everything is now back to normal. After this experience, I’ll remain content in my use of categories to fake tags, at least until I can be bothered updating the theme.
The page at DBA says “Planned for 2008.” Well, it’s now 2008 and they’re on-air. w00t.
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