nerd nouveau
Yesterday, I’ve written about save-games and their nature of encouraging explorative behavior as well as taking pressure off the player’s shoulders.
But what about expanding the (well-known) metaphor of save-games to other applications as well. After all, trial-and-error or explorative practices are not limited to games, they are an inherent part of many workflows as well.
When the effects of video games on children are discussed in the media, it’s all about violence, addiction and sexual content. Well, I’ve played a lot of games a kid, and I believe that these kinds of influence were pretty marginal on me. However, there’s one thing about video games that truly inspired me as a kid, so much that I was thinking about it at least once a day: The concept of a save-game.
continue reading »
Lifehacker is (again) featuring Tim Ferriss’ recently published book, The 4-hour Workweek, today. I’m currently reading it, and it’s truly an amazing book!
Intuition has a certain magic vibe to it. When we call somebody intuitive, we refer to it as a unique talent, as a personality trait rather than a learned skill. It is something we think a person is born with, or that has been unconsciously developed, but not something that can be actively pursued and trained.
When a person acts intuitively, the purely analytical mind is prone to either dismissing their results as luck or to attribute them to a level of understanding and mastery that is unique and exceptional. However, as the benefits of intuitive results as either a starting point for further analysis or as a quick way to make highly accurate predictions are manyfold, the actual concern with intuition should be: Can I train it, and how?
A little more than 2 weeks ago, I’ve written a post about Wakoopa, a Web 2.0 start-up that wants to make your software get social (Rather: Your software usage pattern). I was excited to witness the launch of this Web 2.0 app first-hand, since I’m usually late to the party. Now, after having played with the app, it’s time to share some thoughts about it.
It’s sad to read about the demise of a great game studio such as Clover (via Kotaku). While they have only produced 4 games for Capcom before being shut down in late 2006, all of them exhibit traits of brilliant innovation and are fun to play. Check out the iconically ironic Viewtiful Joe franchise (among the most action-packed games I’ve ever played), the beautifully captivating Okami and God Hand (which I admittedly have never played).
In case you are wondering how a studio with such a great, award-showered line-up can fail, the article’s headline gives the answer: Vision doesn’t sell copies. However, if not even the giant Capcom’s backing with all their marketing channels and a renowned publisher name can bring those fresh game ideas to a wider audience, the question arises wether innovation has a chance at all in the current state of the video game market.
About a week ago, another blogger initiated a little web 2.0 experiment: She is gathering BlogCatalog.com users to create a bit of community buzz for the site. The idea is to have a disperse group of people post a little review in a synchronized fashion on May 14th to spread the word about the services on BlogCatalog.com
This sure sounds like a fun and interesting idea, and I’m obviously in, even if it’s mostly to see what the outcome will be. So what’s BlogCatalog all about? What does it make stand out?
Yesterday, I attended a (fortunately free) info-event for aspiring entrepreneurs. While I managed to mostly get the information on taxes and the process of founding a corporation I was looking for, the presentations were exceptionally bad. Apart from the usual pseudo-inspirational slogans and naive truisms, there was, however, one single tip that I’ve found to be quite useful.
When I was toying around with browsershots.org yesterday, I noticed that my custom blog theme did apparently not render correctly in IE7 (click the image for a larger version. Also note the fugly text-rendering in IE7!). I have to admit that I haven’t bothered to test the layout in IE7 so far: While I’ve specifically added some work-arounds for IE5.5 and IE6, I’ve bought Microsoft’s assertions that IE7 would do away with the quirkiness and be a lot more standards-compliant. As my theme isn’t particularly complex, I thought IE7 would render it just fine, much like Safari and Firefox.
In the aftermath of the recent Digg revolt (see my post here), people are now discussing wether the HD-DVD consortium (or anybody else, for that matter) can rightfully claim to “own” a number. I’m especially referring to some posts on Boing Boing, one of my favorite blogs (the posts are here, here and here).
I’m totally agreeing that DRM as well as its protective companion, the DMCA act (and its European spin-offs) are almost obscene laws that greatly impair my concept of “free use”, such as the ability to rip my media so that I can put them on an Apple TV, watch them on my iPod or simply to back them up. What I’m not agreeing with are some of the arguments presented.
You can reach me by email if you have something to say that's not related to a blog post or that you don't want to have publicly available as a comment to a post.
However, you'll have to prove that you are human! Even though I personally like robots very much, I'm less of fan of SPAM. It's just a simple riddle to solve, but a SPAM bot won't cut it!
To get my email address, take the word before the .com in my domain name first (Hint: The word you are looking for starts with a "g" and ends with an "l"). Next, simply attach @mac.com to this word.
Boom, there's my email address. Simple, isn't it?
Powered by WordPress
Copyright Georg C. Kaindl, 2007 - All rights reserved unless specifically noted