Silly Wampa

I’ve moved on to blogspot.

http://sillywampa.blogspot.com/

This site is basically a spoof of wikipedia. Some of the entries are just odd, others are funny.

here’s a few I came across while continuously clicking the “Random Page” link.

• Taco
• Money
• Dirty Sanchez

Just posting using Flock’s blog tool. It’s pretty cool. check out http://www.flock.com.

Blogged with Flock

Hysterical prank involving Pumpcast News and unsuspecting Gas station patrons.

YouTube Video

found it on digg.

A humorous look at the evolution of a programmer.

The funnier ones are management.

Just a collection of funny images found on the web.

• DeBeers spoof ads
• Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design
• Daddy Left
• You’re Different

So I work for this company that makes lots of plugins for web browsers and IM clients. It’s some cool stuff. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but I appreciate the work that goes into it, especially since I’m part of the team that makes it.

Our latest offering is an Avatar plugin that doubles as a chat app. I normally wouldn’t give something like this a second look, but since I’ve been working on it and testing it, I find it to be kind of a cool app. It’s called Zwinky. Here’s Mine:

I play some first person shooters. They can be fun sometimes. other times, they’re annoyingly frustrating. One of my favorites is Star Wars Battlefront II. I love star wars games. Had Jedi Arena and Empire Strikes Back on my Atari 2600. played X-Wing on my old DOS 486pc. I got SWBF I a few years back for my birthday. When SWBF II came out, I was all over it. Great Game! I play the single player campaign and the multiplayer online.

Lately, I’ve been playing multiplayer A LOT! I like the shoot-em-up aspect of the game. I find that many of the players I’m up against only care about one thing, getting kills no matter what. That means playing as one of the characters that has a rocket launcher(with mines) or the detpacks (triggered explosives). Those items are meant for destroying vehicles or surprising an enemy with a strategically placed mine. People have decided to use them as primary weapons of choice to get their kill rates higher. Instead of trying to shoot you, they just blow you up. On some maps, the battles are really close in tight spaces so doing that often takes out your teammates too. What team? They only care about kills, not the team. Personally, I like going head to head with a guy and we’re both blasting away, trying to get each other and one of us gets the other. Somehow it seems more honorable that way. You walk into a firefight and someone just throws a detpack or blows you up with a rocket, it isnt the same. I’m not above using rockets or grenades when necessary, but I try not to use them when teammates are around.

Now I’m not one to brag about my gaming prowess, and for good reason, I’m not very good. But as bad as I am, I could easily resort to the same “blow em all to hell” tactics and get higher kill counts. How much skill does it take to blow one player up with a bomb meant to blow up a tank? Not much at all.

The same people who do this also seem to ignore the goal of the game, capture all the Command Posts (or flags, if playing CTF). They only want to kill kill kill, and don’t bother going after CPs. I try to be sneaky and will sometimes avoid a firefight to get to the objective. Oh well, what can you do?

I’m just venting here. Not like I expect anyone to even care. Hmm, time to get back on and get blown up again.

I’ve been trying out both of these music services. These are both examples of how interactive radio is starting to bloom. Both operate under a similar premise. You type in the name of a band or artist you like, they find that artist and others just like them. For example, one of my favorite bands is the Descendents. On both services I searched for them and found them plus other bands like Black Flag, Pennywise, Less than Jake, etc. A whole bunch of punk and ska bands. Both services let you skip songs you don’t like which is a huge plus. You can also tag songs you do like so the service can try to match your preferences.

The services vary in how they get the music to you. For Last.fm I downloaded their player, logged in and started looking for bands. I like the standalone player idea. It will even let you use Winamp or another medai player, but it still has to launch to connect to the service. I just wish it would minimize to the system tray like winamp does.

Pandora is a web based service. Flash is required, and I’m not sure, but I think java is too. I don’t like the fact that if you skip too many songs within an hour, you can’t skip anymore. I think I skipped 10 songs in a row and then got a message telling me that due to their license agreement, they can’t let me skip anymore songs this hour. That’s a load of shit.

So, I don’t have any real conclusions or recommendations, just observations. I’d say I probably prefer last.fm so far though.

I originally posted this in January, 2006 on another blog.

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I came across this site this week, BubbleShare. It’s yet another photo-sharing web site. I learned about it thanks to an article on Ajaxian. It’s got a lot of DHTML and AJAX so it’s generating a lot of buzz from that. It’s a very simple site. No real customization options available. The site is in Beta, but if they really want to get people to stick around and distinguish themselves amongst all the other sites, they need to add the ability to create themes and change colors and layouts.

One other thing I dont like. There’s no user authentication. They email you a link that is to your administration area. In one way it might be nice to not have to worry about having yet ANOTHER user/pass to remember, but it doesnt seem that secure without a user/pass authentication.

One plus for this site, it works in Firefox. Some sites give you an activex control to upload photos that only works in IE. this site does that but if you’re not in IE, you can still use it.

I also like that it has a community as well. sharing photos is nice, but sites get more sticky traffic if they have a community.

here’s my album with 5 pics in it. I like the slider for resizing thumbnails. its all Javascript, no activex controls.