Category: Uncategorized

[via _highatus] If you’ve

ever wandered around the “pop” section of your local record store,

you’ve probably stumbled across the compilation series Now That’s What I Call Music! Back when I was a DJ at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub,

these compilations of top 40 cliche-pop saved me from having to buy a

large number of CDs I couldn’t care less about but needed for some

crowd-pleasing singles (I drew the line at the Grease Megamix, however).

If there were a similar compilation for blogs, here’s what it would look like:

Click the image to see it at full size.

Try saying that quickly three times: “Oddball Microsoft Korean Flash Promo.” Tricky, huh?

While you’re trying to do that, see if you can wrap your head around

this Korean Flash animation which I believe extols the virtues of

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. For all I know it may just extol the virtues of getting hammered on soju and dancing in furry pants with your co-workers. Anyhow, you

don’t have to speak Korean or be a programmer to appreciate the

kookiness of the promo…

Looks like the Christmas party at the deVilla residence!

This is what coding in VB.NET feels like.

(If you’d like to see the Flash animation in its original context, go here.)

For day 3 of the Accordion Guy Advent calendar, I present Scorched Earth [633K, .zip file] “the mother of all games” as it was called back in 1994.

Scorched Earth is a tank game

in which up to 10 players — any of which can be human- or

computer-controlled — lob various kinds of artillery shells at each

other. You start the game with basic shells, but as you win, you gain

money, which allows you to buy better (and weirder) weapons, from

tracer rounds, to “liquid dirt” to “funky bombs” and so on. You also

start off defenceless, but money will allow you to buy force fields and

magnetic deflectors. It’s a simple game, but even today, it’s downright

addictive.

This is the unregistered edition of the last version of the game,

version 1.5. Registering the game unlocks more features (you can find

out more about registration here). Although it’s an old DOS game, it still plays just fine on my Windows XP box.

The game is in a .zip file; I recommend you unzip into your “Program

Files” directory. To play the game, double-click the SCORCH.EXE file.

(I’ll try and find a classic game for those of you who have Macs. The problem is that the classics won’t run on OS X machines.)

It looks as though I made the cut in Round One of the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards, where The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century is nominated for “Best Blog”. My thanks to all of you who voted for me, and especially Sass from Postmodernes Sprachspielen (who made the cut in three categories) for nominating me!

Let me restate this, in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas style…

Voting for Round Two starts tomorrow and runs from then until Friday, December 9th. You can vote once per day (and probably per IP address).

In the meantime, here’s my esteemed competition, listed in the order in which they appear on the awards site. Go give their blogs a look:

• Calgary Grit
• Stageleft: Life on the Left Side
• Beyond Robson
• waydownhere.net

I’m a bit busy revamping the Tucows developer sites, so there’s little time to write. That doesn’t mean you’ll leave empty-handed: I’ve saved this guide to things that were considered swear words and phrases over the past few hundred years. I figure it’s timely: with an election on the horizon, there are bound to be curse words aplenty over the next few weeks.

Voting for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards closes tonight. If you haven’t cast your vote for Accordion Guy (under the category “Best Blog”), do so now!

David Janes, friend and right-wing blogger, remixed the Tom Tomorrow comic (America: A Brief Parable) that I posted earlier and posted it to his blog, Ranting and Roaring:

He also writes:

Remember the Afghan invasion … the brutal Afghan winter? The millions of refugees that were going to spill out from that war? The hundreds of thousands of casualties? The graveyard of empires? The quagmire? Remember the Iraq invasion … the millions of refugees? The hundreds of thousands of casualties? The elite Iraqi guard? Being “bogged down” in sandstorms? The quagmire? Bush’s “Vietnam”? The tens of thousands of US casualties?

I know he’s speaking to the portion of the population that’s to his political left, but it might be worthwhile to answer his questions here.

The invasion of Afghanistan was, in my opinion, justified. There were definite connections between 9/11 and Al-Qaeda. 100% support there. Thumbs up. Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

The problems come up with the rest of the laundry list. Remember Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? That the war would last weeks? That American troops would be greeted with flowers and candy?

That the insurgency was in its final throes? Or even why the invasion took place (is it WMDs, fomenting democracy or countering Islamic fundamentalist terrorism?)

(Now that the troops are there, I believe that immediate withdrawal or even short-term withdrawal is a baaad idea. It’ll probably send precisely the wrong message to anyone whose sympathies lie with Islamic terrorists or North Korea.)

How about some of those appointments so awful that even the most die-hard Bush sycophants called him on them? FEMA’s Michael Brown, who could barely coordinate an Arabian Horse society, never mind disaster relief? Or Harriet Miers, whose primary qualification was ass-kissing?

How about the War on Science, from “teach both (creationism and evolution) theories?” to its strange “Goofus and Gallant” approach?

---

Well, David, we’ll have to discuss this over beer sometime. Perhaps before Christmas, so we can exchange small tokens, which I suspect will be the bumper sticker shown below:

Click the image to go to the web page where you can buy such a sticker.