Month: October 2003

Categories
It Happened to Me

Virtual Bubble Wrap [Updated]

[Update January 28, 2005]: Welcome, BoingBoing

readers! I’d love to show you Virtual Bubble Wrap online, but I’ve since taken

the page on which it lived down and put it somewhere yet. It will have

a home soon, promise!


Windows users can download a standalone version from this entry.

Once a year, just to keep this lovely piece of absolutely useless

software alive in the collective mind of the ‘Net, I point everyone to Virtual Bubble Wrap.

Yes, there are many other versions of Virtual Bubble Wrap, but the version created by Mackerel Interactive Multimedia

way back in 1993 is still the best (the original version was part of a

floppy disk-based presentation). I like to think that my Shockwave

adaptation, coded up during a severe hangover the day after my birthday

party in 1995, is a close second.

One reason I was inspired to post this particular entry is that Brendyn Alexander’s trying his hand as developing multimedia apps in Director. Good on ya, Brendyn, and welcome to the club!

Recommended Reading

Burying the Fish. A Cory Doctorow piece about Mackerel that was commisioned for but never made it into WIred. I think it’s the very first time he’d acted as my unofficial press agent — here’s the relevant snippet:

The

next-generation Mackerelites are a mixed bag. There isn’t a one of them

that isn’t hip and downtown as all get-out — walking into the old

Mackerel office was like stepping into some weird Hollywood vision of

sexy young geeks in great clothes, firing Nerf darts at each other and

disappearing into the overflowing kitchen for company-sponsored Shiatsu

massage from a geek therapist who logged in regularily to the company

BBS.

They came from all walks of life. Joey DeVilla, the only production

grunt with a background in computer science, was seven years into a

four-year CS degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, was

DJing one night at a campus bar, and running a hunk of video wallpaper

that included screen captures from the Mackerel Stack, recently

downloaded from a BBS. One of the dancers caught him in the DJ booth

and mentioned that he knew the guys in Toronto who built the thing. The

next morning, Joey packed his things and hopped a train to Toronto, and

demanded that Ollie hire him.

Categories
Uncategorized

Amazing "P2P" cover for the current "New Yorker"

I think this cover for the September 29, 2003 issue of The New Yorker captures the RIAA’s tactics perfectly:

Photo: Cover of the September 29, 2003 issue of 'The New Yorker'.

(A tip of the hat to Joseph Lorenzo Hall — he blogged this first.)

Categories
Geek

Accordion City is SCO’s first stop on their tour

Ryan Skadberg just pointed me to the page for SCO’s “City to City” tour, and the first stop is Accordion City. Surely we can get some kind of prank organized.

If someone can get me a penguin suit and is willing to cover any possible legal fees, I will don the suit, sneak into the conference and “sport hump” (a great tradition from Crazy Go Nuts University) SCO’s CEO and Chief Asshole Darl McBride. Really.

Photo: SCO CEO and Chief Asshole Darl McBride.

Look at that face. You know you want to see me in a penguin suit sport humping this man. Help me to help you.

Recommended Reading

In case you don’t know wat this whole hate-on for SCO is, some articles:

Categories
It Happened to Me

Proof that my priorities are a little screwed up

Last night, while taking some cough medicine, I thought: “Hmmm. Not bad. Tastes just like Jagermeister.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty…*WHAM*

“Dogs have masters,” my ex-girlfriend Erica, a cat owner, used to say. “Cats have staff.”

If dogs could write poetry, they’d write stuff like this:

You’re my best friend

You’re my best friend

You’re my best friend

Is it dinner yet?

Or this gem:

Are you gonna eat that?

Are you gonna eat that?

Are you gonna eat that?

I think I’ll eat that.

Cats, on the other hand, would this poesy of this variety:

I hate you.

Now feed me.

To many people, and in this case when I say “people”, I mean “lonely, bitter shut-ins”, cats are ideal, independent low-maintenance companions. To me, cats are The Other White Meat.

In spite of this, Boss Ross and I have declared — for no other reason than for the hell of it, we swear — that Friday is the First Annual Post a Picture of a Cat to Your Blog day.

Personally, I think that pictures of cats should be perceived as damage by the Internet and should be routed around. However, the vast majority of Internet people seem to like cats, especially those who write weblogs. Weblogging is so associated with cat pictures that O’Reilly and Associates, publishers of computer books with woodcuttings of animals on the covers, saw fit to put a picture of cats on their book on blogging:

Photo: Cover of O'Reilly's 'Essential Blogging'.

So don’t forget, folks: post a picture of a cat to your blog this Friday!

(You don’t have post a cutesy one either. Feel free to go all Lee Harvey Oswald if you like.)

Recommended Reading

My unexpectedly pleasant conversation with John C. Dvorak. Dvorak’s response to my saying that the choice of cat for cover animal on O’Reilly’s book was all his fault. (Okay, it’s really in response to me calling him PC Magazine’s “Resident Asshole”.)

Categories
Uncategorized

Autmn denial

What, October already?

(Cue the sound of every classic rock radio station DJ saying “Hey, everybody, it’s Rocktober!“. For that matter, cue the sound of me repeating “I declare Cocktoberfest!” until the joke gets lame.)

I spent yesterday in bed nursing a really bad cold and doing nothing more strenuous that reading Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, Summer Blonde. I caught the cold because on Monday night, I ran a number of errands on my bike while dressed as if it were still late summer. No jacket, just shirtsleeves.

Today, I am conceding defeat to Mother Nature. I took my sweaters and wool blazers out of summer storage. You have to dress well for Cocktoberfest, you know.