Olymblocks
My Dad fed me another cool link today. The Beijing Olympics done with Legos. Click the link for the article or just enjoy the pics.
Fake Fireworks
I was reading about the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and how the footstep fireworks on the television broadcast were faked because of the risk to the helicopter filming them. All in all, I think the ceremony was incredible. I was truly fooled by the hydralic sequence. I do think some “false” lines were fed to the announcers. Loving watching the olympics in HD… two words… Beach Volleyball! But seriously, it’s nice to see the technology finally coming along. I’ve seen my signal flip between 4×3 and 16×9 a few times, but not sure if thats the broadcast or my tv. Overall pretty glitchless.
UPDATE: Oh, one thing I did want to complain about was that in order to watch Olympic streaming on NBC you have to download Microsoft’s Silverlight. I had avoided downloading it so far (in favor of Flex/Flash or Javascript).
Lego Mindstorm Donkey Kong!
Very cool!
The Software Developer Dilemma
As I listen to more and more techie podcast and listen to developers doing side-projects and involved in the open source community, I have to reflect a little bit on my own career. When I was young (and single) it was easy to spend 18 hours a day thinking of nothing but designing/writing code. As I’ve gotten older and my time on this earth gets shorter and shorter, my priorities have changed. I use to write shareware/freeware… now I’d rather talk a walk, ride my bike, or go on a hike.
But sometimes I feel like I should be doing more than just collecting a paycheck for my talents. I know I could be participating in the open source arena, but do I want to make the time commitment? I have lots of ideas for iPhone apps. The thought of getting a Mac/iPhone and learning a whole bunch of new stuff is enticing. But it’s also overwhelming and most likely would go nowhere. Perhaps that’s the difference… when I wrote Apple II shareware, it was a small community with little competition. Now you have to have graphic artists involved, lots of marketing, etc. Sure, every once in a while an individual contribution gets noticed, but not often.
I’ve seen several co-workers go off and do the consulting route while working on starting a side business. But what’s the chances of being the next MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter? Pretty slim. I guess I should want to do it for the fun of it, but at this stage of my life there’s so many other fun things I’d rather be doing.
Ho Hum… What’s a software developer to do?
Phreaky Photo Phriday
It’s Alive!
dougdavies.net is now active. I’ll be using it to post more personal things (like I just saw the Peter Frampton concert). I’ll continue to post techy ramblings here. I *might* move the more personal articles from here to there, depending on how difficult that is. I’ve already moved my music, artwork, photos, professional info, etc. Subscribe if you want.
NowNow Wow Wow
I was listening to the Linux Action Show this week (man I can’t say that without using my …Sunday Sunday Sunday voice… listeners of the podcast will know what I mean). They had a review of the Amazon Kindle. I want one! The part I found really interesting is the NowNow service by Amazon. I guess I was oblivious to services like this. Basically you can ask ANY question (via the service, via the Kindle, or eventually via sms text message) and it will respond with 3 answers resolved by LIVE HUMAN BEINGS looking up the answer (or giving their opinion). You can subscribe as either a question asker -and/or- a question researcher. Apparently you can get paid for answering questions satisfactorily. Very neat social networking idea. A little like Twitter, but more focused and probably less noise.
I found this informative blog article describing this in more detail.
You can sign up to be a question researcher at http://www.mturk.com.
Go Ask Alice
My father sent this to me today.
Very interesting. Sounds similar to what the Lego Mindstorms kit provides. Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon University, best know for Last Lecture (and died recently), was one to the developers of Alice.
Hancock
Just got back from seeing Hancock. Now that’s what I call a fun time at the movies. Much better than my dreary visit to see Batman.