I have a friend named Sven. The best way to describe him is too smart for his own good. He’s a complete genius when it comes to torturing people with Rick Rolls. Just when I thought he couldn’t go any farther he pulls off his greatest stunt ever - the Rick Roll Remix using our best friends as actors. I will let his work speak for itself.
I just had a great experience with the online Apple store’s customer service. Last week I purchased an Airport Express to extend my home network. In addition I bought a mini-DVI cable. All of this is uninteresting. What is is that today when the box arrived I found my Airport Express but not, to my surprise, a mini-DIV cable yet instead an iSkin Revo iPhone case. Dialing up Apple support I key in only one button to get a real person who, to my surprise, not only sends out the missing cable for delivery in two days but tells me I can keep the $40 case that they mistakenly sent. No need for me to send anything back. She was fast, courteous, apologetic and kept me on the phone only long enough to fix the matter. Impressive - and now my iPhone is enjoying its new home - thanks Apple!
Moving to San Francisco 18 months ago I found myself asking people what they called the fog. Most people simply responded with “why do you have to call it something?” I have to call it something because I like nick-names. Yeah, me and George W., we both like giving nick names. Names like Tobbie, Chav, Poopers, Nyahh, Betz, Yaaaaay, M, Snoops, Skittles, et al. If you know me and if I love you then you’ve got a nick name. So what about this fog?
After a night walking around the Mission in the fog my wife and I finally figured out a name. Fred. Fred the Fog. I’m wondering if I couldn’t turn that into a children’s book somehow. There would be chapters like “Tourist Popsicle”, “Summer Sweaters” and “60F Here, 90F There”. They must sell more sweaters at Fisherman’s Wharf than they do at all the Bay Area Banana Republics combined because of Fred. Fred - the engine of summer commerce.
Right, enough of that, just know that if you come here in the summer bring a fleece and be ready for Fred.
Last February I decided to write a game. Around that same time I was also introduced to Processing. To great things that work great together. If you are a software developer and are not familiar with Processing then I think you should be. It’s a wonderful Java based environment in which you can sketch out graphical ideas very quickly. It lets you worry less about how well structured your code is and instead you quickly formulate your ideas and see them on screen. The number of interesting Processing applications is growing daily and some are very impressive. It was the perfect platform for my game. Well I should be honest - it’s not “my game” it’s a knock off of one by Atari. You see I haven’t written a video game since high school so I wanted to start with something easy and familiar, hence I chose Asteroids.
It only took me about 24 hours of work to get a good version of the game running. It took an extra 15 hours to try and polish out the rough edges. Honestly I could probably use another 24 hours to polish but at this point I feel happy with the game and feel like releasing it and moving on to my next game. Supposedly there is a bug that causes the ship to lock up though I have not experienced it. If you do please let me know and try in detail what was happening at the time of the lockup. Or download the source and fix it yourself. Enjoy!
Controls:
Space - Fire
Left - Rotate Left
Right - Rotate Right
Up - Forward Thrust
Ctrl - Hyperspace