If..Else Log

Bryan has announced the results of his Birthday Bash T-Shirt contest. Nice work Kyle! While you're there, don't forget to also check out Bryan's Q/A on Avalonstar. It's a brilliant achievement to reach 5 years and I'm in awe of his continued enthusiasm.

Oh and before anyone asks, yes I did bribe, bully and hold Bryan to ransom so that my pathetic entry is put up on the contest page:)

McCann-Erickson have produced an interesting marketing campaign for Sony using bubblewrap in Malaysia.

A group of Berkeley researchers have been able to recover keyed text with nothing more than a audio recording of the keyboard clicks and a regular PC microphone.

The researchers were able to take several 10-minute sound recordings of users typing at a keyboard, feed the audio into a computer, and use an algorithm to recover up to 96 percent of the characters entered.

A rather humourous bug in an update for Madden 2006 results in Michael King being shrunk to seven inches in height.

I'd had a busy weekend planned for site over this weekend; roll off a couple of posts¹ (as opposed to shorts), maybe start work on a redesign, and sort out a load of backend stuff which I've been putting off. Yep, I was prepped, rearing to go… and it all came to a screaching halt as that ever friendly guest influenza decided to pay a visit.

After years of being able to avoid its notice, it decided that it has been too long and came round with its friends in tow. Headaches, fatigue, sore throat, coughing, nasal congestion, body aches; crap, I felt like crap. I keep getting reassured that hopefully I should start getting through the worst of it soon but with my brain at this moment still feeling like mush, all I hear is throb, throb, throb as my head pounds incessently only to be interrupted by another round of coughing².

So why am I posting? Well, I'm hoping someone can give me advice on how to get rid of this annoying guest quickly. The rational part of me is telling me that as flu is a virus³, the only thing I can do is get rest, water and let my body recover; my body however, is yelling "Help". And right now, my body is louder.

1. I've got a clutch of half finished drafts at the moment. [back]
2. Oh and thanks again to whoever it was who decided to share his pain with me. Grrrr….. [back]
3. Grrr…. why is it that we can get a man into space, crack open a chest and still can't do anything against flu… [back]

On top of hyperinflation, Britannia has suffered a wave of extinctions, paralyzing hoarding, and a crime problem so intractable that at one point the game was forced to, in effect, split itself in half. Considered as an inadvertent and largely unsupervised experiment, U.O. raises questions about whether people can manage to coexist peacefully even when they don't really exist.
The New Yorker

A New Yorker article from a while back (4 years in fact) talks about the social breakdown in Ultima Online.

The local newspapers are full of investigations into child prostitution, rampant crime, mafia-controlled neighbourhoods, shadowy self-declared governments struggling to maintain order and runaway inflation.

Welcome to Alphaville, the biggest city in The Sims Online
BBC News

Similarly, the world of the Sims Online has a darker, seedier underworld hidden beneath all the gloss.

Whilst I've never really found myself engrossed in MMORPG's, it's nonetheless interesting to read about how idealistic principles are subverted by human nature.

Nintendo's Gameboy grows up. Who needs a Gameboy Micro when you can have a Macro?

The GameMan is a fully functional 6.5 times scale GameBoy, complete with working cartridges. It is over 3 feet tall, and weighs just over 100 lbs. with a cartridge.

Hmmm… Looks like the colour Blue is a Trademark of The Dow Chemical Company (see footnote 2).

Chris Glass writes a post on how to catch a mouse without a mousetrap.

Incidentally, even if you're not troubled by rodents, do take a look at Chris' site. Lovely writing, wonderful photographs and (IMO) one of the nicest designs on the web. I hope he doesn't mind me appropriating his lovely mouse image:)

Matt Munoz, one of the designers on the Red Hat design team, has written up an entry on the the development of the visual-identity for Fedora Linux [Thanks Steven]