Yahoo has a story about a new alternative to LASIK eye surgery that’s just been approved for use in the US. Some of the potential downsides actually sound scarier than the ones with LASIK, but alternatives are always good and if they can solve the potential degeneration issues this could be a great solution, especially if it’s cheaper than LASIK. Basically they implant a lense in your eye in this technique.
The answer to all of life’s dumb little questions….
My bet is there’s been more than one time in your life that you wished you knew that this website existed so you could send the url to someone who’s just asked you a ridiculously dumb question. Well, now you know, and so the question becomes: do you have the chutzpah to actually send it? More than one of you is likely to see this one at some point or another coming from my IM client to yours 😉
Odd observation
I was mulling over the recent move and job change last night and it occurred to me that since 1992, I’ve never applied for a job and been rejected – every position I’ve interviewed for, I’ve been offered, and I’ve only turned down a position once. This covers 7 different sets of interviews. Wierd, huh? Is it because I’m selective about what I apply for? Because I’m damned lucky? Because my employers would have taken any warm body? Suddenly I feel very fortunate, I’ve watched some of my friends struggle with their employment situations over the years and my brother just went through 6 months of uncertainty as he tried to land his first job out of college. Of course, my experience in 1991 was similar to his I guess. Anyway, dunno why this dawned on me last night but I did find it interesting.
Free commercial game list
Here’s a cool website – a compendium of games which while originall commercially released have since been released for free to the public. Many have also had their source code released in one form or another. Some of these releases have led to excellent modern implementations of old, classic games, whilst others are languishing. Find a local programmer and incent him to get to work on one of your old favorites. Me, I’d love to see a project manager take over the Freespace 2 project – technically some of the stuff that’s been released using that code is excellent, but it’s all over the map, and from an outsider peering in, it looks like they need a project manager to bring order (and discipline) to the chaos. Which is a shame, since it’s the finest space sim ever, by a long shot.
Another starch replacement
I’m always on the lookout for replacements for the starches I can no longer eat. Spaghetti squash or julienned zuchini have replaced pasta, for example, and cauliflower has replaced mashed potatoes. But I’ve struggled to find a satisfying replacement for rice in asian cooking. Until this weekend, anyway. When I was in New York a month or so ago, I noticed an atkins-friendly meal on a chinese take out joint’s menu that mentioned mung bean sprouts in place of rice. I tried it this weekend and it’s great, finally something satisfying to lay my chinese food down on top of. Mung bean sprouts are already found extensively in chinese cooking, so they’re a natural fit. I also suspect this will be good with indian food though, I’ll test that sometime in the next week or so. They’re relatively inexpensive too, and easy to prepare, I just steam them for 10 minutes or so.
Simple wiki install
I mentioned last week that I would do this…erm, last week 😉 But anyway I’m getting around to it today. Snipsnap has made it incredibly easy to get a weblog/wiki hybrid running on your own machine. Simply go to their site and click on the java webstart link in the upper right hand corner, execute the file, answer some simple questions, and viola, you’ve got a wiki running on your local machine.
Mind that you’ll need the appropriate version of java for your platform installed, and you should also be mindful of your network and the implications of installing a webserver on it. If you’re at work and reading this, it’s highly likely you shouldn’t do this.
Others, have fun. Snipsnap has its quirks but is a great way to get introduced to how wikis work.
My name up in lights
Well, sort of. I’ve been harping about wikis off and on for the last year and a half or so. In part I’ve become so enamored with them because of a project I helped design at Bowdoin, The Romantic Audiences Project, which was very successful on a number of levels. More levels than I knew, in fact, since the most recent issue of the Educause Review uses the Bowdoin project as one of the examples of the effective use of a wiki in higher ed. I was psyched to discover this today.
The instructor I worked on this with, Mark Phillipson, also asked me to help him write a piece about RAP and wikis for a literary journal that should be published soon, I’ll post more about that as soon as it’s published.
What I miss most about maine
We had a super muggy hot weekend this weekend with some torrential rains. Reminded me of one of the things I miss most in Maine, which coincidentally one of my favorite Bowdoin colleague’s posted a great shot of – the awesome rocky coastline.
Check out more of Mike’s site if you’re so inclined, he posts a picture every day, many of which are really awesome.
Possibly the finest flash game ever?
Think old school. Think classic arcade and console games. Then think Robotron 2084 with just a dash of Tron Deadly discs. Got your imagination running? Ok now go check out Doomed!. Was it anything like you imagined?
It’s nearly perfect. My only complaint is it’s a bit too easy, once you clear a few levels and build up your stats. Here’s hoping they make another version. I’d love to have the original .fla files for this, it’s ripe for tweaking.
Excellent isometric map
File this under the ‘we don’t need no steenking flash’ category, err, which I don’t actually have 😉 Anyway, check out this excellent isometric map of Washington DC. Someone posted a link to it in today’s University Web Administrator’s digest. This an awesome alternative to the too often used flash-based university maps that have popped up in the past couple if years. Javascript and html, and an art style that evokes simcity. Me likes! Note that it’s basically broken in Safari on OSX, use firefox or your favorite flavor of mozilla on a mac, ie also works fine on the PC.
