So Susan bought a new laptop, and it came with an ipod touch for ‘free,’ and we’ve been playing around with it. The thing is absolutely the coolest little device ever and now I desperately want one. Meanwhile though one of the things we discovered was that my old templates looked completely broken in the ipod browser, which got me started looking for something else. I’m going to stick with what you’re looking at now for the time being. Meanwhile, donations towards my own touch are welcome 😉
Diabetes: maybe it wasn’t the corn syrup after all
Andrew pointed out to me that I ought to write up a recent study that showed a correlation between the presence of inorganic arsenic in urine and the incidence of diabetes in humans. Scary stuff – maybe it wasn’t the high fructose corn syrup after all, which is what I’ve been convinced is the primary cause of me developing type 2 diabetes in my mid-30’s. Here’s an article covering the research over on google, and here’s the article over on the Journal of the American Medical Association website.
Ever get an address stuck in your head?
549-5217. That was my phone number when I was a kid, something my parents presumably drummed into me to the point where I can’t seem to get it out. I’ve run into another example of that which is both humorous and tremendously annoying. I’m moving to Susan’s place in Holyoke next weekend. She lives on west franklin street. For ~7-8 years, I lived on west elm street in Yarmouth, Maine. Today I discovered that every site I thought I had typed my new mail address into when I was updating my contact info (ebay, citibank, paypal, newegg, amazon, plus others), I put the west elm street address in instead of the west franklin one. For some reason every time I start to write/type west franklin, my mind goes on autopilot
Playing around with a new theme
Susan doesn’t think much of the green in the right column, and I have to say I agree with her, but I like some of the functionality of this theme, particularly the stuff happening in the right column, so I’m torn. I can also work on the color theme, but also I’m curious as to what folks think. Let me know in the comments and I’ll choose whether to switch back, find something else, or tinker with the photoshop templates to get a better color scheme going.
Friday fun: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Back in the day there was the sword of fargoal, a simple little role playing game for the commodore 64, and I thought it was pretty damned good – so good I’ve written about it several times. In college I ran across several similar games on the old classic macs, and this in turn led to the discovery of roguelikes, a class of computer role playing games with complex interfaces, deep and complex character enhancements, and randomly generated dungeons. I’ve played many of them over the years and written about them occasionally. Unfortunately due to the complexity of their interfaces and their spartan graphics I’ve had trouble convincing many of my friends to give them a try. This post is another in a series that’s attempting to correct that.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a riff on Linley’s Dungeon Crawl. They’re both of a mind when it comes to gameplay elements: strip it down to the core, diving ever deeper into a dungeon that’s overfilled with fiends out to get you on a quest to retrieve the orb of zot at the bottom. They’re similar to Fargoal in that regard, though they layer in a fair bit more complexity, adding things like character classes, a complex inventory system, spell casting systems, and more, but they’re still relatively easy to understand. Stone Soup has grafted on a mouse interface that makes the game mostly playable just using your mouse, and it’s why I mention it here – if you enjoyed Fargoal back in the day, give Stone Soup a try – it’s great fun. Head over here to get yourself a copy for any operating system you’re likely to be running – just make sure to grab a copy with ’tiles’ in its filename – that’s the graphical version of the game. The other files are the ascii (character graphics) versions for purists.
larry gonick predecessor
Larry Gonick is this fabulously talented cartoonist who’s penned a series of illustrated history and subject guides. He’s probably best known for the cartoon history of the universe books, but he’s authored much more than that. If you’re not familiar with him, imagine a fusion of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers art style, Carl Sagan’s careful explanations, and a dash of Mad Magazine style humor, then go try one of his books.
I bring this up because I stumbled onto some really cool books from an earlier time that are thematically similar in the Posner Memorial Collection. in the 1850’s and 60’s one Gilbert A Beckett published several illustrated volumes, including The Comic History of England and The Comic History of Rome. The Posner Collection has the entire volumes scanned at high resolution. I’ve been looking over a couple of pages a day during lunch for fun. The art is an excellent glimpse into an earlier time, in terms of style, in terms of how they conceptualized things, and it’s revealing in terms of their biases and predjudices. The interface to view it is a bit kludgy, but it’s worth suffering through so you can check out the cool art. You can get started here:
Or you can quickly check out a sample page here. Tell me – who does that roman centurion look like to you?
(meanwhile though, go check out some Gonick too, he’s excellent!)
I need to get back to running
Before I got Soolin, my awesome Golden Retriever, I spent a couple of years running regularly for my health. It was pretty great – I was as slim as I’ve ever been as an adult, and in absolutely superb cardio shape. I was running this ~4 mile loop at least 3 times a week, and sometimes as often as 5. The move to NY and Soolin moving in with me mostly got me out of the habit, though I’ve tried now and again to restart including this spring. I thought of this today because of this recent study from the Stanford University School of Medicine that basically concluded ‘running is really good for you, long term.’ It’s worth a quick look.
Friday fun, this time with physics – Totem Destroyer
Here’s a great little friday fun link – a flash based puzzle game. Every level presents you with a golden totem sitting at the top of a stack of blocks. You can click to destroy 1 of these blocks every couple of seconds, which will cause the block to disappear. Your goal is to get the totem safely down without causing it to fall too far, and destroying the blocks can destabilize the tower the totem sits on, jenga-like, so you have to think carefully about where you remove blocks. Add in a few different block types and scoring based on how quickly you can retrieve the totem on each level and you have a simple little lunchtime diversion for your friday afternoon. Check it out!
I’m not your mom, but I’m here to tell you:
Eat your broccoli. It’s already well known that broccoli is great for you, with its high fiber content, high vitamin c content, suggestions that it’s an effective cancer fighter. Now there’s evidence that it may be really helpful for folks with diabetes and heart disease. Eating green veggies in general is fantastic for your overall health – making sure broccoli is a big part of the mix is even better. Fortunately I love the stuff, cooked or raw, and already eat a lot of it.
Friday fun link: Ownage
Flash based, runs in your browser. Remember old side scrollers like double dragon or metal slug fondly? Add guns and grenades, effective graphics, and mouse and keyboard controlled run and gun gameplay and you have Ownage, a simple little game that makes for a great lunch break. Check it out!
Dave's Place/Metamusing 