Go Saints/Colts

The Saints & colts are both 9-0 now. I hope they both go undefeated, just to tie the Patriots 16 game regular season win record and hurt their pride a little. It'd be even better if one of them could even manage to win the Superbowl and beat the Patriots single-season win record by winning all 19 games.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's schedule: a Paul Graham essay

This essay by Paul Graham (Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule) puts into words a problem I've had for a long time: the struggle to complete projects that require multiple hours of dedicated attention when I know about upcoming interruptions.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

On a side note, I think it's interesting that I regularly read essays on the web, and would even like to contribute my own, time & talent permitting. When in high school/college, I thought the regular essay assignments wouldn't translate into real life. After all, I didn't know any adults that ever sat down to compose an essay.

Moving is done

In celebration of a successful move, I'm linking the Onion's moving day tips.

I think the last tip captures the surprising difficulty of moving every one of your belongings safely and quickly: For the love of God, don't ever move.

What I'm Playing Now: Spelunky

Boingboing's offworld kept posting about Spelunky, a 2D low-res platform/exploration dungeon crawler, and I just didn't care - it didn't look fun.

But it's free, so I finally gave it a shot, and got hooked. It is surprisingly engaging. Here's why:

Every level is dynamically generated every time, so every game is completely new.

You are given a set of basic actions that can apply to many objects (whip, pick up, throw, drop), an array of interesting tools (rope, bomb at start; cape, teleport are more advanced) as well as some interesting acrobatics that can be augmented by items.

Some hilarious situations can result from experimenting with actions and objects.

Try it out - download for free.

Periodic Table

What a great periodic table installation! I wonder if making one of these for my kids will give them an edge in chemistry class, 10 years from now.

From Make magazine:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/10/periodic_table.html