ThinkBlog

20 Years of NES

Two decades ago, as of the 18th October, 2005, Nintendo celebrated its domination of the video game market around the world. Look, Nintendo has a soul where others don’t. Microsoft is laughable unmentionable with “soul” in the same sentence; Sony is a huge, multifaceted corporation out to appease the consumer mind. Atari and Sega have since faded with their own consoles. When I was a kid of nine or ten years, I hand-wrote a letter (the first of a few) to Nintendo of America, Ltd., HQ in Washington state. I got a personal reply back, with the maps for the original Metroid game—without charge. Here’s to you, Nintendo—you were my favorite babysitter.

OpenOffice.org Training Videos

Having trouble with OpenOffice.org Writer, or Impress? (Equivalents of MS Word or PowerPoint.) One thing that stands in the way of a mass exodus to open source software is the lack of training. Here’s the answer to that, in part. Try these out for an introduction to OO.o.

Jack Thompson vs. Amazon

My buddy WallyJ almost got Slashdotted directly when an article (the one linked) mentioned a “vomit pic” associated with the new Jack Thompson book. (Jack Thompson is the anti-gaming crusader who’s basically lending even more of a bad name to evangelical Christianity by waving a Constantinian cross-banner over his proud legal struggles against some perceived threat of damnation-by-perversion from violent video games. I’m an evangelical Christian. I’m not anti-games. There are bigger things to deal with than a handful of kids who can’t discern between reality and fantasy, or who indulge when they shouldn’t.) WallyJ posted an “action shot” of the book that was actually a pic of someone vomiting explosively. That’s not necessarily the best route, but it is worth noting, since it got past Amazon’s filters.

MIT Grads’ Program Decides Where Songs will Hit on the Charts

The program that Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan designed as MIT Ph.D. students can predict how you will react to it—and predict with remarkable accuracy whether it will be a number-one chart hit.

This opens a whole can of worms. Really.

If the computer says it’s good, it’s going off of recent data; but what if producers get stuck in an infinite loop whereby they pull data from an algorithm designed to connect with this one and produce music? Yikes.

20 Years of NES

Two decades ago, as of the 18th October, 2005, Nintendo celebrated its domination of the video game market around the world. Look, Nintendo has a soul where others don’t. Microsoft is laughable unmentionable with “soul” in the same sentence; Sony is a huge, multifaceted corporation out to appease the consumer mind. Atari and Sega have since faded with their own consoles. When I was a kid of nine or ten years, I hand-wrote a letter (the first of a few) to Nintendo of America, Ltd., HQ in Washington state. I got a personal reply back, with the maps for the original Metroid game—without charge. Here’s to you, Nintendo—you were my favorite babysitter.

OpenOffice.org Training Videos

Having trouble with OpenOffice.org Writer, or Impress? (Equivalents of MS Word or PowerPoint.) One thing that stands in the way of a mass exodus to open source software is the lack of training. Here’s the answer to that, in part. Try these out for an introduction to OO.o.

Jack Thompson vs. Amazon

My buddy WallyJ almost got Slashdotted directly when an article (the one linked) mentioned a “vomit pic” associated with the new Jack Thompson book. (Jack Thompson is the anti-gaming crusader who’s basically lending even more of a bad name to evangelical Christianity by waving a Constantinian cross-banner over his proud legal struggles against some perceived threat of damnation-by-perversion from violent video games. I’m an evangelical Christian. I’m not anti-games. There are bigger things to deal with than a handful of kids who can’t discern between reality and fantasy, or who indulge when they shouldn’t.) WallyJ posted an “action shot” of the book that was actually a pic of someone vomiting explosively. That’s not necessarily the best route, but it is worth noting, since it got past Amazon’s filters.

MIT Grads’ Program Decides Where Songs will Hit on the Charts

The program that Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan designed as MIT Ph.D. students can predict how you will react to it—and predict with remarkable accuracy whether it will be a number-one chart hit.

This opens a whole can of worms. Really.

If the computer says it’s good, it’s going off of recent data; but what if producers get stuck in an infinite loop whereby they pull data from an algorithm designed to connect with this one and produce music? Yikes.