During my commute to and from work, I’ve been listening to audio book versions of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. They’re fucking great.
I’m almost done with the third book, and I’m soo happy that I’ve got two more books to continue on with as soon as I can (the last two books in the series aren’t out yet). The last time I was this happy with a series of books was Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles. If you’re looking for something new to read, check out the Dark Tower series.
Brian Hook has an collection of writing and links about mostly game development topics. Check it out at www.bookofhook.com.
Just one nice gem comes from Hook’s writeup of the game company he tried to start:
A Good Demo Is Not Enough — It Must Be Jaw Dropping The second thing we learned is that you need a killer demo, not just a good one. Talk is cheap, and a 300 page design doc, presentation, and even a team “on paper” won’t get you a deal — more so today than in 2001. You have to spend time and effort putting together something that is so mind blowing the execs are flat out scared you might sign with someone else. It’s the difference between a pretty girl smiling at you and a naked pretty girl straddling your lap and licking her phone number onto your face. Publishers need to feel like the latter if you want to get a deal.
Kinda looks like me, eh?
(click for Higher-Res) – Drawn by Caleb Callister – April 22, 2004
Friday: Got some new Sketchers shoes. Saw Kill Bill, Vol 2. Loved it.
Saturday: Best weather we’ve had in NYC this year. Spent most of the day in Central Park breaking in the new shoes. Took a pretty neat picture of a tree stump in the Ramble.
Sunday: Visited the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. The walruses and otters were in full effect, jiggling their blubber and looking adorable, respectively. The shark tank is impressive, though the giant turtles are a good deal more interesting to watch than the sharks.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s officialy Spring:
(Central Park, NYC)
This past Saturday, Margie and I spent the day walking around Central Park, enjoying the fantastic (over 60 degrees!) weather. Sure, we went to enjoy the beautiful day, but (thanks to this Gothamist post) we had another agenda: the Peeps Fun Bus.
(Pics moved to extended entry) (more…)
I spent part of this last weekend working on a new layout. You’re looking at it now, and your comments are most welcome. If you really miss the old layout, it’s still available at http://avantbard.com/blog/index_newspaper.php.
UPDATE: Safari and Mozilla (and Firefox) render my page exactly as I intended, but I’ve got a display bug in IE 6. There’s a huge space between the post titles and their underline/horizontal spacer below them. I know I’m probably not implementing this the best way right now (using a bottomBar empty div), but it’s all I could hack together. Can anyone help me out to achieve the same effect but in a better way that renders correctly on IE6, too?
DNS Stuff: DNS tools, WHOIS, tracert, ping, and other network tools.
Wow. I wish I’d known about this sooner. Definitely helpful for running traceroutes/pings from a remote host, and all kinds of other goodies too. Check it out. The network geek in you will be happy you did.
Saw this on Google Weblog, and had to share:
Sergey Brin in Drag – EXCLUSIVEPrivacy advocates have often discussed Google allows your past to haunt you. Any careless mistake or childish prank is preserved on the Internet, forever, available for anyone curious enough to do a Google search.
Well, the problem has really hit home — so to speak — for Google’s own founder, Sergey Brin, whose college website once included a photo of him in drag.
It’s tempting to laugh about how this will completely derail Google’s IPO, and joke about how good Sergey looks in a Speedo, but I think we as a society need to move beyond our embarrassment, and admit that all founders of major companies did some pretty silly things in college — the only difference is that Sergey was dumb enough to put them on the Web for all eternity.
