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Google Buzz test

February 24th, 2010 No comments

First test post after connecting my blog to buzz.

Pretty easy once I realized that I had hidden the xfn relational section in my links editor >_<.   Set up reciprocating rel=”me” links on my blog and google profile, force a google re-crawl at https://sgapi-recrawl.appspot.com, and voila!

Thanks to Dave for the info.

iPhone Games

October 29th, 2009 No comments

ed: Thought I had posted this a while back, but apparently I’d left it in draft form.  Updated and throwing it out here now.

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I recently recommended a bunch of iphone games as a twitter response so I thought I’d post a more thorough entry here.

Games I’ve got loaded:

  • Lux Touch – Risk style game; this is the free version which is good enough for when I get that urge.
  • Quordy – Boggle style game; has multiplayer challenges; I should play more, but there’s so many other games.
  • Fieldrunners – tower defense;  my favorite of the many many TD games that I’ve tried on the iPhone.
  • Mecho Wars – turn based strategy game, similar to Advance Wars;  I like the art style.
  • Tiki Towers – physics puzzler, similar to world of goo, but not as polished.
  • Civilization Revolution – port from xbox live.  It’s not quite as detailed as the pc version, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
  • iBlast Moki – physics puzzler.  It’s my new favorite game.  I love the art style and the game theme plus level design is fantastic.
  • Secret of Monkey Island – classic adventure game :)
  • 2 across – crosswords
  • Flight Control – finger drawing / time management game
  • Robocalypse – RTS game.  ported from nintendo DS
  • Uniwar – turn based strategy
  • Tris – tetris clone

Games I’ve got an eye on:

  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms – koei port!
  • Hybrid: Eternal Whisper – action/rpg
  • Zenonia – zelda look-a-like
  • Catan – official Settlers game, but currently looking clunky
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Series Recommendation – Mistborn trilogy

July 22nd, 2009 No comments

Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a reading frenzy, going through several newish fantasy series. I’ve been avoiding writing anything about them because it’s easier to just say ‘read this’, but I decided I should at least make a short post. I’ve read all of these via Stanza on the iphone. It’s an awesome e-reader that I highly recommend (it’s free).

Update: looks like I’ll just be doing one per post. Haha.

First one I highly recommend is the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. It’s epic, it’s got great characterization, and it’s got some very well thought out magic systems. As I was going through it, everything felt well planned as if driving towards an ultimate goal. I’ve been reading his annotations online at his website and it’s very clear that he’s spent a lot of time working through things to give the maximum impact to the reader.

He’s taken some familiar fantasy tropes and given them some twists. He has created a world where the archetypal fantasy hero has failed (think if frodo had kept the ring) and turned into an evil emperor. There’s some of the other usual fantasy fare like prophecies and magic, but nothing plays out like you would expect at first sight. It just feels logical once you’re done reading.

That logic even touches the several magic systems in play in the book. The main one we’re introduced to is “allomancy”, in which, certain individuals have the ability to “burn” small amounts of ingested metal to give themselves physical abilities. Different metals give different powers like a video game mana system. The actual powers aren’t outlandish, but I was pleased with how he mostly follows the laws of physics and comes up with very creative uses to achieve the feeling of superpowers. The other two systems of magic tie in together quite well as slightly different ways to achieve the same level of powers.

I can’t say enough good things about the series. It kept up a quick pace, never bogging down, but felt complete at the end. The characters changed / progressed. It’s a fairly serious story, but there’s enough jokes to keep things from getting too out of hand. In short, it’s awesome. Read it!

Ok, this was more of a review than I was originally planning. Maybe I’ll get to writing about the other series later.

Smugmug Integration to a Degree

February 24th, 2009 No comments

Ran across this a plugin called SmugWP while trying to decide on the best way to handle adding pictures to my posts.  The great feature that caught my eye is that it integrates your smugmug account to wordpress seamlessly.  When you go to insert a picture, the plugin inserts a tab for smugmug in addition to the regular options.  There’s also lightbox 2 support as well, which creates a very cool overlay effect for viewing pics when you click on them (rather than simply opening it in a new window).  Here’s a couple pics from when we were on the mall for Obama’s inauguration.  Settings I used were thumbnail for the pic, large lightbox size.

Powered By SmugWP Powered By SmugWP Powered By SmugWP Powered By SmugWP

Redirection of my blog

February 9th, 2009 No comments

So I keep paying for this site and never using it. Going to try to use the space for thoughts that can’t fit onto twitter.

I’ve managed to import all of my posts from vox (every post dated prior to this one), but boy does sixapart make it difficult and annoying. There’s no export function in vox (which sucks) and after some research, their rss feeds only show 10 entries unless you specify the page number. So I had to pull 10 posts from the rss feed, import to wordpress, repeat, until I was finally done. Then I realized that the vox posts still required a lot of editing by hand to remove vox specific code.

MEH.

Those posts are staying private until they’re presentable.

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pineapple

August 6th, 2008 No comments

For me, the word pineapple always makes me think of quake as that was a term associated with grenades. In pineapple express, it refers to weed.

Anyway, thanks to becca for the preview. As my tweet said, the first two story arcs were hilarious while I found the last act lacking. I think it just felt like they ran out of jokes and decided to shoehorn an action sequence onto the movie to wrap things up.

I did super appreciate the little touches and object placement. Two that stood out were the footprints poster in James Franco's place and the bartles & james bottles in red's bathroom.

Sigh, I was trying to post this from my iphone, but I can't figure out how to scroll a textbox up/down.  Meh.

Anyway, it's worth seeing for the buddy/weed jokes.

Internet Memes Timeline

August 2nd, 2008 No comments
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booourns

July 25th, 2008 No comments

so the volume button on my iPhone sticks. Went to the apple store in fair oaks and they ordered a replacement. So that’ll be coming Monday or Tuesday. Need to deal with backing up my contacts in yahoo I think. Also all the downloadable apps don’t start and power cycling doesn’t seem to fix it. Deleting and re-installing seems to work however. Yay gadgets. I still want to make out with my phone.

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I can haz Iphone 3g!

July 24th, 2008 No comments

Victory!  Only had to get up at 5:30am yesterday to get my black 16gb from tysons.  Woot!

I want to make out with my phone, it's so awesome.  So, anyone have some reccomended apps?

I've already installed:

smugshot (for viewing smugmug galleries of my photos)
city guide (created by wapo and ties into all their reviews)
remote
google
all the google apps
flashlight / mylite (turns it into an expensive flashlight)
sportstap (sports scores)
shazam (music recog)
yelp (restaurant reviews)
boxoffice (movies)
labyrinth LE (game)
tap tap revenge (game)

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first day back

October 17th, 2006 No comments

So it’s my first day back at work after the surgery.  I’ve been in the office for about 2 hours or so now and I’m ready to go home :)   It suuuuuucks.  For some reason, this chair I’m sitting in is uncomfortable and I haven’t found a good position yet.  I’m sure it’s just a psychological thing in that I’d rather be home rather than at work.

It’s been pretty quiet so far.  Not sure a lot of people know I’m back yet since I haven’t been wandering the halls or anything.  Followup with the doc happens in a couple hours and I’m hoping he’ll be like “look at that amazing recovery, you won’t have to wear the sling much longer.  Certainly not the 6 weeks we originally expected.”

Stupid fucking sling.

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AHHHHHH

October 10th, 2006 No comments

Last day of free use* of my left arm for like 6 weeks!  I’m so nervous.  and sick.  haha, yeah I managed to pick up a cold over the weekend.  It’s awesome.  Tomorrow I’ll be in surgery and there should be some awesome/gross pictures to share when I’m home!**.  Thanks again for driving glynn!

*if you define free use as anything that doesn’t require me to put a strain on the shoulder that could potentially pop it out.

** This assumes I can easily get the pictures off my camera.  Stupid xp+sp2 seems to trigger some retarded microsoft camera/scanner program that doesn’t interface with the camera correctly instead of just mounting the camera as a removable drive.  Dumb dumb dumb.  Guess I need to buy a card reader after all.

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tis but a flesh wound

September 26th, 2006 No comments

It’s official (mostly as I’m awaiting a letter from his assistant).

October 11th is when I’ll be getting my shoulder fixed.  After ely’s wedding, but 15 days before the clemson game so I can have enough time to recover and still go!

The guy that’ll be fixing me is Dr. Ray Thal, the team doctor for the Redskins, so that’s sorta cool.  His office has a wall covered with signed pics of the players.  I’m not sure of the time yet as that’ll be determined by the assistant, but according to him, I’ll be able to type (yay world of warcraft!) just a couple days after the surgery.

What’s wrong with my shoulder?  Well, it dislocates if I look at it funny.  Once in my shoulder, he’ll be tightening up some things.  Also, according to the MRI, there’s a tear in the labrum that connects the ball to the socket.  Soooo, that’s what he’ll be repairing.  It’s an arthroscopic procedure so there’ll just be a couple holes in the shoulder.  The way the tear is, he’ll be using these little anchors that attach to the bone to hold it on there.  The picture he showed me makes them look like drywall anchors.  seriously.  I have the little pamphlet at home so I’ll upload the pics later.

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