If..Else Log

MITs long history of hacks continue with this years transformation of MIT into one of Mario's Lost Levels:)

Love the geeky high scores board!

As I walked into Lobby 7, camera in hand, ready to document the hell out of MITMarioWorld, I was met with…music. The Mario theme was resonating throughout Lobby 7.

Microsoft work with Firefox to adopt a common icon for RSS. I agree with Gordon in saying that this was a smart move by MS.

"So I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools. So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog."

And so, the father of the WWW is now also a blogger.

A wonderful piece of gif animation… watch it till the end! [via]

For more from Dead Karl, visit deadkarl.net but be warned, it takes forever to load.

Instead of disappearing along with the bursting of the dotCom bubble, the speculative business of buying and selling domain names realigned and reinvented itself thanks to the wonders of the big gun Search Engines like Google & Yahoo and their revenue generating services.

Type-in traffic is a growing phenomenon, the fixed costs are minimal, and U.S. advertisers are expected to spend $26 billion on the Internet by 2010 — roughly double the current level… Cellphones.com, a plain page with relevant links, makes an average of $1,300 a day.
…
Schilling's traffic generated more than 1 percent of Yahoo’s $3.6 billion in revenues last year

Regardless, I feel that the current profitability is a side-effect of the times; at present, there are a whole wealth of industries working on top of and dependent on Google and Yahoo (such as Adsense, SE rankings etc). The fact that people are making a boatload of money without providing a respective amount of added value should serve as a warning. History has taught us that easy money is usually an aberration.

Bruno Giussani adds his voice to the proposed redesign of the Swiss Currency which includes, on it's notes, such imagery as the AIDS virus, an embryo and a skull.

Earlier this year, the Swiss National Bank announced its intention to introduce a new series by 2010, and invited twelve designers into a competition, asking them to represent "Switzerland open to the world"
…
Think of having a fun dinner with friends at a nice restaurant, and then hand over to the waiter a 200-Francs bill representing the AIDS virus. Why someone would think that such images belong on banknotes, I can't really fathom. How exactly they relate to the theme "Switzerland open to the world", and how they would signal to the world that these bills as Swiss, also totally eludes me.

Guy meets girl online, guy falls in love with girl, girl uses fake photo, guy asks to meet girl at a beach, girl turns out to be his mother, guy and mother seek therapy to recover from the trauma.

[shamelessly ripped off from the del.icio.us kitta]

Joystiq take the news that they've lost out to Kotaku and Slashdot with gentlemanly grace. To be fair, it is an awful award but the response is loaded with an unpleasant taste of bitterness…

Panic ¹have managed to secure a deal with Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy, to sell official Katamari Damacy T-Shirts.

Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy, is so protective of his creation that, other than the game soundtrack, these shirts are the only licensed goods he's ever approved for manufacture. Takahashi also wanted to challenge the traditional "game shirt" license mentality and really create unique, original, subtle tie-in designs, both fashionable and recognizable to those "in the know".

Every shirt has a great bit of creator commentary in the pop-up detail window (when you click a shirt). The shirts were more than a year in the making, with tons of cross-language Internet collaboration between Panic and Namco: hooray Internet!

Unfortunately, the licensing agreement only covers shipping to the USA, Canada, Japan, and Korea at this time but they're working on adding more countries. I hope the UK is next!

A big yay for Panic, Namco, Katamari Damacy and the Internet!

1. Developers of fine Mac software such as Transmit and CandyBar [back]

Joe Clark vents his frustrations. Everyone else goes quiet.