Today’s friday fun link is something of a cop out. A poster to one of my favorite gaming forums mentioned this list of the top 100 indie games. There are samples of virtually every gaming genre, from action to rpg, including free, shareware and commercial offerings, and there are tons of excellent games in the list. I’m familiar with at least half of them but was psyched to find a number of unexpected gems in the list. Heavily biased towards Windows but many of the games, especially the roguelikes and rpgs, have linux/osx versions available. Enjoy!
What if I took a long vacation…
…and neglected to post the links to the pictures I took. Would anyone notice? Turns out they will – Andrew found the pictures, possibly because he’s used to how this site works, but I doubt anyone else has. I’ve procrastinated about posting them for several weeks now because Susan and I (ok…almost completely Susan) took careful notes about all the stuff we did when we visited Seattle in early June, and our intent was to post the illustrated story of our vacation, which I’m sure everyone would have found incredibly interesting 😉
Instead, you all get this abbreviated version. We went to Seattle in early June and:
visited my brother’s family:
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Went hiking around Seattle, checking out cool waterfalls:
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giant trees:
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and the beautiful Olympic Peninsula, including its stunning coastline:
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We had our occasional setbacks:
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But all in all much fun was had:
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If you enjoyed the above, There’s more of this to be found over on the actual gallery of the trip, which you can check out by clicking the link.
Drink green tea if you want to live longer
That’s the conclusion of a recent European medical journal article, which found a strong correlation between drinking green tea and better blood vessel function. This is another piece in the growing evidence of the positive influence flavonoid consumption has – green tea, red wine, and dark chocolate have all had recent studies published correlating their consumption with positive health outcomes. Here’s a recent webmd article covering the green tea research study, and here’s another article covering similar research into red wine and fruits and veggies. I’m adding green tea to my diet after already having added dark chocolate and (if only I could get over drinking red wine on hot summer days!) red wine.
For sale: 1 brand new Kindle
This is a public service announcement for Susan. She won an Amazon Kindle ebook reader in a raffle at a conference she was at recently and has decided to sell it. I used my ebay account since I have a 10 year history and an excellent feedback profile, so if you’re interested, get on over there and bid on it. Aside from being pulled out of the box to tinker with it for a couple of hours this weekend it’s never been used. Susan’s selling it mostly because she wants a new laptop and selling this will put her over the top in terms of the purchase price.
The worst week of Soolin’s life
So, check out my poor dog:
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This looked much worse on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. It’s the largest part of a hotspot that formed as part of a rash she developed across the whole upper half of her torso and extending in small patches across her entire body. I brought her into the vet in a panic about this on Tuesday and discovered not only did she have this rash and hotspot, she had a urinary tract infection, a yeast infection in her ears, and Lymes disease (again). I went from the weekend, with what I thought was a happy healthy dog, splashing around in the river in the dog park, to the unhappiest, unhealthiest Soolin I’ve seen. It was really heartbreaking to see. She’s normally always got this happy go lucky grin on, and Monday and Tuesday that was nowhere to be seen, her tail was tucked completely under her rear, and she was moping around with her head hung low.
So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that so far she seems to be making a good recovery. The cheek outbreak is already looking tons better, it’s no longer weeping constantly, she’s often back to her happy go lucky self, and the rash seems to be receding. The bad news is we don’t know for sure what happened, though Lymes is a good guess, and she’s got to be on 6 different drugs over the next couple of months – 2 weeks of a course of antibiotics for the hotspot, ear drops for the yeast infection, topical skin stuff for the rash and hotspot, and an antihistamine to try and keep her from scratching, then 8 weeks of a different antibiotic to fend off the Lymes. She also can’t swim or be bathed for the first 2 weeks and man does she ever stink from the yeast infection, plus it’s been hot and humid so she’s dying to get in the water and cool herself off.
Anyway that’s the story at present. I’ll post again if anything significant happens with her from all of this. I’m seriously considering shaving her next summer to try and help her avoid another hotspot outbreak too. She may look ridiculous but she’ll look less ridiculous than she does now with her patchwork shaved spots.
Friday fun link: more free team fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is perhaps the greatest online fps ever. To celebrate this week’s release of new content for the Pyro class in the game, Valve is again allowing anyone to play for free, starting this friday at 11AM. Get yourself over to steampowered and download the client, then have some fun! My advice would be, pick a class with long range capability. Everyone will be playing Pyro this weekend, meaning the soldier, sniper, heavy and engineer will be enjoying a fabulous turkey shoot.
Japanese pizza is the stuff of life
So check out this delicious pizza from the Japanese Pizza Hut:
Pigs in a blanket, fakeburgers, edamame, and corn, just to mention a few of the deliciously greasy items you can get on your pie. Sign me up!
A product everyone should own…
…which doubles as your laugh of the day. Do you live in fear of monkey butt? You should head over to antimonkeybutt.com and buy yourself some anti monkey butt powder, which is apparently a real product you can buy to…you know, keep yourself from getting monkey butt.
[via]
Looking for a web programmer job? Know drupal? I’m hiring
My day job is website management for a small liberal arts college. We use drupal, which we arrived at after a process of review a couple of years ago which was overseen by me, and the ongoing maintenance and development of our publishing platform is also overseen by me. We’re growing our staff this year by 2 programmers. If you know drupal or have an extensive background in web application development, consider applying. The boss is cool, the wages are competitive, the benefits are excellent, you get to work in a college environment for one of the more prestigious schools in the US, and you get to help grow a CMS framework, focusing on open source tools while you’re at it.
[update] Per a suggestion from Andrew in the comments, I’m linking over to a case study on how we’re using drupal at amherst college which I wrote a month or two ago that covers what we’re doing in depth and has a lot of interesting commentary including a few kudos for us.
~22 hours in airplane hell
So, I’m back. I’ll write up how the trip went with some pictures over the next week or so, but I had to tell the unfortunate tale of airplane hell I went through yesterday. My original itinerary was: Seattle depart, 11:22 PM. Arrive Chicago at 5:40AM’ish. Wait for next plane which departed at 6:25, arrive Hartford before noon. Instead what happened was:
1) Seattle plane delayed by 20 minutes, which was then delayed another 40 minutes because they sent a guy onto the plane with a cat carrier which wouldn’t fit under the seat, only the baggage folks didn’t agree, bickered, sent people onto the plane to play tetris with the cat carrier (trying to stuff it under various seats), until they finally made the guy check the cat in as baggage. During the flight, I get 3’ish hours of fitful sleep.
2) Arrive Chicago at 6:30. Rush frantically to gate on the other side of the airport to witness my plane rolling away from the gate. Talk to customer service – get waitlisted on an 11:45AM flight. Get coffee, wander terminal, curse my fate for 5’ish hours. Try to get on flight, fail.
3) Fallback plane, I have a guaranteed seat on a 1:12 PM flight. Wander terminal. More cursing of fate. Watch as plane gets delayed in 20 minute increments, for 3 hours, moving from gate to gate as it gets reshuffled to other gates as part of this process. Watch in bemusement as the terminal starts to get overstuffed with people on delayed flights due to thunderstorms on the east coast.
4) Finally start boarding at 4:15, we are warned as we board that we may have problems due to the thunderstorms.
5) Arrive Hartford and are told we can’t land. Spend ~45 minutes circling at 32k feet in a tight spiral, until we have to bail due to low fuel. Diverted to Syracuse where we have a rough landing due to storms. Spend more than 2 hours stuffed in a hot, muggy, stinky, not air conditioned plane waiting for the storms to pass so they can refuel us. They run out of drinks before the drink tray makes it to us.
6) finally take off and have a rough flight to Hartford, where we land around 11PM, ending with me almost to the point of kissing the pavement I am so pleased to have escaped from airline hell. I speed off at 80MPH with a trail of mist behind me in the rain, grateful to finally be in control of my own fate again.
Thankfully the trip was really excellent which offsets the horrible flight experience. I’ll write more about that later.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 