May 24th, 2008
(One of many thought-provoking text adventures by Spatch.)
And so you were taken from this place to another place, where you had absolutely no damn idea what it is you're supposed to be doing. It's OK, you'll be all right. Just don't pick up the phone
booth, or else you'll die.
PICK UP THE PHONE BOOTH AND DIE
a NyQuil nightmare by R. Noyes
Release 619 / Serial number 960409 / Inform v1502 Library 5/12
Standard interpreter 1.0
The Town Square
You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript New England town. Like most any other nondescript New England towns, there's not much to see or do here, but
maybe you'll find something amusing and enjoyable to do.
A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the square.
>get booth
You grunt with all your might and heave the phone booth onto your shoulders. For a moment or two it looks as if you're not going to be able to lift it, but heroically you finally lift it high in
the air! Seconds later, however, you topple underneath the weight, and the booth crushes you fatally. Geez! Didn't I tell you not to pick up the phone booth?! Isn't the name of this very game
"Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die"?! Man, you're dense. No big loss to humanity, I tell ya.
*** You have died ***
In that game you scored 0 out of a possible 100, in 1 turn, giving you the rank of total and utter loser, squished to death by a damn phone booth.
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
>
(Note: this post was written in February 2007 — which shows how far behind I am…)
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May 6th, 2008
This book is an honest-to-goodness worthy sequel to Alice in Wonderland. And it even has a plot!!!
“These vehicles are horseless carriages.”
“How do you know that the carriages are horseless?” asked Alice.
“Because they haven’t got any real horses drawing them.”
“I didn’t know that real horses could draw. Can they also paint?”
“Alice! You must know what I mean!” Celia cried. “A horseless carriage is what the people of the future call a carriage that isn’t being pulled by a horse.”
“Is that similar to a pianoless lampshade?” asked Alice.
“Whatever’s a pianoless lampshade?” asked Celia.
“Why, it’s a lampshade that isn’t being played by a piano, of course.”
“Alice! I’m getting rather tired of your loopiness!” Celia replied.
(Not to be confused with The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner.)
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October 22nd, 2007
We just finished with Target Multi-Occasion Lists. That was interesting because I got to work with the Yahoo User Interface library (YUI). What fascinated me the most is how many browser bugs haven’t been abstracted away yet. We ran into a lot of issues with the way IE manipulates z-index of elements, especially in quirks mode. But it’s still been interesting.
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May 11th, 2007
Listen if you dare … my 3-minute comedy set went okay but I really pandered by creating a 2-dimensional self-parody.
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March 3rd, 2007
This is why I love being off the media "grid": I didn’t even know about the Academy Awards until after the ceremony. People arguing the merits of movies I’ve never seen, actors I wouldn’t recognize, and prom dresses I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. Thanks but I’ll make do without it.
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November 10th, 2006
My mom called yesterday morning to ask how I was. Has it been raining where you are? Yes, I told her, it had been sprinkling for the last few days. My boss has been working from home and it just dawned on me to read the news and see what the situation was really like. As usual, I was oblivious to the fact that people were experiencing disruptions and property damage just miles away from where I live. Flooding, that’s the word they used. Aha.
Brain, brain, go away
Come again some other day
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October 28th, 2006
Now it can be told.
For the last 5 months I’ve been working with the development team on the new Timex website. We launched on Tuesday afternoon [EDIT: October 24, 2006] at 4:00 pm Pacific time, and it was kind of cool being in the "war room" listening to people report in on the speakerphone as the DNS entries propagated quickly across the net. "It’s picked up on Guardster already." "E.U., I can see the site." "Arizona here, looks good." Kinda like WarGames.
Ironically, amusingly, the only people who had trouble seeing the site initially were Timex back in Middlebury, Connecticut. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out how long it took for the changes to reach their corner of the world. Being a front-end guy, there wasn’t much for me to do after they flipped the switch and went live (it’s not as though their drop-down menus were going to suddenly blow up).
Anyway. I’m relieved, and happy with the end product. Obviously a lot of people deserve credit for the successful launch, but it’s nice to know that I’ve made my mark on the world.
EDIT (20061220): If you don’t believe me, look at my comments in the CSS.
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October 18th, 2006
I’ve changed my mind about the CSS on our site. It was explained to me that the move to CSS was such a major paradigm shift for our organization that everyone is to be congratulated on how well it turned out. I know the devs were basically starting from scratch and they all have a good working knowledge of CSS now. They, in a word, rock.
There, that feels better, now doesn’t it? :-)
EDIT (20061110): To clarify: we were using CSS before, certainly; but large portions of the markup are now tableless and pure CSS.
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October 4th, 2006
So my dad, he sez, how’s it goin? And I’m like hmmm.
Haven’t updated the weblog in a while. We are launching a merchant site in about 2 weeks, so we’re doing all the typical last-minute bug fixes. Everyone seems to like my work, which is still somewhat of a shock. (Talented programmers seem to think they’re either at the top or bottom of the heap, and I’m not arrogant enough to choose the top ;-)
(Thanks to Dad for the post title.)
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September 4th, 2006
So why wasn’t Sinistar [for Atari 400/800] released? Around the time Sinistar was being completed (mid 1984), the video game market was crumbling fast and many games were canceled. Apparently marketing decided that the game wasn’t going to make enough money and canceled the project… without telling the programmers! Jeff and his team continued to work on the project for almost two months after it was canceled, due to lack of communication between marketing and the programming department. Incidents like this were not uncommon, and just goes to show how badly out of touch the managers were at the time of Atari’s collapse. [AtariProtos.com]
That game was hard, too. With the adrenaline flowing through your veins as you scrambled to evade the warrior ships, the voice of Sinistar — preparing his attack — was enough to scare you out of your wits. (I can personally attest to this :) Being overtaken by a taunting, screaming, giant space head is just plain unsettling; when it happens while a random six-year-old is tugging at your pant leg pleading for game tokens, death is swift and certain.
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