I’m in Round Two of the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards under the category “Best Blog”. Voting runs from now until the end of Friday. If you like this blog, please vote for Accordion Guy!
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Now That’s What I Call Blogging!
[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.)
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"Tucows Milking the Internet"
Here’s an article which ran in last Thursday’s Financial Post: Tucows Milking the Internet, which is subtitled “Now it just needs to get investors interested”.
I’m not so crazy about the photo that accompanies the article. It’s
of my boss’ boss and occasional giver-of-special-assignments-to-me,
Elliot Noss:
It’s an odd photo. Elliot seems to be saying “As a matter of fact,
there just happens to be a small part in my movie that’s just perfect
for you. Why don’t you sit over here, where we can talk about it in
further detail…”
Silly stuff aside, the article will provide a quick overview of what it is Tucows does:
Tucows’ domain name business accounts for about 85% of annual sales,
which were US$44.7-million in 2004 compared with US$37.1-million in
2003. The company has operating income of US$2.14-million in 2004,
US$931,735 in 2003 and an operating loss of US$979,747 in 2003. So far
this year, the company has posted nine-month revenue of US$35.9-million
and operating income of US$1.3-million.
David Shore, an analyst at Desjardins, has this to say about our blogging tool, Blogware:
“Blogging has taken the world by storm but the big challenge from a
business perspective is how you make money off it,” Mr. Shore said.
“We
think Tucows might have come up with a way to make money from the
growth of blogs by providing blog capabilities to service provider
partners who bundle it or sell it to customers. To participate in one
of the top three hot trends in the Internet and make money off it is a
good thing.”
Another goodie of ours that the article mentions in passing is Email Defense,
our anti-spam solution. I’ve got it hooked to up my work email account,
and despite the fact that my email is published on this blog (currently
ranking within the top 1000 at Technorati), my spam is down to a
trickle.
Advent calendar, Day Two: today’s goodie is a novelty tune from the 80’s that I’m certain figures into a number of trivia games: Joe Dolce’s Shut Up You Face [2.9MB MP3]
I notice that yesterday’s goodie — “pick-up guides”
— elicited no comment, which I found kind of surprising. I thought I’d
get at least a couple of comments such as “Those are right on!” or
“Those are way off!”
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“Mission Passed! Respect+”
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: