…Realizing that her show is a zero-value add to the news discourse …Having guests show the miracles of lip injections …Realizing that her crew thinks she’s a hack
Meditate, young grasshoppers.
Update much question around is this real or not. Apparently the actual air was them running the Paris Hilton car wash commercial. Nevertheless, Grace did take her producer to task on-air.
Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon.
Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”.
And then the answer became clear….
Mantra: This is why you always make a backup
I took a look at my wordpress blog engine dashboard and noticed that there was a new version out.
I applied this upgrade to my local blog copy on my PowerBook and it looked fine. I did the same thing to the site you’re reading and it messed up in a large way, a much larger way than I was interested in hacking on this morning.
Issues I had:
I’ve noticed that most of the bug reporters who have their own sites are rolled back to 2.1. I’ll stay with them for the moment.
What’s even more surprising, this being wordpress, is that more people aren’t already on it. I think that the mitigating factor here is that some parts of WordPress have now exceeded the casual hacker threshold. With the inclusion of wp-cache.php ( a tool for caching hits…) the mathematics behind a blog site just got a lot harder.
Consider, that it’s easy to ‘mentally’ code a blog.
Not bad.
When you add “handle caching of pages” in there it goes from an intuitive ( but complex ) process to a boggling process with a daunting process. I think that’s why I’m not seeing more “[SOLVED]” notes within the bug tracker: the casual open source developers are not ready for this hill.
Two Christmas seasons ago that mindless namby-pamby drivel known as Narnia assaulted my eye-sockets in San José. The only blessed moment of that two hours of tooth scraping was when a certain screenwriting lawyer-friend of mine abruptly turned and “Ssshhh!’d” a chatty 12 year old behind him.
…CGI lion comes on screen and mutters something… Kid: It’s Qui-Gonn! Lawyer-Friend: ¡¡¡Shh!!!!!
This Christmas, the gorgeous Golden Compass is coming to theaters near you and it’s envisioned the world of His Dark Materials in a lush, dream-filtered, techno-steampunk richness. The plot is compleling and the charaters rich. It’s sort of what Narnia would have been, had it been written by Richard Dawkins.
The casting looks great:
Nicole Kidman playing the fundamentalist Mrs. Coulter equal parts seductive and adamant, like fundamentalism and ignorance themselves
Or Daniel Craig as the Byronic and mercurial Lord Asriel
I think it will be a winner.
And I, for one, am excited to see computer effects bring to life the Nordic-named, heroic, armor-wearing polar bear named Iorek Byrnison.
In March of this year I started the meetup.com group for the Ruby programming language. I wanted to meet some other people who were interested in exploring this elegant and rich system for the expression of thought.
Well, here’s the group!
Wisely, one of our members suggested that we work together on a learning project. Our project of choice was resolved last meeting and it is a ‘text-based adventure game engine’. The generic requirement is that by creating a scenario file ( i.e. the rooms, the contents of the room, etc. ) you can feed that file to the engine and it will give you a text-based adventure story along the lines of Zork or Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
I was so inspired by the discussion we had around this last week, that I wrote a basic set of classes for the construction and population of the universe. Our working model is that everyone will attempt the assignment and then at the next meeting we will compare approaches, decide on which model works, and then collapse those “winning” implementations into our main code branch.
Bit by bit we’ll all learn new aspects of Ruby and grow our own skills. Ultimately we may unleash our inner screenwriters and create a fun game or two.
My sister is soon to have her wedding day in downtown Austin.
Pursuant to such goings-on, a shower was held by my mother in her town on the 11th of this month and Lauren and I went up with my Dad to attend. On Friday my dad drove up and picked Lauren and I up and we proceeded to head to Eastern New Mexico in his big, green, Excursion. It was a drive up 183 towards Abilene and we really had a great chance to talk and socialize.
It was really interesting because Lauren and I have been talking a lot lately about creative process and how good work is done and my Dad had been working on some pitches and it was a really good series of conversations. I think that a lot of my awareness of thinking about business comes from long drives with my Dad. I remember countless afternoons out in Houston when I would ask him to explain the ephemera of the business world to me. I must have asked at least 5 times to explain what the stock market was ( short answer: legalized gambling ).
Oddly having such discussions made the time fly by relatively quickly and we arrived in New Mexico in time for dinner.
That night my mom and her husband hosted us and a gaggle of my relatives for a buffet dinner. Saturday morning my Dad played golf with some of my relatives while Lauren and I visited with my sister, her fiancé, and his parents at my mom’s house.
That evening one of my mom’s friends hosted the shower and it was a wonderful night. There was no wind, the humidity was absent, and on the golf-course adjacent house’s backyard finger-food, drinks, and catching up were the order of the evening.
As the stars ascended into the sky we made our way in for the couple to go through the shower gifts. After a mighty haul, including the legendary KitchenAid Mixer, we retired back to our accomodations.
Sunday morning we got up and wished happy Mother’s Day to mom, gave her a gift, and then headed to Amarillo whence my Dad hails and, en route, decided to take a hike of the Palo Duro canyon. It was a lot of fun and I hadn’t been there since I was a very young boy.
Particularly notable during this entire trip was the green face of West Texas which I, now almost 30 years old, had never seen before! It was like a completely different place. If you look through my photos you’ll see prarie grasses, healthy cacti, and the hidden desert face of the West. It was really an experience to have.
After the hike my Dad showed us some key bits of Amarillo history ( including where my grandparents met! ) and a few other notable family history sites. Noting that we needed a bit of a shower ( red dirt rings around the ankle ?! ) we cleaned up and visited a Mexican restaurant where my second cousins and their families.
Where have I been? Flipside, Flopside, and the greater realms of Super Paper Mario.
As I person who was in late elementary school when the original Nintendo Entertainment System came out, I love Nintendo games. They’re fun, they don’t require a controller with 14 buttons to use and they take you to a world of imagination and levity.
Doug Henning, Canadian master of magic, fantasy, and illusion
Well, most of the time, sometimes they scare the bejeesus out of you with a hovering Grim Reaper.
The Grim Reaper, the penultimate bad guy in Castlevania: a side-scroller with no save, limited men, and this beasty bad dude before Lord Drac. himself
But I digress.
You can learn about the plot and background characters on any number of fan sites, but I’d like to point out some of interesting features of SPM vis-à-vis the overall Nintendo narrative arc.
Playing SPM, I feel it to be the spiritual successor to Super Mario Brothers 2. This was the first game to present the idea that the player is an audience member and that Mario has some awareness of the stagecraft of his situation. The chief devices that brought the audience ( and Mario ) backstage were magic potions that, when thrown, would create a doorway the “reverse” side of the scenery. Generally one could find power-ups and loot on the reverse side.
With this effect Nintendo announced to the Mario player that he was now “in on” the idea there is an other side to this 2-D world.
In level 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers 3 a new element was brought in, that two dimensional layers could be stacked. That is, one could be behind the field of scenery, but remain in front of the background canvas.
This was done to great effect in 1-1 where, when standing on a hovering white block, if Mario squatted for 5 seconds he would “fall onto the canvas” and could then reach the end of the scenario where a secret room provided him a warp whistle.
I do not believe that the programmers ( or processors ) were ready to take on this gag in the early 90’s; however it was really a hint that our friends in Kyoto were thinking about playing with 2-D limitations in the imaginations of 3-D players. Mario would split into several different projects, but it’s with SPM that the master tale of Mario’s adventures picked up on the door openings offered in Super Mario 2.
In the Wii version of paper mario, dimensional gimmick is a core component to game play. In chapter 1 you get a ‘special power’ which flips the perspective to 3D. You remain in the flat ‘paper mario’ world, but the camera moves to forced perspective 3D.
For example, what you saw as a ‘stair step of blocks’ as viewed side-on, could in fact, when viewed 3-D front on, could conceal a hidden area where power-ups / treasure / keys / etc are to be found. Alternatively there could be a ladder that is presented in ‘side-scroller’ mode edge-on that you can’t see ( like the deadly Triangles aka “women” in Flatland ) until you shift to 3-D when you can see the rungs.
One of the concepts behind the Web 2.0 meme has been the notion of the mashup. Example: cross flickr with Google maps and you get flickrMaps
In the gameplay you can get a set of “guardians” to take damage for you and how do they appear? As a cadre of Super Mario Brothers mario characters as we knew them in the early 8-bit version. If you find the invincibility Starman? It renders you as a giant 8-bit mario ( or, even more hilariously, Princess Peach becomes the “Our princess is in another castle” 8-bit princess, but the size of your screen, or Bowser King of the Koopa becomes a gigantic hopping 8-bit artifact of his Super Mario ancestry wreaking havoc through the gamespace ).
There’s a particularly funny gag around what happens when a Koopa minion encounters a Starman, but I’ll save that for you players.
The writing is incredibly funny. The characters, speaking to the youth market of today, use a parlance somewhere between IM-ese and English and it’s very, very funny. Bowser, asked to join the party of good replies smartly that he would not care to join wimpy Mario as he is “100% pure, grade-A FINAL BOSS” material.
The main evil, Count Bleck, is aided by a Dilbert-worthy factotum named Nastasia whose loyalty and command at perverting understandable English into the feel-good, “on message” baloney worthy of Karl Rove’s staff ( or the congressional page program ) inspires both awe and puzzlement. With “um” and “see here” and “m’kay” she hypnotizes and encourages “pulling together for the big win.” It’s brilliant bite at office culture.
Princess Peach shows a decidedly feisty side ( including introducing a nerdly suitor who got a bit too fresh to the business end of an explosive ) and marches ( without being heavy handed ) from being a “Oh save me brave hero” princess to a “Listen here bucko, my parasol thwack is just as bad as my bite” princess.
Something that struck me as a hilarious bend in the story telling is that in one scenario Mario breaks something valuable and is assessed with a million rupee debt ( mind you the coin of the realm is, uh, the coin ) and is made to work for rupees by hitting power blocks ( that is, until he gets wise to the game being played and finds a more creative way to turn the tables ). Now, who would have thought in 1985 that Mario’s predicament would walk in lock-step with the collapse of the sub-prime lending market in the US.
Lastly the mind-bending thought about what happens when 2-D intersects ( literally! ) 3-D owes a debt of gratitude to Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland which several centuries ago romanced the adventure one could have when dimensions collide.
In all, it’s a real joy to play. Wii owners, do yourself a favor and get ready to have a smile slapped on your face.
Thanks again Nintendo!
Happiness, Content, Joy.
The meanings for the Sun are fairly simple and consistent.
Young, healthy, new, fresh. The brain is working, things that were muddled come clear, everything falls into place, and everything seems to go your way.
The Sun is ruled by the Sun, of course. This is the light that comes after the long dark night, Apollo to the Moon’s Diana. A positive card, it promises you your day in the sun. Glory, gain, triumph, pleasure, truth, success. As the moon symbolized inspiration from the unconscious, from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made fully consciousness and wide awake. You have an understanding and enjoyment of science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect, clarity of mind, and feelings of youthful energy.
What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.
The other weekend for the Wedding of the Garcias I purchased the Nikon Coolpix S200. I took a few test shots and it was light, silver, and Mac friendly. I thought a few of the “pix” were a bit grainy, but I needed to see some prints to prove it.
The pix I took in NC basically connfirmed that this camera was really grainy and not that great. I took it back to Costco and then went to the Best Buy and bought the Canon S1000. This will be the third Elph in a row that I have owned and I have no qualms in saying that it is the finest point-and-shoot, portable camera on the market.
While I was there I picked up Lily Allen’s “Alright, Still” and Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”. I also grabbed “Paper Mario” for Wii. I bought the former because this weekend Lauren, my father, and I will be making a road trip up to help fête my sister’s impending wedding.
I thought some new music might make the trip a bit better. And the Mario? Well that’s a reward for getting through my finals at ACC. I’m registering for classes for the summer and I’m planning on taking Trigonometry. This is actually really good for me because I originally was interested in re-learning advanced math so that I coould learn more about OpenGL programming. OpenGL is the language for doing really excellent 3-D magic and you have to know your way around the radians to harness its full power. So, no rest for the wicked.
While I was at the ACC bookstore I was looking around and then i noticed a book out of place, it was the textbook for a beginning class in document publishing, it was all the basics of typography. I thought to myself, the forces of the universe conspired in such a way that this book was out of place and in my line of sight, it must be something I was meant to do. So, i snagged it. It was pretty cheap and actually showed pictures of the actual type characters being loaded into a press and I decided that was where I really wanted to begin this investigation.
I’m putting together my June travel schedule and it’s looking to be beastly: West coast, East Coast, West Coast all back to back.
