Month: January 2005

Virtual Bubble Wrap — M.I.A.

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 28, 2005
4 Comments on Virtual Bubble Wrap — M.I.A.

Hello, regular readers and visitors from BoingBoing! [BoingBoing referred to this blog in an entry posted earlier today.]

Alas, I’ve taken down the pages on which Virtual Bubble Wrap lived. I’ve been planning to put them up somewhere, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Luckily, I posted a standalone Windows version last year. You can get it from this entry.

Screen shot: Standalone version of Mackerel's Virtual Bubble Wrap.

Although BoingBoing‘s Xeni Jardin says that Cory Doctorow says that I am the father of all bubble wrap game sites, the real credit for Virtual Bubble Wrap should go to its creators, Dave Groff and Kevin Steele (creative directors of Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, where I got my first job out of university) and its first coder, Karl Borst (also of Mackerel). They created it to be part of The Mackerel Stack, an interactive presentation handed on a single floppy disk. My contribution was re-implementing it in Shockwave for Director so that it could be put onto the web.

I’ve probably mentioned it a million times before, but I’ll do it again: Cory Doctorow wrote a elegy for Mackerel titled Burying the Fish. It was intended for Wired, but never made it to print.

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I Know All of Those Words, But the Line Just Doesn’t Make Any Sense

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 28, 2005
No Comments on I Know All of Those Words, But the Line Just Doesn’t Make Any Sense

“I, for one,” Deenster writes, “do not like the idea of being on tv.”

It sounds like English, but to my ears, parses as crazy.

Geek It Happened to Me

It Just Dawned on Me That Bill Gates is Partially Responsible for My First Kiss (and Now I Need a Drink)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 27, 2005
5 Comments on It Just Dawned on Me That Bill Gates is Partially Responsible for My First Kiss (and Now I Need a Drink)

Take a look at this screen shot from an old IBM PC game whose filename

was “DONKEY.BAS” (the “.BAS” filename extension denotes that the

program was written in the BASIC programming language):

I will bet that I am the only human being who feels an old adolescent

twinge whenever I see this screen. The reason is that back in 1983,

when I was just shy of turning 16, I was reverse engineering this game

on my friend’s dad’s IBM PC when a girl interrupted me for my first

alcoholic drink and kiss. Had I not been at that machine, that

experience could potentially have been delayed by years (you must

remember that it was 1983, well before the Internet and geek chic made

nerds cool).

Today, I discovered that Bill Gates himself co-wrote DONKEY.BAS. If

Bill hadn’t written that cheesy little demo program, my personal

history would’ve been far less interesting. The girl, you see, was so

much trouble that the rest of the story, I’m afraid, is unbloggable.

Needless to say, the thought of ol’ Bill’s involvement in my first

kiss, however tangential, is a little irksome. I need to do a

double-shot of Crown Royal now.

Photo: Doctored photo of Bill Gates hugging Joey deVilla.

Thank you, Bill…yeeeeesh.

If you want to play DONKEY.BAS or see its innards, check out this entry on IndieGameDev, where I’ve posted both an executable that’ll run on any Windows box (even XP!) and the BASIC source code.

Tags Life/Yeah...girls...geez

It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Starbucks I Have Known

In an article titled Maximum Starbucks Density, Jason Kottke points to a blog entry by Justin Blanton, who used the Starbucks locator web page

and discovered that there are 43 Starbucks branches within a 5-mile

radius of his apartment. He challenged readers to beat that. I can, with 51 branches. The record — a whopping 170 Starbucks — belongs to an area “around Broadway in NYC”.

While looking at some of the locations on the map of the Starbucks near

my house, I got the urge to annotate the map (classifying things

qualifies as a recreational activity in the nerd world). Here’s what I

put together — click the map below for a larger version:

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Cookieright

Graphic: 'Muy Muy Rapido Tuesday' icon.

Here’s a sample of a clever comic commentary on copyright by Tony Esteves in his webcomic, Cigarro & Cerveja:

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The 2005 Bloggies Nominees

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 26, 2005
No Comments on The 2005 Bloggies Nominees

Graphic: 'Muy Muy Rapido Tuesday' icon.

The Bloggies site

is still down from having served more than its monthly allotment (the

page shows the dreaded “509 – Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” error). Luckily

for those who want to know who got nominated, Firda Beka of Weblog

Wannabe (a nominee in the “Best Asian weblog” and “Lifetime

Acheivement” categories) has replicated the list of nominees. If you

were interested in voting in the Bloggies but had no idea who the

candidates were, here’s her list, slightly rearranged to emphasize the

category in which this blog appears.

Note that for the first time, two Blogware-based blogs are among the

represented: this blog for “Best Canadian Weblog”, and Tom Reynolds’ Random Acts of Reality for “Best Tagline” (“Trying to kill as few people as possible”) and as the subject of Random Reality Bites, a Guardian article nominated for “Best Article or Essay About Weblogs”. Well done, Tom!