Categories
Geek

Chris Pirillo Wants to Save You Five Bucks!

Chris Pirillo is

offering a $5 coupon for interested purchasers of the FeedDemon

RSS/Atom reader for Windows. Download this FeedDemon from here

and use this promo code to save $5: CPN05GNOME.

Some of FeedDemon’s features:

  • Pre-configured with dozens of popular feeds, so you can start

    using it right away

  • Newspaper displays news items

    from dozens of sites in a single web page for easy reading

  • Watches collect news items containing specific

    words or phrases,

    alerting you to items of interest so you don’t have to look for them

  • News Bins store your favorite news items for

    future reference

  • Integration with Feedster and

    other popular RSS search engines

  • Built-in tabbed

    browser for surfing the web within FeedDemon

  • Supports all versions of RSS and Atom 0.3
  • Imports/exports feed lists from OPML
  • Easy to use for beginners, yet powerful enough to

    please the most sophisticated news junkie

  • FeedDemon is a native Windows application, so it

    runs fast and does NOT require the bulky .NET runtime.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Pauly Shore is Dead

Darryl Wiggers, programming director for Scream TV, sent me this email:

See, Hear and Feel Pauly Shore LIVE AND IN PERSON!

Special Midnight Screening of the film

PAULY SHORE IS DEAD

Friday, January 28th at The Royal Cinema

[608 College Street West]

with Pauly Shore LIVE in PERSON!

Tickets $12 advance / $15 night of show

Tickets available from Suspect Video

(605 Markham St & 619 Queen St. West)

Sponsored by Suspect Video and Presented by Ultra 8 Pictures

Finally, a movie that answers the question “what ever happened to Pauly

Shore?” with a satirical, sometimes self-deprecating, and often

hilarious honesty. Tracing the rise of the comedic it-boy and his

subsequent fall from favor, Pauly eventually loses everything: his

popularity, his house, his representation and his career. He is

humiliated in the public eye, and is forced to go to work parking cars

at his mother’s club, The Comedy Store; at a loss, he receives a

visitation from the ghost of Sam Kinison, who advises suicide.

According to Kinison, Shore’s dead career would be resurrected and

canonized in the event of the comedian’s death, and Pauly decides to go

along with this, at least to a point. He fakes his own death, and

Kinison’s prophecy comes true as all of Hollywood and fans across the

nation begin to extoll the genius that was Pauly. Basking in the glow

of his newfound appreciation, Shore goes out on the town in disguise,

but unfortunately his secret is discovered, he’s locked up, and now

looks more the fool than ever. The film is successful on the strength

of it’s good-natured, self-conscious quality of comedic revelation, and

is certainly augmented by its star power. The half-fiction,

half-autobiographical film boasts cameos from the likes of Sean Penn,

Pam Anderson, Paris and Nicky Hilton, Whoopi Goldberg, Kurt Loder,

Carson Daly, Vince Vaghn, Snoop Dog, Ben Stiller, Britney Spears, Chris

Rock, Corey Feldman, and Heidi Fleiss, among many, many others. It

would appear that The Weiz is not quite as unpopular as he presents

himself.

I gotta say, I loved the guy in Encino Man. He made that movie (sorry, Sean Astin).

Categories
It Happened to Me

The Old Adage About Goldfish and the Size of the Bowl [Updated]

Update – January 28, 2005, 1:57 p.m. EST: Fixed some broken links. Enjoy!

Over the past couple of weeks, Tucows has been rearranging its office

space. The office has been expanded dramatically; we’ve taken over a

large, airy second-floor office next door.

Before we got this space, a department’s members could be scattered

about the office; it was much easier to simply give a new hire the

first available desk rather than rearrange a large number of people to

accomodate the hire. It was actually possible to be on the other side

of the office from the rest of your department.

The new space has given us a chance to regroup the departments and

leave each one some empty desks to accomodate new hires. Most

departments get a cluster or aisle of workstations. This has proven to

be a really interesting development for my department, Research and

Innovation, which consists of three people. Boss Ross gets a “boss”

workstation at the end of the aisle, which has left me and Darryl with

an entire aisle of 12 workstations all to ourselves. Rather than let

this lovely space go to waste, we’ve taken over the whole space and

turned it into the next best thing to having a private office.

Click on any of these thumbnails to see the corresponding full-size picture.

The ongoing work on our aisle will appear in this photo album.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Virtual Bubble Wrap — M.I.A.

Hello, regular readers and visitors from BoingBoing! [BoingBoing referred to this blog in an entry posted earlier today.]

Alas, I’ve taken down the pages on which Virtual Bubble Wrap lived. I’ve been planning to put them up somewhere, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Luckily, I posted a standalone Windows version last year. You can get it from this entry.

Screen shot: Standalone version of Mackerel's Virtual Bubble Wrap.

Although BoingBoing‘s Xeni Jardin says that Cory Doctorow says that I am the father of all bubble wrap game sites, the real credit for Virtual Bubble Wrap should go to its creators, Dave Groff and Kevin Steele (creative directors of Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, where I got my first job out of university) and its first coder, Karl Borst (also of Mackerel). They created it to be part of The Mackerel Stack, an interactive presentation handed on a single floppy disk. My contribution was re-implementing it in Shockwave for Director so that it could be put onto the web.

I’ve probably mentioned it a million times before, but I’ll do it again: Cory Doctorow wrote a elegy for Mackerel titled Burying the Fish. It was intended for Wired, but never made it to print.

Categories
Uncategorized

I Know All of Those Words, But the Line Just Doesn’t Make Any Sense

“I, for one,” Deenster writes, “do not like the idea of being on tv.”

It sounds like English, but to my ears, parses as crazy.

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me

It Just Dawned on Me That Bill Gates is Partially Responsible for My First Kiss (and Now I Need a Drink)

Take a look at this screen shot from an old IBM PC game whose filename

was “DONKEY.BAS” (the “.BAS” filename extension denotes that the

program was written in the BASIC programming language):

I will bet that I am the only human being who feels an old adolescent

twinge whenever I see this screen. The reason is that back in 1983,

when I was just shy of turning 16, I was reverse engineering this game

on my friend’s dad’s IBM PC when a girl interrupted me for my first

alcoholic drink and kiss. Had I not been at that machine, that

experience could potentially have been delayed by years (you must

remember that it was 1983, well before the Internet and geek chic made

nerds cool).

Today, I discovered that Bill Gates himself co-wrote DONKEY.BAS. If

Bill hadn’t written that cheesy little demo program, my personal

history would’ve been far less interesting. The girl, you see, was so

much trouble that the rest of the story, I’m afraid, is unbloggable.

Needless to say, the thought of ol’ Bill’s involvement in my first

kiss, however tangential, is a little irksome. I need to do a

double-shot of Crown Royal now.

Photo: Doctored photo of Bill Gates hugging Joey deVilla.

Thank you, Bill…yeeeeesh.

If you want to play DONKEY.BAS or see its innards, check out this entry on IndieGameDev, where I’ve posted both an executable that’ll run on any Windows box (even XP!) and the BASIC source code.

Categories
It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Starbucks I Have Known

In an article titled Maximum Starbucks Density, Jason Kottke points to a blog entry by Justin Blanton, who used the Starbucks locator web page

and discovered that there are 43 Starbucks branches within a 5-mile

radius of his apartment. He challenged readers to beat that. I can, with 51 branches. The record — a whopping 170 Starbucks — belongs to an area “around Broadway in NYC”.

While looking at some of the locations on the map of the Starbucks near

my house, I got the urge to annotate the map (classifying things

qualifies as a recreational activity in the nerd world). Here’s what I

put together — click the map below for a larger version: